It is a long time ago that I wrote something on Steemit. There are several time consuming reasons for this. But the one that might interest you is that I played several games that sucked all the few hours I had left ;)
One of them brought me back into the earliest days of my computer gaming addiction: Elite.
Yeah, isn't it shocking? I am so old I actually played the original Elite (The super cool colored Elite Plus 16-colors high fidelity 640x480 graphics though!)
Anyway, a few years ago "Elite: Dangerous" came on the market.
There was quite a bit of controversy about how good it was (after all a quarter century of computer and game improvements had passed!), and I decided to not buy it, also because of the always-on even for single player stuff.
However there was a lot of content added later on with expansions, and there was a summer sale with reasonable prices for the whole pack. I finally gave in into my nostalgia and bought it.
And was stuck in it for nearly two weeks.
It's a dangerous game!
I won't go into details here. There are dozens of websites out there that have done this years ago. But I will give you a short "Is it worth buying" report here.
First of all, I enjoyed it. A lot. There is a lot of different things you can do, and I like that. You can mine, trade, fight, scout star systems and all that with random missions that give you an extra reward. With the DLC Horizons (not worth buying the game without that) you can even land on planets!
There are a few game mechanics that can be annoying from time to time, but overall the experience is smooth. And there is certainly a lot to find and find out (one reason it took me more than a week just to try everything out).
All of the key bindings for example... ahem.
The galaxy is the real one, so it really is HUGE. As in OMFG HUGE
Quite early in the game you get a call by a mechanic. They upgrade your ship if you bring them certain materials. I traveled to the mechanic's base (which took quite some time) and what I needed to bring was... something I have never had any contact with in the game before.
So I googled.
I it something you get by fighting Aliens. Aha. But you can also buy it at a certain station. Let's look at the map where that is...
Oh, just 3 times of the way I traveled in my whole play time. About one real day travel time just to get there. Hm...
That is basically where I was and where I stopped playing. It is not that I had lost the fun. But there was one thing that was really, really annoying to me.
The time.
The time you need to travel anywhere, even in-system. You might spend 5 real time minutes just flying to the local space station after entering a system. Or sometimes 15, when it is far out in a binary star system.
While I see the reasons for it it is just so frustratingly time consuming, I decided to not play. Partly also because at that point a game came out I had been waiting for for months, a game that promised to not waste any of my time with traveling - but that is the story of my next post.
My recommendation for Elite: Dangerous?
If you like a huge playfield, lots of different things to do and long, tactical combats - try it. Get the game (with Horizons!) when it is on sale. But only if you are prepared to put in at least 50 hours just to see most of the content.
If you like fast paced action, wait for my next post. It will be here faster than the Elite-like distance to my last one ;)
Rather than a game, I see E:D more as an experience. While there are major concessions to playability (FTL movement 😑), its rendition of space flight feels real enough to me. It's vast, difficult, boring, uncaring and lethal. And incredibly beautiful.
My personal recipe is to take it as easy as possible. You can't really relax when a distraction might cost you the entire ship. So I rarely play more than one hour at a time, a couple times a week. Some sessions consist entirely in me traveling through a few systems before logging out--a small step in a longer route to a distant nebula, or a routine delivery of expensive goods. I radically change playstyle every few months so E:D never gets old.
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My personal problem with that is that I want to change the play style on a whim. So I would need to always "carry" my miner ship, my scout ship and my fighter ship with me.
And yeah, "Experience" is maybe a better description than "game" :D
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I agree, that's a problem. You can set up a base of operations where you keep several specialized ships, but when you're on the road, which is usually a very long road, you're better off completing what you started.
Another possibility is building a jack-of-all-trades ship that can do a bit of everything. I'm not much into mining, but an exploration+trading+light combat medium size vessel can give that 'millenium falcon' feeling of drifting through space, ready for adventure.
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