If you like these sorts of games (particularly games like Titanfall and Subnautica, or DRG), you might really like Elite Dangerous. Has a big learning curve, but it’s a “once every decade or two” game when it comes to scratching a deep deep Sci fi itch. 1:1* milky way, set thousands of years in the future, with a variety of ships and missions,with excellent HOTAS and VR support. Co-op up to five people, even more if you are in a public server. FPS game with a variety of vehicles, from small cars to aircraft carriers 4x the length of the burj Khalifa.
- the milky way is cut down slightly, as the core of our galaxy is so dense with stars, it melts computers and makes it impossible to fly between stars, which are almost as dense as sand in a sandbox.
My memory of Elite Dangerous is trying to start auto-undocking, and the flight computer putting me on hold because of another person floating around in the docking bay. Eventually, it aborted the auto-undock; and the tutorial had not taught me how to release the controls to manually undock. So, eventually the station’s security systems flagged me as flying in unpermitted space and destroyed my ship.
So that does seem to echo the “big learning curve” bit.
Elite is fantastic at being Elite, I’m actually glad starfield isn’t like elite though. Elite is all about the beautiful desolation of space, and the attempts of humanity to carve out a place in that desolation. But there’s not really any story or characters or much stuff that isn’t procedurally generated. It’s just you and the grind in a really pretty world.
When I have an itch that elite will scratch I pop on and enjoy being in the cockpit (especially in VR). Im playing starfield to scratch that BGS rpg itch. If I had to manually jump from system to system and fly my ship in to land everytime I want to do a small quest I’d be really put off of starfield.
I think my biggest pet peeve with Starfield is the whole looter aproach all Bethesda games have, which means during the first mission, I spent more time rumaging through stuff and figuring out how to break into rooms to get more loot than actually playing the mission.
Not because I like looting, but because I think that if I miss an important item, at some point in the game I’ll be locked out of it and require grinding which is my kryptonite.
Oh yeah I definitely feel the inventory management pain issue lol. Some people have been complaining that you can’t open every draw in every room, there’s so so much loot already that I’m glad tbh that it’s usually only yellow crates and bodies that are worth looting. Having a ship with a large inventory helps massively for me. I can dump all my resources in there, and dump all the armour and loot me and my companions haul back from missing a there, them just go on a selling spree in between a few missions. Almost hit a million in income and 90% of that is from loot from killed enemies.
At level 25 now so starting to hit a real limit on how much money shopkeepers have. Would be nice to unlock richer traders, or do missions for them which gives them more capital or something. It’ll probably mean that I only bother looting things worth 5k or something going forward as otherwise it’s more mass than worth the effort looting and selling. Maybe that’s an intentional game design? Force people to not spend all day looting and managing inventory space?
I haven’t played Elite Dangerous since the first year it came out. At that time it was the very definition of “A mile wide and an inch deep” though.
Has it gotten any deeper?
If you haven’t played since 2014, it has gotten a lot deeper, haha. Hell, there’s even a whole human civilization around Sag A* these days.
