Zero Punctuation: Elite: Dangerous - Space Truckin'

[infohippie]

I loved Elite back in the eighties, and I think I would quite enjoy Elite: Dangerous while waiting for Star Citizen... except for the price. E is barely more than a modernised, prettier version of the original eighties game and I'm not going to spend the price of a typical AAA game for that. If it cost maybe a third of what it currently does I'd probably pick it up, but I refuse to pay that kind of price even for a AAA game let alone Euro Truck Simulator In Space.

Finding myself oddly enjoying space games off late... Started with FTL so will probably pick this up. Also "Longer than Anita Sarkeesian's list of grievances" LOL

I heard that an I was like "Oh shit! Shots fired!" I do love how Yahtzee does not give a fuck who he pisses off. Even funnier when he and his friend was trying avoid the topic of Anita and SJWs on their Drown Outs only to give up and make fun of them the very next week.

Link please? This sounds like it would be amusing.

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

I really, REALLY want to play this, but my laptop doesn't have the required RAM.

 

[KapnKerfuffle]

I've played the gamut of Sim games lately. Construction, Trucking and Farming. This might just be the logical next step.

 

[NavyJames]

The only other point I would make is, egads, is it ever a grind. Once you've got your Cobra (~350k credits), you might as well settle in for flying the same ship for a couple weeks, because the Type-6 Transport (2M credits) is a downgrade in all things not cargo hauling related, and the next ship will run you a whopping 6M credits. If you're good, you might be able to manage about 300k credits an hour, but most runs you'll be lucky to get in under 100k, there's a great deal of randomness to which profitable opportunities you are likely to encounter.

I think the key thing with this game is that your enjoyment will depend partly on what your personal goals are. The game doesn't at any point tell you what your goals should be, so success is how you define it.

For example, my friend's been playing the game since Christmas and still only has a few hundred thousand credits, because her goals involve exploration, a bit of bounty hunting and just slowly upgrading as she goes. She's not considered it a grind because she doesn't define her success in the game by how much money she has. Equally, she doesn't consider that I'm "better" at the game because I've got more money than her.

I, on the other hand, am trying to increase my bank balance as much as I can, as my personal goals include buying the Anaconda (~147m credits, not to mention a ~7m cr insurance cost and another 15-20m credits I'm budgeting for upgrades after I buy her). Our personal goals are different, so we play the game differently and derive different types of enjoyment from it.

One other point I've seen made frequently on the Frontier forums is that the game has been designed with a niche appeal in mind. It's unapologetically a game aimed at fans of the genre and of the original Elite, so there may be a limited appeal outside of that niche and that's something that potential buyers should be aware of.

 

[144_v1legacy]

"Is he going to keep avoiding Smash Bros?"

I kinda don't care at this point - the review I'd prefer is actually Captain Toad... (not that it'll affect my having purchased it)
I feel like We already know his opinions on Smash Bros., and he isn't going to say anything new this time, so the video will struggle to be funny. He's given enough justification to ignore it.
But Captain Toad hasn't gotten any previous mentions from him, and I wonder what he'd think of its gameplay.

 

[Tsun Tzu]

This actually sounds pretty interesting. If I didn't have a huge backlog of entertainment/games/anime I'd be all over another fun time sink like this.

Kind of makes me long a bit for the old flight stick I used to have as a kid.

Link please? This sounds like it would be amusing.

Right here for yas. Spoiler = Buzzed Yahtzee moans. And it's...it's just magical.

 

[deleted+75193]

DELETED

 

[jthwilliams]

Well Frontier owes Yatzee 5.99 (10% is std yes?) I had never heard of this game before this video but it looks exactly like what I wanted when I bought X-Rebirth. X-Rebirth feels like what happens when a developer tries to "simplify" a game while failing to realize the primary audience for their game, likes it to feel like a big huge universe and sandbox.


Of course they make buying this game quite a challenge. You have to register an account, then go varify it, then go fill out a few forms, then you are allowed to buy it. At that point you are allowed to download the installer. Which installs a log in client. You sign into the client and it then sends you a verification code. You use the verification code and you can then start to actually download the game.

I don't know if there are more steps because I'm still downloading, but someone has failed to explain to Frontier the concept of removing every possible barrier between your client and the thing you want them to do (aka buy and install your game)

 

[sovietmisaki]

Thankfully I bought the Saitek X-55 Rhino a couple of weeks ago, though I do seem to take forever to close in without overshooting a spaceport. I do have the landing part down, although even that seems to take a few extra minutes. Thankfully there's also a few spare unbinded keys for the X-55 so I could map some functions to them in the settings, now to figure out what I can bind to them without screwing the current settings in place.... Frontier needs to work on that a bit, most games at least warn you when there's a potential conflict when you're changing the key bindings.

 

[Bedinsis]

As much as I'd like to see him do a paradox game, I'm pretty sure he's mentioned he doesn't like strategy games.

Xcom says otherwise. Besides which, CK2 could be seen as a role playing game. And he enjoyed the nemesis system of Shadows of Mordor; I've understood that system is similar to how social interaction works in CK2.

 

[Tim Chuma]

Gazillionare? Was all space economics and no combat
http://www.lavamind.com/games/gazillionaire/

Kids today!

Was a space combat/trading simulator I saw someone streaming a while back. You start off with a single ship and can build up to piloting a fleet and having your own carrier ships and battlecruisers. top down 2D graphics. For the life of me I can't remember the name. I saw some people play it and they kept running out of fuel and getting blown up as they were too eager to jump out of the starting system.

Starflight was pretty good back in the day. Was mainly mining and looking for clues. Space combat was only a minor part.

 

[Robert Marrs]

I have still seen nothing more fun that being a bounty hunter who lives on the edge of the law with my friend. Almost nobody works together online so it makes things much easier when tracking, interdicting and killing wanted players. The occasional threat to other bounty hunters who are eating up our bounties. Following someone across 3 systems because they gave me a 250cr bounty when flying across my fire. Yes I will spend 45 minutes and accept a 4000cr on my own head just to prove a point.

 

[Jburton9]

Well Frontier owes Yatzee 5.99 (10% is std yes?) I had never heard of this game before this video but it looks exactly like what I wanted when I bought X-Rebirth. X-Rebirth feels like what happens when a developer tries to "simplify" a game while failing to realize the primary audience for their game, likes it to feel like a big huge universe and sandbox.


Of course they make buying this game quite a challenge. You have to register an account, then go varify it, then go fill out a few forms, then you are allowed to buy it. At that point you are allowed to download the installer. Which installs a log in client. You sign into the client and it then sends you a verification code. You use the verification code and you can then start to actually download the game.

I don't know if there are more steps because I'm still downloading, but someone has failed to explain to Frontier the concept of removing every possible barrier between your client and the thing you want them to do (aka buy and install your game)

Woah, talk about barriers of entry. Heh, I assume they are trying to sell this game to other than friends and family?

I liked Elite from back in the day and I have watched some of the Dev videos but my interest was blocked once they announced mandatory online single player.

 

[klaynexas3]

Finding myself oddly enjoying space games off late... Started with FTL so will probably pick this up. Also "Longer than Anita Sarkeesian's list of grievances" LOL

I heard that an I was like "Oh shit! Shots fired!" I do love how Yahtzee does not give a fuck who he pisses off. Even funnier when he and his friend was trying avoid the topic of Anita and SJWs on their Drown Outs only to give up and make fun of them the very next week.

Wait, which episode was that? It sounds like it would be amazing.

 

[Marcu5]

Thankfully I bought the Saitek X-55 Rhino a couple of weeks ago, though I do seem to take forever to close in without overshooting a spaceport. I do have the landing part down, although even that seems to take a few extra minutes. Thankfully there's also a few spare unbinded keys for the X-55 so I could map some functions to them in the settings, now to figure out what I can bind to them without screwing the current settings in place.... Frontier needs to work on that a bit, most games at least warn you when there's a potential conflict when you're changing the key bindings.

Just bind a key or button to 75% Throttle and hit that when the ETA hits the 0:07 mark, and (optional) back to full throttle again once your speed reaches the blue range to shave of a few seconds. Then again IDK how feasible this is with a HOTAS setup (i'm using a joystick & keyboard combination myself).

Once you bind a key that was in use already, the game should tell you what it had been bound to somewhere on the bottom of the screen, but only for a second or two.

 

[raankh]

Being more of a sim-player and space geek, I really didn't like flying zero-g airplanes and got turned off the arcade-y flight model. Even if I can stomach playing without inertia (ie velocity doesn't accumulate), the terribly sluggish yaw rate makes it feel like you are turning into an air stream. All that's missing is that yaw would induce roll, and there's even an option for that in the controls!

Apparently they did that because the community got their knickers into a twist about giving mouse users the option to just sit still and track everyone with beam lasers. So they solved a problem they themselves introduced (by using a static frame, I mean "sitting still" is rather relative in real space!) by nerfing something core to the experience of 3D movement. That's crowd funding for you....


EDIT;

Also, I've already spotted several inaccuracies in the astronomical part of it; they seem to have linked spectral class directly to mass, which is not how it works. Aldebaran is a good example, it has about a solar mass less than it should-- a star of that mass would not become an orange giant; also its companion is unlikely to exist since follow up observations in the last decades have failed to detect a companion, and the star's radius has been determined relatively accurately using modern techniques. Even if it does exist, the measurements of the properties of the main star would have to be accounted for.

 

[angryscotsman93]

Hm. Honestly this sounds kind of interesting. Being a space trader sounds more interesting than driving a truck, particularly if there's the occasional space battle to liven things up.

I'll check it out.

EDIT: 59.99!? Uh. I'll wait for a price drop.

Good move. I like it, to a degree, but then again I spent the first twenty hours flying what was essentially a minivan with jet engines shoved in the back. I'd like it if the combat was more accessible.

 

[TheUnbeholden]

Truck Simulator is good.

Space is good.

Ergo Truck Simulator in Space is good?

Space can be good, especially if you can explore a vast galaxy, fight pirates or federal spacepolice, have like small teams of human people on a ship each doing their own thing (capital ships are coming in a patch), and exploring planets in first person (also coming in a patch), have your own NPC flight crew (also coming in a patch), at the moment its all about transporting cargo or getting in the odd fight which admiteddely is amazingly fun in this game for some reason. I think its because its so atmospheric, they just put so much polish on everything that you feel like your really piloting a ship. You can activate voice commands to do various things (using the word "computer" followed by the command). It gets quite good (unless you have a Scottish/Wellish accent XD).

 

[4Aces]

This 'game' is so broken most of the time, with horrible lags, insta-deaths that the devs acknowledge but will not refund, but then turn around and say that if you figured out an exploit, you will lose any advancement as they revert your only save back to the point before you used that exploit. The largest complaint is that this is half-finished. As Yahtzee said, you have to invent a reason to do anything. The devs could not figure out that a 30 year-old game design might need a spot of upgrading before slapping MMO on it, and shoving it out the door. Oh, and you can forget about that first M. If you get more than 10 PCs in any one instance the game will likely crash. I have seen 2 FPS due to 30 ships being in the same region of empty space. With low poly models, and low resolution textures, I doubt their (publicly traded) company will be around after the class-action refund demand (currently in planning stage) is done with them.

It is fun enough for the first 3 hours. After that, you realize you have seen it all, and begin the grind. After 10 you are looking to sell your account for some magic beans. If you can feed off the nostalgia, and make up silly voices for the NPCs, then you might last 20 hours. I know no one that went beyond that. Most has shelved it, waiting for massive numbers of patches, balancing, and content. Sort of like H1Z1.

 

[XDSkyFreak]

I think there are 2 major caveats that anyone trying to get this game should consider. I know them, because I followed the development process and ultimatly decided against buying the game:
1) The developers are spewing Ubisoft levels of bullshit: according to them they did not add a solo offline mode because "someone could cheat in offline and accelerate his progress to Elite status and then go online and ruin the gaming experience of other people" ... a hilarious implication because of 2 reasons: this can still be done, only you now need an internet connection and it might take some extra time because cheating programs won't work AND BIG FUCKING NUMBER 2: so fucking what? you know one quick solution? you start a game offline, that character stays offline. BAM! Common sense! Not lying to your customers about promised features! Not taking leasons from Ubisoft!
2) The game is horibly unfinished and marketed like shit. It is NOT in any way akin to a space MMO. At MOST you can see 31 other players at any given time. There is no realiable system of grouping with a friend outside of making a private session that only allows you and whomkever you invite to appear in the universe. Even beeing the same system, same station as a friend of yours and exiting the station 5 seconds appart, you can run the risk of not seeing eachother because of the shit way the instancing works. And the final nail in the cofin: You know all those cool features they promised will be in the game? The walking on stations and planets? The fun RP stuff? That will pe available when done AS PAYED DLC! THEY WILL CHARGE YOU MONEY FOR CONTENT THEY PROMISED WILL BE IN THE ORIGINAL GAME (original game which is still missing tons of functionality and that allready has had content promised and not delivered).

With these in mind: how much can you trust these developers? The answer for me and a few friends of mine who wanted to get into this game was: not one bit. Despite beeing released this game is still very much an Early-access afair with the cripling flaw of asking for AAA money for an unfinished product and the promise of features down the line that will have to be payed for as well in DLC money. Make of that what you wish, all I know is that Elite: Dangerous was the most disapointing game launched in 2014 for me (after the latest bioware fuck-up, but the less I think about that piece of shit the better).