51a South Dormitory
Fish Processing Plant 3142
Sirocco
Merlin
Ross 154
-1/0Rs2a S16
31.12.3199
To whom it may concern
It is our duty to inform you of the death of your grandfather, Commander Peter Jameson.
The wreckage of his ship was found in the Reidquat system on 11 November 3199. He was presumed killed in combat after a "misunderstanding" over some stolen goods according to the local press.
A last will and testament was prepared on 3 February 3199 and section 4.1 has been circulated to all living grandchildren as instructed by our late client.
If you have any queries do not hesitate to contact us. The normal fees of fifty (50) Credits per hour (including service tax) apply.
Yours sincerely
Mr Edmond Sneer
When I was a kid, some computer games made an indelible impression on me. One of them was Frontier: Elite 2. I never played the first one, but Frontier embodied the magic of computers, space and everything just by being a space simulator game that procedurally generated the entire damn galaxy for you to fly around in and fit on a single HD disk. There was no plot as such, and no way to finish the game; you went out there and you made your own plot. It was adventure enough to do some trading and missions to save up for a better ship, and then head out to see the galaxy. I still remember deeply impressive stars like Sirius and Arcturus, finding permits to visit places like the federal prison colony on Ross 128 and the religious fanatics at van Maanen's Star, and eventually making my way to the Empire. So when some irresponsible bastard gifted me Elite: Dangerous on Steam, of course I was going to have to try it. I'm going to ramble about some of the practicalities of getting into the game, and then try to give some kind of verdict on whether it's worth it or not.
**
When you start Elite: Dangerous, you're put through a tutorial of sorts where you get your pilot's license and the title of
Luckily, there are a lot of resources out there for anyone just starting out. I've gotten a lot of help out of the beginner's guide on the Caffeinated Pixels blog and the wiki, but there's a couple of things that I would have needed someone to explain to me, though. For anyone else venturing into the game, here they are.
First of all, you may have heard of nav beacons. Scanning them gets you information on everything useful in the system, so that seems like something you'd want to do. However, what no-one will tell you is that the nav beacon you can select as a destination on your navigation computer and supercruise to is not the nav beacon. Instead, the nav beacon is a white square that shows up on your scanner when you drop out of supercruise near the beacon. You then have to point your ship at it, target it and wait for it to scan. Simple, but initially incomprehensible.
Speaking of incomprehensible things, there's the mission board. I've played enough Frontier to know that when you're starting out and your ship doesn't have a lot of cargo space, you want to do courier missions and stuff like that. Also, it's good form to check the mission board to see if someone might be willing to pay a premium for whatever cargo you've got on you. Sadly they've made this last bit harder: whereas in Frontier they'd just straight up pay you for whatever you had, here you have to have a specific amount of what they want.
Anyway, say you find something on a mission board where they want you to either take something somewhere else, or bring them something. Below is an example: some folks wanted me to haul two units of Performace Enhancers to this base.
What puzzled the shit out of me was that I would increment the bar so I was delivering them the two units they asked for, but the button at the lower left was still greyed out and said "partial complete" or whatever. It took several Google searches until I figured out that I was supposed to click the "deliver items" button.
Once you've done that, the Complete button activates. I don't know, maybe this is just me being a moron, but the double confirmation required just completely confused me.
Finally, a third thing: beware the Advanced Docking Computer. So far, the landings have been fine, but the departures not so much! Once I found myself sitting in queue for so long that the timer ran out, and flight control very pointedly told me to leave or get fined. Since it was one of my first real flights, I may have panicked a little and crashed. I came away with slightly damaged shields, dented pride and a fine for reckless flying or whatever. Another time I had to cut out the docking computer when it took off from a landing pad and was very determined to rear-end another ship. Given that launching is really pretty easy to do manually, I think it might actually be wiser to leave the computer out of it entirely. You can set this up in the systems panel.
**
Anyway, after a couple of trips between Matet and Dromi, hauling space steroids and whatnot, I made enough profit to advance from Penniless to Mostly Penniless trader rank.
Once you've achieved a rank in anything, you get a "graduation mission" to leave the Pilots' Federation District. As you can see, it's very easy to achieve with just a little trading. My mission took me to HR 8526, a fairly massive trinary system some 75 light years from Sol. Along the way, I made my first proper manual landing at one of those rotating starbases, namely Noriega Port at Arare, and I think my hands shook for the rest of the day.
This experience simultaneously convinced me that I need to play more Elite, and that I needed a joystick. I was quite surprised to find how cheap some of them were; certainly you could spend hundreds, but I got a Thrustmaster T.Flight HOTAS X, i.e. a joystick and throttle, for 70€. I'm old enough to be genuinely shocked that it really was plug-and-play: you stick the USB cord in and it just works. Elite even has bindings ready for all the twelve or so buttons and various other controls, and when you actually use it to fly, it just works. I can't imagine going back to a mouse and keyboard.
Changing the button bindings is theoretically easy, but in practice requires wading through a fairly large menu that isn't always subdivided quite as logically as you might wish; it occasionally took quite a while to figure out.
**
The nearest Imperial system I could find was Ngalkin, so I headed over there to find some courier jobs. There are two major factions in Elite that you can gain ranks in: the Federation and the Empire. Back in Frontier, two of the three starting locations were in the Federation, so the Empire always seemed more exotic and interesting, and they had the coolest ships. My general plan at this point is pretty much to fly around and make some money, so I can get a better ship and maybe do some real exploring.
One thing the game could really do with is at least some geographical structure. Right now, when I left the Pilots' Federation District, I've pretty much been to systems that just feel totally random. There's not much glamour in grinding out courier missions to HR 8526, especially when I barely have any real idea where in the galaxy I am in relation to anything meaningful. I get that grinding is fundamental to MMO's, but in Frontier, two of the starting locations were in the core systems of the Federation, with marked trade routes leading to stars whose names you could actually recognize, so there was something for you to orient yourself by. Here there's nothing.
But then, I guess that grinding out trade and courier missions in unnamed systems does kind of get to the heart of the Elite experience. As in Frontier, so in Dangerous: you very much need to make your own story. I mean you're not going to be swept off your feet by the plot and the setting; there barely are any. Although there is an actual game, as opposed to a roadmap to a roadmap. So I don't know. If you're looking for an immersive, dramatic movie-like experience, this ain't it. Even as an Elite fan with lots of good memories attached to the franchise, I'd be lying if I said Elite: Dangerous captured my imagination. If you're interested in some zen space trucking? See you in the 'verse, commando.
No comments:
Post a Comment