Elite dangerous

It looks fucking awesome. I honestly haven’t been this excited about a game for yonks. Even upgraded my joystick to a HOTAS, and SOOOOOOO trying not to spend on a rift DK2. Apparently Elite on the rift is the bollocks.

Matt, have you checked out Star Citizen? With the questions you’ve been asking it sounds like SC ticks most of your boxes. I kickstarted SC way back and the Dog Fighting Module (alpha) is out on the 29th May. Busy time for Space Sims. 🙂

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/

I think SC will live up to your PVP expectations, i’ll report back on the 29th 🙂

I’d give it a few days.

E:D had a huge update to beta 2 on Tuesday, but in the process the game got borked.

It’s a real credit to the E : D community that the rage post’s are at a minimum and are letting the dev’s do their job without the threats of murder, kidnap or returning the game like the highly amusing BF4 debacle.

Once the issues with beta 2 are ironed out, I’d say it is worth the 50 quid for early access. But by all accounts the game is still due for a 2014 release, so denending on how much you want the game i might be worth holding off until gamma/release.

I think beta 2 went up to 500 systems. I’m pretty sure the full game has the entire known universe, which is just nuts, but gives you an idea of the enormaty of the game.

Probably a good idea to wait for gamma, there is a lot of bug’s including a game breaker on the launch of beta 2, but it really is fun.

I bought it last week but haven’t really been able to play it too much yet. Its pretty good so far though, just flying the ship and jumping between systems is amazing, I’ve not even really been trying to make any money, just trying to figure out how stuff works and exploring.

They’ve said there probably will be a wipe on release but its not 100% definite. I dont think you can get into the beta any more, have to wait for release now which is on the 16th so not too long. I’m using a joystick + keyboard but you can use an xbox controller or just mouse and keyboard. Getting all of the controls mapped to a gamepad might be tricky though, in combat, you need pitch, yaw, roll as well as full directional thrust up down left and right for strafing. You could do the directional thrusters on the left stick and the pitch and roll on the other but that still leaves yaw (maybe on the bumpers or something)

You can mine and there is a friends list but unless you actually join a group together its unlikely you’ll be able to meet up in space. Its basically heavily instanced from what i’ve read so even if you both go to the same place it wont put you in the same instance. It will just randomly throw x amount of people into each instance while keeping groups together.

Bounties are placed on your head per system by the systems local authority for committing illegal acts. I’m really not sure if it can be directly increased by other players but I don’t think it can.

All in all the game engine, flight physics, sound and all of the basics are amazing but game play wise its very barebones. Your goal is just to make money and theres only a few ways to do it really. Mine, trade, bounty hunt (mostly by killing NPCs) and pirating/smuggling. You make money, upgrade your ship, eventually by a better ship so you can make money and upgrade it. Theres no real purpose and the multiplayer elements are not very well implemented in my opinion. The only way to communicate is directly ship to ship, no system wide chat or station chat or anything like that so you cant just start chatting to people in the local area unless you actually run into them. And with 400 billion star systems thats not going to be very likely. Its mostly a single player experience which is a shame.