Inevitable Comparisons

Contributed by Adrian Ip.

Adrian has gamed on everything from an Apple IIe to a 5960X, Titan X rig with pit stops at various Commodore machines and other consoles. He has a long term love affair with most sci-fi/space genre games, particularly including space combat sims. Current backer/player of both Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous. Finance geek in my spare time. xD.

This article was written about the beta preview version of Elite: Dangerous on the Xbox One. This pre-release version is close to release, however content and performance doesn't reflect the final product.

I take several different methods of transportation to work each day. My 1 hour and 40 minute (on a good day) each way grind starts out in the car, shifts to a train and finally finishes up on the underground. Some days are smooth sailing, but some days you get out of bed and you can just feel that something is going to go wrong. Often it’s the train, regularly the underground and occasionally traffic. Every so often when I’ve done something to seriously piss off the gaming gods, all three go wrong and depending on what happens where I may even need to get on a bus. Why on earth am I writing about my mind numbing and occasionally excruciating daily commute you may ask? Well, I was trying to think of a way to describe playing Elite: Dangerous on the Xbox One and in an odd way, it’s the closest comparison I could think of, I’ll explain more at the end.

Let's Get Into It

Full disclosure. I’m a bit of an elitist. Perhaps dangerously so (see what I did there?). So when I was asked to review Elite: Dangerous on the Xbox One, although I was intrigued, I had my reservations:

1. Generally these days I’m a PC gamer more than anything else.
2. I like “flying” things with a HOTAS (Hands On Throttle And Stick for those of you who weren’t paying attention in gaming class).
3. Some experiences are just better closer to a smaller screen than farther from a big one.
4. I don’t like having to pay a 3^rd party subscription service for online play.

To set some context. I grew up playing games, and perhaps none more so than ones from the Wing Commander catalogue. When I was a kid, I was endlessly cajoled by some of my mates to try out Elite, and then Frontier etc. Eventually I tried them and I genuinely couldn’t see what people were on about.

Fast forward 20 odd years and I’m in a funny situation. I’ve still got my general space game fetish (Mass Effects, Kerbal, XCom, Star Wars, X series etc) but I really missed some of the old school space combat games. Oddly enough, out of nowhere, back come Chris Roberts and David Braben to seemingly fulfil all my wishes! I know that Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous are patently different games but it’s difficult to talk about one without the other coming to mind, and herein lies the first problem.

They’re different. Or are they?

Well, yes and no. Of course one is a finished game in some senses, the other is still a pre-alpha, but looking beyond that, there are a lot of overlaps or intended overlaps. Elite of course takes the approach that it has always taken (a huge, procedurally generated game world) while Star Citizen (for the moment) is primarily hand crafted, although they are working on procedural generation too of course. However, in terms of similarities, there are quite a few:

• Flying spaceships.
• Newtonian physics.
• Missions
• Credits
• Factions

Let’s face it, a lot of the games features overlap, but they both feel as different from one another as their predecessors ever did, perhaps more so. This leads me to a bit of a conundrum. Given that I always preferred one series of games over the other, how to remain impartial since every time I play one I’m mentally comparing it to the other. Ultimately it’s a difficult task for me, but I’m determined to give it a bash. If you feel I’ve been unfair, I’m sure you’ll let me know in the comments J

Flight Model/Controls

Some people are pitch and yawers, others are pitch and rollers, the better ones vary their technique depending on the circumstances and here’s my first issue. Yaw in E:D is virtually useless. If you’ve been following the game on PC, you likely know this already. Well guess what, the lack of “yawability” was of course carried over in the port to XB1. I’m not going to get into a “flight model x is better than flight model y” discussion here, (I’ll leave that to you guys in the comments section) but if you like the ability to choose whether you pitch and roll or just yaw to turn, or even if you’re just a yaw or nothing kind of guy/gal, this still may not be the game for you.

Some aren’t bothered either way and can easily adapt to whatever the game they’re playing allows. Personally I’m probably a 60-40 (in favour of pitch/yaw) guy so I can deal with it, but for those like me it’ll be an annoying itch that you just can’t quite reach to scratch.

The wider control layout however is where the game starts to suffer. As is ever the case with any kind of flight simulation game if it wants to take a semi-serious stab at a simulation experience, you’ll find yourself contorting your hands into an odd mixture of combo button presses to achieve a variety of given outcomes. This is obviously not Frontier’s fault given the limitations of the standard console controller, but coming from PC with a HOTAS, it’s a compromise and from my perspective, a big one.

The simple fact is, flight is a complicated subject. Any game which wants to get remotely involved in it is going to have a lot of controls associated with it. Newtonian spaceflight makes things even more complex. I’m not going to turn this into an Elite vs. Star Citizen flight model discussion but the Elite model is a slightly simpler one which in all honesty probably makes it better suited to consoles than Star Citizen. However I still feel that there is just too much at hand to reasonably be able to control with an Xbox One controller. Even on a PC with a full on HOTAS, part of me still yearns for pedals. Quite simply, that level of control will never come from a console controller.

Driving games have long had wheels and pedals on consoles but the space flight simulator is only a relatively recent resurgent gaming genre. It’s possible we’ll see a HOTAS come to a console at some point in time but the usual questions of what, when and how much are unknown. With the arrival of Elite on the XB1, I think this nudges the likelihood a touch higher, ultimately it will depend on the success of the game on the platform as well as the arrival of other high profile games of the genre for the beancounters at Saitek/Thrustmaster/CH to see if it makes sense for them to invest time and money into working with Microsoft and Sony.

Tutorials

There are a decent range of tutorials to start with. There are of course the standard links to youtube videos explaining that to perform function x you need to press the button(s) bound to that control but that’s not particularly useful, as I don’t know which button is bound to that function! Ok, forget it. I’m sure the videos were done for PC users initially and of course there are umpteen different layout mappings you can do there. It’s time to try some in game tutorial modes.

Ok, this is more like it. Press button this, result that. Do action this, result the other. Now I’m getting somewhere. Except… I’m not. The basic controls are covered, but some of them don’t tell you what button(s) to press or how to perform the actions you’re expected to do to pass the tutorial. Docking was an odd one too. First time round, I actually got killed in the tutorial for loitering around the landing pad when as far as I could tell, I’d landed! At least it gave me a warning before killing me so I could frantically start jiggling my spaceship around in a vain effort to make the game recognise that I’d landed. It still didn’t work, but at least I knew I’d been a bad boy and deserved to be punished! A few goes later and I passed the tutorial.

So, the tutorials section is useful, but not overly so. It’s a bit of a shame. The basic premise/value proposition of the console for me has always been ease of use and pick up and playability. Without a decent introduction to the entire control scheme, the experience already feels somewhat lacking which is obviously accentuated by what I wrote in the previous section. Still, learn by doing and all that. Let’s get in game!

Xbox One

The XB1 in our house actually belongs to my wife. I’ve used it here and there but it’s definitely not “mine”. Problem 1 right out of the box. I want to try out the new “CQC” (Close Quarter Combat) mode of E:D. Cue lots of faffing around trying to figure out why it says my account doesn’t have access to use it. Eventually I google it and of course get a billion hits reminding me that I’m on a console and have to pay a subscription for multiplayer. 1 month of Xbox Live Gold purchase later, and I’m ready for my first taste of arena combat, Elite: Dangerous style.

Close Quarter Combat

Ok, this is what it’s about! CQC is the Elite: Dangerous take on PvP arena combat. I’ve had enough of learning mechanics and just want to get straight in so I dive right into a deathmatch. No teams, no flags to capture, just other spaceships to shoot. I’m still struggling a bit with the controls but put in a respectable first attempt and finish on the podium in third place with 2 kills, 1 assist and 2 deaths.

 

Not bad, time to jump into a “Team Conflict”. Ouch, not so good, match finishes a draw and I died twice not hitting a single enemy. When each round finishes, you see how you/your team did, along with achievements/experience earned (my school days come back to haunt me as I see an achievement called “Try Harder!” with a few XP thrown in for it). It’s important as CQC does not use the currency of the main game itself. Your ships are lent to you for the championship and you have to earn experience to unlock more ships/loadouts.

The controls are becoming a bit more fluid now as I start getting the hang of them, if only they had a yaw (hint, default controller layout, nothing is mapped to yaw!). There are various power-ups sprinkled around the maps which add to the fun and all in all it’s a reasonably fun experience. There are some interface issues which I’ll cover later.

CQC vs. Arena Commander

Yep, I went there! With Star Citizen not being a finished game, this is the one direct comparison I can make between the two games. The difficulty here is that I’ve probably logged 100+ hours in Arena Commander and only a few in CQC. Arena Commander in the sense of a PvP/PvE arena tool is also a lot more mature and it shows in the game modes available if not always in the stability of the module (I’m looking at you post GamesCom 2015 Coop event!).

The comparison is a tough one and in a lot of respects it depends on what angle you’re coming at the game from. CQC feels a lot more “gamey” than Arena Commander. The power-ups, the experience points, the unlocking of levels/ships/loadouts and of course the XB1 controller vs. the wealth of control systems available to Star Citizen.

These concepts aren’t entirely lacking from Star Citizen. If you play it, you’re likely familiar with the in game currency of REC (Rental Equipment Credits) which you earn for playing and allows you to rent new equipment for Arena Commander. Everything from the lowliest gun to the mightiest dogfighting ships are available to be rented with REC for zero real world cash, so in a sense, REC is kind of like an experience system where the more you play, the more you unlock. The Star Citizen system just feels like it has more freedom to it since you’re free to change loadout between any of the 24 ships, 30 weapons and 8 shields available provided the ship supports it.

None of this is necessarily a bad thing, it just depends on the kind of experience you’re after. Arena combat in general is a gamey subject. The default controller layout of a combination of 2 buttons to enable Newtonian mode in Elite is a big no no for me. Additionally, the radar system is less intuitive to me than the Arena Commander one. Loadouts in Arena Commander are also only limited by what equipment you have available to you in game.

CQC has 3 ships with 3 levels of loadouts for 9 different unlockable setups with the ability to do some loadout changes once you unlock some of the higher tiers. The REC store (“Electronic Access” as CIG have named it for chuckles) currently has 24 ships, 30 weapons and 8 different shields available in it for players to mix and match. Even if you discount identical hull variants in Arena Commander, you still have 13 different ships available. The Arena Commander experience feels a lot richer, but with that richness comes complexity. Trying to figure out which weapons fit which hard points and which shields work best against ballistics/energy weapons and which your ship has enough power to sustain reasonably etc does not make for a quick pick up and play session to the new user, so in this respect, CQC is probably better suited to console gaming than Arena Commander.

The Game

So although it's quite unintuitive at first, it’s certainly playable as you’d expect. If you’ve not played it before, you need to create a (free) account on Frontier’s servers, or you can link an existing PC account to the game on your Xbox One, then come the hours of familiarisation.

I had a few issues getting used to the game, specifically the galaxy map/system map, finding your landing zone, landing, radar, the frameshift drive functionality are again relatively unintuitive to begin with for the new player.

These are all small niggles which time and practice overcomes, but once again I found myself slightly frustrated by the lack of just pick it up and get going ability. I’m not sure exactly what target demographic Elite: Dangerous is going for, but fans of the old games have to be a big part of their target market. I’d imagine the die hards in that category were probably in on the PC release, so an Xbox One release is potentially mopping up the less obsessed and targeting a wider user base, possibly a more casual one. There’s nothing wrong with this of course, but if you’re going to pursue people who aren’t as dedicated to learning the ins and outs of the game as your most hardcore fans, you have to make it easier for them to access the game and have fun with it and this is where I feel the game is fundamentally lacking. You're still going to spend a lot of long hours getting used to the system and figuring out all the mechanics, controls, customising controls, learning to frameshift, getting too close to stars and overheating, getting dropped out of supercruise to be interdicted etc. These hours (for me at least) were relatively painful and Elite does little to nothing to smooth the learning curve.

Once you start gaining familiarity with the controls and sub-systems, there is definitely a rewarding game mechanic here. The initial rush of adrenaline after my first successful mission (following several failures) was great and it certainly has me wanting more, even so, the game overall still feels like it’s missing a killer hook to me.

The game itself seems solid in terms of reliability. I had one failure to connect to the Frontier servers but an XB1 reboot solved that. In game, I only found one bug which was a graphical glitch on the contracts view screen in space where the colours showing the contracts were all wrong and you couldn’t read them. Scrolling up and down or just waiting a few seconds usually cleared the problem when it occurred.

Something which isn’t a big problem, rather a mild annoyance is the LOD parameters seem slightly off. I don’t know about you, but I find it a bit of a distraction and immersion breaking when I’m flying/moving towards something in a game and then a fairly large/obvious chunk of that something appears. I’ve experienced this a few times in Elite: Dangerous, mostly when approaching space stations for landing. I guess the difficulty here is that the GPUs in current gen consoles aren’t exactly ground-breaking so a trade-off needed to be made. Personally, I’d rather sacrifice a bit of detail level to have better overall performance and for things to start rendering while I’m still far enough away from them for it to not be obvious. This, coupled with my next point makes me think they are slightly off in the optimisation level for the Xbox One.

The only other problem I encountered is that there are some noticeable drops in frame rate when there’s a lot going on and here I once again defer to my elitism.

Side Rant

PC’s have for most of their history been fundamentally different beasts to consoles in several respects, but fundamentally in their “tinkerer” appeal. All the way back to modifying autoexec.bat and config.sys files and messing around with emm386 to get games running, PC’s have generally always had a more customised experience. With that level of customisation, inevitably at times it brings frustration, but this is something that PC gamers have historically put up with and some even enjoyed in their pursuit of the perfect (for them) gaming setup and experience. Consoles took a different approach. Plug it in, turn it on, play. No pesky configs, no driver updates, no operating system optimisations, no different control schemes.

Plug it in, turn it on, play. The standardisation was its strength. 1 button, 2 buttons, 4 buttons, whatever. Every single person who played a given game on a given console had the same experience and a few page quick start guide to explain the controls. In recent years, in game tutorials and easy starter levels where the games pause the action etc to walk you through things have become more common as the control sets have become more complex, but the basic premise remained. Console players didn’t have to worry about resolutions, frame rates, Stream Processors or Cuda Cores. Until recently. Now there’s this odd halfway house. Console gamers are talking about frame rates. They’re talking about resolutions. They’re aware of these things and given the desire to push what games can do, coupled with the ability for the infamous “day 1 patch”, more and more casual console gamers are finding themselves banging against the limits of their hardware with frustration. Don’t get me wrong, Elite Dangerous is no Assassin’s Creed Unity or Arkham Knight PC day 1 launch, but these problems never used to manifest on consoles in years gone by and I struggle to understand the value proposition of a console if it isn’t for its ease of use.

A noticeable but still very playable drop in frame rate isn’t the end of the world, but it’s just yet another example of the change in dynamic which console players have historically not had to deal with.

Back to the Game

The only other thing I mentioned earlier that I’d come back to is the interface. It’s clean and usable, unless (you guessed it) pitching upwards fast. And yeah, I get it, this seems odd in a game where to change direction effectively you need to roll and then pitch, particularly given peoples likelihood to pitch up rather than down due to historical learning about G and trained behaviour from years of black out/red out mechanics. When you pitch up, the view changes and the radar moves towards the bottom of the screen. Pitch up fast enough and you can lose visibility of half the radar or more. It's not just the radar though, as this section also shows you other useful info, like if your throttle is in the sweet spot of being able to manoeuvre quickly or not (highlighted by the blue range). In that sense it sucks, as to be able to get visual confirmation of something like that, you have to stop travelling in the direction you want to travel so that you can see the radar and your thrust effectiveness.

Summary

To be brutally honest. Elite and its sequels have never been my kind of game and I’ve always struggled to understand this. All the right ingredients for me to love it are there, spaceships, space flight, combat, missions, scale, the list goes on. But for me it’s just a general lack of something to get emotionally connected to. There’s no Confed/Kilrathi, Alliance/Reapers, GDI/NOD, Evil Galactic Empire/Rebel Alliance, Cops/Robbers, Tsurani/Midkemians, Assassins/Templars, Hobbits/Orcs and yes, UEE/Vanduul to get behind. Without a fundamental epic good vs. evil storyline, the sandbox better have some sand in it and this is fundamentally where the game falls down. I know there are factions in it and you can join them as you progress but they feel pretty lacking in personality. There's no overarching theme to the universe and although I'm a grown up (kinda), I like the simplicity of a nice good vs. evil theme to get me into a game. Sandbox is great, but there needs to be a driver to keep playing. Sometimes that's the friendships, sometimes the developer content, sometimes the player content. At the moment, I've yet to identify what my driver will be beyond getting some cooler ships/equipment and more credits. That's fine to begin with, but there needs to be something else if I'm going to put a lot of time into it.

That comment isn’t mine by the way. I came across it on the Elite Dangerous forums by the user _Bishop_ who apparently told some Frontier staff at PAX that he thought they’d forgotten to put sand in the sandbox and they agreed. It’s honestly the best way I can describe how I feel about Elite: Dangerous so far. Now the thing is, I know a lot of gamers who love the game and I’m certainly going to give it a good try, as I've given the previous Elite games a good try. I'm open minded, but from my perspective, it's still an updated Elite for modern hardware. Lots of people will love that, but lots of people will also find it grindy with little reward.

If you've always been an Elite fan, when it comes to the Xbox version specifically I'm sure you'll still love the game. Invest some time to get over the initial hurdles of learning the control system and game mechanics and you'll have a great time. The thing is, if you've got a PC that's even remotely capable of running it, I'd genuinely suggest buying the pc version. You'll find it a lot more rewarding from a piloting and control perspective, plus if you're not an Xbox Live Gold subscriber, you won't have to pay extra for multi-player.

So what was all that about cars, trains and undergrounds? Well, every so often, as frustrating as my commute is, it can also go really well. Sometimes all you catch are green lights, the train before the one I usually get was delayed and I walk onto the platform just as that one is pulling in to the station, get on it and my favourite corner seat is available, then, to top it all off, I get onto the underground and sit next to a friend I've not seen in ages. They're rare occurrences, but they happen and so far, I've found enough of these little gems in Elite: Dangerous to get me curious and make me look past the car accident, the standing room only delayed train and the signal failure on the underground experiences of the half baked tutorial modes and pitch-roll only flight mechanics. I'll be playing it, just on PC. I am an elitist after all.

Pros:

• The Elite: Dangerous experience mostly successfully ported to console.
• Reasonable gameplay.
• Nice PvP arena combat mode with some aspects of the "pick up and play" approach that should be there for consoles.

Cons:

• Xbox One controller seriously lacking for a game of this calibre.
• Graphics are middle of the road at best and still stutter on occasion.
• Serious time investment needed to get the most out of the game.
• If you're not an Xbox Live Gold subscriber, you'll need to pay and subscribe to this to enjoy multiplayer.

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