Elite Dangerous : First Impressions

Have I ever mentioned how much I like the Elite games? I started with the first one from 1984 on C64 - though I played it many years after it was first released. Then I played the sequels in the 1990s. They are great games, both in scope and freedom of play. They are also fun. :)

You can fly about the universe in your spaceship, and are free to play however you like - as a trader, hauling goods across the galaxy, as a pirate, ambushing the traders and stealing their goods and evading the police, as a bounty hunter, hunting down criminals, or following a military route, taking missions to gain military ranks.

Well, I was in the original Kickstarter for Elite Dangerous, but never paid for beta access, so I had to wait for gamma access, which is... now!

So I bought myself a ridiculously expensive controller - a Saitek X-55 Rhino HOTAS - which is actually far more sensible of a thing than its name implies... mostly because I heard this game has lots of buttons and so I wanted a controller with loads of buttons, I love the idea of having a cockpit with buttons and switches for everything.

Then I spent a day sorting out upgrading the PC's main SSD because it'd started developing bad sectors... then I moved my PC into the living room so I could use my big TV, then set things up so I have somewhere comfy to put the HOTAS (I am using a warm blanket and an ironing board, yay I'm a high-tech space traveller!)

£1000 TV + £170 controller + £2000 (maybe) PC ... and an ironing board...

I tell you, PC gaming is HARD WORK. Hahaha!

Then I started the game.

The first thing I tried to do was set my X55 as controller, and start a tutorial.

The second thing I did was exit and look up "what are all the buttons, actually?", because the tutorial will tell you something like "lower your landing gear" and you need to work out which button does that. I found a really useful website for that.

..then I went back in and tried following the tutorial. I crashed into things all the way through, and eventually landed. It congratulated me, and said I was now qualified to dock in any space station, which made me laugh out loud, because if my docking was good enough, the place must be chaos! I don't know whether I dare fly with pilots as bad as me being fully licensed!

Then there was a shooting tutorial - same process, start it up, then get myself a browser and look up the controls... then blunder my way through.

By the time I'd got to the tutorial for travelling between stars... I was lost enough I needed to watch a video on YouTube to tell me what I'm supposed to be doing.

During the "advanced" tutorial on dogfighting, I started playing with switching off flight assist during battles. This stops your craft from following Newtonian physics, and starts it using more realistic space physics. What this actually means is that you can use it to move in weird ways - deliberately fling your craft spinning off somewhere and realign yourself to aim at the enemy, then enable flight assist again to stabilise yourself enough to fire.

And then you *totally* feel like a 14 year old who just stole a mecha and is piloting it like someone who should never ever ever be allowed to pilot anything. And that's just mega-awesome!

At the end of the five basic tutorials, I had been congratulated five times, and felt like an utter noob.

So then I tried the first one - docking - again. And nailed it, smooth take off, smooth, exiting, smooth re-entering, and smooth landing. Like a pro. :D

Then I thought "huh, maybe these tutorials work after all".

So I started up the main game, and the first thing it does is a "pre-flight check" where you push each of the controls to make sure you know the mapping. And I was like... "why wasn't this the first thing in the tutorial??!"

So far I've travelled to two systems, I got inter-somethinged one time, and another ship blew me up, but luckily I had taken out insurance, so it popped me back in my ship with my 1000 credits ready to start again.

I'm now in a place called "Bean City" in a galaxy I can't remember the name of, a ship full of holes, a cargo hold of computer parts that sell for a little less than I paid for them, and 800-odd credits in my bank.

Fun! ^_^

One more thing - although I cannot normally play first-person games due to terrible simulator sickness, I have had no problems with Elite Dangerous, despite playing it all day and flinging myself into space and bouncing off space stations.

I think it's because the pilot is in a fixed position, and the gameplay movement is so unlike any that I would normally encounter in life, that my brain does not know how to go "hang on, this isn't what I expect" - because it has no experience of actual space flight to apply it to.

But it could also be that I started playing these games long before I ever started suffering simulator sickness, and somehow it's familiar enough to my brain to allow it to pass.

Either way, I'm very glad of it. It would have been terrible to not be able to play this game. Especially after buying such a nice but incredibly expensive controller for it. Oh, and because Elite is one of my all time favourite game franchises. :)