Into the Final Frontier, Continued
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.
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