What's the deal with Elite:Dangerous?

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Red Storm

Lifer
Oct 2, 2005
14,233
234
106
So I was grinding trade to make my way up to getting a Cobra. Was going fairly slowly then I happened to notice a mission looking for some metals with a reward of 180k credits. Thankfully I had previously discovered a neighboring system that had a single station that exported metals, including the one I needed. So with two jumps I was able to snag a 180k credit reward, which got me in range of the Cobra's price. So now I've got a Cobra, but no idea where to go to upgrade it. This is probably my biggest annoyance with the game so far, they made upgrading your ship a god awful slow grind of manually searching station after station, system after system, and what makes it even more annoying (aside from the frequent interdictions which happen if you're in "secure" space or out in the middle of no where) is that when you dock, you have to go down to the hangar just to see what upgrades they have, so having to see that slow animation every time just to find out there's nothing there... this game is so advanced in some ways, and yet far behind real life technology/capabilities that have existed for decades. Making searching for upgrades as one of the grinds in the game is really stupid design.

If this game is going to launch in this state in two weeks, it is not going to get very good reviews. It really is only half way complete.
 
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njdevilsfan87

Platinum Member
Apr 19, 2007
2,328
249
106
Procedural planets etc.. all nice and good....but they're PLANNED as expansions. While in Latvia or Italy, there sits ONE SINGLE SOLE DEVELOPER who is working on an Elite clone (check out http://www.novavoyager.com/) who is already showing screenies and a video of planets, planet landings etc. That guy does NOT have millions of dollars backing him, by the way. While we in ED, we see 90% black space and then at the end a space station which all look the same.

His will probably be equally as bland. You can't just come up with a code to randomly generate star systems, and expect them to be interesting after people get over the scenic views (which they will after the first few they visit) when there's nothing to do in them.

I think ED made a mistake with 400 billion star systems. People say to let that number sink in... and I do, because I start thinking about how it could be done in such a short period of time, and the answer is pretty obvious and results in very bland, and drive me crazy repetitive content. So if you're playing ED, you're definitely not doing it for the exploration aspect of it because it will get very old, very fast, which totally goes against what advertising 400 billion star systems is about.

Good Occulus support is very interesting though. I'm interested in trying out ED for that reason alone when the consumer version is released next year.

Overall I think they need to slow this down as well. Star Citizen is still a good 2 years off any sort of initial release, so I don't know what the rush is.
 
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