Be Excellent To Each Other

Ok as posted in the rift thread I have one at work and might try a few games at home with it this weekend

Confirmed that the Xbox deal is a 'timed exclusive' and it will come to PS4 as well

https://twitter.com/DavidBraben/status/ ... 7008444416

@smallfaraway_ Sure. Mac of course, then down the line we will support more, including PS4. The XB1 is a timed exclusive.

— David Braben (@DavidBraben) March 5, 2015

"Mac of course"

It'd be a good deal less fun without a flightstick, I think.

I've been enjoying it with a 360 pad and keyboard. It's certainly not a bad way to play though I'm sure a decent stick would be an improvement.

I was playing last night, had just finished a trade run and decided to stick a couple of beam lasers on my Cobra to go and shoot space mans.

On the way out of the station I decided to boost, didn't notice the ship coming through the mailslot and smacked into the side of him.

Quick look at my radar, and his blip was hollow (meaning an actual player rather than an NPC) so thought I'd better apologise - turned around and waited for my ship to identify him.

It was my brother.

Up until this point we weren't on each other's friends lists, I just recognised his username.

The chances of that seem to be ludicrously odd, given the size of the galaxy in the game and the number of players. Amazing.

And when you told him that story of wild coincidence about why you rammed his ship, did he buy it?

Doesn't it cheat a bit because there's no central server involved, and it's basically a P2P style thing that hooks players up with each other in a slightly artificial way?

I think I saw a post to that effect on Reddit but then again it could have been an LSD flashback from the 60s.

It is P2P, but the only "favoured matching" is with people on your friends list or in groups that you've joined. So in this case, neither of those applied.

Will it not favour people in your geographical location?

Maybe, but if it did it would be on a very large scale (country-wide for a place as small as the UK).

As Grim... said, it'd be country-wide (or even continent wide, perhaps.)

My brother is in Glasgow anyway, so not particularly local to me.

Sounds like you need some griefing tips from Mail A.

Those specs, though

I've played the Mac Beta on my work MacBook Pro (which to be fair is a pretty decent spec, but not *that* good: 2.17GHz i7, 8GB RAM, GeForce GT 650M) and it actually does play okay. Not brilliantly and nowhere near as well as it does on my PC at home, but it is definitely playable. Plus Frontier Developments have said that it needs a lot of optimisation, so they're expecting the minimum requirements will get lower and lower.

Hullo, I've drifted back again. I'm currently fairly hooked on City Skylines, which is awesome, but I suddenly remembered in the middle of meticulously crafting a sunken motorway flanked by parks through my central business district that one of the reasons I wanted a new computer was Elite Dangerous.

However, I've begun hearing a lot of naysaying about it, with people saying there isn't actually that much content. And ouch, £40 etc. Now I don't play games that often, probably 8-10 hours a week, so I won't exhaust something. And it might be fun flying alongside you guys. And yay, I do have a flightstick. So, er, is it worth getting? Or are you all sick of it now?

Haven't played it in ages, and haven't seen anything reported about updates that made me interested in going back. There still isn't really much of a game there.

Hmm, that sounds a shame. As I love space based games. Still wavering, but maybe I should go and give Sunless Sea some more love, instead.

I must have sunk dozens upon dozens of hours into it, and although I was on a break, I have come back again recently. I don't think it's fair to say there isn't much of a game there, it does everything Frontier did (apart from landing on planets) and much more besides, and this time around it actually works. It won't ever tell you what you should be doing, though, so in that sense it is only the game you put into it.

If you ever played Frontier, then all you have to ask yourself is whether you would like to play that again, but with wowsa graphics, great controls and pvp dogfighting (if you like). If not, then it's a lot tougher. It's not designed like a normal game, that's for sure.

My one gripe at the moment is that it is too hard to find good trade routes on your own without "cheating" and using one of the fan-made trading tools available. But with them, or by using something like this (which is what I am doing at the moment), even trading can become a tour of the universe.

I left it for ages, but I've also come back recently and have kinda fallen in love with it again. Lasermink's statement is pretty true - it's not designed like other games. It's very sandboxy. You get a ship and you decide what you want to do with it.

At the point I left, I was getting bored because I was continuously trading rares in my Cobra, and then my Asp - at the time it seemed the only way to make a decent amount of cash. Frontier have started seriously addressing that now and they've rebalanced a lot of the game so that there's more money to be made in other areas. I've since sold the Asp to get a Vulture, which is a heavy fighter, and am now doing more bounty hunting and warzones than trading - it's a lot more fun and I'm probably making money quicker this way too. Right now I'm taking part in the community-goal war in the BV Phoenicis and Kui Hsein systems in Imperial space. It's a lot of fun.

It's shaping up, basically. The upcoming 1.3 update looks like it's going to be quite a big improvement - they're meant to be completely overhauling the currently quite barebones mission system and they're adding a drone system to improve mining, cargo scooping and player-to-player cargo and fuel transfers.

Exploration also pays a lot better now, plus you will get your CMDR name forever stamped on a stellar object (in the map, like) if you're the first to discover it, ie. the first to make it back and sell the scan.

There's actually a few systems between Lave and the Coalsack Nebula that show as being first discovered by me. It's a cool little accolade to have!

This is the nub of it for me, by all accounts there might be a 'proper game' worth playing a few more content patches down the line.

Certainly everyone who bought the game from my circle of gamer friends (and there were a few of them) have stopped playing it completely, with the intention of maybe returning in the future.

Well, presumably the impending Xbone launch will prompt them to work on some more structured aspects to it all.

There's a great game worth playing there right now! It's just not designed with a beginning, middle or an end. You start with the crappest playable ship in the game in an independent system a little out of the way of the main action and you decide what you want to do. There's some training missions that are completely separate game itself to help you get the basics, but there's no hand-holding in the main game at all. I think the way it's totally open-ended it what puts so many off - people are used to games that have fully formed plots and paced progression, not games like the Elite series where you just jump in a ship and get on with it.

The problem it's had since launch is that there will naturally come a time when, unless you're truly dedicated, you're going to get a little tired of it, as really the only thing you're truly working to is more money for bigger and better ships. This has been exacerbated by the lacking missions and storyline, and the grind to the really big ships was way too much. Powerful ships were too expensive and money too hard to come by, so by the time you'd got up to something like the Cobra or the Asp, you were stuck with it while you grinded away for an eternity until you could finally afford something else. Most of this has already been addressed by Frontier.

Of course the previous Elite games were exactly the same - you kept playing them until you got bored of playing them. There was no ending or way to "complete" it. But back then people seemed more ready to accept games like that. Less so now.

The beginning, you might say?

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It's never going to happen.

Yeah, I would rule out single-player offline ever happening. The single-player online mode works well though if you don't want encounters with other players and Frontier have stated they'd make the server code public domain if they ever did shut it down. Whether or not you trust them to keep that promise is another matter of course.

I'm currently buzzing round Imperial space trying to get the necessary ranking to be able to buy an Imperial Clipper. I've got just about enough cash now I reckon if I trade in my Vulture.

I exchanged my Asp for a Type-7, and did one tour of the route I linked above, during which I was able to upgrade to the Clipper.

Now I have bought a Vulture and I am wondering what I should do with it. It is quite tricky to kit out, because it has very little power even with the A power plant. I ended up fitting class 3 thrusters even though it has room for class 4. This let me fit the best shield, a class 3 beam laser and a gimbaled class 3 cannon. Should be able to kick some serious behind with that.

I am wondering about thrusters in general. The ones I have now have the "optimal mass" exactly at what my ship's total mass is, even though they are a class below what they are supposed to be.

Edit: I completely misread what you said about trading in your Vulture.

Heh, I equipped my Vulture in much the same way, including going for Class 3 Thrusters. The only main difference is I have a fixed Class 3 Plasma Accelerator instead of a cannon, although to be honest I think I may ditch that as it's a tricky shit to use against anything other than really big ships, like Anacondas and Pythons. The Vulture is an amazing ship in combat though. In a one-on-one fight, an NPC Anaconda has no chance against it.

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This speculative but from the point of view of someone who knows one way to do it write up of how the galaxy works is quite fun http://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/ ... ne_around/

For those still interested, the Mac version is released later today (12th May). I tried the initial Mac beta and it was absolutely a resource hog as suggested with those early specs, but I've just been playing the latest beta and it's vastly improved. Admittedly my Mac isn't a particular slouch - it's the Early 2013 MacBook Pro 15-inch, with 8GB RAM and discrete Nvidia GT 650M graphics, but I can set it to 1440x900 resolution, graphics to the High preset and it runs steadily between 50-60 fps. It's very, very playable.

Rather lengthy but interesting video about how the new Power Play expansion is a step in a direction that is completely different from what was originally presented by Frontier Developments:



I find it baffling that Frontier has spent valuable time and resources implementing game design which has obviously been lifted directly from free2play and subscription based games where time sinks and grind/pay-to-avoid mechanics make perfect sense from a monetizing point of view, in a game that is neither - and that Frontier has promised never will be.

I certainly have no interest in spending any time on this grind fest, and I think I will just ignore the whole thing. Hopefully Frontier will at some point get around to actually injecting a bit of life into the galaxy, not to mention implementing the promised expansions that I have already paid for.

That's a very polite 'rant'

Seems that the game is going in exactly the opposite direction from that which it needs to, certainly insofar as getting me interested enough to give it a go is concerned.

Sounds like the equivalent of WoW dailies, which were always an aspect of the game I had no love for.

..........................................

Next year.

Thanks, I only noticed this recently. Depressingly my mac is too old. In addition the system requirements states it doesn't work on case sensitive filesystems on mac. Which is mindboggling stupid.

Guess I'm going to have to wait for the PS4 version (or break for a Xbox One, which seems a bit silly...).

This powerplay stuff sounds worrying though (not watched the video yet though).

Powerplay is entirely optional, you don't have to take part. It does seem pretty shit and pointless though... the time and money could definitely have been better used.

I will have a read through