Yeah, when you post a blog tired, you miss things so here is a little addition to my previous post.
Elite: Dangerous is a great game but is it perfect? Well, no.
As an updated version of Frontier with improved graphics and an improved flight engine, it is great but that is all it is at the moment. The game is still lacking in a lot of content, though Frontier Developments have said that they still have a lot to add to the game.
There is a multiplayer component to the game but, at present, it is nothing more than occupying the same universe as other players. There are no systems in place to work cooperatively or do missions as a team, nor is there any way to trade between players (to the point that even if you willingly drop cargo for someone else, when they pick it up, it displays as "Stolen" in their inventory. This is supposed to be fixed in version 1.2 but, seeing as 1.1 isn't released yet, we will just have to see.
Missions are few and far between and, what missions there are, are very samey. There are only a few mission types: Transport, Hunting, Assassination and Fetch (off the top of my head). There may be more but I can't think of them just now or haven't seen them.
As a single player game, it is what I wanted from a Elite game but it can be so much more. Frontier Developments have a plan going forward and I am excited to see what comes next.
In the mean time, I have pirates to kill.
Thanks for reading.
Sakey
Sunday 8 February 2015
My new obsession is my old obsession
So I think my group of online gaming friends are getting sick of hearing the terms "Credits", "Deploying Hardpoints", "Frame Shift Drive", "Bounty" and "Docking" as they are about all that have come out of my mouth on Teamspeak in the last week. This has a lot to do with my playing of pretty much nothing but Elite: Dangerous.
I think a trip back in time is needed here.
The year is 1994. At that time I owned a Sega Mega Drive (Genesis for any Americans reading this) and was busy playing things like Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage, Phantasy Star 2 and a game called Starflight.
Now Starflight was a port of a DOS game that basically allowed you to fly around a galaxy searching planets for resources, negotiating, fighting, managing your crew. Think of it almost like a predecessor to something like FTL. I loved this game but I felt I wanted something more.
Now a guy who I was friends with and lived in the same street as me had (far more sensibly than me) got an Amiga 500 and had a game called Frontier: Elite 2. I had heard of Elite and seen it played but I had never played it myself (due to lack of a system to play it on). So this guy, Ross, let me play some Frontier and I was hooked. Barnards Star to Ross 154. Flying through Sol for the first time. Hyperspace mis-jumps and being stranded somewhere random with no Hydrogen Fuel to jump anywhere else. I fell in love with the game and had a copy on my PC in 1997 when I first got my own.
In the mean time though, Frontier had lit something in me. I took an interest in Newtonian Physics (not that I fully understand them to this day), space flight. and space combat games. Although I got my first PC in 1997, my family actually got our first PC in 1995 and the first game I managed to acquire for it was X-Wing. As much as I like Star Wars, I probably would never have gone for a space combat simulator if it wasn't for Frontier.
Fast forward again to 2013 and my love for space flight simulators still hasn't diminished. Since X-Wing I had played X-Wing Alliance, Freespace 2, StarLancer and FreeLancer (oh man, how I wish that had been joystick controlled and cockpit view). All the time though, I wished for an updated Frontier. Now with all the noise going on about Star Citizen at the end of 2012/start of 2013, I missed the Kickstarted for Elite Dangerous completely and promptly got rather pissed off when I found out about it. So I waited patiently for more news. Then the "Early Access" option appeared, for £200. Nope, no way I could justify that amount of money for the game, no matter how much I wanted to play it.
But the itch stayed there. As I read more about what they were promising with the game I became more and more excited. I mean, come on, 400 BILLION stars. Just, wow. That alone is an amazing achievement.
So fast forward again to January and thanks to us coming into a bit of money I got myself Elite Dangerous at last (along with a Saitek X55 Rhino HOTAS to play it with). I waited, I would say patiently but that would be a lie, until I finished work that evening, fired the game up. Did the basic training to get to grips with the control layout on the stick and started the game up.
Holy shit was I not disappointed. Firstly, this game is GORGEOUS. Even on my aging rig (Core i5 3570K, 8GB RAM, Radion HD 6870) it runs great. The ships look fantastic and are faithful recreations of the ships I saw in Frontier. Space it's self also looks amazing. The first time I FSD jumped to a new system and dropped out of Hyperspace in front of a Star made my jaw drop. Combat with lasers flying across the void, the explosions when the ship you have just been fighting blows up. Words do not do it justice. I will be streaming some Elite: Dangerous over the next weeks so please have a look to see just how good this looks.
Then there is the flight model. It just feels so right. The game has a full Newtonian Physics model but for the most part, you fly around with "Flight Assist" on which automatically counteracts the thrust you exert on the craft to make it handle almost like a plane. You can turn Flight Assist off however, which then makes your craft more agile but has the down side that you have to manually correct every movement. The easiest way to explain what I mean there is if you thrust left in space, there is nothing to stop you, so you would keep moving left, even when you stop thrusting. With Flight Assist on, when you stopped thrusting, the Flight Assist system will thrust right to bring you to a stop. With Flight Assist on, you would have to manually thrust right to stop the craft from moving, but of course, applying too much thrust will then have you moving right so it is a difficult task.
I could go on but I think I could fill another 20 pages on this game. Suffice to say, I haven't stopped playing it and I can't see me stopping any time soon.
Other than Elite, there are a few things going on.
I have finally started my Twitch/YouTube channel properly and will be doing my first broadcast tomorrow (Feb 9th) and 9PM GMT where I will have the first episode of a new series called "I'm Probably Going To Suck At..." where I will be playing games online such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Call of Duty and Battlefield, games I don't usually play, and hopefully not being absolutely terrible. This will be broadcast on my Twitch channel and the VoDs will be uploaded to my YouTube Channel so please come have a watch of that.
Also there is now a Facebook page for SpikeyLogic and a Twitter account as well as a Steam group. Feel free to join/follow any of those you feel like.
Anyway, thanks for reading. If you have any comments, feel free to post them below and have a great day.
Sakey
I think a trip back in time is needed here.
The year is 1994. At that time I owned a Sega Mega Drive (Genesis for any Americans reading this) and was busy playing things like Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage, Phantasy Star 2 and a game called Starflight.
Now Starflight was a port of a DOS game that basically allowed you to fly around a galaxy searching planets for resources, negotiating, fighting, managing your crew. Think of it almost like a predecessor to something like FTL. I loved this game but I felt I wanted something more.
Now a guy who I was friends with and lived in the same street as me had (far more sensibly than me) got an Amiga 500 and had a game called Frontier: Elite 2. I had heard of Elite and seen it played but I had never played it myself (due to lack of a system to play it on). So this guy, Ross, let me play some Frontier and I was hooked. Barnards Star to Ross 154. Flying through Sol for the first time. Hyperspace mis-jumps and being stranded somewhere random with no Hydrogen Fuel to jump anywhere else. I fell in love with the game and had a copy on my PC in 1997 when I first got my own.
In the mean time though, Frontier had lit something in me. I took an interest in Newtonian Physics (not that I fully understand them to this day), space flight. and space combat games. Although I got my first PC in 1997, my family actually got our first PC in 1995 and the first game I managed to acquire for it was X-Wing. As much as I like Star Wars, I probably would never have gone for a space combat simulator if it wasn't for Frontier.
Fast forward again to 2013 and my love for space flight simulators still hasn't diminished. Since X-Wing I had played X-Wing Alliance, Freespace 2, StarLancer and FreeLancer (oh man, how I wish that had been joystick controlled and cockpit view). All the time though, I wished for an updated Frontier. Now with all the noise going on about Star Citizen at the end of 2012/start of 2013, I missed the Kickstarted for Elite Dangerous completely and promptly got rather pissed off when I found out about it. So I waited patiently for more news. Then the "Early Access" option appeared, for £200. Nope, no way I could justify that amount of money for the game, no matter how much I wanted to play it.
But the itch stayed there. As I read more about what they were promising with the game I became more and more excited. I mean, come on, 400 BILLION stars. Just, wow. That alone is an amazing achievement.
So fast forward again to January and thanks to us coming into a bit of money I got myself Elite Dangerous at last (along with a Saitek X55 Rhino HOTAS to play it with). I waited, I would say patiently but that would be a lie, until I finished work that evening, fired the game up. Did the basic training to get to grips with the control layout on the stick and started the game up.
Holy shit was I not disappointed. Firstly, this game is GORGEOUS. Even on my aging rig (Core i5 3570K, 8GB RAM, Radion HD 6870) it runs great. The ships look fantastic and are faithful recreations of the ships I saw in Frontier. Space it's self also looks amazing. The first time I FSD jumped to a new system and dropped out of Hyperspace in front of a Star made my jaw drop. Combat with lasers flying across the void, the explosions when the ship you have just been fighting blows up. Words do not do it justice. I will be streaming some Elite: Dangerous over the next weeks so please have a look to see just how good this looks.
Then there is the flight model. It just feels so right. The game has a full Newtonian Physics model but for the most part, you fly around with "Flight Assist" on which automatically counteracts the thrust you exert on the craft to make it handle almost like a plane. You can turn Flight Assist off however, which then makes your craft more agile but has the down side that you have to manually correct every movement. The easiest way to explain what I mean there is if you thrust left in space, there is nothing to stop you, so you would keep moving left, even when you stop thrusting. With Flight Assist on, when you stopped thrusting, the Flight Assist system will thrust right to bring you to a stop. With Flight Assist on, you would have to manually thrust right to stop the craft from moving, but of course, applying too much thrust will then have you moving right so it is a difficult task.
I could go on but I think I could fill another 20 pages on this game. Suffice to say, I haven't stopped playing it and I can't see me stopping any time soon.
Other than Elite, there are a few things going on.
I have finally started my Twitch/YouTube channel properly and will be doing my first broadcast tomorrow (Feb 9th) and 9PM GMT where I will have the first episode of a new series called "I'm Probably Going To Suck At..." where I will be playing games online such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Call of Duty and Battlefield, games I don't usually play, and hopefully not being absolutely terrible. This will be broadcast on my Twitch channel and the VoDs will be uploaded to my YouTube Channel so please come have a watch of that.
Also there is now a Facebook page for SpikeyLogic and a Twitter account as well as a Steam group. Feel free to join/follow any of those you feel like.
Anyway, thanks for reading. If you have any comments, feel free to post them below and have a great day.
Sakey
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