Elite: Dangerous

 PC
User Score
6.7

Mixed or average reviews- based on 1913 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,150 out of 1913
  2. Mixed: 209 out of 1913
  3. Negative: 554 out of 1913

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  1. Pannon
    Dec 26, 2015
    4
    The gamer site reviews reflect the score, that has hopes and wishful thinking has attached to it.
    If you read them, note the date of the review. They reviewed the game not long after it was released and the game has (had) a huge potential to become something much bigger. The reviewers gave the high scores for high hopes. A year later, the game barely changed, beside a few additional    The gamer site reviews reflect the score, that has hopes and wishful thinking has attached to it.
    If you read them, note the date of the review. They reviewed the game not long after it was released and the game has (had) a huge potential to become something much bigger. The reviewers gave the high scores for high hopes. A year later, the game barely changed, beside a few additional features, which ultimately just gave the game more grind, instead of adding meaningful content.
    If you play it for a few hours you get the vibe, that you may have to do a lot of things to progress anywhere, and perhaps you get excited, just thinking about the endless possibilities and options and choices.
    Give it another 10 hours, and your entire gameplay consist of preparing to start to play the game and waiting for that moment, when you start really playing. Unfortunately, that moment never comes. What you do in your first hour, is what you will do for the rest of the time. Either trade back/forth between stations, which consist of taking off, traveling - loading screen -traveling - landing, or fighting endlessly spawning enemy ships, which change absolutely nothing, whether it comes factions or affiliations of various powers. All the other ships you may see as traffic is nothing else, but background filler. They serve no purpose or function, beside they are giving the illusion of "things happening". You can actually test this by trying to follow a ship, which will end up traveling somewhere infinitely, or landing at an non particular space station, and then taking off and doing over and over, without selling something or fighting.
    You can also test, that whether those ships you blow up makes any difference to their faction or base. They do nothing.
    Eventually, you will realise, that the entire universe is created for you, and outside of your visual radius, nothing really goes on, and everything ceases to exist as soon you leave. Unidentified signals sources pop up for you randomly, if you fly slow and their content isn't determined, until you stop to investigate by dropping out of hyperspace.
    Sound effects is great. That's why I'm giving it a 4. If nobody else, then it's the sound team, that perhaps did their best to make something.
    I see, a lot of people praising graphics. I don't see it that way. It's not hard to draw space and place objects floating in it.It's much harder to create Earth based fantasy worlds or actual locations with buildings, vegetation.
    I can't give more than 4, and if I would not consider the sound and music, this game is maybe a 2.    … Expand
  2. RandyFandangle
    Mar 11, 2015
    4
    EDIT: Back after a month to update review, and it's going down from a 5 to a 4. Nothing new of any use, still empty and buggy. On the plus side, an XBOne version is on the way..... wish they'd stick some content in the PC version before trying to cash in with a feeble port. The 4 is still for potential, though I'm not holding out much hope any more at this stage. Disappointing in theEDIT: Back after a month to update review, and it's going down from a 5 to a 4. Nothing new of any use, still empty and buggy. On the plus side, an XBOne version is on the way..... wish they'd stick some content in the PC version before trying to cash in with a feeble port. The 4 is still for potential, though I'm not holding out much hope any more at this stage. Disappointing in the extreme.

    (Previous review)
    Giving this a grudging FIVE for now, as I've only been playing for a couple of weeks. I'll come back later and update after another week or so.
    What I can say is that NO WAY IS THIS WORTH 10/10 AS IT STANDS RIGHT NOW!
    There are just too many bugs, and mechanisms that don't work as they should. Well, I'm praying they aren't working as they should, cuz if this is how they have designed it then God help us.
    Had some fun, but it's hard to find sometimes. Frontier are gonna have to release some damn good stuff very soon or players are gonna bail.
    Hey, the 5 is for potential. Will have to see.    … Expand
  3. Slickums
    Feb 3, 2015
    0
    Really tried to like this, but after 6 weeks giving it a go, me and my friends have given up.
    So overhyped - shame on some of the reviewers. Can't believe we bought it and stumped up $60 for this empty, broken and frustrating game.
    There are lots of promises of future content, but I really don't think it's been designed very well as it stands, and promises are worth spit anyway.
    YMMV.
  4. TravisPerkins
    Feb 6, 2015
    0
    Guy in the other office was raving about this for months, so I bought it when it came out.
    Asked him today if he was still playing - he said nope "It's too boring and fake".
    He's dead right. Wish I'd waited before buying. Oh well, it's only money, right? LoL.
  5. suntox
    Aug 30, 2015
    0
    Be careful with this game. The people who preordered this game have still not received an actual game with content. All you got by now is a framework of 400 billion star systems which are just generic and empty (automatically created). Generic missions that are extremely boring with over 90% travel time (hours), everywhere the same. The same 3 station models in every system. Only a fewBe careful with this game. The people who preordered this game have still not received an actual game with content. All you got by now is a framework of 400 billion star systems which are just generic and empty (automatically created). Generic missions that are extremely boring with over 90% travel time (hours), everywhere the same. The same 3 station models in every system. Only a few available ships and little equipment. There is close to no content next to this. So at the moment only dreamers and roleplayers actually find what they want.

    And instead of adding the missing content, they offer you the next big update for the price of a full game!!!

    Plus the forum moderators are very agressive if you talk about that on either steam or frontier forum. They ban you on steam forum for fake reasons if you don't shut up when they tell you to, and remove your valid comments. This is pure fascism.

    The name David Braben now seems to stand for exploitation and fraud. Very saddening.    … Expand
  6. LeoKol
    Dec 16, 2014
    4
    DISCLAIMER: This is an objective review. Everyone giving the game 10/10 is lying to themselves, and you. That said, if you own, or are looking to own, an Oculus Rift, then this game is a must buy. The game is beautiful. It makes for a perfect Oculus Rift title thanks to it's stunning visuals, immense sense of scale and beautiful audio.

    tl;dr - Current state of the game: Grind credits to    DISCLAIMER: This is an objective review. Everyone giving the game 10/10 is lying to themselves, and you. That said, if you own, or are looking to own, an Oculus Rift, then this game is a must buy. The game is beautiful. It makes for a perfect Oculus Rift title thanks to it's stunning visuals, immense sense of scale and beautiful audio.

    tl;dr - Current state of the game: Grind credits to buy bigger ships so that you can grind credits better. Graphics & Gameplay has been improved over the original Elite (1984), but content has stayed the same (unless you count the 400 billion empty, lifeless, procedural star systems).

    Elite Dangerous will be a great game in another year or two. I have little doubt of that. However, as of the writing of this review, Elite is almost entirely unplayable. The foundations for a great game are all there, but there's little to keep players interested.

    Mining, exploration, combat and trading are the only activities currently open to players. You can either do any of these activities on your own, or you can accept a generic mission and do them for an npc you'll never meet or interact with. With exception to combat, all these systems are basic and repetitive.

    While there is a dynamic economy in the game, trading is hardly complicated when compared to that of games like X3 or EVE. You buy low, and you sell high. The only excitement comes in the form of random pirate and police attacks. You can observe changes in the economy, but, unless you enjoy watching numbers go up and down, I doubt you'll find this exciting.

    Exploration involves flying to new systems and pointing yourself at 'undiscovered' celestial objects & stations. You won't be stumbling into any ship graveyards or sentient nebulae. There are no surprises here and, unless you're an astronomer looking to observe binary stars & black holes, you probably won't find this very exciting either.

    Mining is even simpler. You find asteroids and you shoot at them. Maybe you'll get attacked by a pirate, maybe you won't. Combat, on the other hand, feels great and intuitive. The game's audio and HUD are highly immersive and really shine in combat. Unfortunately you'll most often find yourself fighting against AI due to the whole 400 billion star systems thing.

    There is no concrete system that promotes team-play, and you'll probably make more money fighting NPC's rather than players. The games selection of ships is also rather limited when compared to other titles (and they all look like geometric shapes).

    The biggest problem with the game right now is the fact that there is no end-game. There's nothing to strive for. You may set personal goals, like visiting a distant system or getting a certain ship, but, at the heart of it, everything you do ends with you making credits in order to make credits better.

    The living world is entirely a novelty, and will almost never directly impact you. You may have to go to another system to buy cheap goods, or you might note the presence of more police ships, but this will never make a significant impact on the way you play the game. You will never feel like you're doing something important. There is a giant disconnect between the world of the NPC's and the world of the players.

    There is a giant intergalactic war being waged, but unless you force yourself to care it's really of no consequence to you. You can't interact with NPC's, so there's very little to connect you to the troubles of the poor populace of miners living on some rock. You might visit a planet with billions of inhabitants, but the space around it will feel just as empty and lifeless as the distant reaches of the galaxy.

    So, all of this leaves you to motivate yourself. Sure, you can try to join one of the galactic empires and lead them to victory, but what's the point? No NPC will thank you, unless it comes in the form of a giant wall of text available as a generic contract in a space station. You won't get a limited edition ship, nor will you get the joy of watching or participating in any giant cinematic battles. There's no sense of urgency or need to drive you forward.

    All you have to do, is to make credits so that you can get upgrades simply for the sake of getting upgrades. The foundations for a great game are all there, but to call this release ready is a joke. I highly advice new players stay away from Elite until more content is added. I've honestly had more fun playing the Star Citizen alpha than I have playing the release-candidate version of Elite.

    To put it into contrast, imagine an X3 with better graphics and combat. Now imagine that you can't control more than one ship. That NPC's don't have a voice and communicate through text. That there is no single player story. That all space stations serve only one purpose. That you never see any other ships unless you're in combat or docking. That you can't own space stations. That exploration only leads to you finding floating credits. And, well, the list goes on...    … Expand
  7. christhenoob
    Dec 20, 2014
    4
    I want to love this game. I really do. I've been a backer since alpha and was really sold on the vision that they had. Unfortunately, the game that was released is not the game I imagined it to be. If you were expecting an MMO, I hate to disappoint, but this is not an MMO in any sense of the word.

    Interacting with other players when not completely broken is almost impossible due to the    I want to love this game. I really do. I've been a backer since alpha and was really sold on the vision that they had. Unfortunately, the game that was released is not the game I imagined it to be. If you were expecting an MMO, I hate to disappoint, but this is not an MMO in any sense of the word.

    Interacting with other players when not completely broken is almost impossible due to the sheer size of the universe. Although huge, I've never played a game that has felt so empty. I imagined roaming the galaxy pirating and bounty-hunting other players in epic battles of wits, but I'm lucky if I even see another player. Not to mention the hours upon hours of tedious grinding it takes to be even remotely equipped to do so.

    Playing with your friends is just impossible in the current version not only because the game lacks even the most basic of social tools, but because the game punishes you for playing with other players. Bounties are only awarded to the person with the last kill, missions are given and rewarded individually, you can't even see your friends half the time, multiplayer is just a downright mess.

    Don't get me wrong, the game is absolutely breathtakingly beautiful, and the sound design might be the best I've ever heard in a video game. But great visuals and audio does not a game make. It's just a shame that the game design is so horrid. There is no story to speak of. Every mission follows the same of several archetypes: "Kill this", "Deliver that", "Fetch this", etc. Missions are boring and feel as though there is no consequence, especially when you're offered the exact same mission seconds after turning it in.

    The actual gameplay is mind-numbingly grindy. Most MMOs get away with this because the grind is for a greater purpose, but in Elite the only reason to grind is so that you can grind some more. It kills what very little motivation I had to play the game in the first place. The combat is pretty good, but it's not enough to carry the game through.

    There is also so little in regards to depth it's absurd. There is an entire universe of systems, yet there is hardly any difference between the systems. The missions are the same, the factions are functionally the same, it's the same system over and over with a couple of variables tweaked along the way. Ships are "customizable" in that the more money you have the better your ship is. There are no side-grades to speak of except maybe weapons where really only 2 or 3 are actually viable.

    At the end of the day, the game is just disappointing. Modern graphics and stunning audio coupled with gameplay from the 80's. I think it's naive to say game design hasn't improved in the last 30 years, and it's a shame that this game decided that it didn't have to.    … Expand
  8. Goosebump
    Dec 26, 2014
    4
    Had been looking forward to this very much. The reviews all sounded good and the videos looked great.

    Now that I've parted with my money and installed it, I couldn't be more disappointed with how utterly rubbish the new player experience is. The in game tutorials are rubbish - enormously disjointed and assume far too much. Rather than have in-game videos, you're flicked out of the    Had been looking forward to this very much. The reviews all sounded good and the videos looked great.

    Now that I've parted with my money and installed it, I couldn't be more disappointed with how utterly rubbish the new player experience is. The in game tutorials are rubbish - enormously disjointed and assume far too much. Rather than have in-game videos, you're flicked out of the game to YouTube to watch some video that again, assumes you know a heap of stuff as it proceeds to talk about "basics" that are not basic at all.

    There is obviously a solid game in here somewhere based on the number of positive reviews and if you have the patience to try and muddle through this minefield as a new player then you might find it. As it is, keep your money - at least until they fix the new player experience (or if you're already versed in such wildly mystifying "basics").    … Expand
  9. WyattDerp
    Jan 30, 2015
    0
    Like others, I bought into the hype some of the reviews and totally false trailers pushed. Seriously wonder if those reviewers actually played the game for more than an hour.
    Well I have, and although I thought it was fantastic for a week, the cracks started to appear dang quick.
    You can't get away from it - the more honest reviews have nailed it. It's a shallow, hollow, soulless game    Like others, I bought into the hype some of the reviews and totally false trailers pushed. Seriously wonder if those reviewers actually played the game for more than an hour.
    Well I have, and although I thought it was fantastic for a week, the cracks started to appear dang quick.
    You can't get away from it - the more honest reviews have nailed it. It's a shallow, hollow, soulless game with little to offer apart from initially pleasing visuals and a good sound treatment.
    And everything DOES start to look the same, as you do the four things that you're allowed to.
    Waste of $60. Avoid guys.    … Expand
  10. WiggyStardust
    Feb 9, 2015
    0
    Whoa!
    Not what I expected after watching the trailers and reading some of the reviews.
    Firstly you really do need a fancy joystick to play properly. Fair enough bought one. Been playing for a couple of weeks - graphics and sound are good at first. BUT, all the star stations look the same, NPCS are dumb as rocks, so they are either boring or instantly kill you. Missions are crap.    Whoa!
    Not what I expected after watching the trailers and reading some of the reviews.
    Firstly you really do need a fancy joystick to play properly. Fair enough bought one.
    Been playing for a couple of weeks - graphics and sound are good at first.
    BUT, all the star stations look the same, NPCS are dumb as rocks, so they are either boring or instantly kill you.
    Missions are crap. Seriously guys, this isn't 1995 any more.
    Wow, just not worth $60 bucks. Not worth $20 bucks either! lol.
    Yeah, server outages, gankers, can't meet your buddies, crappy comms.
    Get the picture?    … Expand
  11. Angus_MacGyver
    Feb 24, 2015
    1
    I am not happy with the way in which this game was marketed to customers.
    Elite Dangerous was to offer me an ingame multi player experience which were not implemented on release. How a company can not even have a way in which players can communicate with each other in game is beyond me. The MMO side of this game does not exist.
    That aside, ED was enjoyable for the first week until one    I am not happy with the way in which this game was marketed to customers.
    Elite Dangerous was to offer me an ingame multi player experience which were not implemented on release. How a company can not even have a way in which players can communicate with each other in game is beyond me. The MMO side of this game does not exist.

    That aside, ED was enjoyable for the first week until one comes to realise the bugs, exploits and total lack of content available for a very expensive game just left me feeling defeated.
    Ship insurance? This is the worst idea since Everquest use to penalise players for deaths by removing hard earned exp. It is quite possible in Elit Dangerous to lose everything you have worked for in a matter of seconds, due to lag, poor NPC AI or just GTA griefers out to destroy your ship using hacks.
    Yes Elite dangerous is a new game, and the bones are very solid. Should FD waited a couple of months before releasing? Yes probably but the push for Christmas sales put it onto the shelves, so now they must contend with angry customers.
    There are some PVE group games available, but without the correct ingame chat/communication, it still feels like a lost cause.
    The current game is very tiresome and dull but does have massive potential. I just hope the Devs hurry up and fix what is already here because as far as I am concerned, it still feels like Beta testing to me.
    My biggest concern for ED and partly the reason why I was banned from the official forums was because I felt the only testers of this game were Flyboys, die hard fans of the original. So we ended up with an almost duplicate game from 1984 but with better graphics.
    You can't do this, a game needs to evolve, it needs to captivate its audience not suck their will to live ( try trade runs for 4 days straight ).
    Flyboys will tell you to experience all the game has to offer..... Right....
    If you are going to market a game as an MMO it neefds to up to the standards of what most expect an MMO to have. ED does not even have the basics of any MMO currently.

    I have high expectations for this game in the future, if you are thinking about buying this dont.
    Wait a few months, check in on reviews, there is just not enough to offer more than a couple weeks of excitement here and the patches seem to be creating more problems than they are fixing.    … Expand
  12. Daisai
    Jan 7, 2015
    4
    If this game was released about 10 years ago it would have been decent with the lack of content, however in 2014/2015 a game which costs this much should have alot more content then it currently has.
    And even the little content that it does have does not work.
    If you are thinking about buying this game, ask yourself, are you willing to spend the money you normally spend on a finished    If this game was released about 10 years ago it would have been decent with the lack of content, however in 2014/2015 a game which costs this much should have alot more content then it currently has.
    And even the little content that it does have does not work.

    If you are thinking about buying this game, ask yourself, are you willing to spend the money you normally spend on a finished product on a product which is not even half done.

    Yes it has alot of star systems, however you can not do anything in more then 99% of these start systems.

    If you buy this product you are not buying a product, you are spending some money in the hope that 1 day the product might be up to a standard normal people/developers might call "ready to release".

    Don't get fooled when they say the scope of this game is huge, since this all depends on their future.
    If they decide to release this game on a console ( which i think they first intended ) the scope of this game gets alot smaller, since consoles are lesser platforms in terms of performance.
    Because at this moment already a playstation 4 has 2 year old hardware, after 1 or 2 years thats even older.
    So if they release this game on consoles they have to take this into account when they release new content.

    So all in all, think well before buying this game, i did and am not pleased with what i got.
    The game is far from finished or even in a state one would call beta, this game shows signs of not even beta testing at all.    … Expand
  13. RadioShed
    Feb 11, 2015
    0
    Thought this was supposed to be a rich interactive and believable galaxy simulation.
    WRONG!
    The trading sim is pathetic, the missions are generic fetch quests, I can barely work up the enthusiasm to type a review here.
    Superficial and fake. Instanced, grindy, boring.
    Tedious, punishing, and boring. Absolutely hate it and have deleted it.
    Enjoyed the graphics for the first week though.
  14. Tick
    Jun 12, 2015
    3
    I'll start off with the 10/10 rating I give everything and work backwards to my score of a 4.

    The Interface is not mouse driven in menus. You have to use keyboard controls which is not intuitive seeing how you used the mouse to navigate the menus before the game launched. The interface has to be instinctual and natural to the majority of PC users. This means the Mouse. The interface is    I'll start off with the 10/10 rating I give everything and work backwards to my score of a 4.

    The Interface is not mouse driven in menus. You have to use keyboard controls which is not intuitive seeing how you used the mouse to navigate the menus before the game launched. The interface has to be instinctual and natural to the majority of PC users. This means the Mouse. The interface is a Vital component as it should be background and thoughtless. Just a smooth interraction to get through so you can play the game. It isn't... It's awkward. You cannot use your mouse in the various menus. When you are in the system map and click on a station you do not get options like "set destination" or anything. You have to use your keyboard as if you were playing an old 286 computer computer game. The galaxy map you can click on things and a pop-up menu does come up but it is so sensitive that trying to mouse over to the options closes it more often than successfully choosing an option. Interface -3

    Graphics are pretty good. They are by no means Amazing. I have settings on Ultra and run it on a 60hz 4k monitor. They never made me go "WOW" they were just pleasing. Score: +2

    the ships are kind blah. Just wedges that look kind of dated. Put up against the environmental graphics the ships look drab... Score: +0

    Controls: They are complicated. This is a steep learning curve. If you have just a mouse and keyboard you have to fool around with the controls for quite some time to get anything resembling intuitive controls to fly with. Score:-1

    Manual everything: Docking is a pain in the butt. Apparently after you play the game for a while you can buy a computer to automatically dock... but if you have played the game long enough you may just like manual docking and not want the computer to do it for you... I don't know why the auto-dock computer isn't a starting item and you can save ship resources by taking it out later on... It's easy to miss the spot you have to land on, you get warnings by the station to MOVE NOW OR YOU WILL BE SHOT, you accidentally press a button to deploy hard-points and your guns deploy. You were just fined. Score: -1

    Navigation: It's ok, you have to adjust the mouse sensitivity and dead-zones to improve this, and if you don't know what these are because you're new to games like this.. You're SOL. Some planets don't even show up on the system map because they are tethered to another planet.. Nothing explains this, you have to figure it out on your own. The ships seem sluggish, and you have to fool around with Pitch, Yaw and roll to get something you like, again if you are unfamiliar with what this means, you're again, SOL. Score -1

    Tutorials: Not very helpful at all. This game assumes you are experienced before you play. It assumes you're an existing backer. It assumes you've played the original game. It seems that without a HOTAS or Joystick set-up the game puts you at an initial disadvantage. Buying a new HID before you experience the game is asking a lot. New Player experience Score -2

    I tried going back to this game, and I couldn't... It's just so boring. I had to drop my score by another point. -1

    I really want space games on the PC to make a come-back. I didn't back the game, and I wanted to try it once it was released. I bought the game, and my experience has not been that positive at all. I showed the game to some friends. they were not that interested in picking it up after seeing how much micro-management is required at the start of the game. I can see micro-management of all the details giving efficiencies and advantages once you become more familiar with the game, but it seems that you have to deal with all this right out of the box and can earn money and buy stuff later to reduce the micromanagement..... Strange..... The community generally says "we want a complex game. So get out of here" I'm sure I'd want a more complex game as well, once I have sunk my teeth into it... but not right out of the box...

    I can't in good conscience recommend this game to anyone other than the initial backers.    … Expand
  15. Darious
    Feb 18, 2015
    4
    The truth is somewhere between the shill tens and the zeros.

    It's a pretty game, but also pretty empty of content. Your primary options are to grind as a miner, grind as a trader, grind in combat, or explore new systems - which, after the 10th or so system, gets to feel pretty ... grindy. But make NO mistake - it is beautiful. And first two week of playing was breathtaking. But as    The truth is somewhere between the shill tens and the zeros.

    It's a pretty game, but also pretty empty of content. Your primary options are to grind as a miner, grind as a trader, grind in combat, or explore new systems - which, after the 10th or so system, gets to feel pretty ... grindy.

    But make NO mistake - it is beautiful. And first two week of playing was breathtaking. But as time went on I'd gone from trading, to exploring and out of sheer boredom bounty hunting and finally to just flat out p-king.

    After about a month I find that I just don't bother to log in anymore.

    Maybe in a year or so it might be worth the bother, but not right now.    … Expand
  16. beegjaymes
    Jan 15, 2015
    3
    I was an early backer so I've played E:D since the first public release. Elite was the game which defined gaming in my childhood. Unfortunately this is just a complete disappointment.

    It's dull.

    Very dull.

    And tedious.

    Very tedious.

    And buggy.

    It makes me sad to say it but: Don't buy it. Just don't.
  17. Gutenisse
    Dec 26, 2014
    4
    It's a copy of Elite II from 1993 with superb graphics. It's fun for a few hours, but then you start wondering why you keep playing it. There's no goal, other than making more and more money.

    The combat is pretty fun, for a few hours. Trading is fun, for even less hours. The only progress is buying a bigger or better ship, bigger or better guns, but why? To make more money, so you    It's a copy of Elite II from 1993 with superb graphics. It's fun for a few hours, but then you start wondering why you keep playing it. There's no goal, other than making more and more money.

    The combat is pretty fun, for a few hours. Trading is fun, for even less hours.

    The only progress is buying a bigger or better ship, bigger or better guns, but why? To make more money, so you can buy bigger and better ships. It's fun - for a few hours.

    After a few hours, it gets boring and I'm starting to remember why I stopped playing Elite II.    … Expand
  18. Saratosa75
    Dec 14, 2015
    1
    Horizons buyers, be aware of a few facts, before you decide to pay $50.00 for an expansion.

    1. Premium Alpha and Beta backers are discarded, not listened to and continually been ignored, since 2014. I paid $75.00 for Premium Beta, and according to Frontier, I do not qualify to own Horizons. There are thousands of us, some paid over $140.00 and left in the ditch by Frontier    Horizons buyers, be aware of a few facts, before you decide to pay $50.00 for an expansion.

    1. Premium Alpha and Beta backers are discarded, not listened to and continually been ignored, since 2014.
    I paid $75.00 for Premium Beta, and according to Frontier, I do not qualify to own Horizons. There are thousands of us, some paid over $140.00 and left in the ditch by Frontier Developments. They are fraudulent and money grabbers with a half baked product of something they call a game, and obviously they are not implementing any meaningful changes to the game, beside adding more places to do nothing (Horizons) for a full price of a new game.
    2. Anyone bought Elite: Dangerous previously and paid for the full product $49.99, must pay another $49.99 to own Horizons. So, they have to buy twice the price, just to land on planets.
    3. Those who only buy Horizons, only have to pay $49.99 and essentially own both Elite:Dangerous and Horizons.
    Let alone the fact, that the base game "Elite:Dangerous" continues to remain just a shell of a game, an empty void with barely any game play, beside auto-generated -spawned AI ships and completely non-functioning economy. Despite the raving reviews a year ago, the game has not evolved, beside a few additional gameplay elements, which has not changed much the game.
    You can kill thousands of ships, it will not make any meaningful (nobody is getting weaker or stronger) changes in the game world.
    You can trade thousands of items all across the systems, nobody is getting richer or poorer, beside you, and your reward is, that you can buy a bigger ship and do the same mindless/meaningless truck driver job or arcade shooter.

    The "Horizons" addon, let's you land on planets with no atmosphere, but not even all.

    Please, tell me if this is a fair business practice.
    Even the most criticized EA Incorp. with its endless addons and expansions to their core games don't do this.
    If you buy - for example - Battlefield 4 (core), for $49.99, your expansion of your pick will not cost another $49.99, and they aren't only adding another rifle to shoot with.
    Following Frontier Developments' money grabber practices of the past- my predictions:
    - You will be able to land on planets with atmospheres (sometime in 2016) for additional $20.00 for Horizon owners. Elite:Dangerous owners (if they still havent deserted this empty shell of nothing) must pay another $70.00 to own Horizons with "Elite: Atmosphere" upgrade.
    -You will be able to land on gas giants for addititional ($20.00) for Horizon owners, or you can get a Gold-Platinum-Game of The Year (no doubt the reviewers will hype it again, with a whole-total of 5 mins of gameplay) full package of Elite:Dangerous Horizons Atmospheric Gas Giant Edition for as little as $95.00.

    Previous Elite:Dangerous owners with no Horizons upgrade must pay an addtional $120.00 to enjoy Horizons+Atmospheric Landing+Gas Giants super package.
    -    … Expand
  19. Chaotic-Entropy
    Dec 29, 2014
    4
    With deep regret, for I am a lover of the genre, I cannot bring myself to recommend this game to a wider audience than extreme fans desperate for a fix and willing to accept anything. An outsider looking in will not see a sandbox (if you can call it that), at best the game is a sandcastle beach, where you are merely a bystander. At worst, the game is a barren desert, one which you areWith deep regret, for I am a lover of the genre, I cannot bring myself to recommend this game to a wider audience than extreme fans desperate for a fix and willing to accept anything. An outsider looking in will not see a sandbox (if you can call it that), at best the game is a sandcastle beach, where you are merely a bystander. At worst, the game is a barren desert, one which you are free to play in. It is an open world, but it is an empty world and one which players can play little to no real part except with ever watchful approval of Frontier.

    If you can somehow not tire of doing the same old repetitive missions or doing the old repetitive trading, mining or "exploration" then good for you. I however expect something more from a game of revolutionary scope than to just provide me the bare minimum of paltry amusements. Not to mention that it takes everything that is annoying about online games and removes all of the benefits, leaving just the always online, unpausible and constantly running mission timers. It provides no social features, little interaction with others without a lot of effort and has a game breaking approach to player conflict which rewards rage quitting and disconnecting by removing you from these difficult situations at your leisure. Just quit and reload and you're fine.

    At the same time, it provides a basic and simplistic singleplayer approach to a space game, all the travel, all of the grind, with little reward or acknowledgement. You will hear a lot of comments about using your imagination in the forums, to which I respond that I did not pay good money to a developer for a pretty backdrop for doing nothing but imagine.

    At the moment, it's release state is a framework of a game, with glaring issues and nonsensical design choices around every turn. This is a great shame as it has a lovely amount of potential, it's galaxy is mind boggling and gorgeous, it's combat is quite entertaining, if infrequent and unrewarding. The game engine is polished and stable, but without content and any semblance of immersion and interaction then there is no point. Nothing you do matters beyond what Frontier actively allows, it is not a malleable sandbox, it is reduced to a glorified Elite museum.    … Expand
  20. Megalon
    Dec 18, 2014
    0
    The slogan you will hear floating around the Elite community is "play YOUR way". Well i am here to tell you, that is only true if your way happens to coincide with the way the developers play. There is a glaring sense of selfishness in the development of the game that has turned out for the worse upon release. It is, as others have said, a shell of a game. There are some great flightThe slogan you will hear floating around the Elite community is "play YOUR way". Well i am here to tell you, that is only true if your way happens to coincide with the way the developers play. There is a glaring sense of selfishness in the development of the game that has turned out for the worse upon release. It is, as others have said, a shell of a game. There are some great flight mechanics and wonderful graphics holding up a flimsy grind fest that lacks any depth or character or content or multiplayer or anything that would make it an actual game. Elite: "Dangerous" is basically a space flight simulator minus the simulation.

    Just to give you some history, i backed the game when it was in closed beta and have played for a few hundred hours and have done everything the "game" has to offer. So i want to try to give you a quick run down of the features they are ADVERTISING without all the marketing fluff to hide what you will really be getting.

    "Play Your Way"- unless you want to be a solo trader, this is the biggest lie you will find in the descriptions of the game on their website. you will not play your way unless your way is- playing alone mostly and almost never seeing another real player while trading and trading and trading and trading again to have any hope of having enough money to "Play Your Way"

    Combat- first the website will make it sound like there is great PvP bounty hunting to be had in tandem with difficult PvE. I can tell you that there mostly certainly is not any of that. What you will get is news updates at stations for bounties on players you will never see. you will probably see Jesus Christ in this game before you take down a player bounty. The AI in the game is terrible and so easy to kill or escape from that they serve as nothing more than a waste of time. However if you do happen to take some damage or lose an engagement in anything but a stock starter ship, the cost is so astronomical that your immersion will be broken the moment your read the total. When you combine this with the extremely poor pay outs for combat, what you get is a fundamentally flawed risk vs reward system in terms of combat roles.

    Exploration- exploration consists of pointing your ship at astral bodies that are "undiscovered" then trying to get to a system as far away from your discovery as possible to sell it. basically it is information trading for sightseers with a small profit margin than standard trading. i will take this time to say that, if your goal is to explore a 1:1 representation of the milky way and nothing more- this game is perfect for you.

    Trading-"your every trade contributes to the dynamic market activity". the trading system is a static, one-note system that equates to little more than "easy win mode". of course there is nothing to WIN in ED, but what you can do is make money and trading is the easiest way (and i mean painfully easy) to do that. there is no economic simulation in place and you will never have a noticeable effect on any market. the worst of it all is that they do not tell you that there were exploits during the "gamma" phase of the game and they did not wipe any players prior to the 1.0 release. so you will be playing with players in 50 million+ credit ships who are multi billionaires. I am not sure how much the last part matters because, again, you will NEVER see them anyway.

    Factions- the faction rep system is broken as far as i know but even when it is working it does not provide any tapestry or color to your world in ED. all factions are just letters on a screen in a station telling you to do more boring stuff for hours so you can gain rep (broken) and do slightly less boring stuff for slightly more money. when i got this game i said "finally, i can be like boba fett and do merc work for the empire", then on Dec 16th i started the game in a turd of a ship deep in Federation space 200 light years away from the empire's capital. it took me 3 hours to fly to the outskirts of imperial space. this is not playing MY way.

    Now, i know what you are thinking- "this has a pretty decent meta score and i totally LOVE space sims". Well, i love space sims and rely heavily on feedback from the pc gaming community when making purchases. DO NOT BE FOOLED BY THE SEMI POSITIVE REVIEWS HERE. The Elite community is filled with the most blind and relentless fan boys one will ever encounter. If you would like to put what i am saying to the test then simply register for a forum account and attempt to post some useful criticism of the game. Before you know it you will be trampled by the horses of a thousand ED white knights and the keyboard punches of mighty neck bearded fan boys. You can attribute the reviews here to a small portion of those gray bushed and naive super fans. The reality is the game is 1 year away from being complete at best and even then i have little faith in the creator and lead dev and their ability to make this game work for a contemporary community.

    Save your Money    … Expand
  21. Wyzak
    Dec 18, 2014
    0
    Have a look at the kickstarter comment feed or the refund page on their forums. Some people have been waiting for more than 27 days for a refund after Frontier broke the promise to make it an offline only game. They have stopped all communication with the customers who have been requesting refunds. Those customers are also being treated like criminals, and like they are trying to abuse theHave a look at the kickstarter comment feed or the refund page on their forums. Some people have been waiting for more than 27 days for a refund after Frontier broke the promise to make it an offline only game. They have stopped all communication with the customers who have been requesting refunds. Those customers are also being treated like criminals, and like they are trying to abuse the system.

    The game is incomplete, it features very little of the actual promised features and everything has a little star next to it saying this will only be added post-release. It took my friend and me 8 hours to reach each other because the game does not allow you to specify your start location and does not offer any fast-travel methods. That's also a post-release "promise".

    Because the game has always-online DRM the future of the game is entirely in their hands and you never actually own the game yourself. If they pull the plug on the servers tomorrow all your money and time is gone. Due to the high cost of the servers I would not be surprised if the game is F2P in 6 months to a year.

    Their EULA also allows them to add in-game advertising...

    It's actually a 7 or a 8 game, but I can't give them a score like that with the way that they are treating their customers. and for the reasons listed above.    … Expand
  22. cmkao
    Feb 21, 2015
    4
    I got this due to the fact that I loved Elite II back in the day. It is OK.

    Lots of grinding - but then we had that in other Elite games, right? True, but here hours worth of credits can be lost by a random encounter with a pirate - and there is no reload option. If you spend hours (and I mean hours) of your free time grinding in the hope of getting a bigger ship and being able to do    I got this due to the fact that I loved Elite II back in the day. It is OK.

    Lots of grinding - but then we had that in other Elite games, right? True, but here hours worth of credits can be lost by a random encounter with a pirate - and there is no reload option.

    If you spend hours (and I mean hours) of your free time grinding in the hope of getting a bigger ship and being able to do a few more things, but then at the end of the day you are back where you started, you have to wonder if it was a good use of your precious time    … Expand
  23. UKastrogeek
    Feb 18, 2015
    3
    Not really too happy with the game as it stands, as it isn't living up to the hype and the BS reviews.

    Multiplayer is supposed to be patched in the next release, and we'll be able to form in groups of 4. Yes, that's right. FOUR. Don't get me started on the griefers or the boredom factor with so little interesting content in the game. Rapidly losing confidence in this, and I had    Not really too happy with the game as it stands, as it isn't living up to the hype and the BS reviews.

    Multiplayer is supposed to be patched in the next release, and we'll be able to form in groups of 4. Yes, that's right. FOUR.

    Don't get me started on the griefers or the boredom factor with so little interesting content in the game.

    Rapidly losing confidence in this, and I had such high hopes. Fingers crossed they can fix things quickly enough to stop everyone leaving, otherwise it's just wasted money again.    … Expand
  24. taiko88
    Dec 18, 2014
    0
    The game is a boring and dry adventure into nothingness. The awe will drop off after the first hour and you will be left wondering what else is there to do besides the simplistic combat, the mind numbing trading, or the boring exploration. The multiplayer is broken and doesn't even work, the game itself is just a shell of what the game promised by the developers. Don't worry though allThe game is a boring and dry adventure into nothingness. The awe will drop off after the first hour and you will be left wondering what else is there to do besides the simplistic combat, the mind numbing trading, or the boring exploration. The multiplayer is broken and doesn't even work, the game itself is just a shell of what the game promised by the developers. Don't worry though all these amazing awesome features they keep promising will come.… Expand
  25. Blackcompany
    May 7, 2017
    3
    Amazing sound. Quality graphical presentation. A large universe. These are the pros of Elite: Dangerous. And they are the only ones.

    On the other hand, flying is amazing difficult. Too many minute facets of fine control to balance at once. Docking is a horrendous pain, as its all in real time with tiny station entrances and a game that makes no effort to help you find your assigned    Amazing sound. Quality graphical presentation. A large universe. These are the pros of Elite: Dangerous. And they are the only ones.

    On the other hand, flying is amazing difficult. Too many minute facets of fine control to balance at once. Docking is a horrendous pain, as its all in real time with tiny station entrances and a game that makes no effort to help you find your assigned dock.

    Activities are the same tired ones that appear in every space sim: trading, pirating, delivery jobs and bounty hunting.

    It must have been easy to refine and polish the existing space sim genre when making Elite. I say this because, judging by the design direction, the first thing they decided against in the beginning was any semblance of actual innovation at all.

    Not recommended.    … Expand
  26. Daffan
    Dec 17, 2014
    1
    Good flight model

    Good graphics Good Sound design --------- Multiplayer is an afterthought, in an MMO. No social features, group features. PVP is a second feature to even that with being able to move saves from singleplayer to multiplayer and back on demand. no PVE capability with friends either. peer 2 peer and instanced Nothing to do other than grind AI who cant fight    Good flight model

    Good graphics

    Good Sound design

    ---------

    Multiplayer is an afterthought, in an MMO. No social features, group features. PVP is a second feature to even that with being able to move saves from singleplayer to multiplayer and back on demand. no PVE capability with friends either. peer 2 peer and instanced

    Nothing to do other than grind AI who cant fight back, Mine rocks to sell to AI or trade with AI on static markets that cant have any player buy or sell orders or any player industry.

    Overall, a grind to get the biggest trader to carry the most to make the most profit, nothing to use money on and same for combat ships. No need to have smaller specialised craft when the biggest does everything in one, no role-warefare    … Expand
  27. Kaltern
    Dec 22, 2014
    3
    I'm not even playing it any more.

    I LOVED the original Elite, and I lived in Frontier, but this... this is just boring. Hell I get 100% more enjoyment out of Euro Truck than this, and that literally is going from one place to another. I think one of the main issues is the idea that players should have to manually do EVERYTHING. I mean, sure docking is fine, it's old school and you    I'm not even playing it any more.

    I LOVED the original Elite, and I lived in Frontier, but this... this is just boring. Hell I get 100% more enjoyment out of Euro Truck than this, and that literally is going from one place to another.

    I think one of the main issues is the idea that players should have to manually do EVERYTHING. I mean, sure docking is fine, it's old school and you have the option of a docking computer.

    But no autopilot when going from one station to another? Why? It's not as if you can click 'A' and then go make a coffee, cos you could be interdicted at any moment, but it sure as hell beats having to make sure you leave SuperCruise at precisely the right moment. It's a manual mechanic that wasn't even going to be IN the final game (it was added after alpha design discussions), so I don't know what was going to be in it's place.

    Combat is clunky and slow, the deliberate crippling of yaw movement sounded like a good idea at first, but in practice, it's a forced mechanic that just doesn't make the slightest bit of sense in space. Even with it's many many issues, SC's combat is so much better.

    Even the landing procedure is just odd... Ok, I get the reasoning behind there being no keybind for 'Request Docking Permission' - it will make macro-trading a lot more difficult - but it's not hard to overcome, and in the end is just an awkward way of yet again making manual control more prominent.

    Mining is pointless.

    This game is literally a timesink of the worst kind. If there was a bit more automation for travelling, then it might not be quite so bad. The laughable idea that your ship's navigation computer has absolutely no data on any other system except your starting one, and a couple of others (which I don't understand how or why), unless you purchase them from the map screen (not from Cartography, like you USED to be able to - another convoluted design change), makes no sense to me.

    And WHY you get money for 'discovering' stars and planets is beyond me, considering that data for this already exists to buy! Naturally, if you visit a truly unexplored system (which mathematically, you will, if you travel far enough), you SHOULD get paid oodles of credits, and would make exploring worthwhile - but exploring a system WHEN THERE ARE PLAYER SHIPS IN THE SAME AREA is utterly stupid.

    Elite is like an egg without a yolk, a sandwich without filling, beer without alcohol.

    And it's boring as hell.    … Expand
  28. flexy123
    Jan 7, 2015
    4
    I played in the Beta, mind you, before Retail hit the shelves. In the Beta, I made a lot of money until I finally was able to get an Anaconda. I also got me a shiny new joystick, throttle, etc...etc....
    I have no desire to play this game (even if it's right there installed on my HD) since I "feel" I have already seen everything this game has to offer. You can only have "so much" fun    I played in the Beta, mind you, before Retail hit the shelves. In the Beta, I made a lot of money until I finally was able to get an Anaconda. I also got me a shiny new joystick, throttle, etc...etc....
    I have no desire to play this game (even if it's right there installed on my HD) since I "feel" I have already seen everything this game has to offer. You can only have "so much" fun spending some days, a week or two flying in a dark, empty space from A to B to make credits and to buy a new ship. How long do you think would such a "game" sustain motivation? Others are correct, this game has not one yota of what I'd expect from a new game which calls itself MMORPG, this is user interaction, communication, PvP, trade, building etc. This game has NOTHING of that. It is a game for 45+ year old nerds (like me) who buy an expensive PC rig and then "enjoy" flying in an empty, dead space from A to B with other 45+ year old nerds. In other words: It's incredibly boring. A game concept that was cool in 1983 can hardly sustain 30 years later. When I get into a game today I want to feel I play in a "living world" where I can meet and play with others, where adventures and challenges arise from playing with others, discovering new places etc...but ED entirely failed in this MM aspect of the game. Another HUGE turn-off for me is that the "simulation" aspect of this game is a mere illusion, and one done badly actually. You can not actually fly to other star systems, instead you "jump" from one "box" to another, the universe as such is therefore not really connected since you're only always in a tiny local "box" which you cannot escape unless you get into Hyperspace mode. If you are not hyperspacing you could target another system and you will NEVER reach it. I am aware that this is due to technical limitation and other games in essence do the same thing, but for me it's a huge turnoff to know that.
    And...PULEASSE stop it with stupid comments such as "good foundation" or "there will be cool expansions coming out". You don't enjoy a game because "there will be great things added in the future". You play a game NOW, not "in the future". And Frontier will have a hell of a bad time "adding" stuff to the game since this is the main mistake they made from the beginning: Rather than building upon a good foundation which deserves a name such as MMRPG..they merely *added* features, this is why anything *added* appears halfassed, such as multiplayer, communications, missions etc. If the game at its core is already built wrong (netcode....) you will have a hard time to make it better by "adding" stuff.    … Expand
  29. AresDeus
    Jan 1, 2015
    0
    Next to no content and poor menu design. Your engine can handle the vicinity of a black hole but get´s slowed down by a freaking planet. Simple actions like docking permission requires to push a lot of buttons while you have no visibility. Almost anything you do needs to be done by scolling through menues that prevents you from flying. Exploring is a boring joke. Mining is even worse. NoNext to no content and poor menu design. Your engine can handle the vicinity of a black hole but get´s slowed down by a freaking planet. Simple actions like docking permission requires to push a lot of buttons while you have no visibility. Almost anything you do needs to be done by scolling through menues that prevents you from flying. Exploring is a boring joke. Mining is even worse. No risk vs. reward anywhere. If you are not a hardcore fanboy that loves to fall asleep while you´re doing "missions" or trading you better don´t waste your money on this game. But hey they always promise that content will come in future expansions (which you have to pay ofc). The game is a joke imho.… Expand
  30. WallyGog
    Feb 12, 2015
    0
    Another day, another update released.
    The release does not of course contain much in the way of sorely needed content - just another raft of attempted bug fixes, which will if past experience is anything to go by break twice as much as they mend.
    Other reviewers have already told you how shallow and broken the whole thing is, so I won't repeat their words. All I'll say is that if you're    Another day, another update released.
    The release does not of course contain much in the way of sorely needed content - just another raft of attempted bug fixes, which will if past experience is anything to go by break twice as much as they mend.
    Other reviewers have already told you how shallow and broken the whole thing is, so I won't repeat their words.
    All I'll say is that if you're thinking of purchasing this, have a good look at the negative reviews, and have a good think about it.
    Peace.    … Expand
  31. PizzaTheHutt
    Dec 16, 2014
    2
    If you have played any of the deeply complex X3 space trading sims, then Elite falls flat on its butt even more. I believed the false advertising of offline mode and getting a game that is worth playing. Not even good in online and offline is missing anyway, for absolutely no reason but greed and cash shop tactics. No modding will be possible, so this is a lost case. Waiting for refund butIf you have played any of the deeply complex X3 space trading sims, then Elite falls flat on its butt even more. I believed the false advertising of offline mode and getting a game that is worth playing. Not even good in online and offline is missing anyway, for absolutely no reason but greed and cash shop tactics. No modding will be possible, so this is a lost case. Waiting for refund but likely not going to happen, so I´m going to give it away or put it on ebay. Grab a cheap deal… Expand
  32. Squicker
    Dec 16, 2014
    3
    I was really looking forward to this game, being a massive fan of the original game and having in fact reached Elite status 3 times on 3 separate platforms. However this game leaves me cold as it feels like a rushed xmas cash grab.

    Let me start with the good: It's beautiful and very relaxing. One definitely feels the vast emptiness of space in this game, and on the Oculus Rift it does    I was really looking forward to this game, being a massive fan of the original game and having in fact reached Elite status 3 times on 3 separate platforms. However this game leaves me cold as it feels like a rushed xmas cash grab.

    Let me start with the good: It's beautiful and very relaxing. One definitely feels the vast emptiness of space in this game, and on the Oculus Rift it does look superb.

    However you will be forever taking off that Oculus Rift because the UI is so old-hat. There are no journals or trading tools in the game, I have already given up on the Rift and moved to monitor so I can play, because the simple things we take for granted in a modern game are not there. It's as if the designers are stubbornly remaining in 1984 and they don't care how cumbersome it makes their game.

    Next, not only is space empty but grouping with friends is near impossible and when you do, the next work performance is a horrid glitchy mess. I have 80Mb/s fibre and this game runs like I am on a 14.4Kb dial-up modem. Again, 1984 is looming. Ships glitch in and out, space stations appear from nowhere, collision detection is horrible. I don't think the network code is finished, not by a long measure. I would like to play this game offline to eliminate these problems but because Frontier did a very neat bait and switch one month ago, I do not have this option. This is probably the single worst technical aspect of the game.

    Challenge: there is none. The game is incredibly simplistic and is just rinse and repeat gameplay. I am trading and there's a handful of commodities to trade and within my 8 hours today I have already made a small fortune. It's just too easy to pick a short haul route and rinse it. Easy but dull.

    Content: There is none. This a framework for a game. Perhaps with some content it will even be a reasonable game (apart from above problems) but right now you've seen and done it all in a day.

    Presentation: Really old-fashioned. The menus are clunky things straight out of 84 but with higher res fonts, there's no consistency on using controller vs mouse in various menus. The Oculus is coded for but you have to take it off. Seriously out-moded thinking here with no join up to other game elements. Really feels cheap and rushed.

    Flight model: Dumbed down and in my view overly simplistic. Very arcade-like and clearly this game is designed to port to consoles easily, in fact this could be a PC version of a console game, it's that simple. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but just be aware if you are looking for a deep space-sim like experience here, you will not get it. I think the game is obviously aimed more at a console crowd than old fans of Elite and that's where the money is. So a sound business decision maybe, but it hurts PC players.

    Overall this is a sad day for Elite fans who looked forward to a re-envisioning of their old classic game, there is no vision behind this release. It's just a series of clunky mini-games held together by the theme of space travel. For the amount of time and money spent on Elite Dangerous this really is a surprisingly weak release and I can only think that Frontier ran out of money to release the game in a clearly unfinished state. My advice is to wait a few months and pick this up in the sales when perhaps frontier have written some new content and crucially, fixed online multiplayer, because that is game breaking at this point in time.    … Expand
  33. Redqwerty
    Jan 26, 2015
    0
    In an ideal world, I'd have given this maybe a 4, but there are so many completely mental 10's that I can't bring myself to do it.
    Keeping this short, the more negative reviews are spot on. The 10's are probably from people demonstrating extreme post-purchase rationalization cognitive bias in my opinion.
    It LOOKS pretty for a bit. then after a couple of weeks, you realise everything    In an ideal world, I'd have given this maybe a 4, but there are so many completely mental 10's that I can't bring myself to do it.
    Keeping this short, the more negative reviews are spot on. The 10's are probably from people demonstrating extreme post-purchase rationalization cognitive bias in my opinion.
    It LOOKS pretty for a bit. then after a couple of weeks, you realise everything and everywhere looks the same, and there just isn't that much to do. Except grind for a better ship. So that you can earn credits faster to grind for a better ship......
    Ultimately, it's completely boring. There is no rich story - it's just delusional roleplaying.
    Suggest you avoid it for at least a year, and have another look if the servers are still on.
    Wish I could get my money back.    … Expand
  34. Vtrgott
    Dec 29, 2014
    0
    No content, not worth.

    Elite Dangerous is not a good game. It tries to feed off some lingering nostalgia you may have. However, while the playable area is large it feels empty. The player has no palpable impact on the universe.
  35. WaytoomanyUIDs
    Dec 18, 2014
    0
    From what I saw of the game In Beta, it is quite pretty with some great visual design on the spacecraft and excellent sound design. However the flight model is abysmal for a space sim. For some bizarre reason the devs decided that spaceships should handle like aeroplanes, so they turn abysmally slow on the horizontal axis. "No problem" I thought, "I'm sure someone will mod in a sane flightFrom what I saw of the game In Beta, it is quite pretty with some great visual design on the spacecraft and excellent sound design. However the flight model is abysmal for a space sim. For some bizarre reason the devs decided that spaceships should handle like aeroplanes, so they turn abysmally slow on the horizontal axis. "No problem" I thought, "I'm sure someone will mod in a sane flight model when it's released, after all they promised offline and modding support".

    Then on the 14th of November, little more than a month before release and totally out the blue Frontier Developments announce the dropping of offline mode and with it most modding.

    They still have to come up with a satisfactory explanation, and when you consider that the game was going to miss it's Kickstarter goal until they promised offline mode and modding support, "It doesn't fit our creative vision" doesn't cut it as an explanation for dropping offline.

    I didn't test the social features of the online side of game, as I wasn't interested in the multiplayer, but from what I've read they are very limited

    And before you accuse me of reviewing an incomplete game, apart from the complete universe in Gamma and release, there isn't much difference between Beta and Gamma, just a lot of new bugs.

    Also the "customer service" from Frontier Developments is some of the worst I've encountered. I submitted a refund request on the 17th of November, was offered a partial refund on 03 December and today, the 18th of December 2014 have still to receive the promised refund    … Expand
  36. RadiantRadmila
    Mar 4, 2015
    4
    This can be a nice game. It isn't at the moment.

    Pros: + Huge universe + Nice atmosphere + Nice music + Potential Cons: - There is no MMO component at all - Chat with friends does not work - There are many hackers who exploit a game and ruin the experience for everyone - No grouping yet, can't play with friends, can't even meet in space - Missions are boring and dull - Game    This can be a nice game. It isn't at the moment.

    Pros:
    + Huge universe
    + Nice atmosphere
    + Nice music
    + Potential

    Cons:
    - There is no MMO component at all
    - Chat with friends does not work
    - There are many hackers who exploit a game and ruin the experience for everyone
    - No grouping yet, can't play with friends, can't even meet in space
    - Missions are boring and dull
    - Game is bugged and you will often blow up for no reason and go poor again
    - Game feels empty and it's not worth the money currently. Maybe it will change with time, but so far I've paid for promises, nothing more.
    - Servers often disconnect me in the middle of the flight.    … Expand
  37. gadthrawn
    Dec 18, 2014
    0
    I don't care about the potential of a game.
    It was announced as offline game. The offlien mose was cancelled near release.
    If you try to get a refund - the company is slow in replying to emails. A "48 hour" support ticket takes right now over a month. Other bad things form additional account (not refundable as it was already used in beta) Only four types of stations, most missions    I don't care about the potential of a game.
    It was announced as offline game. The offlien mose was cancelled near release.
    If you try to get a refund - the company is slow in replying to emails. A "48 hour" support ticket takes right now over a month.

    Other bad things form additional account (not refundable as it was already used in beta)
    Only four types of stations, most missions are stupid grinding missions. On 99% of the routes theres no profit for trading, price system is far better in other games (do you really want to use a occulus and then note prices on a paper sheet which are wrong next time as even in solo game other players influence the price?), Advertising, ...

    So for me the game is crap.    … Expand
  38. Polar-eX
    Dec 25, 2014
    3
    To be very short about this game: its a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Everything(!!) look exactly(!!) the same, multiplied by 400 billion star systems. Have fun!
  39. Glidej
    Dec 18, 2014
    3
    Single player canceled in late stages and will not be implemented. Game was released waaaay to early as it is not even close to being done. Wait a year or buy it for $20 or less.
  40. medwyn
    Jul 17, 2015
    3
    After 30 years this return of the classic title looks like a bunch of question marks for me.
    Its values in the extreme - beautiful and immersive graphics and sounds, great piloting features and ship management on one side and a chaotic mess on the other.
    Obviously this game fell into the same trap of the later years' games development trend: it was released very early without making it    After 30 years this return of the classic title looks like a bunch of question marks for me.
    Its values in the extreme - beautiful and immersive graphics and sounds, great piloting features and ship management on one side and a chaotic mess on the other.
    Obviously this game fell into the same trap of the later years' games development trend: it was released very early without making it satisfactory quality. This alienates me completely as I feel tricked for the price rather than satisfied.
    The more hours one puts into the ED universe flying around, the more glitches to be found. Depending on how the player is willing to counterbalance these problmes with "roleplaying" workarounds and other mind techniques, they are there embedded into the very texture of the game.
    After nearly 3 years of development it's still not clear for me what ED wants to be - it's more clear what it doesn't. The P2P system the whole engine is built on renders the possibilites of making a really consistent universe pretty limited (or I can say impossible). So the 400 billion stars represented as the full Milky Way galaxy becomes pretty 2-dimensional, it's like a repeated pattern of small bubbles reacing out to 30 light years distance.
    The release was rushed and it ended up in a seriously unfinished state where instead of game elements we got empty, buggy and non-functional placeholders. Persistency is non-existent, the economy background is static and insignificant, the NPCs are spawning and disappearing just for the player in the very instance, they are not going anywhere and can be farmed like chickens.

    We are now 8 months after this very questionable release and the backbone of the game is still missing but Frontier has been very busy cashing in more money for this quarterly-baked game-skeleton by porting it over to Mac and lately X-Box. The so awaited 1.3 is a meaningless grindfest, the incoming CQC is another firm step towards an unorganic arcade shooter gameplay.

    The community forums are toxic when it comes to crisicism, those rare and lengthy discussions with constructivism are fading away soon without any feedback from the devs.

    I gave 3/10 as a modified review now, big disappointment. I would like to see a great game where there are much more dimensions than just flying from point A to point B and increase a bank balance to buy another ship to do the same. Without proper and consequent interaction with each other and with the universe it's really flat no matter how beautiful it is. ED is an exhibition of stars but not a game.    … Expand
  41. korsobar
    Jan 2, 2015
    3
    Like a beautiful hollow cake. It looks really good, but, just when you sink your teeth into it, everything collapses.

    Graphics, sound, ship handling are all good. The content is slim to non-existent, and many of the core features of gameplay are just a skeleton waiting for skin. For example: exploration sounds like it might be a really great option for those who are less interested    Like a beautiful hollow cake. It looks really good, but, just when you sink your teeth into it, everything collapses.

    Graphics, sound, ship handling are all good. The content is slim to non-existent, and many of the core features of gameplay are just a skeleton waiting for skin. For example: exploration sounds like it might be a really great option for those who are less interested in combat. Except you quickly find that exploration income is tiny, you get exactly zero feedback about which systems make more money, many systems and areas will disconnect you, the process of exploration is to jump into a system and hold a button or stare at a planet for several seconds, etc.

    Mining is even less involved: shoot lasers at a rock then crawl around actually scooping them. The only income that scales with your ship is trade, which involves simply comparing spreadsheets in identical looking stations until you find two items that allow a profit. Then you travel back and forth selling those. Hundreds of times. There is no reason to move once you have found a profitable route. At all.

    Even if you decide to grind out credits in the hope of better content later, you have to cope with the always online even for solo play problem. To be honest, I thought this was no problem at all for much of the beta and gamma phases. Then the servers went nutso yesterday, messing up peoples' accounts, balances, ships, modules, cargo and everything else. There are no support staff available and no one has talked about the issue on their official forums yet despite 24 hours elapsing. Hint to Frontier: if you want to run an always online mmo, someone has to be available to answer the red phone on holidays, too.

    On top of that, the game has started crashing to desktop and occasionally causing BSOD crashes for me as well. I have a top of the line gaming PC that I built myself. I have never had a BSOD from any other game. Support tickets go unanswered, everyone is out.

    If you complain about ANY issue on the official forums, be prepared to be met with a legion of defenders who will promptly inform you that -they- have no problems, you must be doing something wrong. If you prove their was a problem, they will defend the problem as a necessary feature of the game. If you point out how flawed it is, they will tell you that the game is not for you, go away.

    Elite: Dangerous proves that kickstarter and early access does nothing to solve the problem of games being pushed out the door too soon.

    Come back in a year or two and this game might be a real gem.    … Expand
  42. Not_Casual
    May 7, 2015
    2
    There's a lot of stuff here that's neat, but to 'release' the game in it's current state is just a setup to be disappointed.
    The multiplayer has no grouping systems at all. No way to share missions, waypoints, or bounties. Defeats the purpose of working together. And pvp conflict is completely undermined by there being no penalty/countermeasures for death logging. About to kill someone?    There's a lot of stuff here that's neat, but to 'release' the game in it's current state is just a setup to be disappointed.
    The multiplayer has no grouping systems at all. No way to share missions, waypoints, or bounties. Defeats the purpose of working together. And pvp conflict is completely undermined by there being no penalty/countermeasures for death logging. About to kill someone? Blip, they just logged off so they didn't lose anything.
    For a 4 Billion star system galaxy there is little variety in populated areas, and most populated systems look/feel the same because every faction is using the same two or three space station models. There is no voice in the game. All things are text based unless you can voice with a friend on the lonely multiplayer. To top off the lack of variety, missions are usually "Haul this somewhere", "Kill this dude", "Kill -These- Dudes", and "Bring me Something". Even the old freelancer had double the variety of missions and the culture differences in people who settled in different areas gave great variety to the people you could meet.

    The only thing this game is currently good for, is the flight model, which is better than Star citizen's flying turret vomit comit mess; and the Accurate 1.1 scaling of the universe. It's a neat little star explorer simulator but that's all it has going for it right now.

    I'm really hoping they continue to add things. I hear they only released it because the publisher pressured them for a 'release' or they would pull the plug. I will continue to wait for the game to be the polished mmo space adventure that I was promised. And I will update this review as they add their little weekly patches.

    Update-
    After a few months, the wings update has allowed people to group, and that's just about the only noticeable improvement. I gave this game a lot of leeway with my previous score, but the insane lack of meaningful updates is continuing to cripple this seemingly already dead game. Death logging is still undermining the entire point of an open world setting. There is 0 risk because anyone can alt+f4 with no consequence whatsoever. Furthermore the ability to take the same ship between open world and single player is utterly mind boggling. Grind your dream ship without risk in single player and then log into open play to nuke everyone. And when you're done be sure to alt+f4 to avoid dying. To top it all off, I've been playing this since release, and aside from friends i've cooped with, not seen ANY OTHER PLAYERS.

    To sum it up, essentially everything this game promised to be is currently a lie. The only pleasure to be had in this is in the exploration. The ai is too dumb to provide any sort of combat challenge. Other players seem entirely absent, or exploit the game to undermine any pvp. And even when you do go out to explore eventually the billions of unnamed systems all start to seem alike save for the one or two with rare celestial bodies. Even then these are rare and you visit them once. Avoid this like the plague until its sold at about 10 dollars, or the game crippling multiplayer issues are resolved.    … Expand
  43. Veryance
    Mar 5, 2015
    4
    Just the latest entry in the fad of selling an incomplete game as the whole product. The game dumps you into the deep end, probably as a way to obfuscate the fact that at the end of the day, there really isn't much to do. The learning curve is needlessly steep; everything you want/need to do will have to be gleaned from the internet, because the game won't teach you, or even provide theJust the latest entry in the fad of selling an incomplete game as the whole product. The game dumps you into the deep end, probably as a way to obfuscate the fact that at the end of the day, there really isn't much to do. The learning curve is needlessly steep; everything you want/need to do will have to be gleaned from the internet, because the game won't teach you, or even provide the tools in-game to find your answers. After the first couple hours of daunting gameplay, you realize that the tip of the iceberg is actually just the whole iceberg. Balance some spreadsheets, blow up bad guys, repeat. Not to mention that Frontier cleaves to the classic tightlipped-developers-that-think-their-playerbase-is-retarded ideology, which essentially precludes any hope for this game to right the many many things it gets wrong.
    That being said, it's gorgeous to play, and the sounds are amazing, so if you don't want anything more from your game then to fly around in space aimlessly, then this is right up your alley.    … Expand
  44. elfindreams
    Dec 29, 2014
    4
    As an alpha backer, I really wanted this to succeed. Regrettably, I am left with the feeling that while parts of the game are good overall it fails to deliver an enjoyable or compelling end product.

    The problem with this title lies in its emotional and storytelling execution. Even the most basic sandbox game must give the user enough context to emotionally engage the user and make    As an alpha backer, I really wanted this to succeed. Regrettably, I am left with the feeling that while parts of the game are good overall it fails to deliver an enjoyable or compelling end product.

    The problem with this title lies in its emotional and storytelling execution. Even the most basic sandbox game must give the user enough context to emotionally engage the user and make them desire to interact with your world.

    With E:D you (optionally) go through some mechanical tutorial missions and are then placed in a station with no context at all about the world you are in. Eventually you learn that there are factions but no real reason is ever provided for why you should care that there are factions. There is no emotional pull and zero context. If you were lucky enough to grow up with Elite in the UK you might know more about the universe based on novels and other media produced about it but if this is your first foray into the Elite universe, you are given no reason to want to do more than scratch the surface and then move onto a different game.

    The bulletin board system provides missions with zero real soul and context (I was offered a mission to free slaves but given no indication at all about where in the universe slavery might be found, where in the universe slavery is common, the ramification of slavery in the universe, etc and two missions to provide very basic goods again with no real context about where to find them... it turns out I was able to purchase both sets of goods in the very station offering the missions...)

    Now to be clear I have been a gamer for over 25 years and the type of gamer that spends hundreds of hours in most games I play... I don't just play games I fully mine them for all they are worth and I was left with the question in my mind of why should I bother.

    Even if you force yourself to continue despite any emotional investment (in my case because of the rather large monetary investment) you find a game where combat is enjoyable but so sparse as to be practically non existent and where every other activity (mining, trading, exploring) is undocumented, obtuse and tedious.

    This game may be a technical marvel of procedural generation but it lacks a soul. Maybe someday someone can transplant a soul into it but until then, please do yourself a favor and give this title a miss unless you are already emotionally invested in the Elite universe.    … Expand
  45. moblin
    Feb 18, 2015
    4
    While the game looks and sounds beautiful (even more so with an Oculus Rift), it does however lack gameplay depth for long term enjoyment. There's a lot of tedious grind to get anywhere (or to get the money to get anywhere), and if you don't keep changing what you do - trading, mining, exploring, bounty hunting, the game can get boring fast.

    There's also a feeling that the game isn't    While the game looks and sounds beautiful (even more so with an Oculus Rift), it does however lack gameplay depth for long term enjoyment. There's a lot of tedious grind to get anywhere (or to get the money to get anywhere), and if you don't keep changing what you do - trading, mining, exploring, bounty hunting, the game can get boring fast.

    There's also a feeling that the game isn't really cohesive, like there isn't an overall design that underpins everything. Your presence in the universe is meant to result in some small influence on how things unfold, but everything feels like its coming into being for the moment you are there, and then disappearing after you leave, like instances. It feels very much like a typical MMO but without any story.

    There are plenty of features in the pipeline that will expand the game - the new update promises to enhance multiplayer, but treat what exists now as early access / beta, or keep an eye on the updates before taking the plunge.    … Expand
  46. SpectralShade
    Dec 16, 2014
    0
    Basicly a tech demo and nothing but promises of for the future (with the reminder for the wary that the developers already gone back on big design decisions).

    Game was wouted originally as an offline/online game. 1 motnh prior to release (after 2 years of development), they let slip that they cancelled offline. People wanted a refund because the game wasn't anymore what they were sold    Basicly a tech demo and nothing but promises of for the future (with the reminder for the wary that the developers already gone back on big design decisions).

    Game was wouted originally as an offline/online game. 1 motnh prior to release (after 2 years of development), they let slip that they cancelled offline. People wanted a refund because the game wasn't anymore what they were sold and Frontier Development Started a dragged out tug-of war with their own customers to delay payments. Game itself is a shell of what it should have been. The old frontier game has more meat on it, which shows where the money to develop this game went (graphics and tying people online). The online requirement is bogus. Most of the time it feels like a singleplayer game anyway and the it has to go down as the most lonesome "MMO" ever.
    Given Frontier Developments finances, chances are that they required servers for the game to be played won't be sustainable for any decent amount of times, so add this to the rushed release of what is essentially a tech demo for the game, my advice is to stay well clear of this game as well as this developer.    … Expand
  47. KnightEnvy
    Feb 13, 2015
    4
    If you get this game you will be WOW'd right off the bat. Combat is fun and works great with a joystick. Graphics are amazing.

    And that's about it. Most of the universe is without story or at least irrelevant to it. Only 1/2 the ships are available, and if I come across more than one or two players per hour you are in luck. Disappointed I paid $60 for this. Until the price    If you get this game you will be WOW'd right off the bat. Combat is fun and works great with a joystick. Graphics are amazing.

    And that's about it. Most of the universe is without story or at least irrelevant to it. Only 1/2 the ships are available, and if I come across more than one or two players per hour you are in luck.

    Disappointed I paid $60 for this. Until the price drops to about $20-$30 I would wait for Star Citizen.    … Expand
  48. jclaiborne2007
    Dec 20, 2015
    0
    Woohoo! Not buying in on this game is a real win for me. Frontier loves to screw its backers. Please give us your money for an empty game and if we ever do make anything worth playing we will be sure that the backers pay 10x as much as a new player. Paying $100 dollars to fly around in an empty game, gee now that is a great deal!
  49. BigBangerB
    Jun 19, 2015
    0
    The game looks good, ships fly good. Yup that's about it for the positives. The rest of the game is designed purely for people with 0 lives and all the time in the world to throw at it. I don't get why people do it though because you certainly are not rewarded with anything. It's like if you want to go out for a nice jog, and instead you wound up on your grandpa's nordic track in theThe game looks good, ships fly good. Yup that's about it for the positives. The rest of the game is designed purely for people with 0 lives and all the time in the world to throw at it. I don't get why people do it though because you certainly are not rewarded with anything. It's like if you want to go out for a nice jog, and instead you wound up on your grandpa's nordic track in the basement staring at the cement walls. That's the difference between "space sims" and "elite dangerous."

    Elite just isn't that fun unless you have limitless hours to play. There is no variety, and the devs ONLY PROGRESS since the "launch" has been adding more ways to make the game a grind. To boot, they just recently jacked up repair costs for no reason.

    Flight in this game would be good if there was a reason to fly anywhere other than station to station. PVP is so buggy it's pointless. Even if there were no bugs, no abysmal P2P network system that is constantly getting hacked, there's no reason to PVP because it's a battle of shield cells. Once they are down, people can instantly target your ships Power Plant, rendering 100% of your armor 100% useless. There's literally no point to PVP. What about NPC you ask? What about them I say. They are awful. They can't fly straight. They are suicidal. The NPC pilots of the worst ships in the game will constantly harass you by the dozens, and each one will only last for about 5 seconds of firing before you've killed them and collected your pennies.

    What's that? You want DANGER? The most dangerous thing in Elite dangerous is the start menu. Why? Because you have to go in and out of the start menu 1 or 2 dozen times before you get placed in an instance with DECENT ships spawning, instead of just garbage.

    I'm not even going to get in to the fact that literally every one of FD's trailers has been an absolute lie in terms of actual content and gameplay. They make me sick to watch. It's like a completely different game.

    I really REALLY want to say something good about elite, like it is fun to explore or what not, but what GOOD there is in Elite:D is DESTROYED by all the bugs. Exploring was the bees knees, but since the 1.3 patch it's been broken. Every couple of system jumps you will crash out of the game and lose your last 2/3rds of exploration data. FD doesn't even care. Fun fact, it took me TWO WEEKS to return from a trip I spent only 3 days going outbound on. That's how bad the servers are. I contacted support about millions of lost credits and the constant crashes and they basically said they know about the issue but don't care.

    Why should they care when I can just keep slamming my head against a wall, grinding away for the chance to unlock another reason to grind away.    … Expand
  50. Hawkcircle
    Jan 13, 2015
    2
    I love space games. I was extremely disappointed to discover I don't like this one. While pretty, the learning curve is just too high. You also can lose everything in just a moment, whether Solo or in group mode. Bottom line, it's just not "fun" as a whole.
  51. Hackworth
    Jan 21, 2015
    1
    If you want a good picture of what this game is like: Imagine EVE online without content and without other players. Everything that remains is repetitive grinding for bigger, better stuff.
    This game is for you if:
    - you are a kid or teenager and don't care about school and just can waste endless hours for nothing. - you are unemployed and/or divorced and can waste endless hours on    If you want a good picture of what this game is like: Imagine EVE online without content and without other players. Everything that remains is repetitive grinding for bigger, better stuff.
    This game is for you if:
    - you are a kid or teenager and don't care about school and just can waste endless hours for nothing.
    - you are unemployed and/or divorced and can waste endless hours on nothing.
    - you are old and retired and don't have anything to live for anymore.

    What can you do in Elite Dangerous?
    First of all, there are 400 billion star systems that can all be explored. As a new player, you are tempted to just blaze off and see everything. Bad idea. First of all: you're always limited by your choice of ship modules, i.e. to get far, you need to buy better equipment, your starter ship won't get you very far. Interestingly enough, the best modules in ED almost always cost more than the ship itself. So before you can start to explore this vast world, you need some things: better FSD (jump drive), Fuel scoop (to refuel on the way), better Scanners (Advanced and Surface, they're north of 500k CR). So to get started, a few million credits will help you.

    How do you get the credits? You can either trade, but to effectively trade, you need more cargo space. Most of the time you can make about a 1000 cr per ton (cargo space unit). So with the starter ship, you can make about 4000 cr per run, IF you find a trade route that gives you that much. Most of them just give between 300-900 cr/ton. So you can grind your way up slowly, until you get into the millions.

    Bounty hunting: effectively the same grinding, less profit, more fun. Hunt NPCs at Nav Beacons or Resource extraction sites, be careful not to fire on npc police (they tend to fly through your line of fire, like any excellently programmed AI does of course ;). But for better equipment and thus better bounty, you should do some trading before.

    Missions: Good for beginners, but the rewards stay low, no matter how much you progress and the missions are just iterations of the same things all over again. Boring but a good income for beginners for the first few hours in game. After that, missions are completely obsolete except for the occasional system permit offer or progressing in the ranks of your chosen faction.

    Mining: as others already stated: About as funny and lucrative as watching paint dry.

    USS: unidentified signal sources. These pop up occasionally when flying through systems in FSD. There you can find either npc traders, npc pirates, mission targets or floating cargo, which you can scoop and sell. But beware: all the cargo you find is always marked stolen, so you have to find a station with a black market, and you have to smuggle it in (fly in silent mode) to avoid detection when scanned. If scanned, the fine you get almost always outweighs the profit.

    That's about it. Multiplayer? forget it. Tried it, took about 2 hours until my friend and I finally landed on the same server.
    The waypoint plotting for exploration is nothing but a joke. In your galaxy map, you can plot a course only to the nearest systems, unless you wait a few minutes. Apparently, the game developers made a minigame or better a waiting game of the galaxy map. It's even animated: from your current location, lines are drawn to every possible reachable location around you. slowly these lines extend and after a few seconds, you can select a system that is 30 LY away as destination, after a few seconsd more you can select a system that is 40 LY away, then about 60 LY and so on. If you want to plot a course for 100 LY distance, you have to wait about a minute. Yes, that's no joke. The course plotting in Elite Dangerous is nothing short of an absolute travesty. If you want to fly across the galaxy, you have to spent several hours in the galaxy map plotting courses.
    Exploration itself is nothing short of tedious than plotting courses. First, you scan an unexplored system. To find everything that is present in that system, you need to equip the best scanner possible (1,5 million cr). To make money of your scans, you need the detailed surface scanner (500k cr). Afer the first scan, every orbital body in the system is reveiled, then you have to fly manually to each orbital body. Depending on it's size you have to fly as close as 15 LS before the scan starts, and it takes somewhere between 10-30 seconds for your scan to finish. The rewards are between 400 and 85000 per system (my frame of reference, best system I found was one with 2 habitable water worlds), depending on how thoroughly your system exploration is and what you find (rare star types, rare planet types). The furthest I explored was about 1200 light years, about 12 hours of gameplay, netted about 1,8 million credits.
    It can be rewarding if you discover nice planets and stars, but after a few hours, it becomes repetitive, and the graphics are not that good that they compensate for the endless repetitio    … Expand
  52. suncokret
    May 15, 2015
    0
    Basically a framework - great graphics, great sound. That's it. Could've been great. But it's not.

    Just tell me, what's the point of 100+ billion star systems if the space feels *empty* as hell, the stations look the same, the stars look the same? Is it really logical and scientific to have the same stations thousands of LY away? How many pilots will go even remotely deep? 0.01%? People    Basically a framework - great graphics, great sound. That's it. Could've been great. But it's not.

    Just tell me, what's the point of 100+ billion star systems if the space feels *empty* as hell, the stations look the same, the stars look the same? Is it really logical and scientific to have the same stations thousands of LY away? How many pilots will go even remotely deep? 0.01%? People in multiplayer are so scarce, the further you get, the less and less real people are encountered. It's EMPTY.

    It's obvious that Braben's main highlight was the "hundreds of billions" star systems. I'd much rather have only 500 stars in total but busy and exciting gameplay, with mystery and suspense. If I need the space atlas, I'll use Stellarium.
    Besides, it's easy to add the stars no one sees and cares and much tougher to build the great gameplay.    … Expand
  53. Davido1
    Jan 5, 2015
    0
    This game is a no buy, I am sorry. It is extremely boring with most of your time simply flying through space in super-cruise, which feels downright flaky. The game is empty and devoid of any kind of reason to be there. The missions are basic scripted deliver cargo X to randomly generated station Y.

    The kill missions require you to fly around in super-cruise constantly, you over shoot    This game is a no buy, I am sorry. It is extremely boring with most of your time simply flying through space in super-cruise, which feels downright flaky. The game is empty and devoid of any kind of reason to be there. The missions are basic scripted deliver cargo X to randomly generated station Y.

    The kill missions require you to fly around in super-cruise constantly, you over shoot your destinations...apparently there is no auto pilot assist to prevent this "feature" from occurring. Combat is meh, if you do manage to find it. They might as well take multiplayer out of the game as the only way to interact with others is to randomly shoot them.

    There is the tiniest COMS box you could ever imagine where text comes in. Don't think you will be hailing an enemy ship and seeing a face video comms or voice...not happening. It will be a one liner in the upper left corner of the screen in a tiny chat box that pales in comparison to MMOs 15 years ago.

    The fact this game has such high reviews is an absolute farce. For anyone who is not a DIE HARD...and I mean MUST HAVE space sim fanatic, I would recommend you stay far far away from this game. It is a borefest of epic proportions. 90% of your time will be spent docking and flying in super-cruise.

    I can stand like maybe 30 mins of playing this....absolutely the most boring thing I have ever encountered in my gaming experience. I cannot rate this low enough to be honest.    … Expand
  54. ScienceAdvisor
    Dec 16, 2014
    2
    This is being over hyped by those trying to justify pre-ordering at $150+ (yes they actually spent that much). I will not bother re-hashing all the details of how this is just a shell of a Beta, and not a game (yet). Go to YouTube/Twitch and watch the videos. Shut the sound off so you are not influnenced, and just watch the actual 'game' you are going to get for $60 (USD). Perhaps in aThis is being over hyped by those trying to justify pre-ordering at $150+ (yes they actually spent that much). I will not bother re-hashing all the details of how this is just a shell of a Beta, and not a game (yet). Go to YouTube/Twitch and watch the videos. Shut the sound off so you are not influnenced, and just watch the actual 'game' you are going to get for $60 (USD). Perhaps in a year when there is more than token gameplay, this will be worth more than $25, but until then, stay away.

    Oh, one last thing. Exploits for the economy are well known and were identified weeks ago. It was assumed that these would be fixed before the final wipe of progress the day before the final release. The devs in all their illogical splendor decided to not only ignore most of these exploits, but not to wipe the servers before going live. So you will be starting out with a crappy little ship, while people own their own outposts!

    I would have voted for a 5 but all the BS 10s that are being thrown on here are rediculous lies. So it gets a zero for now. I will try to remember to re-review in six months after they have tried to sell DLC to fill in some of the missing parts.    … Expand
  55. joejean
    May 25, 2015
    4
    After buying the game, I was in heaven, I like to learn on my own, so I took off into space and started learning what I could. The mechanics of the game seemed great, it seemed they would work great for an MMO, supplying small space stations with trading revenues would make the station expand in size and the faction in control of it would start rising in the picking order of that system.After buying the game, I was in heaven, I like to learn on my own, so I took off into space and started learning what I could. The mechanics of the game seemed great, it seemed they would work great for an MMO, supplying small space stations with trading revenues would make the station expand in size and the faction in control of it would start rising in the picking order of that system. You would create guilds and nurture specific parts of space to grow them and be allowed to make missions for your guild members, creating a 3 tier economy between the NPCs, the game Powers (politicians) and the individuals (independent players).

    You could form groups of flying wings to secure or interdict certain parts of space, the interaction possibilities seemed endless, this add everything a great MMO should have. I was so hyped...

    So I played at steam release about 160 hours in 12 days, learning organically I would say, trying to avoid going on youtube for easy answers and so forth. But then, the wall hit me, I started looking at videos released by the game makers, most of witch we're 2 years old, promising the moon, the sun, the whole universe in fact (pun intended)... Well, I started seeing a trend, the maker (don't wanna name him, I feel dirty just thinking about him) was a smooth talker, savvy man, saying everything right, everything anyone wants to ear, then, at the end of each reply he would give he'd be like: "If this sounds good to you, then please, please go on kickstarter and back us up."

    This trend kept going and going, he then produced super high quality videos of his entire staff, each of them making a passionate plea about how great the future of the game is and how ships would be multicrewed and you could board them and then fight in first person mode to then take over the ownership of that vessel, those poor employees seemingly pouring their heart out, being so emotive and seemingly so priviledged to be part of such a great game endeavour.

    Then I read a blog written by said game maker, talking about how the new gaming industry is basically the new far west, comparing his business basically to a cowboy living in one of the hardest, dirtiest, lawless era of mankind, a time we're people killed for food, destroyed an entire native civilization for greed and so forth.

    At that point I understood what this guy's game was, he's a con artist, a smooth talker.

    He talked people into giving him over 3 million dollars, went corporate, ISOed on the stock market and is now ready to reap his rewards. From all the features he "talked" about, about only 10% made it in to release, which that's a wrong appellation, this is an ALPHA product, sold at AAA price.

    Worst thing I found tho, is that the MMO tag was applied WRONGLY on the steam client, fooling me into believing this game would have human interactions in it, when in fact, 10,000 players online could all be in SOLO individual instances, making this the biggest SINGLE PLAYER game ever made...

    In over 400 hours of play now, I came across about 12 people total in their so called OPEN PLAY...

    Add to that the total lack of directional content, you are suppose to read walls of text as if we are in 1984 still, even then most of the text content is fluff and mostly pointless, as a single player you have no influence on anything.

    Top this off with a fanboi community bent on attacking anyone making the slightest negative comment on the game, a fanboi community actually given FREE CONTENT and EXCLUSIVE features to edit their own community goals, allowing people who bother to go to the forums a huge edge on regular fools like me who bought the game in good faith, thinking this was a serious game maker, not a con artist led project to spruce up the corporation stock...

    This game will most likely see one more free patch (powerplay) and then it'll be 1 or 2 half done expansions for money, close the books, start the next title to release on steam next year, close the servers for E:D and ride the fame train with nice fancy videos and more smoke and mirror effects to reap the maximum out of the unexpecting steam crowd.

    All in all, there is fun to be had in the game if you like being a loner, never meet other players and basically be a space trucker... Go watch some videos on youtube, look at the guy talk, wouldn't he sell you a used car? See the glimmer in his eyes? That's the glimmer of greed...    … Expand
  56. Pureforce
    Dec 19, 2014
    3
    The game looks good and that's pretty much it.
    Game area is so big you will rarely see another person and even when yo do so it will most likely disconnect or instance you. It is not possible to play with friends since instancing throws you into different instance after each jump. The game disconnects a lot. There is broken chat and no other social side to interact with people.
    Apart    The game looks good and that's pretty much it.
    Game area is so big you will rarely see another person and even when yo do so it will most likely disconnect or instance you. It is not possible to play with friends since instancing throws you into different instance after each jump. The game disconnects a lot. There is broken chat and no other social side to interact with people.
    Apart from online multiplayer issues, game gets stale fast. After trade you quickly get tired of their archaic navigation system, you literally have to path plan every jump every time.

    Would not recommend.    … Expand
  57. rockdacazbah
    Dec 26, 2014
    4
    Do not buy this game yet!!!!!!!! No gameplay! No content! nothing just a space trucker cred grind fest. It will hopefully get better but don,t hold your breath nothing that was promised is there just a bare boned demo. £40 wasted atm imho. Oh and if you do buy it ,don't put any negative threads on the forum as they are policed by over zealous, cantankerous, supercilious snarky fanboys thatDo not buy this game yet!!!!!!!! No gameplay! No content! nothing just a space trucker cred grind fest. It will hopefully get better but don,t hold your breath nothing that was promised is there just a bare boned demo. £40 wasted atm imho. Oh and if you do buy it ,don't put any negative threads on the forum as they are policed by over zealous, cantankerous, supercilious snarky fanboys that get upset if you do.… Expand
  58. Deionarra
    Feb 9, 2015
    2
    The first four hours were good. Getting into the game, learning the systems and exploring a bit, so far so good. Then after trying everything, mechanically speaking, that the game has to offer it becomes apparent that the game is a hollow affair with placeholder design everywhere and no depth at all to the mind-bogglingly big galaxy. Width with no depth is the very definition of this game.The first four hours were good. Getting into the game, learning the systems and exploring a bit, so far so good. Then after trying everything, mechanically speaking, that the game has to offer it becomes apparent that the game is a hollow affair with placeholder design everywhere and no depth at all to the mind-bogglingly big galaxy. Width with no depth is the very definition of this game. It has potential to grow, but I didn't buy a game for its future potential, I bought it to play a fun game - and currently Elite: Dangerous is the most anti-fun grind you can possibly imagine.… Expand
  59. cgavin1
    Dec 19, 2014
    3
    The problem is that you have all these horrifically shallow and borderline insulting your intelligence (requiring no thought, planning, offering no challenge etc) activities that make you credits. But there's nothing to spend them on except a bigger cargo hold to make more credits.

    That sort of monotonous grind is bloody terrible and we've all had more than enough of grind MMOS. Let    The problem is that you have all these horrifically shallow and borderline insulting your intelligence (requiring no thought, planning, offering no challenge etc) activities that make you credits. But there's nothing to spend them on except a bigger cargo hold to make more credits.

    That sort of monotonous grind is bloody terrible and we've all had more than enough of grind MMOS. Let alone faux ones! There's nothing to build. Nothing to own or conquer. Nothing to create and - critically - nobody to share the journey with. It's like being trapped in an entry level job on a zero hour contract. Few people can enjoy that sensation of enforced compartmentalisation and poverty of imagination in terms of game design.

    I find this particularly sad as one of the things Braben said was that he never wanted to play Spreadsheets In Space; which presumably was a jibe at EVE Online. And yet EVE offers seat of the pants adrenalin pumping PvP backed by real consequence, compelling socio-economic warfare that scales really well, politics, emergence etc.

    It isn't everyone's cup of tea and is dated, clunky and bordering on impenetrable to new players, but, to literally not try to bring any of those kernels of tried-and-tested over a decade compelling gameplay features in to a 'space sandbox' seems daft to me! For all their bluster and vision: a bunch of soulless statistics is all you amount to in this game. In terms of modern gaming it's an evolutionary dead end (p2p aka lobby multiplayer is dead as a dodo) that doesn't offer a satisfying, rewarding or structured experience. It will likely never be able to circumvent that gaping flaw in design sadly, because its an anachronistic rehash of a very old format, that is baffling by design and fundamentally anti-social; lacking in emergent gameplay, patently shallow and repetitive and therefore .. dull. No matter how much content they add, it will always be crippled by this and the rather awful multiplayer implementation.

    I have trouble understanding how nobody could have pointed this out at the brainstorming phase? It feels to me like they wanted to make a single player game with some multiplayer elements but ended up trying to make an always on MMO without any of the requisite MMO components. A truly unfortunate decision. The name of the game doesn't really serve to suggest anything but the digital equivalent of an ironic-beard either! Elite: Dangerous. Odd choice since the game as it stands contains literally no peril, risk, consequences or challenge and has the software equivalent of a hardwired gastric band.

    If they had just made a single player game in the style of the older releases, packed with things to do, places to see, an Elder Scrolls in Space if you will, I'd have bought it and not been too concerned about the multiplayer aspect being weak. But trying to make a multiplayer game without any actual credible multiplayer, including the social or competitive building blocks required to make any multiplayer sandbox game 'work', was just dumb bordering on insane. It also perhaps explains, in my mind, why Braben has never done a sequel to the Elite series before now - arguably nobody would back him/it without a clearer commercial vision. I seem to remember a quote from Ian Bell along those lines: Braben arguably does not understand 'fun' and how to package/juxtapose that with a commercially viable but artistically integral product.

    Moral? If you are going to make an MMO make a proper client/server MMO. If you are going to make a single player game, make a single player game. If you want to add on some limited multiplayer functionality then do so. Don't try to make an MMO with limited multiplayer functionality and no content. It won't end well.

    My advice to anyone is to hold off right now. Wait a year and maybe pick it up when it is finished. And even then be prepared to be disappointed with the heavily instanced region locked p2p multiplayer and the inevitable lack of compelling content. I'd also caution people not to invest or buy in to anything Frontier have offered as game design proposals or pledges as they have already back pedaled on much of what was originally proposed and seem to be distracted by external commercial and financial pressures.

    Overall I think this is a massive disappointment and very weak offering that fails to offer the basic ingredients most players of sandbox games expect: challenge, development, aspiration, mutability, depth and decent multiplayer. Frontier just seem to have been way too naive in their presumption that a tiny dev team who have never done this kind of game before and a tiny budget could produce the kind of AAA game they thought they could. Sadly Elite Dangerous falls way, way short ..    … Expand
  60. Braddyapples
    May 12, 2015
    3
    The game is seriously boring. There are a lot of features in the game, but none of them are fleshed out very well. Only buy this game if you're looking for a huge time sink with pretty space visuals. That's about it.
  61. Legojon
    Dec 19, 2014
    0
    Wow, I supported this game all through beta. Spent £150 on 3 copies, persuaded my friends to buy it. They should have just released it next year when it was done. This is still just beta to me. I didn't want to spoil the release, so haven't played since beta 2. I loved beta 2! Was so excited about the final game. What have they done to it? Its still full of bugs, theres stillWow, I supported this game all through beta. Spent £150 on 3 copies, persuaded my friends to buy it. They should have just released it next year when it was done. This is still just beta to me. I didn't want to spoil the release, so haven't played since beta 2. I loved beta 2! Was so excited about the final game. What have they done to it? Its still full of bugs, theres still little to do.

    The starting space station has no market! WTF Why not? So I have to go somewhere else to begin trading, well how about telling me that. They've slowed the supercruise speed down, so you now spend about 10 minutes starring at nothing happening. I was so bored, I did the laundry and came back! Then, I finally got to my destination to sell the poxy 4 food cartridges to make a measly 60 credit profit, I navigated to the landing pad and the ship wouldn't dock despite being perfectly lined up and landing gear down.

    I retried 3 times to dock, then just repeatedly rammed the landing pad (still perfectly on target). Then quit and uninstalled this rubbish! Save your money. Oh and I'd already given up on the multiplayer by beta 2. So don't expect to play with friends either.    … Expand
  62. peciskk
    Dec 16, 2014
    1
    Written by programmers FOR programmers. In other words for themselves and not the average person. It is a game for people with OCD issues and have fun doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different results. In other words its a game for nutters.

    Avoid at all costs.
  63. C_M_K
    Dec 16, 2014
    4
    Currently Elite has a decent framework in place, but there's no real 'game' there -- you can literally experience all of the content in a few hours and it changes extremely little regardless of what system you go to or what ship you're flying.

    Pros: Very pretty (aside from the painfully dated and barely functional HUD). Amazing sound. A gazillion star systems to go 'explore'.    Currently Elite has a decent framework in place, but there's no real 'game' there -- you can literally experience all of the content in a few hours and it changes extremely little regardless of what system you go to or what ship you're flying.

    Pros:
    Very pretty (aside from the painfully dated and barely functional HUD).
    Amazing sound.
    A gazillion star systems to go 'explore'.

    Cons:
    Every single gameplay system -- trading, mining, pirating, bounty hunting -- is simplistic in the extreme, most are broken in one way or another, and frankly all of it has been done far better elsewhere.

    Eleventy gazillion systems to explore means little when the vast, vast bulk of them are basically identical.

    Multiplayer? What's that? The game's multiplayer features are so barebones as to essentially be nonexistent.

    Online only. This wouldn't be a con if the netcode (especially the perplexing decision to go with P2P architecture in an online-only game) wasn't so flaky, if there were actual multiplayer features that worked, or if there was, well, any meaningful reason whatsoever for it the game to be online, but the netcode is flaky as hell, there aren't meaningful (or even usable) multiplayer features, and there's no real reason for the game to need to be online-only other than as DRM.

    Basically Frontier has created a universe simulation that you, the player, have little to no effect on. It's a place where you can fly around and see the same systems, the same stations, and the same ships 400 billion times. Sadly they forgot to include any gameplay beyond the most barebones in there.

    At best the game is being pushed out the door six months too early, at worst Frontier has actually made the game they intended and they really do think that copying a thirty year old game with some new graphics will do well. Either way, best to avoid this one for a while and see if they eventually actually add some gameplay before it crashes and burns.    … Expand
  64. ACRIET
    Jan 10, 2015
    4
    1000 credits, a spaceship and lightyears of space ahead!

    Enjoyable for a few hour's but then it gets boring. Nice graphics, sounds and some space-fights don't make a good game, unless they throw in a serious patch to lighten things up. No storyline at all other than some small quests for some small credits. So big buck trading it is and if you think you feel like searching for the    1000 credits, a spaceship and lightyears of space ahead!

    Enjoyable for a few hour's but then it gets boring. Nice graphics, sounds and some space-fights don't make a good game, unless they throw in a serious patch to lighten things up. No storyline at all other than some small quests for some small credits. So big buck trading it is and if you think you feel like searching for the ultimate buy/selling prices; you got a match in this game of endless empty boring space... My opinion: DO NOT BUY THIS GAME UNLESS YOU'RE IN A RETIREMENT HOME!!!!    … Expand
  65. Viking84
    Dec 22, 2014
    4
    Elite looks great, combat is fun, and the full scale realistic universe is brilliant. Sadly, once you have learnt how to land, how to fly and how to fight, you start seeing the games limitations and realise you are simply repeating the same simple tasks over and over and over again. Besides combat nothing requires skill, only patience, and even the bountyhunting becomes a little on theElite looks great, combat is fun, and the full scale realistic universe is brilliant. Sadly, once you have learnt how to land, how to fly and how to fight, you start seeing the games limitations and realise you are simply repeating the same simple tasks over and over and over again. Besides combat nothing requires skill, only patience, and even the bountyhunting becomes a little on the easy side once you get the hang of it.

    First 10 hours of gameplay are worth 8/10 if you can be bothered googling how to do things, after that I'm afraid you have seen what there is to see unless you have an unusually vivid imagination. 4/10 from me, hopefully more content/depth will be added to this great framework in the next 6 months or it will have been a huge waste of time.    … Expand
  66. hazmatt1
    Dec 25, 2014
    0
    Pros: Pretty visuals/Nice sound. Combat is fun for a while if you have a well-equipped ship. That's it.

    Cons: This game is, for the most part, just one long repetitive grind which mainly consists of flying from one destination to another, interspersed with the occasional dog-fight. For a game which is set in the vastness of deep space, it feels decidedly shallow quite quickly. First    Pros: Pretty visuals/Nice sound. Combat is fun for a while if you have a well-equipped ship. That's it.

    Cons: This game is, for the most part, just one long repetitive grind which mainly consists of flying from one destination to another, interspersed with the occasional dog-fight. For a game which is set in the vastness of deep space, it feels decidedly shallow quite quickly. First person Eve-Online this ain't! Scratch beneath the thin veneer and there really isn't all that much of substance underneath....just lots of nothing to 'explore'. Also, it's still till very buggy at this late stage of developmen and an internet connection will be required to play - a last moment decision was made by the developers to drop the off-line play option, despite promising this option to it's backers. Way to repay your loyal fans who enabled you to get your project off the ground in the first place...

    Verdict: Cashing-in on nostalgia (although there are many middle-aged fanboys out there who don't seem to mind) with a half-baked product which promised so much but delivered very little; essentially just a graphically enhanced version of a 30 year old game which was created on a 32 K computer (with multi-player tacked-on). Please stop wearing the rose-tinted spectacles - you're just feeding these greedy corporate monsters...    … Expand
  67. Mark1973
    Feb 5, 2015
    3
    No content yet. There are a few ships. The combat is dull and doing anything mildly interesting takes more money than it gives. To earn cash for the better features you have to grind, but they've just nerfed that as well.
  68. CoSm1c_gAm3r
    Apr 6, 2015
    4
    I am quite disappointed by "next" game from Elite universe. This game also suffer from casual targeted crowd.

    They made some idiotic design for lateral rotation that will make your teeth sparkle from grinding it while you try to rotate just to see for example station details or land on landing pad! I heard all excuses/explanations and all are totally retarded and all of them made me    I am quite disappointed by "next" game from Elite universe. This game also suffer from casual targeted crowd.

    They made some idiotic design for lateral rotation that will make your teeth sparkle from grinding it while you try to rotate just to see for example station details or land on landing pad!
    I heard all excuses/explanations and all are totally retarded and all of them made me laugh.
    Small ships and medium ships rotation rate is more than 1 minute to make 360 degree turn while in full stop. That is just plain retarded design. Nothing can excuse such idiotic design. NOTHING!

    Idiotic boost system that uses always the same amount of power but when you are at "TOP SPEED" then adding 1-10 m/s cost still the same amount of power from capacitors :D
    Also any boost would kill pilot because it creates so many G's that only robots and androids would deal with it without any problem. But cargo would turn into mashup so passengers would need to be frozen hard or something just to survive that trip with immortal player character that can be killed by ship explosion.

    About that. ships explode because ED future didn't deal with instability of explosives so if magic HP meter go down then ship is turning into big POFF! xD
    I can compare that to Star Citizen and I see that Chris Roberts used more common sense. In SC ships mainly are destroyed and if more damage is dealt or they crash into asteroid then it fell apart while in ED ship crashing into asteroid just bumps away then after a second it decides to go boom! How dumb is that!!! :D

    If you love details in design and value sense, logic, and basic believability then this game is not for you.
    I bought it when it was in beta and even if I don't like this game then I am not totally disappointed because there was very long period in gaming industry that space sim was ignored and SC with ED may change that so it was worth to support this game but it is not satisfying for my taste and my demands. To bad that it was touched by casuals demand as lots of modern games. Dumbed down just to earn money on not demanding players. Sad modern gaming reality.    … Expand
  69. terminatahx
    Mar 19, 2015
    0
    A complete waste of money and time. After grinding hard to a Type9, I could no longer deal with the lack of content, community lack of support, censorship, and rampant bugs. Once the newness of the game wears off, you will find yourself bored to death. The economic engine is the biggest problem for me: larger ships are penalized for being better trade ships, the supply/demand model isA complete waste of money and time. After grinding hard to a Type9, I could no longer deal with the lack of content, community lack of support, censorship, and rampant bugs. Once the newness of the game wears off, you will find yourself bored to death. The economic engine is the biggest problem for me: larger ships are penalized for being better trade ships, the supply/demand model is a disgrace: all prices across the entire universe are within the same narrow price range. Bottom line is that on the service, the game is jaw-dropping gorgeous. Once you learn about the "core" of the engine and it's shortcomings, you feel duped. Don't buy, unless you are desparate for a game where you can fly around in space.… Expand
  70. Lorderan
    Dec 18, 2014
    2
    My god guys, don't even bother. You will need 3-4hrs fighting the "tutorial" let alone the bloody game, which it just dumps you in a hangar without any direction. Worst early game experience I have ever had. Low score because I'm tired of fighting the game to play it!!!
  71. Lirezh
    Jan 19, 2015
    0
    I thought a while but except for writing a bad review I found nothing is going to reach those developers.
    Let's begin with the reason for 0 stars:
    They have no customer support and no community relationship. They have a support forum but they do not respond to people there (never) and they have a ticket system but they do not respond to tickets. At least not in the first half year. This    I thought a while but except for writing a bad review I found nothing is going to reach those developers.
    Let's begin with the reason for 0 stars:
    They have no customer support and no community relationship. They have a support forum but they do not respond to people there (never) and they have a ticket system but they do not respond to tickets. At least not in the first half year.
    This alone is a reason NOT to buy the game, if something fails, good look getting what you paid for.

    The next reason is that the game is still an early BETA, they just changed it to "release" and act as if it was finished. The promise a few upgrades but area already heavily working on several paid extensions.
    They cheat on the players. It's all about grinding the money our of us instead of delivering high quality.

    The game has many bugs, none of them are handled.
    The existing VR support is nice but there has not been any development toward reducing it's problems since a long time.
    All their development likely was put into the paid extensions, they want to make 300 million USD within 2 years (according to their press releases).
    Would be nice to read that they want to make the best game possible within 2 years, sadly not the case.

    The game itself runs fairly stable but it has no content. You can not play together with other people it's a solo game with random player encounters. You are always in your own instance. (not a true MMO)

    The PVP is simple, you just press the EXIT button you are out of it. You can not lose your ship as long as you log out before it's gone.

    Sadly PVE content is nearly non existent. It works well for the first 2-3 hours but once you have a bigger ship it turns to endless repeated grinding against non existing AIs.
    There is no mission to do except a single one which is very anoying (search a specific ship for one hour, kill it in 2 minutes).
    There is no way to play together with friends, even if you could see them (they are not in your instance mate, sorry) you can not share bounties or transfer them items or money.

    The only missing feature to finish the game off would be the ability to buy ships for real money.

    I was advertising it in the beginning, now I can only give a big STAY AWAY.
    Hope for Star Citizen, hope for one of the other games.
    Frontier is treating their players too bad to give a recommendation.
    If you don't care about all the problems, the game can be quite some fun even with the tiny content it provides.    … Expand
  72. Spiral
    Feb 10, 2015
    1
    For my review I wanted people to know that I played Elite in 1984 AND that i am a beta backer with lifetime DLC(125.00$) plus ive bought 2 Mercenary edition copies for friends.

    Anyone who rates this game a 10 either hasnt played it, or is a rabid fanboi who will vote a 10 on anything because they dont know any better. There are MASSIVE bugs with the game, even going so far as to    For my review I wanted people to know that I played Elite in 1984 AND that i am a beta backer with lifetime DLC(125.00$) plus ive bought 2 Mercenary edition copies for friends.

    Anyone who rates this game a 10 either hasnt played it, or is a rabid fanboi who will vote a 10 on anything because they dont know any better.

    There are MASSIVE bugs with the game, even going so far as to instantly exploded your spaceship when youre trying to land(Anaconda landing gear bug). Bugs that have been in the game from 1 year ago, ARE STILL IN THE GAME as of Feb 2015.

    Griefers and even hackers abound in Open Play(Multiplayer), as FDev has a P2P client so the client end data is easily hacked to provide unlimited hull and ammo for them to kill you with.

    The background simulation that runs the games NPCs and Economy is ATROCIOUSLY bad....a first year programming student could do better with some guidance. Braben stopped the offline version because he wanted the game to be "Curated" for better player interaction. Let me tell you that NOTHING is curated here...there are NO Dynamic events, NO gms to be found anywhere at all. Instead all you get for losing offline play is some stupid Blurb on Galnet about some planet that may have a sale on equipment or maybe some battle to be fought, or maybe they are short on resources. In other words BORING ASS STATIC NOTHING!

    There is literally no reason to do anything in the game at all, other then to collect money to spend on bigger ships, and FDev is CONSTANTLY nerfing peoples ability to make money.

    Let me put it in perspective....from your starter ship to a BASIC(Suck) Anaconda is likely to take the average person 5 months. And thats IF you dont have a set back because of the games many many bugs, and IF you avoid Open Play....cause surely you will be griefed otherwise. But the fun doesnt stop there!! Once you have your BASIC Anaconda, i forgot to mention that it will take you another 5 months to equip it because the costs of your equipment will be more then your ship cost. And as anyone in this game knows....the basic equipment on a ship sucks soooo sooo bad.

    There is NO opacity in the game...the information that is relayed is next to non-existant... The stats of the weapons are almost all hidden from the player, same with what the other pieces of ship equipment. You have no idea how stuff performs until you actually mount it on your ship and go use it. Take Thrusters for example.....D Class thrusters which are HALF of what C class thrusters cost, are BETTER on EVERY ship in EVERY situation you can imagine. Everything in the game is poorly balanced and designed, as if the ship systems were completely thrown together and then tacked on.

    In game trade data is useless...completely useless. There is NO GUI or other way of gathering accurate trading data other then GOING TO EVERY STATION AND WRITING IT OUT BY HAND. There is no Trade Computer or Software ala X3:Albion Prelude....there is no way of even querying the station for the data....Yes...its the year 3300 and you still must land AT EVERY PORT LIKE ITS THE 1700's.

    Okay, now on to the last two points:

    FDev has no idea what to fix first...they are messing with COMPLETELY NEW SYSTEMS in there latest big patch update, before fixing even 10 PERCENT of the problems the game had on release. Its mind boggling how they are tacking on even more potentially broken systems before even fixing whats already broken. I cant stress enough how ass backwards this new 1.1 patch is. Yes, some of it is good and will improve the quality of players lives in the game but WOW.....so many things in it are just INSANE to try and tack into a broken game!

    And my last point...Support. There is NO support from FDEV with tickets...customer service is almost nil. I and many other players have had ticketsin for months now over game breaking bugs.

    That last point is completely unacceptable in a game where a significant loss can STOP you from playing the game again, ever.

    Avoid it for now, give it a year or so and then check back in.    … Expand
  73. Sepa
    Jan 25, 2015
    1
    Been some time now since the release, I had time to take a proper look, and I feel that this 'game' is biggest dissapointment I had in space-sim genere (though I did not try X-Rebirth after I've read the reviews) ever.

    Anyone looking for modern space sim should look elsewhere, this game has less content than Elite II: Frontier had (released 1993) and only a bit more than Elite from 1984    Been some time now since the release, I had time to take a proper look, and I feel that this 'game' is biggest dissapointment I had in space-sim genere (though I did not try X-Rebirth after I've read the reviews) ever.

    Anyone looking for modern space sim should look elsewhere, this game has less content than Elite II: Frontier had (released 1993) and only a bit more than Elite from 1984 had.

    Absurdly boring, repetitive and buggy gameplay - buy, fly, sell x 100 so you can buy bigger ship, repeat x500 so you can buy bigger ship, repeat... Or fly around and 'explore' - point your nose towards a planet, wait 30s, scan complete, repeat. Or shoot NPCs, slightly more entertaining, but still X3 was way better, or some free space shooters (proper MMO ones) are available, too. I have not tried minning, as on paper it looks even more boring.

    Expect that one way or another the game will break for you, and if you are lucky you might get response from support in a few days. If you are not, it may take weeks or months (seriously, check the forums).

    Fanboys crying how good this game is are mentally impaired, as for them simple things like external camera are 'breaking immersion', and autopilot (present in Elite 2 and 3 as far as I recall, and in every other space game) will 'kill the game'. They keep saying that the supercruise minigame is fun and entertaining - so actually sitting there correcting throttle and direction every few seconds and pressing 'j' once arrived close to destination is their idea of everlasting fun (and you might need to sit there for a good 10 minutes on one way journey). And don't anybody dare to say 'can we get autopilot' - this is ELITE!
    Seriously, people that cry how good the game is, how great FD is, how fantastic is the fact that trading commodities prices have to be tracked with pen and paper (or external app that need to OCR the screen shots) have something not right with their heads. But, to be just, society needs workers that can do repetitive tasks all day long and be happy with it, too. Maybe it's a game for such.

    Frontier Developments made a run for money here, and most of the fanboys are unfortunately blind enough that they don't see it. The ones that saw it are fighting for refunds right now.

    4 points for graphics and sounds as they are not too bad (on par with X3), 1 total for everything else being so damn broken/non existant/scam.

    Ah, and don't get fooled by adverts that this is MMO game - it is not. There is only a basic chat (VERY basic one) and a chance you might see somebody in space. No way to fly together etc - 'coming' in future patches, and FD already offered that players can pay to access beta and test it...

    Also, if you think of other space games and imagine all those fancy shiny weapons, shields and other systems that you will be able to put on a myriad of ships - again, get X3:AP. Elite a few modules, coming in exciting variants like A to E, and sizes like 1 to 7. They differ in how much they cost, weight and power consumption. And there is about 15 ships if I recall right, from free one to multi milion credits costing ones, just 1 of the type (trader/multi purpose/fighter) in 'tier', increasing in price. And the only way to gather sensible amount of credits is to grind them through trading. No missions that could give you fancy ship in reward etc, this is 'Sandbox', and most of all, this is Elite!

    Can this game become something sensible? In theory, yes - but that would require FD company to grow up and start behaving like responsible developer of a big title, and change in fanboys base (most of them really want 1984's Elite with better graphics, any suggestions to make this a modern title are being considered a heresy). Time will tell if this title will survive the test of time, if one would like to bet - I'm not going to put my money on it...    … Expand
  74. scabberwocky
    Feb 16, 2015
    3
    Joined up to leave a review... Have been playing since release late last year, and have had some fun - espescially at the beginning. Well not right at the beginning, because I had no idea what was going on, and the tutorial such as they are, are terrible.

    Pros: graphics are good, and the ship designs I like for the most part. The sound was good until the latest bug fixing patch which    Joined up to leave a review... Have been playing since release late last year, and have had some fun - espescially at the beginning. Well not right at the beginning, because I had no idea what was going on, and the tutorial such as they are, are terrible.

    Pros: graphics are good, and the ship designs I like for the most part. The sound was good until the latest bug fixing patch which seems to have broken it. Combat is a bit hit and miss, and often ends up drawn out. The scale of the thing is impressive on paper, but it's just pixels: you could triple the number of stars for no extra right?

    Cons: Let's not beat about the bush - it's a grind for the most part. Trading is quite boring fairly quickly, all commodities/cargo are just text labels. Mining is appalling. The persistent background simulation is pretty fake. There are loads of bugs, and as many are introduced with the patches as are fixed. In open play you find antisocial types ganking you for no good reason. Lastly, it is now boring. There's little incentive for me to log on.

    Conclusion: Good initially, becomes grindy and repetitive fairly rapidly. Limited long term appeal.    … Expand
  75. DevilDoc
    Dec 16, 2014
    0
    Elite Dangerous is not a good game. It tries to feed off some lingering nostalgia you may have. However, while the playable area is large it feels empty. The player has no palpable impact on the universe. It wants to be an MMO but does not give you appropriate tools to interact with other players. In fact, consider yourself lucky, when you manage to get put into the same instance as theElite Dangerous is not a good game. It tries to feed off some lingering nostalgia you may have. However, while the playable area is large it feels empty. The player has no palpable impact on the universe. It wants to be an MMO but does not give you appropriate tools to interact with other players. In fact, consider yourself lucky, when you manage to get put into the same instance as the other players on your friendslist. There are frequent server problems and disconnects. Elite ignores any and all advances that have been made in gameplay and story telling in the last 20 years of the industry. The gameplay is unbalanced so your only viable recourse is MINDLESS GRINDING of trade runs. PVP is non-existent because people rarely meet and if you meet someone that you would like to fight it is a 50% chance that they won't simply alt-f4 and ghost away in solo mode. Ridiculous. The games only redeeming quality is its virtual reality support, which works really well in the smaller ships. However, it breaks in the larger ships like the Type-7, because the cockpits are so large that the edge of it are in the same focal plane as the galaxy background, which makes it feel like you are sitting in a model of a ship that has a screen projecting the galaxy half a meter behind the edge of the cockpit. I have been with the game since alpha, hoping things would get better for the release, however Frontier is not listening to negative feedback and is just powering forward with blinders on. Finally, the customer support is abysmal. People are waiting 6 months to get answers to simple accounting tickets. Abysmal.… Expand
  76. bokor
    Dec 16, 2014
    3
    It's a sandbox all right. Do what you want: trade, explore, mine, bounty hunt - it's all the same. You go into super cruise (like warp speed) with a barely hidden load screen and fly from instance to instance where you'll run into no players. I've heard the argument that there's only a grind if you make it a grind - but those people are fooling themselves. There are HUGE money gapsIt's a sandbox all right. Do what you want: trade, explore, mine, bounty hunt - it's all the same. You go into super cruise (like warp speed) with a barely hidden load screen and fly from instance to instance where you'll run into no players. I've heard the argument that there's only a grind if you make it a grind - but those people are fooling themselves. There are HUGE money gaps in-between ships so you'll find yourself flying in small ships for hours and hours until you want to fling yourself off of a cliff.

    It's not all bad. The flight mechanics are GREAT - ships feel weighty and satisfying to fly. Open-world PVP is always great (just stay near popular systems to find players to fight.) The docking mini-game is fun, but tedious after hundreds of times.

    A vast ocean that's inches deep, Elite Dangerous isn't the game for everyone. I'm addicted, but I just space truck. I feel like Frontier rushed this game out to help pay for development. That's not a bad thing, but don't expect a full game just yet.

    I just can't recommend this game, despite the hundreds of hours I've already put into it.    … Expand
  77. StockportJambo
    May 14, 2015
    3
    Backed this game at planet naming level (£750), as well as sunk another £200+ into it since then on merchandise, skins, and so on. I named my planet & space station after my late Dad. I was heavily involved in the Design Discussion Forum (DDF) all the way through. Needless to say, I wanted this game to be good.

    Unfortunately, once the initial "wow" factor of the huge galaxy wears off,    Backed this game at planet naming level (£750), as well as sunk another £200+ into it since then on merchandise, skins, and so on. I named my planet & space station after my late Dad. I was heavily involved in the Design Discussion Forum (DDF) all the way through. Needless to say, I wanted this game to be good.

    Unfortunately, once the initial "wow" factor of the huge galaxy wears off, you discover there's very little actual game there - and, worse, even less opportunity for you to create your *own* game. The systems are very similar, the stations are even more similar, the NPCs serve no purpose whatsoever, and the ill-advised & badly implemented "multiplayer" doesn't make up for the overriding feeling that the game is largely devoid of purpose. Everything feels "fake".

    It looks pretty in my Oculus Rift (bought for the game during alpha). It's a useful tech demo in that respect. The menu systems are terrible. Having to take your eyes off the action to fiddle with menu options to do some basic task is stupid. I'm not surprised that they're releasing a console version, as the "game that is designed for the PC from the ground up" (as promised during the Kickstarter) clearly wasn't.

    There is no pause button. Even if you only play solo (as I usually did) if you accept a (boring, fetch and carry) mission, you better finish it in that play session because the timers will count down on it even if you're not playing. Then you will lose rep. It would make sense if there was an actual effect on the system / faction if they didn't receive their 6t of Tea in time... but there isn't.

    It's incredibly grindy. There's nothing to do except grind for more cash to... buy a bigger ship... just so you can grind faster to... what? That doesn't count as "progression".

    There is a 1.3 update coming - codenamed "Power Play". With luck, that will address *some* of the deficiencies of this game for *some* people. No word on any further updates though... so I wouldn't hold your breath.

    However, the overriding feeling I have is one of profound disappointment & regret. I wish I hadn't spent so much money on it. I wish I hadn't named a space station as a memorial to my Dad as the game will now only exist for as long as Frontier continue to pay for the servers, thanks to their disgraceful last-minute bait'n'switch on offline mode. I am happy that some people are getting enjoyment from it, and it is clearly aimed at a demographic, but I am now acutely aware that this demographic does not include me... a huge fan of the originals and a high level Kickstarter backer.    … Expand
  78. Remiel_Pollard
    Jan 15, 2015
    2
    Elite, the game, is decent enough. Most of the reviews of the game are pretty accurate, especially the PC Gamer one. What kills it for me is the community - a bunch of little whinetards that need their hands held and noses wiped. What kills it more is, the devs accommodate them, and anyone speaking out about that is overzealously targeted and moderated on the forums. Play it if you justElite, the game, is decent enough. Most of the reviews of the game are pretty accurate, especially the PC Gamer one. What kills it for me is the community - a bunch of little whinetards that need their hands held and noses wiped. What kills it more is, the devs accommodate them, and anyone speaking out about that is overzealously targeted and moderated on the forums. Play it if you just want a game, but buyer beware, seek out not to participate in the community, it is vile, poisonous, and lorded over by some very cranky englishmen with their heads deep up their own arses.… Expand
  79. ikarii
    Dec 18, 2014
    3
    What a weird, frustratingly designed game.

    The decision to pivot to always online clearly hurt it - it has less players than BF4 in an instance. Practically no features for teaming up with your mates. Only one single server location worldwide. Peer to peer networking. So, basically, an "MMO" without the massive multiplayer, but forced to be online, presumably as half assed DRM.    What a weird, frustratingly designed game.

    The decision to pivot to always online clearly hurt it - it has less players than BF4 in an instance. Practically no features for teaming up with your mates. Only one single server location worldwide. Peer to peer networking. So, basically, an "MMO" without the massive multiplayer, but forced to be online, presumably as half assed DRM.

    There's so little to do and so little content - so few different stations and ships, only a few different weapons (and even less if you exclude simple reskins). There seem to be about a total of ~30 something models in the whole game, including asteroids, all the space stations, and all the ships. There's a good variety of suns and planets, to be sure, but they're basically differently textured spheres.

    As it stands the game sits very awkwardly between something like Eve, and something like Freelancer, and is unlikely to please fans of either. The grind for cash is as basic as any MMO but with none of the game systems that make a good MMO - especially in terms of teaming up - but even basic things like being able to work out arbitrage between systems, navigation, communicating with other players, etc, are practically nonexistent. And in terms of single player space game fans, there's nothing much for them either - the grand space war they promised consists of "conflict zones" consisting of mindless AI battles in space, to the achievement of nothing, no NPCs that aren't simple disposable space ships (which might as well be named 01001110), and no missions of any consequence for yourself beyond reputation and cash.

    Essentially there's nothing to recommend about it - other than the sound design, which as others have said, is genuinely fantastic. Other than as a workout for headphones - this is a really expensive game, which in many ways is much much less complex and involved than games like Freelancer, Freespace and Eve, which cost practically nothing. It's about the level of 8-bit Elite, which is below the level even of most f2p mobile phone games these days.

    It's hard to see this as much other than a big flubbed opportunity and a mad dash into chasing MMO cash, but without the budget for anything MMO fans have come to expect.    … Expand
  80. colescole
    Dec 18, 2014
    3
    This game is a shiny turd. It looks good but there is very little to do. Multiplayer doesn't exist. If you enjoy endlessly staring at different colored spheres then buy this game. If your hoping to have fun save your money and buy any thing else.
  81. weatherdog
    Feb 13, 2015
    0
    been playing for about 6 weeks now, didn't know that it was really a roleplaying game rather than a proper simulator or mmo. Done trading, tried mining which was the worst, and bounty hunting. The fighting part just ends up as just endless turning. if you get a good ship setup, the nexxt bugfixing patch cripples it. not enough to do and thats enough for me now. going to playbeen playing for about 6 weeks now, didn't know that it was really a roleplaying game rather than a proper simulator or mmo. Done trading, tried mining which was the worst, and bounty hunting. The fighting part just ends up as just endless turning. if you get a good ship setup, the nexxt bugfixing patch cripples it. not enough to do and thats enough for me now. going to play something more FUN like tetris or checkers with the dog.… Expand
  82. abwatrboy
    Feb 23, 2015
    3
    First off I'd like to say all of the fanboys giving this game a perfect 10 are delusional. Also giving it a 0 is not right either.

    My review, I'm came into this game as a new comer to ED I've always been a space sim fan. I've played many including X3, eve online, and others. Where this game wins, Graphics are impressive to say the least. The sounds and sites are really    First off I'd like to say all of the fanboys giving this game a perfect 10 are delusional. Also giving it a 0 is not right either.

    My review,
    I'm came into this game as a new comer to ED I've always been a space sim fan. I've played many including X3, eve online, and others.

    Where this game wins,

    Graphics are impressive to say the least. The sounds and sites are really impressive. Combat is very exciting,and very well done. The flight mechanics are awawesome. You can fly as a highly maneuverable jet (not very realistic but very fun) or by turing the flight assistance off you can also have the experience of what an actual spaceship would fly like in space. So in the simple mechanics of the game. I would in fact score that as a perfect 10 of 10. Because they have absolutely nailed it. Home run.

    Where it fails,

    This is an very long list. I'll try to keep it as short as possible. As many others have gone into great detail. This game is very hard to figure out. I can almost guarantee the first few hrs of gameplay will be very frustrating. From having to figure out controls to googling simply how to actually get paid from a bounty.
    Saying that there is lots to do is almost a double edged sword. Yes you can spend countless hrs doing the same repetition that doesn't mean there's lots to do. Intact there's only 2 things to do shoot something or fly from point to point.

    Once you've figured out how the game works you will no doubt have some fun. Because there is a lot of excitement. There is some fun value here. I don't want to totally trash it. But it just doesn't have any content. Once the honeymoon phase ends. You start looking for something to do! You want to immerse yourself in the community. There really isn't one. The comms are spotty at best. There's no chat. There's no grouping (1.2 patch seems to have this is mind. But that's at least a month off still) you want to find somtionse interesting mission content. There isn't any. Missions range from kill 6 pirates, or something else. Pick up this bring it here. All of this "stuff" is supposedly going to change the influence of of the controlling factions. You're suppose to be able to actually influence economies. Cause economic booms, civil wars, etc and that would truly make for some interesting content. If it worked. You will still find posts on the forums today wondering if it even works. There's a huge group of player from launch that have had this single goal. With no luck. Their efforts have been in vain. The system is completely broken.

    There is no mission structure (or the previously a mentioned lack of influence) so you will be left grinding out trade missions/routes. Bounties and the only kill mission being. Kill anaconda. The only reason you do this isfor in game currency . So you can buy better ships and modules. Just so you can go back out and grind for more credits.

    The 400 billion systems is really a joke. Once you've travelled around a little you're going to realize. It's pretty much 4 or 5 systems over and over again. Exploration is extremely boring. Once you've seen one gas giant you've seen them all. And it's not even interesting. Point your ship at planet for 30 seconds scan complete. Take in for (very small amounts) of credits. There's nothing to do there's nothing to find. Except maybe take a screen shot for your wallpaper. Except you'll have to use a third party program for that. And it will have the ship hub in the sho. Because there isn't even an in game picture camera.

    There is no dount in my mind in 6months to a year this game will be awesome. But Frontier has a lot of work to do. There really isn't a game there. Not by today's standards.

    The price point of $60 is an insult. There isn't enough content there to justify $20 let alone $60. This game is little more than a very impressive technical demo.

    I do not recommend picking this game up at all. Check back on reviews in 6 months. Maybe it'll be on sale or have made drastic content upgrades.

    If they could at least fix the reputation/influence system that would be a great start.    … Expand
  83. Joote
    Dec 16, 2014
    3
    Loved the first Elite, but don't like this one at all. The game is confusing and everything that should be simple is made as clunky as possible. You don't feel as if your playing a game, more like having a nightmare. Interdiction's are worse than a nightmare, I had 8 in one trade run and ended up getting destroyed.
    The game feels like a alpha were most of the functions are still bug    Loved the first Elite, but don't like this one at all. The game is confusing and everything that should be simple is made as clunky as possible. You don't feel as if your playing a game, more like having a nightmare. Interdiction's are worse than a nightmare, I had 8 in one trade run and ended up getting destroyed.
    The game feels like a alpha were most of the functions are still bug ridden, which is funny as the first beta I played was better than this release.
    First Elite was a great game, Elite dangerous is a horrible frustrating, badly designed game with some really stupid ideas implemented. It does look pretty when it's not jerking though. Bye bye Elite, a opportunity wasted.    … Expand
  84. Gunhed
    Dec 16, 2014
    3
    I can't recommend it to my friends in the current state.
    As a beta player there are too many things amiss.
    Trading system borked. High supply system/station don't have stuff and demanding system/stations are in high supply. That doesn't change if you purchase trading information. Everything in this game is so tidies and not rewarding. I don't want to have a game that feels like a job    I can't recommend it to my friends in the current state.
    As a beta player there are too many things amiss.
    Trading system borked. High supply system/station don't have stuff and demanding system/stations are in high supply. That doesn't change if you purchase trading information.
    Everything in this game is so tidies and not rewarding. I don't want to have a game that feels like a job without payment.    … Expand
  85. matunaga
    Jan 14, 2015
    1
    Sorry to say, but I gave up on it today. Maxed out my Lakon t7 (Midrange Freighter) that was planned to support Fighting/Pirating/Whatever in open play, but now I simply give in to the boredom. Hadn't it been for the fabulous "tradedangerous" for research on interesting trade routes I'd propably have done so a week ago.

    Biggest setbacks were: - no chance to contact friends online who    Sorry to say, but I gave up on it today. Maxed out my Lakon t7 (Midrange Freighter) that was planned to support Fighting/Pirating/Whatever in open play, but now I simply give in to the boredom. Hadn't it been for the fabulous "tradedangerous" for research on interesting trade routes I'd propably have done so a week ago.

    Biggest setbacks were:
    - no chance to contact friends online who were ingame at that time
    - no group functions whatsoever - how do I pay guards? By dropping cargo, really? How do they aid me when pulled out of Supercruise? etc. pp. Is no MMO, is to little populated in open play to be likely to become one.
    - Gained Access to restricted Imperial Home System - and found nothing whatsoever worth restricting
    - You can't be what you whant to be ingame, it's rather a choice between minigames.

    Biggest plus:

    - may be immersive Space Sim Cockpit Simulator with Oculus Rift, as long as this expirience doesn't give way to boredom.

    I played Elite on C64 and loved it, even if it wasn't much more than back'n forth, as now. But at these times the whole concept was brillinat. It seems to be a little less brilliant right now. Let's hope Star Citizen doesn't end up as bloatware (backed that too).    … Expand
  86. Vulture02
    Dec 16, 2014
    0
    This game is simply trash, and this review will be a list of why this is the case.
    -Hundreds of features promised by the devs to be included on release are not in the game, many of which will be expanded upon in my next bullet points. For example, they promised 25 ships on release, and we don't have our 25 ships.
    -Devs have said themselves on the forums that the features they have    This game is simply trash, and this review will be a list of why this is the case.
    -Hundreds of features promised by the devs to be included on release are not in the game, many of which will be expanded upon in my next bullet points. For example, they promised 25 ships on release, and we don't have our 25 ships.
    -Devs have said themselves on the forums that the features they have implemented are the "minimum implementation" of said features. How long should I expect to wait for these features to be fleshed out considering the game has been in development for years, and launches today? This game is basically an alpha in terms of actual features, and yet they are launching it as a full game.
    -Offline mode has been permanently removed, despite the promises of the devs that it would be in the game during the kickstarter phase. This means no modding.
    -The "multiplayer" aspect of this game is simply terrible. There is no local chat, no grouping, no coop missioning, no way to jump between systems with your friends, and no way to actually stay in an instance with your friends so that you can actually play with them. There is nothing to actually do with other players besides kill them and talk to them one at a time if you're locked on to them.
    -Furthermore, the "instancing" in this game is also trash. Even if you're flying right next to a guy talking to him, you'll often find that he will just disappear without a trace because the servers decided to put him into another instance for no reason. Instances are limited to 30 or so players (not that you'd ever even find that many players together at one time), so the MP is actually designed to be completely dead.
    -The "background simulation" running the universe is a complete sham. NPCs jump around with random cargo and never actually dock to sell said cargo. The sole purpose of the existence of NPCs in game right now is to make the universe feel less dead.
    -Nothing happens in game unless the devs "inject an event" to make it happen. For example, "wars" which go on right now consist of ten ships fighting each other in a war zone eternally, until the "war" is ended by the dev team. You can sit in the warzone for hours killing every NPC in sight, but when the war is eventually ended by Frontier, absolutely nothing will change in game. There was no reason for the "war" to ever happen because nothing happened as a result.
    -The universe is completely empty, and not in the good way. You go into supercruise, and there are "unidentified signal sources" which you can drop into to explore a bit, but every USS is just the same 3 events over and over again, so there is no reason to ever stop at them.
    -Super cruise takes forever. Some players report that they spent over 1.5 hours just super cruising to a space station to complete a mission, and that while they do that they will actually play ANOTHER GAME in the mean time so that way they'll be less bored.
    -Everything in game is extremely expensive, and incomes for all "professions" if you can call them that, is non-existent. It would take you many thousands of hours of grinding just to buy the expensive ships.
    -Your ship accrues "wear and tear" meaning that even if you just want to fly around empty space and enjoy looking at the skybox, you can't even do that without grinding to repair your ship.
    -Everything is procedurally generated. 400 billion systems empty systems that are all nearly exactly the same because some algorithm made all of them, who cares. I'd take a few hundred hand crafted systems over this procedurally generated junk any day.
    -Every single in game feature is so shallow that you can master it in seconds. There is nothing in game that takes actual skill.
    -There is no reason to actually do anything in game, because nothing you do changes the universe in any way. You could be the worlds best trader, pirate, bounty hunter, soldier, whatever, but nothing you do matters. All you're doing is grinding for imaginary credits.
    -The devs go out of their way to make features boring or frustrating, such as super cruising as I mentioned above, or even cargo scooping. To scoop cargo, you need to fly up to every single piece and manually scoop it into your ship. Sure, it sounds like fun to do one time, but it becomes massively tedious after the nth time, particularly considering that you need to scoop to pick up other players cargo, or mine asteroids.
    -Equipment for ships stocked at stations is completely randomly generated, and also randomly changes with time. I hope you like flying around the universe for 10 hours just to find a new engine for your ship. The devs are aware of this, and insist it is a feature, not a bug.

    I've run out of room in this mini review, but this game is certainly not worth $50.    … Expand
  87. deb0
    Mar 19, 2015
    0
    A total ripoff. Engine is full of bugs, support is pathetic, and the community is hostile and unsupportive. I wasted alot of time and money on this as a beta-backer. Not worth half of what I paid.
  88. Morkha
    Dec 16, 2014
    0
    Launch trailer is a lie,

    ok the game is beautiful buts that's all Repetitive game-play , poor actions, slow actions, poor content , smaller battles , ... Just an other sandbox without tools to build your sandcastle. Example : Quest : get x ... or kill x ... ( no scenarios no script ) Start : jump => cinematic , sun , kill x or get x. jump => same cinematic (yeah always    Launch trailer is a lie,

    ok the game is beautiful buts that's all

    Repetitive game-play , poor actions, slow actions, poor content , smaller battles , ...

    Just an other sandbox without tools to build your sandcastle.
    Example :
    Quest : get x ... or kill x ... ( no scenarios no script )

    Start : jump => cinematic , sun , kill x or get x. jump => same cinematic (yeah always the same, wherever u are) , sun ( always a sun ) , quest complete , do it again .

    Farm credits again and again and again( by mining or travelli.... heu i mean trading or , ... )

    have an other ship for .... i don't know , then repeat .

    Of course tell about huge bugs lags and problems .

    repeat is my definition for that boring game    … Expand
  89. yamalight
    Jan 30, 2015
    1
    I could've been a great space sim with an incredible world, but it failed short. And not only because of extreme lack of content and broken system on launch, but as well because of the way the company treated kickstarter (who need to fulfill promises to backers, right? nobody will miss that offline mode).
  90. bohemond1944
    Feb 2, 2015
    0
    What a boring, boring, snorefest. This game is the pinnacle of overhyped trash; requiring no brains and no fun. This has all the complexity of staring at a map of the galaxy. A cheaper way to enjoy what this game has to offer: project footage of the galaxy on your wall and get a sawhorse; either way you'll have to imagine your own fun.The game is pretty, but considering the almost completeWhat a boring, boring, snorefest. This game is the pinnacle of overhyped trash; requiring no brains and no fun. This has all the complexity of staring at a map of the galaxy. A cheaper way to enjoy what this game has to offer: project footage of the galaxy on your wall and get a sawhorse; either way you'll have to imagine your own fun.The game is pretty, but considering the almost complete lack of any content, that's not saying much. If you're looking for an engaging space sim then play the X series, Wing Commander series, or wait for the space sim made by the guy who did Freelancer: Star Citizen. This game is for people who like to be told what to like by ads, really it isn't a game.… Expand
  91. Mike101506
    Dec 19, 2014
    3
    I gave this a three because frankly, the game explains little to nothing in terms of how to play as a new player. I was very excited to play this but have yet figured out how to really do anything. Besides the training which was self explanatory I mindlessly rove around until I eventually run out of fuel. It looks great, the gameplay is incredibly slow and arduous. Until they come up withI gave this a three because frankly, the game explains little to nothing in terms of how to play as a new player. I was very excited to play this but have yet figured out how to really do anything. Besides the training which was self explanatory I mindlessly rove around until I eventually run out of fuel. It looks great, the gameplay is incredibly slow and arduous. Until they come up with more training missions to provide "how-to's" like accessing the bulletin boards/when dropping out of LTL how you scan and get to objectives, map plotting etc. it is not worth it. Also, if you purchase and want to return it...tough luck. No refund policy.… Expand
  92. YanniHasni
    Dec 16, 2014
    0
    What a massive disappointment. If you thought Braben's previous two space games were bad, this beats them hands down. This can barely be called a game. It is a astronomy simulator consisting entirely of pretty graphics, nice sound, and five insultingly boring mini-games. Plus a ton of bugs and crippling server problems. AVOID!
  93. Indissentient
    Feb 1, 2015
    0
    I would rate the game 6/10, but since there are so many fanboys rating it 10/10, I have no choice but to counter-rate.

    The good: Combat is excellent. It's actually good enough to warrant a game of its own, or at least a game mode. Graphics are fairly good. Sound is actually excellent (yes, sound in space, deal with it). The bad: There's nothing to do in the game at the moment.    I would rate the game 6/10, but since there are so many fanboys rating it 10/10, I have no choice but to counter-rate.

    The good:
    Combat is excellent. It's actually good enough to warrant a game of its own, or at least a game mode.
    Graphics are fairly good.
    Sound is actually excellent (yes, sound in space, deal with it).

    The bad:
    There's nothing to do in the game at the moment. Bounty hunting, trading, exploration and mining are all extremely repetitive and you get bored of that really fast. You can generally expect to get bored of the game within a month.
    Very little player interaction. No corporations, no fleets, no simultaneous FSD jumps, no co-op, no trading. Pretty much the only things you can do to other players is destroying then and sending them text messages.
    You can't actually affect the universe to a significant degree. Sure, you can run missions until dominant faction in a system changes, but it doesn't really affect you as a player.
    That may be subjective, but the amount of time you actually play the enjoyable parts of the game is less than you spend traveling around, and most of the travel (supercruise) is very simplistic and boring. Point your ship at the destination, wait until 7 seconds until destination, press a button, wait until you're there do nothing in between.
    Bugs. The game obviously doesn't get enough testing. There are a lot of bugs still left from the beta (for example, one that causes security ships to attack you even though you are clean). On January 1-2 the game suffered from huge problems with transaction server that makes cargo disappear and reappear, with some people losing their money and some exploiting it for free credits.
    Game is missing even some basic features, for example, handling of disconnections. If you kill the game during combat, you simply disappear from the game world, which allows you to escape any undesirable situation.

    The release was obviously rushed, littered with bugs and features missing, and most importantly, lacking mechanics to actually be enjoyable. I strongly encourage people to wait for at least half a year before buying the game: it's not worth its price in its current state.    … Expand
  94. Jaysyn
    Dec 16, 2014
    1
    Elite: Dangerous looks great, but it's a poor-man's EVE: Online. A single player game shoe-horned into an incomplete MMO framework. Definitely not worth the money & there is no way Elite will be able to stay afloat without either subs or adding pay2win features.
  95. Drenzul
    Jan 21, 2015
    1
    I'm a big elite fan from the original and sequel.

    This game does neither justice. There is barely more content than the original game, the customisation is less than Frontier elite. The game design is horrible, too many factors that the devs either just didn't think about or just didn't care about. This game isn't anywhere near what most people would consider 'release ready'    I'm a big elite fan from the original and sequel.

    This game does neither justice. There is barely more content than the original game, the customisation is less than Frontier elite. The game design is horrible, too many factors that the devs either just didn't think about or just didn't care about.

    This game isn't anywhere near what most people would consider 'release ready'

    Combined with the extremely unprofessional aspect of the Frontier development staff, who recently sent E-mails to a good chunk of the playerbase accusing them of exploiting when the vast majority weren't, I'd mark this game on my avoid list.

    Trading is shallow and repetitive and if you want to make money its the only real option.
    Combat missions are basically the same thing over and over. No variation, no excitement. Combat itself is very shallow and poorly thought through. There is little to no skill involved, its pretty much who has the better ship and in PvP, who decides to pull the net-cable to escape if they need to.

    Maybe in 1-2 years it might be playable. Its not at the moment.    … Expand
  96. tomphoenix
    Dec 29, 2014
    0
    WAIT on it. Right now it'll give you a few weeks of play time before you're bored with it. Once you figure out how to game it, the grind portion of the game becomes shorter (and it is currently a grind fest). You get into better ships and then what? Nothing. There's very little risk and very little depth to the game.

    It has a VERY promising future and the game's engine, sound, and    WAIT on it. Right now it'll give you a few weeks of play time before you're bored with it. Once you figure out how to game it, the grind portion of the game becomes shorter (and it is currently a grind fest). You get into better ships and then what? Nothing. There's very little risk and very little depth to the game.

    It has a VERY promising future and the game's engine, sound, and graphics were well done. It is enjoyable to dog fight (until you learn how to take out NPCs without risk - but still PvP is enjoyable ... when you see other players that is). It should be a great game worthy of the review you see, but today it simply isn't so.

    Be careful: The reviews you see are based upon promises and the future of what Elite may (and likely will) become. They are not based on the game as it is today. No sane person in their right mind would call the game complete. It shouldn't have been released yet and it shouldn't really be rated yet either.    … Expand
  97. crucible
    Dec 16, 2014
    1
    *sigh*
    Sadly, I conisder my money wasted for a DRM pseudo MMO with attached cash shop with orverpriced skins, and it won´t end there. It should have been offline, but they broke their promise, likely to get full control against piracy, not because of other reasons, mostly to make more cash. If they would be honest, they would refund everything they got from Kickstarter. Besides half of    *sigh*
    Sadly, I conisder my money wasted for a DRM pseudo MMO with attached cash shop with orverpriced skins, and it won´t end there. It should have been offline, but they broke their promise, likely to get full control against piracy, not because of other reasons, mostly to make more cash. If they would be honest, they would refund everything they got from Kickstarter. Besides half of the announced features are no where to be seen in the game. Disappointment of the decade.    … Expand
  98. Mitbox
    Dec 27, 2014
    2
    The Dangerous in the title refers to what you could hit your head on after falling unconscious from boredom.
    If you suffer from insomnia it may well be worth the purchase though !.
  99. jeffdunnham12
    Jan 29, 2015
    1
    the only game I regret kickstarting. was expecting a modern elite, but instead I got a P2P MMO with micro transactions and expansion packs. in a year or two when the kids get tired of killing everyone on sight( and after they've chased most of the old timers off), the game will slowly die. great way to end your flagship series braben..

    gave it a 1 because: prurtty gafics.
  100. burzum793
    Dec 16, 2014
    2
    Don't buy it now, it is a rushed release and a feature incomplete product. Wait at least ~1 year and then try it again. Keep reading for details.

    I've been a premium beta baker and followed the development closely and I'm not happy with the game yet, however I really want it to become a success and good game but it simply isn't yet. So far there are only three good things about it:    Don't buy it now, it is a rushed release and a feature incomplete product. Wait at least ~1 year and then try it again. Keep reading for details.

    I've been a premium beta baker and followed the development closely and I'm not happy with the game yet, however I really want it to become a success and good game but it simply isn't yet. So far there are only three good things about it: FANTASITIC Oculus Rift support, good graphics, not outstanding but good and a very well done flight model - but it's not newtonian but more like air planes but it feels very good.

    If you want a boring space truck with flight times through the dark that goes sometimes up to 15 minutes and you love Excel and spreadsheets, well, then this game is for you! It is not 1984 any more, I would have expected to have some in-game tools for that task. There are people who are happy with that - I'm not. Eurotruck 2 is more entertaining if I would like to move stuff from A to B.

    Except the flight model every other game mechanic feels very very simple and incomplete. One of the game devs even said in the forums (the beta / gamma forums are gone now) that for example mining is just the bare minimum implementation right now.

    The game lacks diversity. You have basically 400 billion times the same stage: Some planets and less than a handful type of stations and ships that all look the same. You can't really see a difference between the factions just by looking at them, they don't feature unique designs. The game fails hard to build a connection with the player. Factions don't even have a logo in the bulletin boards, no face, nothing, just text that is always the same. I don't care if its company A or B or NPC X or Y, there is nothing that would create a binding between me and them. I don't care about them, I just look at the numbers and how much credit I'll gain from a mission - that's it.

    Overall the game world is not very logical and inconsistent, there is far to much dice rolling going on instead of providing a logical world that makes sense. For example there are trade routes shown and then the exporting system doesn't even have what it exports available. There are missions telling you to get X in system Y and what it basically means is: Spend one or two hours flying around, waiting for a RANDOM spawn of a "unidentified signal source" and hope you're lucky and it generated the instance with the needed item for you. Another example is the RANDOM ship and ship equipment distribution. There are no ship yards, there are no factories that produce parts, it is totally luck based if you can get something somewhere. The chances are higher in hightech systems but it is still random. The missions in the bulletin board as well rotate very quickly, every 5-10minutes it seems it comes up with "new" missions - same stuff just different numbers. It is no magic to create a procedural game but to make it feeling alive and diverse is an art, so far Frontier failed to do that.

    There is a A LOT potential but the current "game" just lacks the game. It is a collection of game play mechanics and basic implementations of them. The game needs at least another year of development, if not more, IMHO.    … Expand
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Awards & Rankings

65
#65 Best PC Game of 2014
5
#5 Most Discussed PC Game of 2014
2
#2 Most Shared PC Game of 2014

Critic Reviews

All reviews »
Metascore
80

Generally favorable reviews - based on 54 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 46 out of 54
  2. Mixed: 8 out of 54
  3. Negative: 0 out of 54
  1. LEVEL (Czech Republic)
    Jul 8, 2015
    80
    First minute the game takes your breath away and then it entertains you for another couple of hours to end up like a meditative tool for hard working individuals. What a waste and shame for a game in such beautiful environment. [Issue#253]
  2. Ragequit.gr
    May 11, 2015
    90
    Everyone who played the original game back in the 80's, should be right at home. It's the 21st Century version of "Elite." But newer, uninitiated players may find it strangely desolate and repetitive. A grand space simulation, aimed at the series' hardcore fans.
    Read full review
  3. Games.cz
    Apr 23, 2015
    80
    You can focus on the journey, not the destination – even when some "road work" signs will bother you for the time being in the reincarnated Elite. But their numbers are declining with every new update so a thirty-year-old vision becomes more and more complete.
    Read full review
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