A Preview of Good Things to Come
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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