Simon Bradshaw (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
major_clanger) wrote2014-12-28 09:06 am
major_clanger) wrote2014-12-28 09:06 am
Elite:Dangerous - first thoughts
At 16 there was no question whatsoever of my favourite computer game: Elite, on our BBC micro. It's hard to overstate how incredible it was at the time, with 3D graphics, seemingly vast expanses of the galaxy to explore (cunningly produced via procedural generation to let the game fit in 32K memory) and a trading system to fund your progressive levelling-up of your ship. It was incredibly addictive, although - fortunately for my university plans - I didn't neglect my homework enough to get the titular highest ranking in the game.
There were of course other games that tried to do what Elite did, but I never really got into any of them. The sequels tried to build on Elite but felt to me that they lost more than they gained by doing so, and Wing Commander: Privateer was pretty, but too obviously a space combat simulator recast as a trading game. A few years ago I went through a brief flirtation with Oolite but after a while the nostalgia of playing a somewhat updated version of Elite wore off. What I really wanted, it seemed, was a proper update of Elite that made proper use of the near-millionfold increase in desktop computing power since the original was developed.
So, when David Braben, co-creator of Elite, announced that a complete new version would be funded by a Kickstarter campaign, I signed up like a shot - even though by now I was a confirmed Apple fanboy, and the Mac version was vaguely promised as a later development.
That was two years ago. I read the updates from Frontier, admired screenshots from the early Alpha versions, and noted the announcement a couple of months back that the game would go properly live in December. But I still filed away the prospect of actually playing it for when the Mac version actually appeared some time in mid-2015.
And then fate intervened, in the form of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
attimes_bracing having to replace the geriatric laptop she used for PC-specific games and work. Although she wasn't after a high-end gaming machine - her tastes being more towards strategy and puzzle games - the one she got had a good enough spec that it occurred to me that it could probably run Elite: Dangerous. And I had just been emailed my free download code by Frontier...
First impressions: Pretty. So, so pretty. Flying around space feels like being in a very good astronomy simulator (which Frontier has pretty much built into E:D as part of the game engine). Ships and space stations are recognisable from their counterparts in the original game, but basic polygon graphics have turned into spectacularly detailed models. The galaxy map is amazing, especially if you enable the overlay of trade flows. I won't post pics here as there are so many available online, but you can get a flavour of the game via the official training videos, which I'd definitely recommend watching before you try to play.
E:D comes with a number of training scenarios to work through, such as a basic shoot-the-dumb-target mission that introduces you to the controls, a docking exercise, and an intro to interstellar flight. After working through them I quickly decided that the keyboard-mouse controls were OK for routing pottering around but really not up for combat, and so decided that it was high time I got hold of a joystick. In the mean time I thought I'd try some basic trading, so set up Commander MajorClanger and set off to become a galactic millionaire.
First difference from the original: trading is more realistic, i.e. less transparent. Although you only found out current prices at a given system in Elite after docking, you could guess from the system description. The typical trading grind involved finding an agricultural system near an industrial one - preferably with both being nearer the 'democracy' rather than the 'anarchy' end of the security scale - and shunting food one way and manufactured goods the other. That still works in E:D, but checking the map soon reveals that you lack information on many systems. You can pay for that, but that uses up valuable credits. Or, you can look at the advice in the commodity market as to which nearby systems import or export particular goods, but unless you buy exploration data (more expense!) you may well have no information as to whether the system in question is peaceful and relatively safe or is a hotbed of pirate activity. Indeed, one of the added dimensions of E:D is that you can make money, and even forge a successful career, as an explorer, visiting systems, scanning them and selling the resulting data.
I made a couple of runs, and had nearly doubled my original 1,000 credits, when I ran into one of E:D's current teething troubles. As I approached a station I noticed nearly a dozen new contacts, all of which on being scanned turned out to be other player characters orbiting the small outpost I was planning to trade with. I found out why when I requested docking. "Clearance denied". I tried again. And again. The problem was clear: this outpost had only a couple of docking pads, and there was a queue to use them. I switched to map mode and began poking around for possible alternative systems to offload my cargo...
ZAP ZAP PEW PEW PEW. "You are under attack">. No shit! I fumble around trying to get back into main view, panic, hit emergency thrust instead and ram the station I am loitering near. Between the attack, the impact damage and (I suspect) the station's own defensive response I suddenly find myself having ejected from my exploding craft. I am not dead, but I'm back where I started, only now with a lien against my trading transactions to pay for the loan I've just incurred to cover my uninsured costs of restarting my trading career. Ow.
Checking the online forums I find out that this experience is not uncommon. It seems that new players are being spawned in a relatively small area of space, so stations are getting crowded, especially on popular trade routes. Not only is this frustrating in terms of delays - there seems to be growing demand for Frontier to add space traffic control, or at least a queue system - but it means that otherwise safe areas are full of tempting targets for pirates, or players who just want target practice and don't care about getting a bad in-game reputation.
A couple of days later I try again. This time I aim to get away from my starting system (which, sure enough, is the same one as before) and make a series of trades that take me a good forty light years away. This requires a bit of planning, as the game mechanic is tweaked so that an average ship has a jump range for a single jump only a bit greater than the typical distance between stars. This means that the available routes form a fairly sparse tree rather than a dense mesh, and it's possible to find yourself in a stellar dead end with no option but to retrace your steps. (One difference in E:D from the original is that you have enough fuel for four or five jumps in succession, even though each one is limited in length, with the limit varying depending on your drive rating and how heavily laden your ship is; quite often, routes are plotted through planetless star systems.) I've now found a cluster of fairly close star systems that also has good onward links, so for the time being I'll stay here and build up my resources.
Another new feature: missions! In the original there were just two, triggered at defined points as you rose through the pilot ranks. Here, any station will have perhaps half a dozen on offer. They will range from delivery of famine relief (reward: reputation with one faction) through courier runs for urgent goods (reward: money) to mercenary work (reward: lots of money, if you have a well-armed ship) and offers that boil down to "er, take this box to a nearby system, don't look inside and, um, try to avoid meeting cops, OK?" (reward: money and a bad reputation with one of the major political factions and/or local jurisdictions). I've stuck to the safer end of the spectrum of such transactions and made a moderate amount of money doing so, added by a side-benefit of travelling a fair distance from my starting point in that I was able to sell cartographic data about the systems I'd flown through.
I now also have a nice joystick which, even though I'm still avoiding combat (I have yet to fire my guns other than in the training scenarios) has made flying and in particular landing my Sidewinder a far easier experience. One odd omission, by the way, is that there are no side/rear views in E:D; even the original had those. Come on, I've driven rental cars with rear parking cameras, why doesn't my spaceship have one? But that has freed up the view-hat on my joystick for other uses, and mine is now set up to control the ship's manoeuvring thrusters so I have left/right and up/down translational control to add to pitch/roll (via main joystick), yaw (via control on throttle) and forward/back (via throttle) - full six-axis rotational and translational control without having to peck at the keyboard.
I've now racked up 6-8 hours of gameplay since restarting and have managed to turn my 1,000 credits into 20,000. Soon I'll start thinking about ship upgrades, although if I continue trading I may want to buy a bigger ship at some point - 380,000 credits and I could upgrade to the venerable Cobra Mk 3 from the original game, with 4.5x my current cargo capacity! Even so, I've barely scratched the surface of some of the game's details, for instance by trying to gain reputation with local factions to widen the choice of missions offered to me.
It's probably for the best that I can only play E:D for now by borrowing S's PC, which given that it's on the same desk as her iMac means that this has to be when she's not on her other computer either. It's nice to get back into gaming, but I have a lot of demands on my time from work and I don't want to get too deeply invested in it. For now I'll see how I get on with it during the holiday - more updates in due course...
There were of course other games that tried to do what Elite did, but I never really got into any of them. The sequels tried to build on Elite but felt to me that they lost more than they gained by doing so, and Wing Commander: Privateer was pretty, but too obviously a space combat simulator recast as a trading game. A few years ago I went through a brief flirtation with Oolite but after a while the nostalgia of playing a somewhat updated version of Elite wore off. What I really wanted, it seemed, was a proper update of Elite that made proper use of the near-millionfold increase in desktop computing power since the original was developed.
So, when David Braben, co-creator of Elite, announced that a complete new version would be funded by a Kickstarter campaign, I signed up like a shot - even though by now I was a confirmed Apple fanboy, and the Mac version was vaguely promised as a later development.
That was two years ago. I read the updates from Frontier, admired screenshots from the early Alpha versions, and noted the announcement a couple of months back that the game would go properly live in December. But I still filed away the prospect of actually playing it for when the Mac version actually appeared some time in mid-2015.
And then fate intervened, in the form of
attimes_bracing having to replace the geriatric laptop she used for PC-specific games and work. Although she wasn't after a high-end gaming machine - her tastes being more towards strategy and puzzle games - the one she got had a good enough spec that it occurred to me that it could probably run Elite: Dangerous. And I had just been emailed my free download code by Frontier...First impressions: Pretty. So, so pretty. Flying around space feels like being in a very good astronomy simulator (which Frontier has pretty much built into E:D as part of the game engine). Ships and space stations are recognisable from their counterparts in the original game, but basic polygon graphics have turned into spectacularly detailed models. The galaxy map is amazing, especially if you enable the overlay of trade flows. I won't post pics here as there are so many available online, but you can get a flavour of the game via the official training videos, which I'd definitely recommend watching before you try to play.
E:D comes with a number of training scenarios to work through, such as a basic shoot-the-dumb-target mission that introduces you to the controls, a docking exercise, and an intro to interstellar flight. After working through them I quickly decided that the keyboard-mouse controls were OK for routing pottering around but really not up for combat, and so decided that it was high time I got hold of a joystick. In the mean time I thought I'd try some basic trading, so set up Commander MajorClanger and set off to become a galactic millionaire.
First difference from the original: trading is more realistic, i.e. less transparent. Although you only found out current prices at a given system in Elite after docking, you could guess from the system description. The typical trading grind involved finding an agricultural system near an industrial one - preferably with both being nearer the 'democracy' rather than the 'anarchy' end of the security scale - and shunting food one way and manufactured goods the other. That still works in E:D, but checking the map soon reveals that you lack information on many systems. You can pay for that, but that uses up valuable credits. Or, you can look at the advice in the commodity market as to which nearby systems import or export particular goods, but unless you buy exploration data (more expense!) you may well have no information as to whether the system in question is peaceful and relatively safe or is a hotbed of pirate activity. Indeed, one of the added dimensions of E:D is that you can make money, and even forge a successful career, as an explorer, visiting systems, scanning them and selling the resulting data.
I made a couple of runs, and had nearly doubled my original 1,000 credits, when I ran into one of E:D's current teething troubles. As I approached a station I noticed nearly a dozen new contacts, all of which on being scanned turned out to be other player characters orbiting the small outpost I was planning to trade with. I found out why when I requested docking. "Clearance denied". I tried again. And again. The problem was clear: this outpost had only a couple of docking pads, and there was a queue to use them. I switched to map mode and began poking around for possible alternative systems to offload my cargo...
ZAP ZAP PEW PEW PEW. "You are under attack">. No shit! I fumble around trying to get back into main view, panic, hit emergency thrust instead and ram the station I am loitering near. Between the attack, the impact damage and (I suspect) the station's own defensive response I suddenly find myself having ejected from my exploding craft. I am not dead, but I'm back where I started, only now with a lien against my trading transactions to pay for the loan I've just incurred to cover my uninsured costs of restarting my trading career. Ow.
Checking the online forums I find out that this experience is not uncommon. It seems that new players are being spawned in a relatively small area of space, so stations are getting crowded, especially on popular trade routes. Not only is this frustrating in terms of delays - there seems to be growing demand for Frontier to add space traffic control, or at least a queue system - but it means that otherwise safe areas are full of tempting targets for pirates, or players who just want target practice and don't care about getting a bad in-game reputation.
A couple of days later I try again. This time I aim to get away from my starting system (which, sure enough, is the same one as before) and make a series of trades that take me a good forty light years away. This requires a bit of planning, as the game mechanic is tweaked so that an average ship has a jump range for a single jump only a bit greater than the typical distance between stars. This means that the available routes form a fairly sparse tree rather than a dense mesh, and it's possible to find yourself in a stellar dead end with no option but to retrace your steps. (One difference in E:D from the original is that you have enough fuel for four or five jumps in succession, even though each one is limited in length, with the limit varying depending on your drive rating and how heavily laden your ship is; quite often, routes are plotted through planetless star systems.) I've now found a cluster of fairly close star systems that also has good onward links, so for the time being I'll stay here and build up my resources.
Another new feature: missions! In the original there were just two, triggered at defined points as you rose through the pilot ranks. Here, any station will have perhaps half a dozen on offer. They will range from delivery of famine relief (reward: reputation with one faction) through courier runs for urgent goods (reward: money) to mercenary work (reward: lots of money, if you have a well-armed ship) and offers that boil down to "er, take this box to a nearby system, don't look inside and, um, try to avoid meeting cops, OK?" (reward: money and a bad reputation with one of the major political factions and/or local jurisdictions). I've stuck to the safer end of the spectrum of such transactions and made a moderate amount of money doing so, added by a side-benefit of travelling a fair distance from my starting point in that I was able to sell cartographic data about the systems I'd flown through.
I now also have a nice joystick which, even though I'm still avoiding combat (I have yet to fire my guns other than in the training scenarios) has made flying and in particular landing my Sidewinder a far easier experience. One odd omission, by the way, is that there are no side/rear views in E:D; even the original had those. Come on, I've driven rental cars with rear parking cameras, why doesn't my spaceship have one? But that has freed up the view-hat on my joystick for other uses, and mine is now set up to control the ship's manoeuvring thrusters so I have left/right and up/down translational control to add to pitch/roll (via main joystick), yaw (via control on throttle) and forward/back (via throttle) - full six-axis rotational and translational control without having to peck at the keyboard.
I've now racked up 6-8 hours of gameplay since restarting and have managed to turn my 1,000 credits into 20,000. Soon I'll start thinking about ship upgrades, although if I continue trading I may want to buy a bigger ship at some point - 380,000 credits and I could upgrade to the venerable Cobra Mk 3 from the original game, with 4.5x my current cargo capacity! Even so, I've barely scratched the surface of some of the game's details, for instance by trying to gain reputation with local factions to widen the choice of missions offered to me.
It's probably for the best that I can only play E:D for now by borrowing S's PC, which given that it's on the same desk as her iMac means that this has to be when she's not on her other computer either. It's nice to get back into gaming, but I have a lot of demands on my time from work and I don't want to get too deeply invested in it. For now I'll see how I get on with it during the holiday - more updates in due course...