Elite Dangerous caught my attention along with Star Citizen and No Man's Sky and the possibility of these being ported to consoles. This game is huge, not just the vastness of the universe you can traverse (400 billion star systems) or the daunting scale of a planet as you fly down to it and the length of time it takes, but the detail and controls.
Fitting a keyboard worth of commands onto the Dualshock 4 controller has been done very well and cleanly. Left thumb stick controls your ships roll and pitch, right thumb stick controls yaw and in space stations or close to surfaces your vertical elevation like a jet. L1 slows your thrusters, R1 speeds up. L2 and R2 are your weapons. R3 changes camera to free look around your cockpit using the controllers 6 axis movement (bit awkward but has it's use in dogfights) L3 changes to a different set of flight controls, and then you have the plethora of other commands to learn. These are done via holding a button (square, cross, triangle, circle) and then a transparent template appears of the controller where the buttons all have a secondary function. Holding square opens all weaponry functions, cross opens all map/target/sensor functions, triangle opens your engine options (supercruise, hyper space jump etc) and circle controls lights, landing gear, cargo scoop and camera edit. Tapping cross while aiming at a target locks into it and provides useful info, tapping square arms/disarms weapons, tapping triangle engages whichever flight/speed option is selected after it's charged, and tapping circle provides a speed boost in dog fights. Your D pad can assign power to different parts of the ship (Left = systems, up = engine, right = weapons) meaning you can regenerate shields quicker, fly faster or do more reason damage, but selecting one detracts points from the others, meaning quick use of these is brilliant for dog fights i.e when a enemy flies past you and is behind quickly assign all power from weapons to engines and slow thrusters to stop and to turn quickly, then back to weapons to do damage. Inside the cockpit pressing the track pad or left + square activates your computer (galaxy map, missions, contacts etc) you must use contacts within 7,500km of a station for instance to request docking permission. Pressing square and up activates messages/comms computer where imortant mission updates and messages from players or NPCs in game will show. Square and down gives access to additional craft/SRV buggy, and your ship/commander info. Square and right gives access to status as imortant ships functions (you can turn off modules to things like ships engine and thrusters, sensors, life support where your oxygen will stop; giving you a countdown etc) all modules or ship/space rover systems have a power usage like programs taking up RAM, go over the maximum wattage your ship can supply and your engine will shut down, meaning you must make allowances by relaying power via turning off less needed modules at that time (shield generator for instance if in a safe area) but you can upgrade your ship and it's modules/functions very extensively, this will be a big list.
Anything from upgraded:
- Thrusters (additional speed)
- FSD warp drive (greater LY jump distances)
- FSD interdictor (you fly behind and pull ships out of supercruise with a gravity/magnetic pull and mini game where you must fight the magnetic field (I'm guessing?) And keep crosshairs at the escape vector if you're being interdicted or at the target if interdicting, until the blue meter fills up.
- Cargo racks (for more space)
- Different scanners (like planetary surface scanners, kill warrent scanners to pick up federal security ship radio chatter on wanted bounties, basically a police scanner)
- Refinery (used for mining, an ore made up of 2 or more base minerals can be broken down and put into bins, more bins the better, less bins means you must use the eject button you'll see beneath the mineral you do not want, then once vented into space you can get more ores. Until you eject the mineral you do not want; and the refined/spent ore that will be dimmed with the caption refined, you cannot get another ore with your cargo scoop, it'll say unallocated. Be careful you do not eject the mineral you are mining for, it'll say in the bottom left what an ore piece comprises of once locked on to. Once that mineral is filled to 100% you'll have 1 unit of sellable goods. Little refinery/mining tutorial there as confused me at first)
- Docking computer (allows you to slow down near a star port and automatic controls dock your ship, this upgrade is brilliant. I've destroyed 50% of my hull accidentally pressing O to turbo boost into the ground instead of O & down to open landing gear. It also saves time)
- Flight suite (computers that allow you to effectively fly close to surfaces)
- Chaff launcher (temporarily disable a ships weapon tracking)
- Electronic counter measures (used to their off any missile or torpedo locks
- Cargo scanner (let's you scan a ship for its content of items and personnel. You'll often be scanned entering any big star ports, and by federal ships, also some pirates)
- Frame shift wake scanner (lets you scan the energy/remnants of a ship before it jumped into super cruise or hyper space jump so you can follow it)
- Heat sink launcher (lets you dispose of heat via ammunition when your ships getting dangerously hot)
- Shield cell banks (lets you quickly regenerate shields in combat if not completely disabled)
- Point defence (A turret that shoots any incoming missles, torpedos, mines or hatch breaker limpets)
- Control limpets (little drones that can mine asteroids, collect the minerals, can scan asteroids for their composition, break ships cargo hatches to steal cargo or deliver a ton of fuel to a stranded ship. There's a website called Fuelrats where the people will try and save stranded ships running out of oxygen from zero fuel, make sure that's not you via the next thing)
- Fuel scoop (that allows you to orbit close around a red dwarf, or sun, and collect fuel from the nuclear heat while in supercruise, but don't get too close otherwise you'll come out of supercruise and take heat damage, and avoid the solar flares. You can actually also use a heat scoop to supercharge your FSD drive and increase your hyperspace jumps range. This special little trick is important for long distance travel. You have to find a system with a white dwarf; a dying star with 2 blue jet cones coming out either side, and pass through the tip of the cone, your ship will lose control as it passes through the magnetic field and it'll say FSD drive operating beyond safety limits, eventually blue writing will say FSD super charged, you can now hyperspace jump further. White dwarfs increase range by 50%, neutron stars or pulsars; wiggly blue cones that aren't really found unless diving downwards in space 1000LYs, increase range by 4 times or 300%) Note this damages your FSD drive a little each time.
- Field maintenance unit (repairs your ships modules/equipment)
- Hull reinforcement package (as the name suggests)
- Planetary vehicle hangar (allows you to store an SRV space buggy)
- Fuel tank (increases tonnes of fuel capacity)
- Life support (increases your emergency oxygen if your ship has no fuel or a hull breach)
- Alloys (strengthens your ship)
- Power distributor (handles your assigning of power to sys/eng/weap)
- Power plant (what keeps your ship turning fuel into electricity)
As you can see the amount of ship upgrades and equipment is huge, and that's not even a full list. Upgrades take into account everything from power draw, boot time of that module, it's weight and the effect on jump speed etc.
In star ports you're given a big menu screen with a lot of options.
- Commodities market (buy and sell items from various categories like minerals, food, technology etc, your actions from missions can cause systems and their factions to go through economic boom or bust, civil peace or unrest, changing prices of items etc).
- Mission board with various characters that can give you missions for rewards like the title suggests. Missions that are available depend on requirements like rank, cargo space etc.
- Passenger lounge where you can be a taxi or courier and deliver people to destinations or additional quests like passengers who want to collect data from planets etc. These range in reeards of up to millions of credits but require large passenger ships, luxury accommodation, long flight distances along with certain flight behavior depending on the customer (some dislike delays, being scanned by other ships or erratic/damage inducing flying, others don't care) these missions are more end game missions going by their requirements.
- Contacts which allows you to handle fines you may have occurred (arming and firing weapons in civil air space, loitering dangerously over other docking bays etc) you can also trade in bounties, trade dividends etc via authority contracts. Combat bonds. Even the black market to trade in drugs/weapons.
- Universal cartographics, here you can sell data obtained of new planets, history etc you've scanned and uncovered. But need to be a certain number of light years from that given system of discovered data you sell it.
- Crew lounge allows you to browse and buy additional crew members that you can fit on large ships as a pilot for a fighter craft. On certain planet bases special engineers can be found too that can craft you special ship equipment.
- Livery let's you customize your ships paint job, number plates, decals, ID, weapon and thruster colours etc.
- Holo-me allows you to customize your commander/pilot with a generous amount of face options and unlockable outfits. (These and ship mods can be purchased from the store using bought frontier points, though you'll get 1000 with this legendary addition.)
- Outfitting let's you kit up your ship with all sorts of new weapons from pulse lasers to rail guns or multi cannons, or purchase new internal modules, external equipment like sensors.
- Shipyard is the place for new ships (you appear to start off with a loaned ship full of loaned modules and weapons).
- Advanced maintenance let's you select a number of individual repairs to specific parts like paintwork, thrusters, etc. Otherwise you can quick select to refuel, repair all or restock all.
You have a number of ways to earn credits and ultimately upgrade your ships, from bounty hunting to exploration and cargo runs.
Landing on planets or cities takes some training as due to the vast scale of everything, you need to fly towards them in supercruise (higher speed than normal, km per second up to 2,500km/s in your starting ship) but low enough speed in the supercruises speedometer or range otherwise you'll end up having to take evasive action to avoid crashing into a planet! This is done by slowing down thrusters to highlight the blue section of the gauge so that you can come out of supercruise while coming to a slow pace as close as possible to the planets surface/station etc. You'll first drop into orbital flight as you go around the planet to reach your target, then out of this into a glide that will abort if approached too sharply. Otherwise you'll be flying forever at standard speed of 200km/s. Hyper speed jumps/frame shift jumps are simpler, aim at a target selected from your galaxy map, charge up, go (any obstructions will bring you out of hyper speed, which is quite an experience when you think you're hurtling into the sun) this is a super quick way to travel and different ships or with upgrades can travel at hyper speed for a greater number of light years including the above mentioned slingshotting by supercharging your FSD via a neutron star. Your distance from anything is measured in light years, then days, hours, minutes etc as you draw near.
There's also planetary landings along with station docking where you must wait till the little template of your ship on the radar goes over the middle crosshair which turns blue, and you can safely land. Here you can use the SRV buggy vehicle and drive around, which along with your ship can be made more difficult from whatever the given planets G's or gravity pull is.
Some helpful info:
- To the top left of your main map, there's a circle with a crosshair and often a blue dot, the blue dot will be your way marker or objective (or simply a ship/object you've locked on to) space has no up or down and it's easy to get disoriented for instance if you over shoot something or lose track, this will tell you which way to turn to find your target, and makes things a hell of a lot less annoying.
- Missions, at first it feels like you're thrown in the deep end, for instance a trade data salvage mission, says go to this system and look for signal sources, a system is huge, what are you looking for? For any mission you want to arrive at a given system using other systems as jump points (you won't be able to hyper space jump more than 6.4 light years or so to begin with, and don't want to try flying there manually in a 1:1 scale universe) upon arriving lock on to and fly to the Nav Beacon (square & Left then go to contacts, it should be in the list) after going to the nav beacon way marker you'll find the physical nav beacon close by, beeping with a morse code like sound, highlighted by a grey reticle. Scanning the Nav Beacon you'll get all the imortant info for that system including possible targets for your mission objective. If so they'll be highlighted Blue and you'll probably get an imortant message from your mission giver (Square & Up to read comms then R1 you change tabs) this is how you move forward and give yourself a direction in most missions. Without knowing this it can otherwise seem daunting. If looking for a bounty target it's the same, nav beacon, new location in the system, go to the new location probably a small moon or planet, fly around it looking for a signal source that will turn blue saying mission objective located.
The game is huge and has much to delve into, and the controls though many soon become second nature, a proper space sim where more will be eventually added later down the line, including ship free roaming etc. It requires a little patience at first but is fun getting to grips with and will offer a ton of longevity. Make sure you do the training missions! But otherwise enjoy.
And pay no mind to the low ratings, seems people just find it to hard to get to grips with and gave up (the flight controls are simple, the additional controls you'll soon remember) the game doesn't hold your hand like COD and isn't about constant explosions. Did I mention there's black holes and earths solar system?
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Sources: Review I did, Images