Okay, not done one of these for a while so bear with me. So, impatient gamer that I am I'm now in the beta for the soon to drop full Elite: Dangerous. This will be the first Elite game that I've played so a lot of this is new for me.
I'll begin at the beginning. Upon starting up the game Frontier look to have made things as simple as possible so that once you're past the main menu you find yourself in your Sidewinder ship and outside a space station ready to initiate yourself into the world of space exploration straight away. First port of call is familiarising yourself with the controls. For the sake of ease I've set mine to Controller with Yaw, it's mapped mostly as you'd expect with this setting, the left analogue controls pitch etc whilst the right analogue controls yaw. Movement for the most part is easy enough and the front bumpers will control your engine speeds in both forward and reverse. Right trigger raises weapons and select puts them away while X sets off a short range engine boost. Clicking in the right analogue frees your vision from the front screen and lets you use the right analogue to look around the cockpit and go through the additional options etc. The controller covers your standard controls but you'll still need the keyboard close for more complex setting and control options especially for quick selection and hyperdrive controls.
As you only start with so much fuel the first thing was docking in the station and getting a mission. Docking is entertaining but frustrating at the same time. You have to be within a close range to request docking clearance, wait, then navigate through port and into your space whilst engaging landing gear. When up close it's awkward to find where the docking port is though so you have to back out and reapproach, your typically given a 10 minute window from granting permission to being locked in port which is generous enough but it still took me 8 minutes to do on first attempt, especially with the station constantly spinning as you try. After that various simple menu's will let you resupply, repair or upgrade your ship, deal with bounties, take on missions etc then your back into the blackness of space.
I took on the lowest earning cargo mission as an easy introduction. No combat, just a simple pick and drop. Once outside you lock on location which can be determined through the mission description and then engaged hyperdrive. If you tried to travel without hyperdrive between systems the game would let you but it would take hours to get anywhere. Once or twice it stopped me as I was passing in close proximity to suns/planets etc. Once manually steered past you can re-engage to your destination. Sadly, once at the next station I got request to land then promptly crashed trying to navigate into it. Back to the first station for me. That mission process took a good 30-40 minutes though and the two systems I travelled between contained around 12-14 destinations plus ships so given the game currently holds 50 systems it would take a huge amount of time to explore it all, not taking into account the other ships to interact with and upcoming update that adds 500 more star systems. If the planned later updates come true, that add countless more systems and let you land on planets, the games size and scope could become immense.
Visuals wise it's handled very nicely. You're kind of aware that nothing special is going on with it and yet it has a very nice visual style to it none the less. Something the audio adds too, its all very subtle and understated, half the time you're unaware of it but it never intrudes or gives a sense of being too bleak an experience. Very easy to get engrossed and have time sink away. First impressions would be of a good game, with the potential to be great once its updated, with the potential to be classic once fully realised.
One or two more pics are going into the XPS thread
I'll begin at the beginning. Upon starting up the game Frontier look to have made things as simple as possible so that once you're past the main menu you find yourself in your Sidewinder ship and outside a space station ready to initiate yourself into the world of space exploration straight away. First port of call is familiarising yourself with the controls. For the sake of ease I've set mine to Controller with Yaw, it's mapped mostly as you'd expect with this setting, the left analogue controls pitch etc whilst the right analogue controls yaw. Movement for the most part is easy enough and the front bumpers will control your engine speeds in both forward and reverse. Right trigger raises weapons and select puts them away while X sets off a short range engine boost. Clicking in the right analogue frees your vision from the front screen and lets you use the right analogue to look around the cockpit and go through the additional options etc. The controller covers your standard controls but you'll still need the keyboard close for more complex setting and control options especially for quick selection and hyperdrive controls.
As you only start with so much fuel the first thing was docking in the station and getting a mission. Docking is entertaining but frustrating at the same time. You have to be within a close range to request docking clearance, wait, then navigate through port and into your space whilst engaging landing gear. When up close it's awkward to find where the docking port is though so you have to back out and reapproach, your typically given a 10 minute window from granting permission to being locked in port which is generous enough but it still took me 8 minutes to do on first attempt, especially with the station constantly spinning as you try. After that various simple menu's will let you resupply, repair or upgrade your ship, deal with bounties, take on missions etc then your back into the blackness of space.
I took on the lowest earning cargo mission as an easy introduction. No combat, just a simple pick and drop. Once outside you lock on location which can be determined through the mission description and then engaged hyperdrive. If you tried to travel without hyperdrive between systems the game would let you but it would take hours to get anywhere. Once or twice it stopped me as I was passing in close proximity to suns/planets etc. Once manually steered past you can re-engage to your destination. Sadly, once at the next station I got request to land then promptly crashed trying to navigate into it. Back to the first station for me. That mission process took a good 30-40 minutes though and the two systems I travelled between contained around 12-14 destinations plus ships so given the game currently holds 50 systems it would take a huge amount of time to explore it all, not taking into account the other ships to interact with and upcoming update that adds 500 more star systems. If the planned later updates come true, that add countless more systems and let you land on planets, the games size and scope could become immense.
Visuals wise it's handled very nicely. You're kind of aware that nothing special is going on with it and yet it has a very nice visual style to it none the less. Something the audio adds too, its all very subtle and understated, half the time you're unaware of it but it never intrudes or gives a sense of being too bleak an experience. Very easy to get engrossed and have time sink away. First impressions would be of a good game, with the potential to be great once its updated, with the potential to be classic once fully realised.
One or two more pics are going into the XPS thread
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