Elite Dangerous Reviews

To be honest, everything is way better if it has a lot people playing it xd. Give it some time, it might grow big

I think players who complain about repetitiveness would say the very same about CF... if the only goal is to get the biggest ship asap, it may end in making same trade-runs over and over again - like in CF.

After playing for 4hrs, I thinks it's already a game worth buying. I like the "feel" it gives you to the huge distances in space and the flying around in 3 modes of speed is nicely done. Found only one negative point (but maybe I'm just to unexperienced yet): I find it hard to distiguish players from NPCs without risking beeing thrown out of supercruise and stripped off my cargo by a nasty pirate. On the other hand, that tiny nutshell I'm in has the worst scanner... dunno. Haven't figured out yet if chat with others is possible only in scanner-range or whole system. But it looks like one can make up groups to chat across greater distances.

Another point I read a lot before trying ED were complaints about making nearly no profit in trading... i don't know if something has changed, but I went home with ~400k credits after 4hrs and was moving near my starting system just doing a few *cough* special deliveries.

The possibilities to outfit the ship are somewhat overwhelming and look like it gives room for some "tactical" approaches in outfitting. Installing a heat-sink can protect you from appearing on radar, but after a while your ship may run too hot... (haven't tried yet, but def will give it a go)

The trading is a bit strange (or maybe realistic simulated), as you never know the exact prize at your destination (even if already visited). You can judge imprt/export by types of stations or see import/export-streams of visited stations.

Exploring is paid (after you moved some LY away from system) in a "logistic function", same is true for prices of "rare goods" from some stations.

When a pirate tries to stop you, a mini-game comes into play. You can try to follow an escape-vector with your ship. The opponent does the same and if you manage to follow this vector better than your opponent, he doesn't stop you.

So far my experiences after a short time ED... may say more after the next weekend.

@Moorhuhn, where did you got your game copy from?

@Huor, bought it via Steam, as I already had it installed due to XCom.

Dug into ED a bit further today.

I think the main reason that players are rather silent around my starting system is the fear of pirates and murderers. However, around stations is a "weapon free zone" (station will punish you if you dare pewpew around there) and while i hung around waiting for a free place to dock (station was crowded by smugglers) I had some nice conversations.

Tried that abovementioned "running a low heat-signature" thing a bit and must clarify that a heat-sink isn't needed at all. When smuggling to bigger stations, there is a high risk of beeing scanned when entering. That would ground your reputation and seems to be a really bad thing especially for starters. Here comes running cool into play, as you can shut down all systems not needed and close your cooling-circuit of the ship so that chances for a scan are at minimum. You have to hurry into the station as ship overheats quite quick, but by donig so i wasn't scanned so far and made enough credits to jump into another ship with 10x the cargo of the starter one...

I learned that flying in wings gives an extra-reward paid from the station you are trading with, but hadn't had the chance to try that out yet. I've seen quite some players flying in wings, though. Decided to skip exploration for now as the reward seems to be a scale lower than smuggling/trading and keep myself out of fighting until I have a second ship outfitted for that.

As requested, I will upload a few screenies to my album...

From what i've read from you, ED seems to be a good game. I kinda find it sad to read so many bad reviews about it. I would like to try it out myself, but i've 2 problems: I'm not quiet sure if im Computer could handle it (i think even low graphs and a smaller resolution wouldn't help, might check it) and the other, bigger reason is, the price it self. In my opinnion for a "beta" it's quiet big. It's 70$ right?

Btw, please post some screenshots of the station, outside and inside too, please

Isnt the price something around 38 €? As for graphics, i am pretty sure they will also allow you to play on low performance PCs but then not in the beauty it is supposed to be played

Hmm, then the price has fall. If i remember correct, when it just came out, it was around 60-70$ (not quiet sure). And about my PC, he will probably be able to run, but it won't have 50 FPS. I know this, because even CF doesn't run on 50 FPS all the time. For example, the Suns are killing me! Hahha

its 39,99£

so about 55€ or 63$

on steam it seems to be cheaper -> http://store.steampowered.com/app/359320/

The reviews on steam are quiet good and funny too xD. When i get a better PC, i might try it out

Quote from GodEatGod

Btw, please post some screenshots of the station, outside and inside too, please

Uploaded a few more screenies to my album. There are 5 different stations in the game. The three I made pictures of are very similar inside (all rotating cylinders). The Outpost have landing pads outside and there should be some stations on Asteroids, but I didn't ran across one yet (and haven't searched for)...

The System I'm running is an AMD Phenom II x6 @3GHz and AMD 7850 GPU... allows quite high settings with acceptable FPS.

If someone from herel is in Elite-space, I would highly appreciate some team-flights...

My system is Intel Pentium E-6600 @3,07 GHz and AMD Radeon HD 6450, (1GB DDR 3 VRam) 4GB Ram Kingston

What's better now, in your opinnion, ED or Star Citizen?

After playing the game a while i can only agree to the negative reviews.

The game is way too generic and boring.
Teamplay does not work at all.

Over the past week I only experienced negative stuff which completely destroyed the motivation to play.

But lets point out the weaknesses of this game in detail.

• The graphics are not half as good as you would expect from such a game. Infact even on ultra high settings the texture size is pretty limited. Planets dont look as sharp as you would expect (even in CF planets have a higher detail grade). Sometimes you see the low res (on ultra settings) even on ships in close view.
• Other than empty space this game has little to offer. In nearly 2 weeks of gameplay i have not seen any cool space scenery (not one). Most of the game happens in empty space... thats where the stations are located. Asteroid fields... planetary rings... anything else that looks interesting... You really have to search for such stuff in the game (well it exists but by default there is no real reason to go to such places). The size of the systems completely destroys possible visual highlights. Cool sceneries get lost in this game.
• Lack of content. There exists maybe 10 types of ships and exactly 3 different types of stations.... thats it. Every place to fly to looks the same.
• Repetive gameplay. Since you have no other choice than trading its always the same you do... accept a trading/smuggling job... launch from a station... fly to a different system... find the other station... dock... deliver your cargo. Before you have reached your first mio you have to do this procedure 20 times... if you also want to equip your ship with some weapons, new engines etc. you have spent at least 200-300 times "lauch and dock" (minimum). -> there is no alternative to that.
• Even more repetivive is the UI. For every shit you have to open one of the game menues... browse through countless of sub menus and even the submenus of the submenus... until you find what you are search for. Just alone the navigation menu is a mess. You have to browse through a list of up to 50 (or more) nav targets to find what you are looking for. There is no filter option... nothing. A fast way to find a specific target does not exist. Oh... and mission targets dont appear at all anywhere in the nav list (for that you have to fly through the entire system in order to maually try to find the target -> which easily could take an hour).
  Until today I have no idea how to open the chat menu without being forced to chat. I mean... everytime I open that menu I am in the active typing mode... even when i simply want to browse through the sub menus. No... I have to open that menu... hit esc to abort writing more and then eventually i can use the menu.
  Oh... and when i really want to write something to a different player and meanwhile some ingame interaction happens like dunno... starting the cruise engine... then the chat menu automatically closes and my written text is lost.
• Navigation and targeting sux. There is no easy way to get an overview of the players or npcs close to you. There is absolutely no visual feedback on the screen. No target indicator anywhere. No easy to see contact list.... no.... you have to open a menu... and browse to its submenu.... and hope that in the meanwhile you were not shot down or missed the target by a few million km.
  Targeting is also a major weakness in combat when you have multiple enemies. The targeting works so bad that its better not to switch to another enemy.
• Rewards/income. While with upgrading your ship you instantly are confronted with much higher insurance costs for the ship (and also the costs for the upgrades which are insane compared to their actual effectivity)... the rewards dont get better.
  So you might face the situation that i had yesterday that you accept a 30k credits mission to find a target and kill it. After 1 hour searching and getting a bounty meanwhile I found the target and wanted to do my job coz the time for that mission was already running out (which results in negative reputation with the faction that offers the mission). So I found the target and started to attack it and suddenly alround me all ships went red and started to attack me.
  In the end I was killed and had to pay 400k credits for the ship insurance.... just becaue i wanted to play a simple destroy mission in one of the starting systems of the game.
  The mission was designed to fail. You couldnt attack the target without making yourself target of other ships. And even with my pretty good equipment i was not able to do a mission in a starting system of the game that had nothing to do with trading.
  The thing is... 400k credits is not earned that easily... as i already told... that mission was only rewarding 30k credits. Trade missions usually pay about the same amount... some also pay only 10k... only smuggling allows higher rewards (50-150k) but that is always connected with reputation changes (negative).
  Yesterday ive spend 4 hours in the game... tried to do catch up with the "wing" (a try to play in a group) which failed... and doing that stupid mission which has cost me 400k credits.
  Over the past days I have lost more money than i was able to earn due to stupid mission design or players which consider the starting systems a great area for weapon tests on weaker players.
• The game is badly translated.
  By default german was activated and the translation in many areas were simply bad and confusing.
• The games tutorials lack pretty much everything. I have problem to call them tutorals coz the ingame tutorials are only dealing with the very basics of the game and not even in a way that you would understand them. The only way to learn to fly correctly is to watch a few youtube vids outside the game and even there lots of questions remain unanswered.
  There is a 59 sites long manual.
  Ive read it.
  I didnt understand it.
  The descriptions in there leave more questions open than they answer.
  e.g. Group play.
  In the manual its described as "you can play with your friend in a group". Oh really? Thats it? I couldnt have imagined that in group play you can play with a group of players.
  Well... even if you choose "open play" you can play with a group of players (aka wing).
  So whats the deal about that game mode? Whats the advantage/disadvantage? What are the features of group play?
  Nowhere in the manual or the game or the tutorals anything about that is explained.
  Overall there nearly nothing explained in this game.
  You start as a noob and that remains this way.
  You cant expect getting any explanation about a game feature inside the game.
  "Oh... there are commodities with a different color ... why do they have a different color?"
  Your best friend is google... because for most questions you wont get an answer in the game or from the manual.
  More than 500.000 people have ordered this game... and probably 450.000 people have given up already (which would explain why you dont see many real players in this game).
• Travels take way too long.
  You launch from a station after accepting a job... then you jump to a different system... and you target the station you want to fly to and then you have to wait... 2mins... 3.mins... 4... 5... or longer staring at the black screen. Most of the time you spend in that is for waiting until you finally reach a station. The cruise accellerates damn slow and takes even more time when you need to slow down again.
  You can not do anything else than waiting.
  Thats what this game is about... waiting.
  The extreme example is the Hutton run. You have to sit 90mins in your damn cockpit and wait. And if you have bad luck (like me) somebody discrupts your cruise 2mins before reaching that station in order to kill you.
• I have more to complain about the interface actually.
  This time about the settings. The game settings are a mess. You get a long list of options which nearly all deal with flight controls. There is nearly no indication where these options apply to as you have thousands of different flight modes. Flight mode in crusie... flight mode in normal space... flight mode in dock.. flight mode on ground (wtf?). There are millions of settings in a 10 pages long list without any descriptions where these settings are apply to... for what they are important... or what the setting options actually mean.
  Google is your friend again... either that or you are completely lost.
• Wings: Instancing seems to be a major problem with this game. Players dont appear to be able to join wings and then fight together as intended. At least thats the impression i got from yesterdays tests.
  I was not even able to see my Wing-mates on my radar.... or highlighted on the HUD (this is something I simply would expect from such a feature). I flew 150LY to meet them... arriving at the correct system I had to guess where they are coz nowhere exactly the location was displayed. I assumed where in the system they were... and even when reaching that point i could only spot one of them, eventhough the other one was in theory marked as target. But thats also an Interface issue... not only that you can not easily find your wing members and locate them via an onscreen target indicator... no... you also have to click through a shitload of menues and submenus to form wings and set/lock targets. Everything is so every complicated that when you finished all the required settings you actually have lost the interest in playing together. 4 hours i was online last evening and all that time was wasted.
• No long term goal.
  During the past 2 weeks that ive played this game I found nothing that really motivated me to play the game.
  There is no long term goal... at least none that I could find. But since this game is so terrible documented it might exist somewhere and I simply dont know about it.
  Dunno.
  So why am I playing this game?
  There is nothing to build up.
  There is no true war to win.
  No alien race that has to be defeated (there are no aliens at all in our galaxy -> very disappointing).... or i simply didnt find any reference to them (im not in the mood to google it).
  Its not very motivational to get new ships and equip them with better gear coz that means that i dont need just one evening to compensate the money loss from the insurace when im killed one time... it means that I probably need an entire week to make enough money. Seriously ... im not motivated to get other ships. I only see disadvantages in doing so.
  So what else is there to achieve?
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

In two weeks of gameplay I had only one motivational moment. That was when i got my cobra mkiii. But back then i didnt know about the costs and troubles which await me and the frustrating time doing the same shit over and over again.The game does not feel like fun... it feels like work. And from the regular gameplay that i am forced into (trading/smuggling) i dont see any highlights of the game... not gameplay wise and also not graphic wise. From a game I expect that I can join it when i have 20mins free time and have some fun in it without frustration.

I dont have a problem with getting killed in a game.... i just have a problem when getting killed means that ive to spend an entire evening to get back what i lost.
I also dont have a problem if here and there something is the game is a bit bugged (so far I havent even mentioned the massive lag during cruise or the other technical problems which prevented that i could start the game one week ago). I have a problem when a game is designed to be overly complicated (eventhough it is not neccessary) just to ensure that players have to spend alot of time in the game to make only minimal progress.
I was hoping that a game like Elite could be the answer to "what to play in this community in the future"... but to me it looks more like a singleplayer game which forces you to be online. But not something that you can play with friend or even a clan.
What should a clan do in this game? Try not to go bankrupt from week to week?

After yesterdays incidents where I already wanted to remove this game from my HDD I decide to give this game another try... I launched today.... accepted a trade job in order to earn enough money to pay the insurance... launched from the station and jumped to the destination star system where instantly after my arrival I was forced to leave cruise and within 5seconds shot down. No warning... no chance to escape... no chance to fight... no money to pay the insurance costs for my ship. Every day this game manages to kill the slighted glimpse of motivation.

Some very valid points, OP!

Just let me comment on some points, which I have a different view or can give a bit of extra information:

ad 2) the idea to mimic the distances and sizes in space is interesting and the three modes of travelling are well made to deal with that in game. Especially the ring-planets are beautiful and often visited by me as pirates show up at the Extraction zones quite often, so you can get their bounty and raise rep with local authorities. Or for mining (but found it a bit hard with small ship as i couldn't fit all necessary equipment to do it effectively). During a bit of exploring, i've seen many boring looking barren planets - as it is in most systems. The gas planets were nice to look at and finding a water planet was satisfying. I hope reward for exploring will increase a bit, as it falls behind trading (and trading is as always repetitive).

ad 4) Trading/smuggling is needed in Sidewinder in my point of view, but even in a Cobra you can go for other missions. If interested in fighting, the even cheaper Eagle is okay if you don't try on Pythons / Anacondas / Clippers. The abovementioned Ressorce Sites can give high rewards, depending on the rank of the pirate. Seen everything between 6k - 90k creds. The Conflict zone (popping on in systems where a change of local authorities is ongoing) I flew around the last 2 evenings gives me around 300-700k until I need to refill ammo. Time is usually between 30-50min. I was killed 6 times (~2mio rebuy) on first tries (were my first visits to CZ), but still made a plus of 5mio in around 8h yet.

ad 5) yes, the prcoedure of docking-request could be easier to access. And a filter for the navigation list would be helpful. The need to search an assasination target is something what can be seen differently, though. It feels right if authorities just know a "last spotted" info and don't know exactly where the target is. During flight in supercruise, the signal sources can be seen as circles on HUD or if not in line of sight, from navigation menue.

ad 6) again yes. You just get a list of ship types on scanner in the panel. More info comes up only after you scanned the ship (e.g. player name). If not much ships are around, keys for next/prev target can be faster to cycle through

ad 7) rewards get better when rep with locals raises. If you choose a mission which includes shooting an unwanted ship, FEDs are not happy with that. Looks like it's the way it should be. Maybe they'd jumped away a few seconds later? With some equip like wake-scanner and disruptor, you can follow your target and pull it out. FEDs need some minutes to jump in (attacked ship will send distress signal to FEDs. You are doing the same when beeingattacked, can be deactivated on right panel, as you certainly don't want the FEDs to show up when smuggling as example)
The instancing is in fact a problem and as far as I read due to the P2P nature of game design. It worked better for me after i added elite to firewall and antivir, but there are problems and I hope they will get better, soon! From personal observations I would say that instancing in wings worked 75% for me and when they didn't work, there was nothing doable except maybe logging completely off and on again (but doesn't work always). Smuggling lowers your rep *only* if you get caught! Successful smugg raises your rep with the faction given the order and has an impact on the faction where you delivered (e.g. hauling weaponery to a station will increase the posiibility of a civil-war or sth like that).

ad 10) Some systems are annoying, yes. Especially the starting system for most players atm "LHS 3447" where you always enter at the distant sun. Many other systems are faster to travel. You can see distance to sun in map.

ad 12) see point 7 and as addition: if wings don't see each other in SC, it sometimes work if one drops to normal and deploys a beacon which serves as exit-point for the others. But yes - this is definitely annoying! Set same target as wingman is done with 2 pressings on key(?) I think default is 7/8/9 to choose wingmate and 0 to choose same target as the wingmate. If you disable "auto focus on text input field", you don't have to esc everytime when accessing the top-panel. (I set change of tabs in panels to joystick keys, so I don't need to esc anyway)

ad 13) This is a major point! I adressed with this question some cmdrs I met during flights and two said that supporting local faction will undergo an overhaul. Tried to find intel on that yesterday, but wasn't successful (and didn't want to read through all the dev-posts). On a bigger scale, the powerplay faction could be supported, but I read a lot about repetitiveness and the need for some changes of mechanics. Last major update for powerplay was a month ago, again I dunno how and if it will be changed. There are rumors that the Targoids (alien race in original elite) will enter into the game (some explorers found "closed" systems way out... so maybe aliens will show up, but again no intel when or if...

TL;DR
on some points one could have a different view, but instancing and long-term-goals are major issues at the moment. Game could be better explained, but generally I find it okay to find some mechanics myself (yes, manual should give more detail).

My game went far better so far (probably pure luck) and although I see the problems, I have hope that the game develops in a good direction. So far, there are many things on my list which I haven't done properly yet and looking forward to test them a bit in more detail.

2) i completely disagree with that
98% of the game looks like a black box and for a player doing regular missions (those that can be done without fucking up anything) there is no need and no time to visit such places

4) in 2 weeks I had tons of fights... none of them were in any way profitable
and doing combat missions has been so far the most frustrating event during my 2 weeks of gameplay
yes you can kill ships in this game... i even killed a python with ease... but its not profitable... and the risks are way too high compared to the rewards which i have seen so far
risking a ship worth 400k credits for a 30k mission is not worth the effort... and also not the extreme long time this mission took

5) as already explained yesterday to you... the mission did not state where to find the target and also not the name of the target.
It was a stupid guessing game without any sense which got me a bounty on my head.
If the game tells you "kill a trader" what do you do? Kill all traders you encounter until you find the correct one?
That is stupid mission design. Period!
It is also stupid mission design that nearly every trade mission has lower risk... higher profits and takes by far less time to complete since you dont have to search an entire system for the right target

7) if I take a mission where i am supposed to kill somebody then feds shouldnt be nearby at all. If feds are nearby you can not complete the mission. Again stupid mission design. Its simply impossible to do the mission then. The target was not jumping and the other ships also didnt. I waited long enough before i attacked.
What do you mean with "P2P nature of game design"?
Does this game really use my local resources to provide the environment? If so then why isnt there at least some info about that? P2P requires explicit permission.
You are wrong about smuggling btw. 2 days ago I had a status screen showing that a successful smuggling job lowered the reputation to one of the factions (and i cleary was not caught).

12) not related to the topic but: can you stop using misleading abbreviations.... this pisses me off
"lets do ISA, i want to see if my ODDY build deals more DPS with EPtWx2 or with EPtW+EPtS in combination with TT1x2 and TT1+KLW1 if im using the Zemok DOFF"
See, I can do that better and you need half an hour to google what I actually mean.
IF you ever intent to do group play (and if that game ever will allow group play)... stop that. It does not help anyone to assume that other players know what you mean.
Until I reached "LHS 3447" yesterday I didnt even know what you guys were trying to do there. I asked... but didnt really get an answer.
And up to now i only know that you probably tried to do a mission ... i dont know what kind of mission... if i was equiped correctly for that mission... if i had to be combat ready... or if that mission probably would have fucked up my reputation.

So far i can tell only that playing the game alone was more constructive than playing it in Wings and there is relative little motivation for me to try it again anytime soon.

13) yes its a major point and mights and maybes wont help here.
Also supporting a faction in powerplay is certainly nice... but what in gods name should motivate me to do that? Whats the benefit?
In worst case my reputation with the other factions are messed up then. I couldnt care less about supporting factions if there is no greater goal to achieve.

And well... generally I dont have problem to explore some game features.... no... but i have problem when the basics of this game are not even explained... just like the stupid main menu... the game modes... the options... the UI options. Playing Elite Dangerous is like sitting infront of a chinese keyboard.
The few attempts to explain stuff in the manual is so extremely misleading or obviously obvious. "group play is for playing with a group"

thx for these information. i'm a little bit disappointed now about ED. what OP wrote are good points for me to avoid this game: complicated UI, endless of wasted times (while travelling), too slow progress. seems i can save the money for something else or maybe some other players have many more good points to tell?