We need to talk about Elite: Dangerous

My brand new very old game!

Thanks NASA!

So, I've been playing Elite:Dangerous quite a bit recently. So much in fact that I fried my computer back in December and had to rebuild it. I felt rushed to do so because I'm enjoying it so much.

Some history of my life as a gamer: way back in the day, I was quite enamored with flight simulators. Mostly, I loved them because those were the only video games I was allowed to own (well, that and Myst). I dutifully flew around in Microsoft Flight Simulator '95 for a few months until I was able to convince my family to let my buy X-wing vs TIE Fighter. I freaking loved that game and flight sims were my go-to games until about 1999 when I discovered Homeworld.

Elite: Dangerous is in many ways a flash back to my childhood in a X-wing cockpit. There's nothing between you and the cold black of space except some windows and a shimmering blue force field.

This is just a random screenshot, not my cockpit. 

Space; the final Frontier. 

But, I've grown up a little bit and merely making a space combat flight-sim wouldn't ordinarily be enough to entice me. What I also love about E:D is the developer's comittment to building an accurate representation of the the Milky Way. Here's a small bit from a recent Polygon article:

To create Elite’s gamespace, Braben’s team started with as much information as they could gather about 160,000 known star systems from our galaxy. The trouble is, so very few planets have been discovered outside our own solar system. To fill the gaps Braben’s team created the Stellar Forge, a methodology that uses procedural generation to extrapolate out the composition and orbit of all the undiscovered exoplanets in our galaxy.

Braben used acutal models from the ESA and NASA to build his procedural generation engine. At this point, the game is capable of accurately (to the best of our current knowledge) recreating 400 billion stars systems! Moreover, the developers continue to update the galaxy with new information as it becomes available. About 1 month after the game was released, NASA's Kepler telescope found the most earthlike planet we've ever found, Kepler 438b. The next game patch featured this little gem:

- Updated exoplanets Kepler 438 b and 442 b

That's a pretty cool commitment! Although, exploration is only one aspect of the game, some of the community seeks to explore. A group of around 1000 players have organized an expedition to explore as much of the galaxy as possible. The game allows exploration as a full time pursuit with players able to sell planetary and celestial data to various entities. The logistics of long distance trips are pretty interesting. Ships need fuel and repairs but the galaxy is only populated within a certain radius of Earth. From what I can tell, it's about 300 light-years in any direction. Without nearby stations, ship captains have to employ the dangerous strategy of scooping hydrogen from stars. Of course, that it limited by how much heat damage the ship can withstand.

This image is a lie. You never get to exit your pilot seat.

Such complexities draw me further into the environment created by E:D. Heat management is actually fairly crucial since there aren't easy ways to rapidly dissipate the heat generated by ship components. Similarly, ships have limited fuel and limited power generation capacity so a balancing act is always required. Want to load your ship up with freaking lasers? Be careful not to use so much power that your engines and shields are weakened. Want that 20+ light year jump engine? You'll have to sacrifice cargo capacity and armor.

Pew Pew!

Oh, and there's the option to fly with nearly full Newtonian flight rules applied. Traveling at 400km/s in one direction? Then you'll have to work hard to cut that speed before you can suddenly turn around and head in the opposite direction. Luckily, you can enable a flight assist computer to make flying much easier but (those trade-offs again!) you'll handicap your maneuverability a little bit. The game is rather unforgiving in that way. You'll never really get a single ship that excels at every role. While a well rounded ship is possible, it'll always have limitations which a specialized ship doesn't.

Trade is another major aspect of the game. Populated systems have multiple stations each with multiple factions offering a variety of missions. Some are for smuggling, some are above the board. Some are bounty missions. Or, you could just buy commodities from a station and go off in search of somewhere to sell your cargo. Some systems even produce rare goods which increase in value the farther you get from their originating system. You're incentivized  to spend time finding profitable trade routes. Just watch out for pirates: both NPCs and players can attack and take your cargo.

Yeah, you flight straight inside the station and land. It's always fraught with danger. Just looking at this docking bay makes me nervous. 

Trading is how I spend most of my time in game. I bought the game's equivalent of a U-haul and ferry precious metals and mineral extractors back and forth between a high tech space station and a small orbital mining platform 9 light years away. It's super routine and repetitive and I love it. No, you don't understand. I LOVE it. Days that I'm not working, I wake up, get Lisa out the door in one piece, make some coffee, and settle in for some trade runs. I keep some interesting reading or Netflix on the laptop while I pilot my ship around. The turnaround time between stations is about 5 minutes so I only have to complete a few runs before I can invest the proceeds in a new ship or some kind of upgrade. If I get bored of the trade run, I can swap my space U-haul for a sleek fighter and go hunting criminals or I can get my long range exploring ship and take a few rare goods across colonized space while gathering some map data at unexplored systems along the way.

Technically, Elite: Dangerous is an MMO. There are thousands of players active at any given time and the number is growing. But, remember that space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly bit it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's juts peanuts to space. The starting positions of players are not random but they are fairly spread out. Since leaving the systems I started in, the only place where I routinely encountered other humans was when flying around Sol. That's not to say I haven't had a few run-ins.

Cool Story Bro.

Right after I bought my shiny new space U-haul (literally like 10 minutes), I was ripped out of hyperspace by a player who kindly requested I eject some of my cargo as "toll" for passing through that system. I put max power to engines and began a wide spiraling turn away from his Cobra. I had no weapons and only basic armor and shields. Escape was the only option but his ship was faster than mine. He asked again for my cargo and in a volley of laser fire my shields were down. He didn't press the attack though and my jump engines were back online. Just as I hit my jump button, the HUD flashed red and informed me a missile was launched.  At the point it was a race between the missile and my hyperdrive's time to spin up. The ship computer counts down: 4...3...2...1... and I jump away.

This is what a space U-haul looks like. 

I was secure in my victory for about 2 seconds before I was again interdicted. As my ship dropped out of hyperspace, I pulled up my sensor menu and saw that the same player had somehow followed my jump and nabbed me immediately. My shields were still down and my ship was spinning from the interdiction. The player didn't say anything this time. He began pelting my bare hull with laser fire and warning messages began coming up over my HUD: Thruster failure, life support failure, sensor failure. Then the warning I was sure would kill me: incoming missile.His range was so close I had no time to maneuver. With a loud clang, the missile latched onto my hull and began drilling into my cargo bay. A limpet drone! Valuable metals began jettisoning into space ans the drone reached into my hold and pillaged my ship. I tried to spin up my jump drive but the drone also stops your ability to jump. I'd have to wait until it was done and my cargo hold was empty. I was still spinning but I had managed to get a little more distance between me and the player. A message came across my comms: "There, that wasn't so hard was it?"

"Okay," I though to myself, "this guy is flaunting his superiority." Fuming, I wheeled my ship around and saw that he was slowly gathering the bits of cargo which trailed my ship. The drone had stopped by that point and most of the cargo was gone. The Cobra's pilot (Cobra Commander if I'm feeling cheeky) wasn't pay any attention to me. A quick glance at the senors showed he had his cargo scoop deployed and was moving about very slowly.  My ship, however, had largely recovered from the attack and I still had several minutes of oxygen left. I could either limp away with most of my cargo gone, or I could try to take him out. Now, my ship had no weapons so the only way I could hope to damage his ship would be to ram it.

All power to engines, maximum thrust, and shields up, I hit the unsuspecting pirate squarely amidships. His Cobra was only about half the size of my cargo ship but my hull was at about 50% integrity. It was enough. We both spun off in different directions and as my ship broke apart I saw his Cobra explode, followed shortly by my own ship's fiery death. I re-spawned at the last starport I'd been at and repurchased my space U-haul. I also spent the remainder of my funds on defensive measures. Next time a player tries to rob me, I'd have a better chance of escaping and fighting back. Only, nobody's tried to rob me since then. In fact, I haven't even seen another player for about a week. For me, that's appealing.

Nobody's perfect.

Now, just because I love the game doesn't mean it's perfect. Bugs are becoming more and more scarce with each patch but they are still a bit too frequent. And there are a lot of features still to come. At this point, you can't exit your ship and walk around on the space stations. You can't land on planets. Players can't trade directly with each other and they can't really play as a group easily. (It pretty much involves each player following the one in front of them to go to the same place. They're technically together but they're not really grouped like you'd expect from a multiplayer game.) Moreover, Frontier, the developer, got in a lot of hot water by promising completely offline gameplay  during their crowd funding campaign and then backing away from the promise just before official launch. Some of their announced features are also planned for paid expansions which irks many potential players. Sure there are no monthly fees but who wants to buy a space game and then have to pay for the expansion which lets you exit the ship and walk around?

There's also a big competitor around the corner, Star Citizen. It promises much of the same kinds of gameplay but they are taking their time to slowly implement every feature before launch. But, as good as that game looks, E:D is playable right now and SC is slated for launch in 2016. That's a lot of time for E:D to shape up.

All in all, I think I enjoy Elite: Dangerous so much because it fits my lax style of play so well. Sure, I can enjoy intense TIE Fighter throwback combat but I can also relax and run cargo around while reading blogs or watching a movie. The fact that the game doesn't really penalize me for doing either is something which I think any MMO could learn from. There's really no pressure on me and that means I never feel like playing is a chore. If you're itching for some fun and often difficult space fairing adventure, take a look a Elite:Dangerous.

Oh, and you can't have crew members so that other chair will always be empty.