Tag Archives: Simulation

“No Man’s Sky” Review

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No Man’s Sky box art

Hello Games initially Kickstarted No Man’s Sky in 2016, promising a vibrant, life-filled universe to explore. Unfortunately, under-delivery led to an initial backlash, but Hello Games has since built it into a worthy and unique game.

No Man’s Sky is an exploration-focused, survival crafting game with space simulation elements, like Astroneer or Subnautica. You play as an unnamed “traveller” who wakes up on an alien planet with a damaged spacecraft and no memory. You initially explore, gather resources then craft things. Crafting first extends survival by refilling oxygen and recharging your exosuit’s components. Eventually, you repair your ship, construct bases and build vehicles to increase your exploration speed and range.

No Man’s Sky includes activities common to space simulation games like ground combat, space combat, piracy and trading. You can adopt, ride and breed pets. The brave can explore derelict freighters. Later in the game, you can also maintain a fleet and periodically send ships on distant missions, build and oversee a town or relax into daily quests for upgrades or cosmetic rewards.

No Man’s Sky provides quests to introduce players to new mechanics and provide context and purpose. The main quest line examines existentialism. However, unlike other survival crafting games, No Man’s Sky treats this solemn theme lightly. For example, the game lacks the conviction of Subnautica’s pacificism and environmentalism or Breathedge’s self-deprecating humour.

What sets No Man’s Sky apart is its massive procedurally generated universe containing quintillions of planets. Procedural generation is not new, but No Man’s Sky‘s scale and beauty are unique. Each planet has a biome (e.g. desert, marsh, paradise, volcanic), which determines the flora, fauna and geology populating it. Some planets have seas and caves, effectively different biomes on the same planet. The player earns credits by scanning specimens and gets a bonus for finding samples of all a planet’s fauna. 

Graphically, No Man’s Sky is a love letter to 1970s- and 1980s-era science fiction art. Those artists portrayed landscapes with recognizable terrain and creatures with recognizable limbs but in alien colours or orientations. No Man’s Sky harks back to the endless potential and wonder these artists captured, looking at the universe through nostalgia-coloured glasses.

A ring over a paradise planet in No Man’s Sky. This screenshot shows the beauty that Hello Games promised in 2016 but took a few more years to deliver. Captured by the author.
No Man’s Sky uses bioluminescence not just to allow the player to see at night but to create beautiful grass seas with luminescent waves. Captured by the author.
No Man’s Sky is also home to the bizarre, like the Giger-esque hive worlds. Some planets, like this one, use extreme palettes, emphasizing their alienness. Captured by the author.

All players share the same universe. However, it is a vast universe, so the chance of meeting another player outside the Anomaly (the central quest hub) or your friend list is remote. PVP combat is by mutual consent only. You can play offline but lose the ability to claim credit for first discoveries or interact with other players.

No Man’s Sky favours accessibility over challenge. For example, its space flight and combat are arcade-like and lack the atmospheric handling of flight simulators or Newtonian handling of more realistic space simulators. Ships have different inherent strengths and are upgradable, but the process lacks the depth and specialization found in other games. No Man’s Sky‘s simplistic trading uses static economies and routes. Landing and docking are automated.

Realism is out the window. Procedural generation sometimes produces gravity-defying floating rocks or improbable creatures. Planets do not orbit their stars. They are often close enough for their gravities to cause horrendous damage and collisions. The game’s chemistry is more comparable to alchemy than real-world chemistry, allowing easy conversion of one element to another or liquid water at high or low temperatures.

Neither of these are oversights. No Man’s Sky does not want to be a gritty, “realistic” universe like in Elite Dangerous, Eve Online or Star Citizen. It is not the game for those looking for complex ship outfitting, pouring over spreadsheets maximizing trade profit, elaborate joystick and HOTAS setups or ruthless PVP. 

Instead, Hello Games designed away anything distracting from the almost meditative play. They created a game where losing hours to the self-expressive joy of building bases or the “sense pleasure” of seeing the sunrise on yet another verdant or desolate world is easy. Internal consistency and beautifully varied landscapes are what matter.

While survival and permadeath modes are available to those looking for a greater challenge, No Man’s Sky also offers expeditions. These temporary game modes increase the difficulty and provide different main quests. They feel different enough to be novel without losing familiarity, keep experienced players engaged and give unique rewards.

The most significant criticism of No Man’s Sky is that, while Hello Games has worked hard in the last six years on survival and crafting mechanics, it is still a procedural generation engine looking for a game. The designers could have shrunk No Man’s Sky into several dozen unique planets spread across a few solar systems. This choice would expose all planet types while satisfying the limited curiosity of most players.

Meanwhile, No Man’s Sky wants to be a live-service game – an ongoing online entertainment service – but it lacks end game mechanics beyond intrinsic exploration or social interaction. It degenerates into daily or periodic quests once the shallow main quest line is complete. Some game loops also deteriorate into grinding. If you want to upgrade your freighter or find that perfect-looking ship, you must keep retrying until you fluke the right one. 

However, despite offering no paid expansions, Hello Games continues to expand the game with new features, including regular expeditions. They do so more frequently than comparable games like Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen. Along with the more casual appeal, these draw in a large and growing audience that loves No Man’s Sky. 

The name No Man’s Sky is a play on “No Man’s Land”, the unexplored part of old maps where no kingdom or empire holds sway. No Man’s Sky presents a universe full of the unknown, ready for players to explore but much safer than the early European explorers found it.

Those looking to satiate curiosity and meditative “sense pleasure” from exploration and self-expression from building bases will enjoy No Man’s Sky. You can finish the main quest in a few tens of hours, but the game will capture your imagination for much longer.

No Man’s Sky‘s low challenge also appeals to a broader audience and may help introduce new players to the space simulation genre. It is a welcome change to one often dominated by hardcore players and niche games. 

“Elite Dangerous Odyssey” Review

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Elite Dangerous Odyssey image showing armed, suited commanders on a planet surface with an Anaconda and Cobra Mk II (space ships) flying above them

I had mixed feelings when Frontier Development released the Odyssey expansion for Elite Dangerous. On the one hand, new content and improved graphics could breathe life into Elite Dangerous and take it in a new direction. However, the on-foot play could dilute the core premise of flying spaceships. The inevitable launch bugs could also cause a player backlash. Both turned out to be true.

Odyssey introduced the ability to finally leave your ship and walk on planets or in space stations, what some call “space legs”. It added two new ranks to progress: Mercenary (on-foot combat) and exobiology (scanning plant-like organisms on alien worlds). Suits and guns appeared alongside ships as the things to upgrade and engineer. Settlements, small planetary outposts, became mission locations. Surface conflict zones hinted at mixing ship and ground combat.

The problem with the above description is that, while accurate, it is ambiguous. For example, the above could turn Elite Dangerous into a universe simulator, where ships become tools rather than classes. However, Frontier provided something more modest, much to many players’ disappointment.

For example, many players were looking forward to walking around inside their ships. Frontier mentioned this early in Elite Dangerous‘s development as a long-term goal. Unfortunately, Odyssey lacks this. Many feel “teleporting” to your pilot seat from outside your ship breaks immersion. While that is true, I cannot think of anything I would sacrifice in Odyssey to add ship interiors given Frontier’s finite resources.

The new Exobiology rank added thousands of new types of plant-like alien life to find and scan. It adds additional play loops to exploration and more reason to land on planets. However, it could have been more than scan three organisms more than a few hundred metres apart.

I liked the better world-building in Odyssey. Elite Dangerous largely eschews lore to let players write their own stories. However, Odyssey’s in-game advertising and bar music emphasize things that make Elite’s galaxy unique, like the various companies that produce ships and weapons or the rare commodities players can trade. The new engineers are not just tools for progression, each having personalities and visually interesting planets.

One of the most polarizing aspects of Odyssey is the new graphics engine. The new planet graphics are gorgeous, turning Horizon’s (the previous expansion’s) beige into coloured hues and blocky barrenness into beautiful vistas. Anyone playing Elite Dangerous for sense pleasure, like many explorers, found a galaxy worth re-exploring just for the visuals.

However, the new graphics engine led to other problems, particularly in Odyssey’s new settlements. PCs that happily played Horizons on maximum settings were suddenly humbled. While Frontier is working hard to improve performance, fixing it is a long-term effort.

Odyssey’s FPS combat is polarizing. For example, some weapons are more effective against shielded opponents than non-shielded opponents and vice versa. While an Elite Dangerous staple, constantly swapping weapons frustrated many.

Some felt that high-end suits were too resilient, requiring too much damage to take down. However, while engineered suits help, you are hardly impregnable. The resilience forced a tactical- rather than twitch-based playstyle.

Many speculate Frontier released the expansion too early, possibly due to financial commitments. The poor reception and low quality were enough for Frontier to delay Odyssey’s release on consoles (PS and Xbox).

Whereas many blast Odyssey with hyperbole- and expletive-ridden rants, I take a long-term perspective. No Elite Dangerous release has been bug-free. No online game release, either. Frontier has also improved communication with a player-voted issue list and more “meet the developer” sessions. 

Odyssey is not perfect. I was frustrated by the poor performance and felt exobiology was underdeveloped. However, I enjoyed the new content. The visuals are spectacular, particularly the local star casting its rays through a coloured atmosphere. On-foot conflict zones capture FPSs’ frenetic pace while still being characteristically Elite. 

Odyssey demonstrates why many AAA FPS games have nine-figure budgets. It is hard to make an FPS with a bespoke engine (Frontier’s Cobra engine) and a setting whose scale precludes pregenerated optimizations. 

Handling player expectations is harder. As mentioned above, the promise of “space legs” conjured desires for exploring ship interiors and a Star Citizen-like experience. Many players also looked at the work required to complete the new ranks and engineer suits and decided to seek their space game thrills elsewhere.

Elite Dangerous is a relatively old game, and the wonder has faded for many. Some players yearn for unexplored mechanics and settings. Novelty has a strong gravity, even to the unreliable and incomplete Star Citizen with its dubious funding practices.

My main criticism of Odyssey is the lack of content. After a few hundred hours, most players had sufficiently engineered on-foot gear and Elite ranks in Mercenary and Exobiology. For a game that prides itself on complexity and self-discovery, even the popular Elite Dangerous Youtubers ran out of Odyssey content after a few months. Idleness breeds discontent, as they say.

Take engineering as an example. Unlocking engineers from Horizons, the previous Elite Dangerous expansion, required players to experience the game’s breadth. You had to travel far into deep space, mine, sell stolen cargo at black markets, trade rare commodities and fight. This requirement was a great example of exposing players to neglected parts of the game while leveraging existing game loops to provide new gameplay.

I suspect Frontier wanted to do something similar for the new on-foot engineers in Odyssey. However, the required content did not exist. Instead, unlocking many on-foot engineers requires a frustrating grind. Players need to repeat tasks for hours, like logging out then back in at the same location, hoping for rare materials to spawn. 

Moreover, Odyssey relies on having a strong “middle game”, specifically randomly generated on-foot missions, settlement assaults and conflict zones for replayability. From Frontier’s perspective, this maximizes the number of players using the new features. However, even fun game loops lose their appeal after hundreds or thousands of hours.

Instead, Elite Dangerous needs more “late game” content. For example, something akin to Thargoid combat with a higher difficulty level, a social aspect, and correspondingly better rewards. Such content keeps the experienced players engaged and is aspirational for new players.

Such content will likely not arrive soon. Until Odyssey releases for consoles, Frontier appears focused on performance and stability. That makes sense, given every new Odyssey-only feature added incites more resentment in console players.

Meanwhile, Frontier includes “hero” features in each monthly patch, like on-foot emotes and a new surface vehicle. They promised fleet carrier interiors for early 2022. These are all welcome. However, none will add more than a few hours of new content. They continue to emphasize “middle game” content, reusing what is already there. Perhaps new ships or on-foot Thargoid combat are coming later.

Is Odyssey “good” or “worth buying”? These are the wrong questions to ask. I have enjoyed the new content and am glad I bought it. Yes, there are performance issues and bugs. However, Frontier will have to fix these to get the revenue from the console release. 

Is Odyssey the best FPS game available? No. Many specialist FPS games offer deeper or more varied FPS play. Odyssey, like Elite as a whole, is a victim of its breadth and shallowness, becoming unintentionally comparable with specialist games that do niches better. 

However, Odyssey’s FPS is fun, distinctly Elite Dangerous and integrates well with Elite’s other game loops. New features will likely be Odyssey only. Odyssey is the best choice if you want more of the same but better. 

Odyssey takes Elite Dangerous in a new direction. Like Horizons, Odyssey starts a journey and is not the end. If you want something with a different vision, Odyssey will only constantly remind you of that. 

“X4 Foundations” Review

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X4 Foundations, released in 2018 but continuously patched, is the latest game in the long-running X franchise. I made several false starts with the franchise previously but, given my recent interest in space games, it was an excellent chance to revisit it.

Superficially, the game plays and looks like a single-player space sim akin to Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen. You pilot a spaceship and trade, fight, mine or explore. You progress by increasing reputation with in-game factions, gaining access to better ships, upgrades, commodity pricing and missions, and accumulating credits to buy those better ships and upgrades.

The small but not claustrophobic map segregates space into hexagonal sectors. Most interaction is with space stations, although sectors contain other objects like minable asteroids and gas clouds. Ships travel between sectors using jump gates.

X4 Foundations handles this space sim play well. Ships are customizable with compelling tradeoffs, although not as varied as the other games mentioned above. Ships can perform like real-world aircraft or a more straightforward, uniform handling for those used to a more Star Wars: Squadrons style of play. The variety of mission types is unusually varied.

However, X4 Foundations is not only a space sim. Once you realize you can hire pilots for purchased ships that can automate simple tasks like mining, trading, exploring or fighting, the game’s focus shifts from the pilot and their ship to logistics and strategy. As you start building space stations to process raw materials through a complex web of production facilities into spacecraft, the game’s focus switches again to economy.

X4 Foundations is more a 4X game about rising from nothing to something on the galactic level. What exactly that “something” is depends on the player. There is no defined end, and little actively opposes the player. Instead, the challenge is transitioning from one level of play, like assembling a small fleet or building and running profitable space stations, to enabling the player to attain their own goals, like fighting off the game’s alien nemeses or amassing a fortune.

However, X4 Foundations is also a frustrating game. Progression slows once you reach the 4X playstyle at the middle game. While missions are vital in the early game and the occasional late-game “build base” or “build fleet” mission is lucrative, passive income quickly overtakes them. Often simply waiting for credits to accumulate or production to finish is the most effort-effective strategy.

X4 Foundations lacks the statistics and insights you need to identify opportunities or trends, despite the heavily menu-driven interface. For example, it does not provide easy access to the total credits traded for a commodity, high buy and sell price differences or details about trades between sectors.

X4 Foundations’ modular approach to building space stations brings out creative fun. However, building stations is seemingly meant to follow a progression, starting at cheaper modules then purchasing better ones as you accumulate wealth. Unfortunately, this progression takes tens of hours. Following the optional but well-written mission arc can short-circuit it but, if the progression is not fun and skippable, why have it?

X4 Foundations’ space ship and space station models are intricately detailed. Each faction has a unique style, whether it be the angular shapes of the Argon (humans) or the rounded, organic style of the Paranid.

However, beyond the models and textures, the graphics are dated. The force field over landing pads is simply a moving texture with transparent portions. The representation of humans practically fell into the uncanny valley, almost taking immersion with it. A stylized representation may have been more effective.

X4 Foundations certainly has its moments, though. When roaming space stations on foot, you cannot help but admire their scale, the kineticism of large ships regularly docking and undocking and the ground staff scampering to service them. It is the glee of a child watching trains or bulldozers.

Similarly, standing on the bridge of your capital ship as you order your formationed fleets to engage your enemy makes you feel like an admiral from many science fiction franchises. You can teleport into the pilot seat of a fighter to take out that troublesome turret or engine, then back to your capital ship to admire the target’s demise at a safe distance. Alternatively, you can order your marines to capture the ship. Your fleets can ignore enemy ships and destroy their space stations to cripple their production capability. The strategic options are surprisingly deep.

X4 Foundations is a victim of its breadth, becoming unintentionally comparable with specialist games that do their narrower pieces better. Perhaps these issues are addressed in the expansion packs or mods. It is also a long game, requiring dozens of hours to learn and more to finish. However, the X4 Foundations’ unique gameplay combination is compelling for those willing to endure the grind through the middle game or enact their own “rags to riches” story.

“Eve Online” versus “Elite Dangerous” Comparison

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Eve Online image

As a long-time player of Elite Dangerous, Eve Online had always intrigued me. Being almost 20 years old, Eve Online is known for massive PvP battles and intrigue, ganking and its player-driven economy. I wanted to experience Eve Online to understand its design philosophy and re-examine Elite Dangerous with different eyes.

The goal was to only highlight the fundamental differences in design, intention, and appeal between Elite Dangerous and Eve Online. A detailed comparison would fill volumes. Developers also evolve mechanics and features so a detailed comparison would also quickly date.

Elite Dangerous is more intimate than Eve Online. Flying a ship in Elite Dangerous is like flying a modern-day fighter. Many use a HOTAS (hands-on thrust and stick) and enjoy the sensation of flight. Eve Online uses more abstract, high-level commands, such as fly to this navigation point, with a keyboard and mouse. Elite Dangerous has a first-person camera view. Eve Online uses a usually zoomed out third-person camera view to get a better tactical perspective.

Combat in Elite Dangerous involves manoeuvring the opponent into your weapon sights, lining up a shot and firing at the correct time. It occurs at a range of a few kilometres. Combat in Eve Online is more tactical, with the game aiming for you, and battlefields can span hundreds of kilometres.

Graphically, Elite Dangerous’ textures, models and effects are more detailed then Eve Online because you see them up close. Elite Dangerous‘ sound design is brilliant and immersive, with each ship having distinct sounds. Elite Dangerous is even more immersive in VR, which Eve Online does not support.

Eve Online focuses more on player-interaction. While both are MMOs, Elite Dangerous involves smaller groups of players and ships than Eve Online. While both have large squadrons (Elite Dangerous) or corporations (Eve Online), Eve Online has more tools for managing large corporations like alliances, inter-corporation war and in-game calendars. Eve Online’s corporate tax system sequesters a portion of each member’s income to support combined activities or reimburse members. Many play Elite Dangerous in solo mode, sharing the same galaxy but not interacting with players.

An Elite Dangerous player can exploit or ignore the in-game politics and universe around them. Eve Online players are the politics and universe, including building and destroying space stations. Before introducing Triglavians in Eve Online, the only endgame was large scale PvP. Elite Dangerous’ endgame is mainly PvE, including a detailed simulation of galactic politics called the “background simulation”.

Eve Online has a much more complex economy and industry than Elite Dangerous. You cannot construct or purchase ships or components from players in Elite Dangerous, the opposite of Eve Online. Building a ship from the blueprints you researched and from the ore you mined in Eve Online is a great feeling. At least, it is until you realize how uneconomical it is compared to specialist players.

Mining in Elite Dangerous is more involved than Eve Online, requiring prospecting individual asteroids and gathering the released ore fragments, but only translates time into credits. Mining in Eve Online is simpler, coining the phrase “AFK mining”, but provides the raw material for the broader economy and has specialist ships and skills.

Elite Dangerous is more forgiving. Non-consensual PvP is a fact of life in Eve Online – I lost more ships in my first two weeks of Eve Online to ganking than in thousands of hours of Elite Dangerous. Elite Dangerous, by comparison, has player groups like the “Fuel Rats”, who altruistically deliver fuel to players whose ships ran out of fuel. If you lose a ship in Elite Dangerous, you pay a rebuy price of 5% of the ship’s total cost and respawn in a fitted, engineered ship matching your original. If you lose a ship in Eve Online, you get back a smaller portion of the cost then must manually purchase and fit a replacement.

Eve Online comes from an earlier game design mindset where challenge and setback were necessary to contrast achievements and progress. Eve Online’s age also shows in its UI, reminiscent of Everquest, with many information-heavy windows. Elite Dangerous’ UI is less cluttered and simpler, partially driven by Elite Dangerous’ console support, but deals with less information than Eve Online. Elite Dangerous replaces Eve Online‘s sometimes ambiguous warning buzzes and tones with an unambiguous and science fiction-style cockpit voice assistant.

While both games provide tutorials, both require experimentation, help from third parties or patience to learn and master. Various tools and websites support both games, supplementing the game UIs.

Mechanically, a significant difference between the two is Eve Online’s skill system. Elite Dangerous allows any pilot to fly any ship, assuming they have sufficient credits and reputation. However, Eve Online’s skills both determine what the pilot can do and how effective they are.

Eve Online’s skill system means players can specialize in a role or type of ship. For example, one player may specialize in missile weapons and one race’s destroyers. Another may specialize in laser weapons and a different race’s cruisers. Another may specialize in mining ships and industry. This system means there is no “one size fits best” ship or fit, unlike Elite Dangerous. It creates niches and encourages cooperation. Skills are easy to learn but hard to master, so experimenting or role switching is still possible.

However, the only in-game way to increase skills is time. Skill points accumulate at a constant rate, even when not playing. The player’s actions neither predispose nor increase the rate of accumulation. Long-time players benefit, even if absent. Eve Online’s developers get a revenue stream through new players purchasing skill boosts.

This contrast highlights the different revenue models. You pay for the Elite Dangerous game upfront then, optionally, cosmetic upgrades. Eve Online has a limited free mode but frequently nags to upgrade to a monthly subscription. You can earn enough in-game currency to upgrade to the paid tier. However, it is only possible in the late game and requires a significant time investment.

Another key mechanical difference is exploration. Exploration in Elite Dangerous consists of flying to unexplored star systems, scanning then selling the cartographic data. Players have discovered less than one percent of Elite Dangerous’ over 100 billion star systems in a 1:1 model of the Milky Way galaxy. In-game photography is common, particularly when players find beautiful rings or other stellar vistas. You can land on planets and experience a “Neil Armstrong moment” as you walk on them.

Exploration in Eve Online consists of scanning known star systems for points of interest that do not appear in regular scans. These points of interest could be wormholes, hidden bases, wrecks (destroyed ships) or players not at warp. The latter is an important part of PvP in Eve Online compared to Elite Dangerous – other players can easily find you and attack you. Players can salvage wrecks for crafting components. Wormholes lead to unmapped star systems with a higher risk/reward.

These different approaches reinforce and support existing gameplay. Elite Dangerous’ exploration spreads the players out and encourages more individual play. Eve Online’s exploration supports PvP or industry.

Eve Online is influenced by the Homeworld series and Warhammer 40K with the larger fleet battles, constructing huge engines of war and trade, and emphasis on rediscovering ancient or abandoned technology. Elite Dangerous owes more to Freelancer or the Wing Commander series – a single pilot surviving and thriving in a space “wild west”. Both games have extensive lore that serves mainly to give context to the current world. Neither game is story-based or examines themes.

I liked Eve Online’s “try before you buy” model by playing an Alpha (unpaid) for a while then upgrading to Omega (subscription) temporarily with a starter kit. Elite Dangerous has a high upfront cost. However, once purchased, Elite Dangerous lacks any “pay to win” mechanics or nagging.

I also liked Eve Online’s complex industry and economy, which has no equivalent in Elite Dangerous. It opens whole new play styles, earning the moniker “spreadsheets in space” from its depth and complexity.

However, Eve Online’s Darwinian environment was frustrating. The solution, and a tenet of Eve Online, is cooperation. Whereas Elite Dangerous leans toward meditative soloing and slow constant progression, Eve Online is more tribal and brings together communities to play and progress with and against other players.

Eve Online and Elite Dangerous scratch different itches. Both games have withstood the test of time and flourish, despite a few bumps with Elite Dangerous’ recent expansion.

“Elite Dangerous” Review

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Elite Dangerous promotional image

Elite Dangerous is a space trading, exploration and combat simulator released in December 2014 and regularly updated since then. Based on the 1984 Elite that seemingly crammed a galaxy into 64KB, Elite Dangerous expands this to a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game with modern graphics and gameplay.

You play a pilot flying a single spacecraft. You start with a small fighter, then work your way up via combat, exploring, trading, mining, ferrying passengers and completing missions to earn larger, better or more specialized ships. The Horizon expansion adds landing on planets, driving a ground vehicle and limited multi-crew. The upcoming Odyssey expansion adds “space legs”, allowing pilots to leave their vehicles and walk around space stations and some planet surfaces.

Elite Dangerous is set in the Milky Way galaxy. All of it. As you zoom out on the galaxy map for the first time, its sheer enormity becomes apparent. The game is set a bit after the year 3300, where humanity has colonized “the bubble” around 150 lightyears from Earth, encompassing over 20,000 inhabited star systems. However, 400 billion stars are accessible, backed by hard science, where possible, and procedural generation, otherwise. Looking at the sky and realizing you can travel to most visible stars is a humbling experience.

Life in the Milky Way is not static. Like many space trading games, an economic and political simulation underpins Elite Dangerous. Perform enough missions for your favourite faction or fight along one side in a war and see the borders shift and economies wax and wane. Although more as a backdrop to weekly in-game events than a narrative, there are also ongoing events and lore.

While the original Elite’s graphics were appropriate for their time, it left a lot to the imagination. Elite Dangerous’s renders planets, nebulae, gas clouds, asteroids and other stellar objects beautifully. It has spawned a whole stellar cartography and photography community.

Stations’, settlements’ and ships’ beautiful graphics have an industrial, semi-realistic aesthetic. Space stations are gorgeously detailed, with triangular reinforcement struts, flashing warning lights and BladeRunner-like holographic advertising. Ships’ thrusters fire realistically as they manoeuvre. Lasers rake glowings arcs of molten yellow-orange metal on ships’ hulls.

The sound design is also exemplary. Ships have distinctive sounds. You can hear the subtle creaks and vibrations as a ship decelerates into a planet’s atmosphere or the shudders and groans as a landing pad retracts into a space station. Closing your eyes as you dock with a station reveals many small sound effects that add so much.

Unlike many games, Elite Dangerous’ soundtrack is more atmospheric and ambient than inspiring and memorable. One notable exception is the rousing orchestral choral theme for a capital ship jumping into a conflict zone. It is reminiscent of John Williams’s scores to any of the Star Wars films. Another exception is Straus’s “Blue Danube”. It plays whenever auto-docking and is a nod to the similar scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original Elite.

While I play with neither, Elite Dangerous is considered one of the premier examples of virtual reality (VR) and using a HOTAS (Hands-On Thrust and Stick). Using both apparently creates an immersive experience few games can match.

I usually choose single-player games (note the blog’s name) with more apparent stories or themes. At first glance, Elite Dangerous does not fit that mould.

Instead, Elite Dangerous is an example of great game design. Despite some lingering bugs, Elite Dangerous consists of many different games strung together. At the lowest level are the simple mechanics like targeting, shooting and manoeuvring. The game combines these into dynamics like combat, exploration and trading. Above them, you have more abstract and strategic activities like advancement, supporting in-game factions or galactic superpowers. It reminds me of how Paradox Interactive, the developer of games like Crusader Kings and Europa: Universalis, builds games.

This breadth allows players to construct their own goals. One goal could be working toward an expensive or reputation-locked ship. Another could be travelling to the edges of the galaxy. Many choose to focus on the combat, whether it be against NPC opponents or other players.

While Elite Dangerous is an MMO, you can still play solo or with small groups of friends. I spent my first several weeks solo, but I still rarely interacted with a human even after “graduating” to open play. Almost all content is soloable. Even PvE content seemingly made for cooperation, like fighting aliens introduced in the recent expansion, is frequently soloed.

That does not mean players are absent. While the game economies and politics are not player-centric like in Eve Online, there are many thriving squadrons and player groups, both for good and bad. PVP-focused players frequent star systems where others congregate, praying on the weak. By comparison, the “Fuel Rats” is a group of volunteer players who help those that have run out of fuel.

Meanwhile, Elite Dangerous’s greatest strength and biggest weakness is its demand for self-discovery. While there are some tutorials, players must learn most of the game’s mechanics themselves, either through player-generated content or trial and error. Even seemingly basic things like landing a spacecraft are difficult for first-time players. This demand attracts some but repulses many.

Elite Dangerous delivers a form of retro-futuristic nostalgia. The crackly radio transmissions you overhear are reminiscent of the attenuated analogue radio used during the moon landing. Spacecraft fly like World War II or Korean era fighters, at least until you turn off “flight assist”. All text in the user interface is uppercase like early computers.

With a few exceptions like faster than light travel, Elite Dangerous is about a realistic simulation of the future as you can find. In its future, artificial gravity does not exist, meaning spinning space stations or. Physics rules spaceflight and spaceship modifications. Make it heavier and your spacecraft will be slower and less manoeuvrable. Space is big. Travelling, even with a faster than light drive, takes time.

Elite Dangerous is a game for serious space fans willing to invest time learning the game. It is also for those comfortable setting their path. Those looking for something thematic or more casual will find it unfulfilling.

Why did I play this game? I remember watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos as a young child. He talked of a ship of the imagination, allowing you to travel to only dreamt places. Elite Dangerous provides that. I felt the joyous wonder when I first jumped into a system, seeing the kineticism of hurtling toward a star when decelerating. I felt it when I saw my first black hole and the light lensing around it. I felt it seeing starlight reflecting off an alien gas giant at sunrise, illuminating a ring of asteroids. Elite Dangerous is for those happy to head to the “second star to the right and straight on ‘til morning”.