Review: Elite: Dangerous is the best damn spaceship game I’ve ever played

This is my third attempt at an Elite: Dangerous review. It’s one thing to play a game for a few dozen hours to form some opinions and then write a release-day review—not to trivialize game reviewing, but that’s a relatively easy task (in the same way that any kind of journalism is "relatively" easy—it’s mostly a straightforward process, at least). But I’ve been living with Elite: Dangerous since June of 2014, and it’s been in a state of almost constant flux the entire time–adding features, removing features, changing gameplay elements. That means I’m not condensing a few days or weeks of playtime down into a review—I’m trying to wrap my head around ten months of time spent sailing out in the black.

Here is the plain truth: Elite: Dangerous was released unfinished, and it’s still unfinished. There’s every indication that the December 16 1.0 release occurred in order to hit an arbitrary "before the end of 2014" release date, and the 1.0 product we got was not release-worthy. Major gameplay mechanics, like the much-hyped "background simulation" whereby the galaxy’s economy and politics evolve, were broken or flat-out missing. Multiple poorly tested or overlooked gameplay exploits were present. The game’s peer-to-peer networking architecture was easily subverted and eminently hackable. The game’s multiplayer was just a wreck, with broken and unreliable player comms and no way to group up or trade money or cargo; in fact, until very recently, the only meaningful way to interact with another player was simply to blow them up.

And yet, in spite of how broken the game was at launch and all the ways in which it remains plagued with bugs even now after two major patches, Elite: Dangerous is so damn good that it transcends its problems. When I strap on my Oculus Rift DK2 and look around my cockpit, I am flying my own spaceship.

Blasting through Witch space, docking at stations, hauling goods on long trade routes, hunting for bounties, blowing away NPCs or other players in conflict zones, or exploring a thousand light years away from known space—David Braben and his team at Frontier Developments have built the best, most immersive, most gripping "you are flying a spaceship" experience I have ever played in the 30 years I’ve been playing video games. When I’m cruising in silence above the plane of a gas giant’s rings, banking slowly and looking down for signs of pirates that I can drop down on and crush like the fist of an angry space-god, it doesn’t matter that the game still isn’t fully baked, because I am flying my own spaceship.

My buddy Matt insightfully described Elite: Dangerous as "the best game you’ve ever thought about playing," and he’s right—long after I’ve logged off, I think about what I want to do next. I imagine new weapon layouts for my ship, or new goals I want to hit—gotta gain some Imperial rank so I can get an Achenar permit!—or new things I want to try. And that’s perhaps the key to Elite: Dangerous: it really is the successor to 1984’s Elite, and to enjoy it in the long-term after the new game shiny has worn off, you really need to be the kind of person who enjoys setting and reaching your own gameplay goals. Because there’s not a lot of structure in Elite: Dangerous to guide you.

Good luck, Commander

Elite: Dangerous starts you off in a small Sidewinder-class multirole ship with 100 credits to your name. There’s not so much a "learning curve" as there is a "learning vertical wall"—there’s a manual you can download and tutorial missions you can access from the game’s main menu, but unlike many games there isn’t anything resembling a tutorial built into the actual mainline game. Once you start a new game, you’re thrown into the deep end—just like the 1984 game after which this one is modeled.

The overall goal of the game is to advance your rankings to the titular "elite" status. You have three such rankings: one for your performance in combat, one for trading, and one for exploration. Each ranking starts out at the lowest level—your combat rank is "Harmless," your trading rank is "Penniless," and your exploration rank is "Aimless." To gain rank, you fight, trade, or explore. These three rankings encapsulate the three main "paths" of the game—there are lots of things to do, but they all come down to either fighting, trading, or exploring.

Your starter Sidewinder isn’t a bad little ship. It’s nimble and can be upgraded to hold up to ten tons of cargo, and you can build up your money by accessing the jobs board of the space station you start out at and signing up for a few quick missions—mostly light cargo transporting. Once you’ve got some more cash in hand, you can add some better components to your Sidewinder, or upgrade to a different ship. There are currently seventeen playable ships, with at least three more to be added in the near-to-midterm.

As a set of meta-goals, "get credits and upgrade ship" works for a big chunk of the game. Most of the ships in the game are good at something; trading (especially rare items) is the fastest way to make the most money initially, and so a typical route for new players to take is to try to amass enough money to buy one of the dedicated trading ships like the Lakon Type-6. Or, players more interested in shooting stuff can trade their way into a Viper, and then start hunting bounties—or become bona-fide space pirates.

The sheer number of things to do—and the lack of any externally imposed goal other than "raise your rating to elite"—has drawn criticism. The phrase "mile wide, inch deep" has been thrown around a lot, but I don’t think that’s really the best description—rather, Elite: Dangerous is a mile wide, and maybe a few feet deep. There’s plenty to do in the vast virtual galaxy of 400,000,000,000 procedurally generated star systems Frontier has brought us, but you will eventually get bored unless you can entertain yourself in the sandbox.

MMORPGisms

Elite: Dangerous is properly an MMORPG by strict definition—it’s a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (an offline mode was planned during development and promised as a feature, but was scrapped prior to release). The game requires an always-on Internet connection and its persistent universe lives on Frontier’s servers. The game world is chopped up into various instances and players are added to or removed from those instances as they travel around.

The instancing means that you’ll never run into more than a few dozen players at any given moment, as that’s the upper limit on the number of players that can be in any given instance. You’ll never find yourself parked outside of Lave Station watching a thousand players shuttle in and out of the docking bay—there might be a thousand players at Lave at the moment, but only a handful will be in your instance with you.

Of course, you don’t have to play multiplayer at all—the game has three modes of play. The first, "Open," is just that—you can be dropped into an instance with anyone else who’s in open play. The second is "Private Group," where the only other players you’ll encounter are the folks you’ve manually added to your friends list. Playing in the third mode, "Solo," means that you’ll never encounter any other players. You’re still playing in the same persistent universe with all the consequences and effects of that universe—and we’ll get to that—but you’ll be joined to your own instances wherever you go.

Prior to the game’s 1.2 patch, multiplayer was relatively perfunctory and interaction with the other players you could encounter was sharply limited. You could send text or voice chat messages to them (when the comms system didn’t just give you a "cannot send message" error, which was probably about 50 percent of the time), you could dump cargo for them to pick up (which would be marked as stolen and unsellable except at a black market), or you could blow them up by shooting or ramming. The 1.2 patch has added a meaningful grouping mechanism called "Wings" whereby players can more easily join together in a flight of up to four ships, share their statuses and locations, and each get a cut of bounties from their kills.

But multiplayer in Elite: Dangerous remains a hit-or-miss affair. There’s still no way for players to form any kind of lasting alliance—like a corporation—or jointly own goods like ships. There’s still no way to trade currency (though players can now dump cargo for each other without having it automatically marked as "stolen" on pickup). "Killing" remains the primary means of interaction, and the game’s peer-to-peer networking mechanism is still grossly vulnerable to easily Google-able exploits and cheats.

It’s not uncommon for players to simply terminate the game or yank out their network cables in the middle of a firefight rather than risk losing their ships (a phenomenon referred to as "combat logging," and one that is not at all unique to Elite); though Frontier Developments has said that they are monitoring those kinds of abuses, the fact that each client’s computer maintains its own game state rather than having a central server arbitrate things makes cheat avoidance an impossibility for now.

Elite: Dangerous is not EVE—it’s old-school Elite

A not-insignificant number of players are coming to Elite: Dangerous from the enormously successful EVE Online, the biggest and most well-known space MMORPG out there. This has led to a detectable undercurrent of disappointment in a lot of comment threads at a lot of places because Elite: Dangerous is most definitely not the same type of game as EVE.

Players looking to form up in large-scale alliances or corporations will be disappointed, because Elite doesn’t have that. Players looking for spaceships that conform to traditional MMORPG roles (healer, tank, caster, and so on) will be similarly disappointed—not only can you not form player groups larger than four ships, but the ships also don’t necessarily align to traditional MMORPG classes.

Elite is nothing more than it advertises itself as being: an up-to-date modernized version of the 1984 original title. It is first and foremost about the experience of being one pilot physically sitting in a cockpit, and the entire game is geared around that conceit. It is not and will never be about fleet actions or raids or players flying capital ships passing along orders. There’s no automatic docking (well, there is a docking computer, but it's extremely slow and sometimes actually rams you into walls or other ships) or automatic pilot—the ships in Elite are all hands-on, all the time. Plotting a ten-system jump across Alliance space to deliver cargo? Don’t take your hands off the stick or you’ll come out of FTL and plow into a sun. Headed into the docking bay to land? Better not prang the deck, pilot, because repairs are expensive.

More than any other game, Elite: Dangerous resembles its original predecessor, 1984’s Elite. Nowhere is this clearer than in the game’s flight model, which if you’re new to the Elite franchise can feel—well, a little weird. Your spacecraft has six degrees of freedom—that is, in space it can move without restriction along the X, Y, and Z axes and also without restriction along the roll, pitch, and yaw axes. However, every Elite ship’s yaw maneuverability—that is, the ability to turn the nose left or right—is heavily limited. From the most nimble fighter to the largest gunboat, yaw response is terrible. This is on purpose; according to both Braben and lead designer Michael Brookes, damping yaw to near non-existence was done to prevent "turrets in space"—that is, to prevent players from simply parking their ship and keeping the nose pointed at a threat.

It’s an oddly artificial limitation, considering that Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen doesn’t have it, but it’s also in keeping with the original—in 1984’s Elite, ships were incapable of yawing at all. Movement was constrained entirely to pitch and roll. In Elite: Dangerous, yaw is used for fine-tuning your aim with fixed weapons or for minor adjustments to your trajectory, but it’s not a primary maneuvering axis. It’s still an odd design choice—and not one that I particularly like or agree with—but it is at least very, very Elite-like.

Master the grind for the best flavor

Whether you’re after a multiplayer-focused experience or you just want to fly solo, the basic mechanisms are the same—you need credits to kit out your ship, or to buy better ships and kit them out. Taking a page from previous Elite games, the most profitable thing to do in the game is to trade—to haul cargo from one starport to another.

In the original Elite, trading followed a few basic rules. Different star systems had different economies, and while prices on goods varied, you could always make a profit by using common sense about supply and demand—moving food and basics from agricultural systems to high-tech systems, then moving fancy commodities and farming equipment from high-tech systems back to agricultural systems, for example. Although there were other ways to make some bonus money along the way, the first game was all about trading.

Elite: Dangerous tries to thoroughly modernize that idea by implementing not just basic supply and demand, but an entire simulated economy that stretches across thousands of inhabited systems. The idea is grand in scope, and it’s also been one of the most frustrating aspects of Elite: Dangerous because even now, four months after release, it still doesn’t really work all that well. Problems plague the background economy simulation—the rudimentary in-game trading tools are essentially useless, and players must rely on a combination of user-built tools and old-fashioned pen-and-paper (or at least a copy of Excel running on a second monitor) to perform any kind of trade route planning.

To make real money in trading, a player has to devote a significant amount of time to manually traveling between dozens of systems, scouting out market prices and webbing together a route themselves. High-profit routes are usually kept top-secret by traders who discover them, because supply and demand is finely balanced and dozens of players descending on a prized route could quickly trade it into nothingness.

As an alternative to trading, players can go on the hunt. All pilots in the game, be they NPCs or other players, can incur bounties and fines if they do something illegal or unfriendly to a system’s controlling faction; some offenses incur only local bounties, and others are almost galaxy-wide. There’s money to be made in finding ships with bounties on them and blowing them up—in fact, with the latest patch, Frontier has made bounty hunting quite profitable.

Piracy is a legitimate method of making money, too. You can purchase an interdiction upgrade for your ship and snag other ships out of in-system faster-than-light travel and threaten them over comms, or even deploy "limpets" to sabotage their cargo hatches and yank canisters directly out of their cargo hold. Pirating is naturally a contentious topic, since piracy is a play choice that of necessity involves ruining someone else’s day; even the most polite and dashing pirates can have difficulty making a living, especially when dealing with stubborn players who would rather self-destruct than surrender. Still, the pirate’s life is a perfectly valid play style and there’s a substantial difference between a bona fide pirate and a "griefer."

Mining is another path toward riches, though it’s been relatively neglected since the game’s beta stage. Mining requires specialized equipment and a lot of patience, and also a lot of searching to find a high-quality asteroid belt or planetary ring to harvest from. Worse, mining areas (called "resource extraction sites" in the game’s maps) are typically crawling with wanted NPC pirates, and a lightly armed miner spends more time running away than mining. In fact, resource extraction sites are currently so lousy with bad guys that they’ve become the preferred spot for bounty hunting players to hang out and blow up wanted NPCs.

Exploration is the last major career, and it involves fitting your ship with more specialized hardware and jumping out into the unknown. The human-inhabited systems only number a few thousand out of the game’s 400,000,000,000-star galaxy, and so there are billions and billions of systems to discover and scan. Each system scanned is worth some amount of cash, and if you happen to be the first player ever to scan a system, you get your name attached to it as its discoverer.

Exploration can be monotonous, since it involves jumping to a new system, giving it an overall scan, and perhaps also giving some of the system’s bodies an additional detailed scan (Earth-like worlds and rare stellar objects like black holes and neutron stars give a significant cash bonus), but one person’s monotony is another’s zen. There can be an amazing amount of peace in just zoning out and flying through space for hours at a time, scanning systems as you go.

Regardless of the method, the twin goals of all of these activities are the same—to make money and to raise your rankings. And here’s where accusations of "grind" come into play: even though Elite: Dangerous currently has seventeen ships for players to choose between, the price variance between those ships means that you’ll be stuck in a few of them for a very, very long time while you work up the cash to upgrade. If you don’t enjoy the journey, the dozens of hours of "work" required to get the money to buy a Python or an Anaconda (and the additional dozens of hours to then get the extra money to outfit them properly) can look extremely unappetizing.

This is one of the game’s most divisive aspects, going by what feedback I’ve seen in the official forums and on the main Elite: Dangerous subreddit. The game is the proverbial pie eating contest where the prize at the end is the ability to eat more pie faster—after trading for weeks of real time, you can jump up to a ship that lets you trade more. If you don’t enjoy the time you’ve spent trading, then what have you gained? There really isn’t an "endgame" in Elite: Dangerous, other than topping out your rankings and buying the best ship for your play style and fitting it out with top-shelf gear.

To find Elite: Dangerous a good game, you have to like what it is: the greatest "I feel like I’m flying a spaceship" game that’s ever been made up to this point in the history of computer gaming. Meticulously planning out your trade routes and then hauling cargo for hours at a stretch has to be its own reward. Flying thousands of light years out into the black to see what no human has ever seen has to be its own reward. Blowing up dozens and dozens of criminals to snag their bounties has to be its own reward.

The journey has to be worth it for you, because otherwise, Elite: Dangerous is a monotonous grind-fest with no destination.