Elite Dangerous

I left Elite Dangerous about eight years ago because of engineering. What should have been an optional progression system became a mandatory grind that turned ship building into a second job instead of something fun. I recently decided to give the game another chance, hoping years of updates had addressed those problems. Instead, I found that nearly everything about the game feels like trying to run a footrace underwater. Engineering is still effectively mandatory if you want to participate in combat without being hopelessly outclassed. The catch? To get the materials needed for engineering, you're often pushed into fighting enemies who are already engineered while you have none of the upgrades yourself. It's a ridiculous progression loop that punishes you for not already having what you're trying to unlock. Then there's the travel. Want to engineer your weapons? Fly several hundred light-years to one engineer. Need shields next? Fly several hundred more to another NPC. Thrusters? Repeat the process. Instead of playing the game, you're spending hours staring at a jump counter. Nothing respects your time. The information overload doesn't help. Every system seems buried beneath multiple layers of menus, submenus, and obscure interfaces. Even after completing the tutorials, the game barely explains its mechanics. You're left searching through third-party websites, YouTube videos, and community spreadsheets just to understand systems that should be explained in-game. Preparation has become the game. You spend more time gathering materials, flying across the galaxy, unlocking engineers, pinning blueprints, hunting down obscure resources, and configuring modules than actually doing the activities you logged in to enjoy. Whether it's combat, exploration, or bounty hunting, the setup feels ten times longer than the payoff. And here's the thing: the game isn't difficult. It's not challenging in the satisfying sense. It's unfair, convoluted, and intentionally time-consuming. Artificial barriers aren't the same thing as meaningful gameplay. To make matters worse, the technical state of the game feels surprisingly rough. Within five to ten minutes of logging in, I can almost guarantee I'll encounter some kind of bug—overlapping ship menus, interface glitches, or a black screen after disembarking. These aren't rare edge cases; they happen often enough that they become part of the expected experience. It gives the impression that Frontier is doing the absolute bare minimum required to keep the game functional because there isn't a true MMO space sim competitor pushing them to improve. Whether that's true or not, that's certainly how the game feels. The saddest part is that I wanted to like it. The flight model is still fantastic. The galaxy is still beautiful. Flying your ship still captures a sense of scale that few games can match. But all of that potential is buried beneath layers of unnecessary friction and endless busywork. I honestly don't understand how brand-new players stick with this game. Without engineering, you're routinely matched against opponents that vastly outclass you. Yet acquiring engineering materials often requires surviving exactly those encounters. It's a progression system that borders on self-parody. Elite Dangerous doesn't feel like a game that's trying to entertain you. It feels like a game that's constantly testing how much inconvenience you'll tolerate before giving up.

honestly, the game isnt bad but people like me that have horrible pc. its js really depends on ram maybe

This game has it all. Ship combat. On-foot combat. Asteroid mining. Trade. Exploration. Exobiology. Anti-Xeno. Colonization. Squadrons (basically, what other MMORPGs call "guilds"). Fleet carriers. Endless ship, suit, and weapon mods and customizations. You can even hire an NPC pilot to assist you in space combat by flying a ship-launched fighter, and if you keep them on retainer and continue flying with them, they'll eventually level up to Elite and help you take on much stronger enemies than you'd otherwise be able to do alone. And then there's the background simulation and Power Play mechanics which make the Elite Dangerous universe feel alive and dynamic because stuff keeps happening even while you're not playing. It's basically impossible to get bored of this game, because you can always switch to something you haven't done before or haven't done recently.

Отличный космо-сим который очень много лет держит планку. Но последние пару лет начали добавлять много новых кораблей, и это круто, выглядят они потрясающие, но они настолько перебафанные что это просто сюр, новые корабли просто плюют на правила которые были всегда и лучше просто потому что. Разрабы оправдывают это прорывом технологий в мире игры, но прорыв технологий не оправдывает игнорирование правил физики, которые влияют на все старые корабли. Вес корабля теперь просто красивая циферка, а не имеющая значение характеристика. А знаете почему это происходит? Правильно, деньги. Как только разрабы начали клипать новые корабли их теперь можно покупать за реальные деньги (в первый месяц выхода корабля ТОЛЬКО за реальные деньги) и помимо этого можно покупать сразу с крутыми модулями. По итогу баланс идет в помойку, ведь новые корабли всегда будут лучше старых и это доходит до абсурда когда самые свежие корабли лучше кораблей вышедших меньше года назад. Разрабы своей жадностью губят игру, я не против продаж кораблей за реал, особенно учитывая сколько времени занимает фарм денег в этой игре, но не надо делать новые корабли настолько перекачанными, что старые перестают иметь смысл. Теперь в этой игре работают правила паршивой гачи, где старые персонажи забываются и больше не вывозят конкуренцию с новыми

2600+ hours in, still coming back — but the game's got real gaps that need saying out loud. Combat is an inch deep and ten miles wide. You can dogfight for a decade and it never gets more complex than gimbals/turrets and pips. Worse, group PvP right now looks like a zoomer joust: three vets all slamming into each other chasing the same single target because there's no real coordination layer, no capital-scale fights, nothing that rewards a team acting like a team instead of a pile of ships dogpiling one poor sap. PvP is basically dead because there's nothing epic to fight FOR or WITH. What needs fixing: - NPC crew should be able to actually man the guns, not just fly the fighter. More crew slots too. - Panther Clipper carrier variant — trade some cargo for a fighter bay/launch slots. Same hull, easy add. - Let System Architects name their own colonized systems and actually DO something with them after they're built, instead of the ownership experience just ending at "it's built." - Let your extra owned ships patrol your systems or run trade routes for you automatically. - Stop balancing around "players have too much money." A decade-old PvE/PvP game having veteran players sitting on big credit piles isn't a design flaw, it's just what a mature game looks like. Fix the fights, not the wallet. - Flight model: supercruise throttle is fine. Normal space and dogfighting need more granular throttle control, and throttle needs to reset to zero when you drop out of supercruise — like literally every other space/flight game does it. Right now it doesn't, and it makes combat feel worse than it should. Great sandbox, gorgeous galaxy, genuinely unmatched scale. But the actual moment-to-moment fighting hasn't grown up with the rest of the game. Fix combat depth and give PvP something worth fighting over, and this game goes from "good with mods of patience" to genuinely great.

My experience for the last 3 hours: - Log in the game, disembark to a station to buy gear to do operations, games crashes and I get stuck on a black screen. - Join an operation, board a ship and kill waves of stupid enemies that takes 2 full magazines each to kill, cannot finish objective because the last enemies are stuck somewhere bugged and we cannot find them. The mission fails and it tries to restart us at checkpoint. The game crashes. - Fed up with bugged operations, I decide to do a trade run I buy goods and dock to a station to sell them, my ship clips the dock entrance and gets stuck unable to move, a timer starts and my ship gets blown up by police for "loitering", I lose my ship and my cargo. I get sent to prison 1 hour away from my location. - Frustrated with that experience I go clean my house and have 20x times more fun (and I hate cleaning my house)

Elite Dangerous sells you a dream similar to Star Citizen. A huge sandbox. The sandbox is a mile wide and an inch deep. Beginner combat is very frustrating. Guides and helpful resources are in short supply and what does exist is very warped or out of date. Youtube videos with beginner information frequently feature a player running a beginner ship but with endgame weapons, who claims that doing various tasks for progression is fast and easy and fun, while melting anything in their way with a magic cannon they got for twelve billion credits after investing a hundred hours into Engineering or Faction Warfare progression. Elite Dangerous expanded to on-the-ground FPS gameplay and as far as I can tell this has not worked since it was added, and seems to have gotten worse. Veteran players complain that the shooter gameplay is buggy and shallow and repetitive and that you can load up literally any shooter game and have a better experience, so they scratch their heads and ask why this gameplay is even here. I tend to agree though I could never progress much into FPS combat because doing so requires some equipment you get from endgame gameplay, even though you can choose to begin your character as a primarily on-the-ground specialist, going directly into FPS missions rather than directly into space combat missions. Most ships are useless. You either pick a big cargo ship to do low profit hauling missions or you pick a fast fighter, anything else is pointless. You do hauling because to create new stations in the game world, players have to haul resources to a system that has a construction project active. Building new stations and expanding a faction's control over more of the galaxy doesn't really serve the players. It's not really possible for any one faction to "win" so controlling more of the galaxy does not achieve anything except annoying players who have committed to the other factions, by making it so they get attacked by NPC patrols if they travel through a highly upgraded system. I've played a lot of space combat games over thirty years and while this one is one of the flashiest of its time, it was also the most annoying by far. And once you see past its illusion of depth, it's definitely one of the most shallow space shooter games I've ever played. A sequel might be good but this is unlikely, and the parent company prefers exploitative live services, so it would be another game that caters to whales who buy the newest ships with real money, who then will fly those ships around waiting for newbies to exit stations to blow them up randomly. Many players in Elite Dangerous are very toxic. They will kill you just because they have nothing better to do after reaching endgame. They won't even bother to loot whatever cargo you're carrying. You exit the station and there's someone hovering in front of you who immediately fires into the dock to kill you, and then they fly away happily. NPCs might aggro on them but the NPC ships don't matter to the players who have invested hundreds of hours and dollars into this toxic pond. If you play, don't play in the public realm, play with friends in the private realm, and understand that you'll have to figure out all the abstract nonsense around Engineering and commit hard to that grind and fight through many online guides that are full of incorrect and useless information. It will be a struggle but it is possible to have a little fun, for a short while. Or you could load up literally any other dogfighter game and have a better experience.

I have played quite a bit of this game. And while it has a learning curve for sure, the scenery you can visit is stunning. Its a space sandbox. you can trade, explore, dog fight, mine asteroids (with lasers or blow them up!) There is on foot fighting, basically a 3rd person shooter with missions all on its own. And so much more. The Elite Community is vast and very tech savvy with apps, videos, ship builds and websites etc. Check this game out, you wont be disappointed !

Note to self: Grind. "Realism." Liveservice slave.