Well I backed it in the end. Utterly gaping gay for Elite, me.

I also want to be able to manually land on planets

Don't forget Eve's full of the utterest cunts on the Internet, too.

Could you land on planets in Elite?

Just stay in high-sec space if you want to avoid the cunts.

He's making it multiplayer according to the bumpf.

No.

Correct, but you could in Frontier and First Encounters, and I would imagine he'd be unlikely to take such a massive step backwards for this version.

Have any of you guys tried X3?

Admittedly I've not played it myself, but a guy at work is a big fan and he's said on more than one occasion that it's basically a modern Elite.

He's put over 100 hours into it according to his Steam profile, and he's not known for playing shit games.

It is the best kind of correct, you're right

Frontier was actually subtitled Elite II.

EVE is shit for Elite afficionados, though. Goddamnit, I want to actually fly the ship, not click to tell it where to go. I also want to be able to manually land on planets, and jump to any system I can get to with a hyperdrive and enough fuel, from anywhere in my current system, instead of having to use bloody jump gates.

While the ability is nice, and something that made me prefer Frontier, I found as soon as I found a lucrative route that I was Autopilot/Time compression all the way.

Just chucked on £20, seeing as I can put it aside from xmas money... Seems to be the best option, as you get the game plus your name reserved.

I hope it runs on my gaming PC, which was bought in late 2008.

True. I like the extra flexibility though, especially if your hyperdrive failed mid-jump and left you stranded out in the middle of nowhere, but you had the forethought to fit a fuel scoop, so you could fly over to the gas giant in the system, refuel and then jump again.

Have any of you guys tried X3?

Admittedly I've not played it myself, but a guy at work is a big fan and he's said on more than one occasion that it's basically a modern Elite.

He's put over 100 hours into it according to his Steam profile, and he's not known for playing shit games.

The counterpoint to that is having a large enough ship that you could spare room for it (6t is a lot on many ships). You also had the drive breaking down with almost complete certainly every year unless you serviced it, and the fact that the 'distress signal' function was completely useless so if you ran out of fuel or otherwise became stranded, even in a system with lots of other ships around, there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.

This really harmed my suspension of disbelief, especially in a game otherwise quite meticulous about little details like that.

I also got tired of flying into systems and having to fend off half a dozen pirate attacks, either by pirates who'd collide with you killing themselves in the process, or pirates in tiny airfighters that were almost impossible to hit but also so puny they could do no damage either their weapons or by kamikaze attacks.

Respect for getting them to wake up long enough to discuss anything.