Elite: Dangerous

[Executor32]

Anyone else been playing this? My friend got it for me as a slightly-late Christmas present, and I've been playing it almost exclusively since.

No words I can say can really do it justice, so here's a few screenshots I've taken during my travels:


The sun rising over a distant world.


A very close-set trinary star system.


A closeup of the two on the left.


The swank interior of an Ocellus-class station.


I came to this system to find a black hole. I've found two planets orbiting it, but no sign of the hole itself.


Found it! Turns out the planets were orbiting a barycenter several hundred light-seconds away from the actual hole.


Black holes in this game look sick as hell. I dared not get any closer.


The system map for the system with the black hole.


oh god how did i get here

[Purple]

This thing looks mondo graphics heavy. How well does it run?

[Executor32]

It runs smoothly at 1920x1080 and medium/high settings on my 1GB GTX 560 Ti. I can only imagine how much nicer it looks on a card like the GTX 970/980.

Graphics aside, the most amazing thing about the game is the sheer scale of it, and they're only getting started. Right now, roughly 100 billion star systems are simulated, including all catalogued stars and exoplanets, with the remainder being procedurally generated. Besides the usual space sim flight at terrestrial speeds, your ship's frame-shift drive enables both in-system FTL flight and near-instant hyperspace travel between systems. All of this is to scale, with transitions between travel modes being near-seamless. Future expansions will add the ability to land on planets and walk around, with FPS-style ground combat, and flight from orbit to the surface will be completely seamless.

Suffice to say, as these expansions come out I plan on giving them all of the money.

[Enigma]

Looks to be great. Though I'm holding out for the PC version of No Man's Sky before getting Elite: Dangerous.

[Executor32]

I'm definitely getting that, too, because space dinosaurs.

Also, look what I found at a nav point in the Sol system labeled 'Ancient Probe':



Here's a shot from another angle, with Sol selected as a distance reference:



A nice touch is that once you drop out of supercruise at the nav point, you start picking up a transmission of the 'Greetings from Earth' section of the Golden Record.

[Darmalus]

Pretty, but what's the actual play like?

[Terralthra]

But...the Golden Record isn't actually playing as Voyager floats through space. Sigh.

[bilateralrope]

I see a message about daily maintenance in that last picture. Naturally I wanted to know when. Partly to know if it's a problematic time, partly to see which timezone(s) the message is announced in.

One quick Google later:

Server Maintenance Downtime Over Christmas Period

Elite Dangerous servers unavailable daily between 0700 and 0715 UTC

Dear Commanders,

In order to provide the most reliable game experience during our busiest times of the day, we are starting a daily maintenance period during which the Elite: Dangerous adjudication servers will be offline.

As for when we release new game updates, Server Broadcasts will be sent out giving 30 minutes advanced warning to let you fly somewhere safe.
After the maintenance, the game servers should be available again within 15 minutes.

We appreciate that this will be inconvenient for Commanders playing at that time, but we believe that having predictable times when we all expect the game to be unavailable will let us provide a better experience for everybody.

Yours,

The Server Team

Status page

Elite: Dangerous servers are unavailable for 5 to 10 minutes during scheduled daily maintenance at 7am (GMT)

Being in New Zealand, this is a problem as I'm looking at a 7pm/8pm downtime depending on DST.

[Executor32]

But...the Golden Record isn't actually playing as Voyager floats through space. Sigh.

I know that, but I can forgive them for taking a bit of artistic license.

bilateralrope: Yeah, the daily maintenance is a tad annoying, but as they say, it's usually for only 5-10 minutes (1 AM my time). I just get up, take a piss, grab a drink and/or make a snack, and by the time I get back it's usually over.

Darmalus: Mostly like other space combat games. Flight is normally non-Newtonian, but there's a button to toggle 'flight assist' so you can fly realistically if you wish. Other than space combat in the form of bounty hunting, combat zones, and piracy (both partaking in and being the victim of), you can also haul cargo between systems, mine asteroid belts and planetary rings for raw materials to refine and sell in the commodities market, and explore new star systems, selling the exploration data you gather once you land back at a station or outpost. These can be done either of your own volition, or for missions in the case of everything but exploration. For someone like me, who usually spends most of his time in sandbox games fucking around doing random shit instead of playing storyline missions, it's like a dream come true.

I should also mention that it's online-only, with open play, private group, and solo modes that all make use of the same inter-system trade and faction data and whatnot. Open play is the mode most people play in, from what I gather, but it's basically DayZ in space so I haven't mustered up the courage to give it a try yet.

[Zaune]

What I want to know is, does it play The Blue Danube when you activate the docking autopilot?

[Executor32]

Actually, it does:



Never tried it myself, though; I've heard the docking computer is pretty unreliable, plus I can practically land on a dime manually anyway, so I didn't find it worth the expense or the equipment slot.

[The Infidel]

I did play the old Elite on my ZX Spectrum 48Kb and Elite II on my Amiga. I'm a bit afraid to start it, because I can get so hooked on these things. Maybe after my computer upgrade, that always seem to postpone to the next generation of CPU's.

[salm]

It is supposed to be outstanding with and Oculus Rift.

[bilateralrope]

bilateralrope: Yeah, the daily maintenance is a tad annoying, but as they say, it's usually for only 5-10 minutes (1 AM my time). I just get up, take a piss, grab a drink and/or make a snack, and by the time I get back it's usually over.

Maybe for people with enough free time that they can afford to be up at 1AM.

Me, my main playing time is evenings. a 7pm downtime I can work with, but an 8pm one hits in the middle of my gaming time. So it is a big problem.

[Executor32]

Like I said, I just see it as an opportunity for a pee break. I'd probably still see it that way even if I were in your shoes, unless your free time is so limited that 5-10 minutes is a significant fraction of it.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I did play the old Elite on my ZX Spectrum 48Kb and Elite II on my Amiga. I'm a bit afraid to start it, because I can get so hooked on these things. Maybe after my computer upgrade, that always seem to postpone to the next generation of CPU's.

Indeed. I picked up X3 with the expansions on a Steam sale a couple of years ago when I was between jobs (not a euphemism, I actually had a job lined up that hadn't started yet). Played 13 hours straight the first day, woke up and played 14 hours the next day. Woke up the 3rd day, uninstalled it and vowed never to touch that particular brand of heroin again. A proper modern Elite game might be even worse.

[Elheru Aran]

So from what I'm seeing this is basically like a super-massive sandbox type game?

[bilateralrope]

Like I said, I just see it as an opportunity for a pee break. I'd probably still see it that way even if I were in your shoes, unless your free time is so limited that 5-10 minutes is a significant fraction of it.

It's not just the 5-10 minutes of the break. It's the time before downtime where I have to stop what I'm doing and get somewhere safe. Then the time taken to get back to where I was.
It's the time spent before downtime where it's not worth starting anything, because it will be interrupted. For example, If I expect a fight to take longer than I have before downtime, there isn't any point starting it because if I'm winning, the other player just won't log in straight away.

It's that I can't do anything that requires more than 90 minutes of uninterrupted playing time, because that's the longest chunk I'll have.


Now maybe Elite:Dangerous is designed so those aren't a problem. But you haven't convinced me of that.

[Executor32]

How much time do you have before downtime? Most dogfights are over within minutes. You also won't need more than 90 minutes of uninterrupted playtime; while most missions give you 2-8 hours to complete them, and mission timers tick down even while the game isn't running, I haven't had any yet that have taken much more than an hour. The longest missions are arguably the assassination missions, which might take up that entire chunk if you were to try and do one in one sitting. The mission timers for them are like a day and a half, though, so that's not necessary.

Elheru Aran: A super-massive sandbox space combat/trading game, yes. Kind of like a mix of Freespace, EVE, and Euro Truck Simulator, with the whole galaxy as your playgound.

[SpottedKitty]

So from what I'm seeing this is basically like a super-massive sandbox type game?

Oh, no, it's a lot bigger than that...

Another old Spectrum player here as well. I usually did quite nicely, got to Dangerous level without too much bother, and Elite fairly often. Wish I had the computer horsepower to play this new version, it looks like this is what all of us had going on between our ears while playing the original.

[Jub]

This is the kind of game that it feels like you should build a dedicated flight rig and fake cockpit for. Play with the lights dimmed to match what you see of your cockpit and just slide into a new world. It doesn't seem exactly fun, but, not having yet played it myself, it seems to have that minute eating quality that all great games have.