NEW VIDEO HERE: th-cam.com/video/0tHKx3-N6EM/w-d-xo.html Even with all it's issues, I'm nearing my 400 hours and just can't seem to put it down. I just wish the developers were in touch with the community more. Still an Elite fan?
Excellent review, and you nail it... in your own special way! I'm someone that played the original Elite on the first generation of microcomputers back in the 80s. Man I played that game to death, back then there was just nothing else like it. I got into ED on PS4 back in 2017. It's a sorrow to me that I've never experienced the game in VR, but I've just never had the time/opportunity/money to get a gaming PC and collect all the necessary bits and pieces. I actually had to sell my PS4 and move to a different country in 2019, but I made a promise to myself to get a PS5 when ED was updated for the next generation of consoles. So you can imagine how I felt about the news that it was NEVER going to be. A freaking disgrace, of which Frontier should be ashamed. So I ended up buying a second-hand PS4 and playing the game again from scratch, just for nostalgia really. Like you I discover the moments of greatness again... and the deep suckiness of the grind and the course of recent events. Perhaps there is still hope, perhaps Frontier will pull off a No Man's Sky and realize what a piece of greatness ED is. Gotta be honest though, I look at all that running around and shooting with _Fifth Element_ style guns in the Odyssey videos and feel utterly underwhelmed. I actually detest FPS games, sad to see ED turning into one.
@@Raygo. you are exactly the sort of player that made elite dangerous such a special community who frontier left behind. It’s a real shame. But thank you if for sharing your story lad. Totally appreciate it!
I got ED for free late 2020 with epic launcher, i downloaded the game by curiosity and fall in love minutes later during the tutorial. Almost 2 years later I have something like 1.5k hours and I keep coming back from time to time, especially for the current storyline. I wish frontier development put more money in the game to fill the lack of gameplay here and there and to answer the expectations of the players. But it's still a good space game that, I hope, will have a very successful future.
The thing to consider about ED is that there is no GRINDING if you can just get out of the HURRY HURRY RUSH RUSH to the final boss and end credits. It's only a grind if you get in a hurry. I've logged over 12,000 hours playing ED. I have all the ships, and the fleet carrier. I have Elite rank in Trade, Exploration, as well as Combat. The parts you don't like, you can simply ignore.
@@Lothaii just do what you like doing. You can go from the starter Sidewinder to flying an Anaconda in under 20 hours of game play doing absolutely nothing but exploring. And go a very long way to completing the GRIND for either Empire or Federation rank to unlock ships in the process. Only needing to complete the various rank up missions. Bounty Hunting is an excellent means of collecting both data and manufactured mats if you use a ship with limpets and a collection limpet controller. And make decent credits in the process. Up to you how much risk you take. Mining is a great way to make money relatively fast once you get the hang of it. But just putting a single mining laser and collector limpet controller on your ship you can pick up Raw mats from any asteroid ring or belt. You can get by without the collector limpets but it's a lot more work.
While trekkiing out to unlock the various Guardian modules or farm the high level raw mats can feel all grindy and stuff. Bringing a friend along (operating as a Wing) can result in quite a bit of pure fun and shenanigans in the process of getting the stuff you went there for. Enough fun to make you forget it was supposed to be a boring assed grind to do.
Strictly Exploring can take a bit longer if you're just sort of doing it hit or miss. If you really want to go that route there are guides written and researched and videos posted to go from that starter Sidewinder to flying an Anaconda. While completing almost all of the rank grind to unlock either the Federal Corvette or the Imperial Cutter in right at 14 hours of game play. And having something akin to a billion credits to your name in the process.
Exactly. What people REFUSE to understand is that you're not meant to be in a Federal Corvette in a week or even a month. A lot of this stuff is meant to take time. It's why a Power Play module takes 4 weeks to unlock. Progression is supposed to take REAL time. If you collect mats as you "live your life" you'll gradually start unlocking stuff. You'll have a lot more fun if you just set yourself some personal goals and complete them without always worrying about when you're getting end game ships. The people who complain about the grind are doing it to themselves. In the 6 years I've been playing, I haven't had to grind a day in my life.
1) Abandon the fps side (keep space legs and stations) 2) Focus on making the space flight part richer and deeper with engaging multi layered narrative and interesting things to do, discover and influence. 3) Incorporate VR across everything 4) Develop ship interiors.
One of my drop dead number one favorite moments in my limited Star Citizen alpha playtime was flying my Freelancer out to a derelict station, getting up out of the seat, walking back into the cargo hold, manually opening the rear ramp and EVAing out into space, maneuvering myself into the station via jetpack and then around the interior. That's the kind of comprehensive space sim experience I want and it doesn't seem like ED is ever going to deliver that.
We have been saying this since 2014 unfortunately with how the game works ships are place holders they arent physical things in the game outside of a collision box. They would have to rework the entire game.
What appeals to me about Elite Dangerous is that I feel insignificant. I’m a nobody with a starship in a universe of nobodys with starships. Anything I do is because I want to do it and it only *really* benefits me. Sure I can add my drop of water to the ocean of community goals and stuff, but I only do them when I want to. I forge my own path, and at this point mainly to spite frontier.
I went from VR to 2k screen. It was just too messy for me to handle things like Discord (I am in a playergroup that has a PMF in the game) when in VR. And I do not miss the VR to be honest. It gets old quite quickly and the hazzle with the headset, cables etc is just not for me. It is a great experience the first 2-3 hours though.
i agree, Elite is 100% a VR game, there is just no way I play this game without a headset. i do miss a few things like external tools and its a pain to take the headset off just to lookup somethings on inara because the donkeys at frontier are unable to provide essential stuff in-game, but hey still, I would never go back to flat game.
I'm also a huge fan of using Voice Attack with the game. Yes, it's a paid product, but the ability to verbally command your ship is so nice (ESPECIALLY with the number of controls this game has). I pair it with the HCS Voice Packs, so I get voices like Tom Baker or Brian Blessed as ship systems. Helps tremendously with the immersion, in my opinion.
CMDR Smorgasmorgue 1700+ hours in Horizons and I just bought Odyssey a couple weeks ago so I'm trying to figure that out. You are right on that this game is a mile wide and an inch deep. SOOOO much potential in Elite and so many wasted opportunities by the developers. I wish I could try VR but I lost my right eye in 2006 and the left is damaged, so no 3D vision anymore. On the bright side, playing this game while wearing an eyepatch really makes you feel like a pirate! Great review! I subscribed.
Thank you T-Bone lad, your support is always appreciated from Reggie and the boys. So sorry to hear about your vision situation, but you're one of the gang now and we got your back.
@T Bone I too am blind in one eye and need a contact lens in the other - so normal depth perception is pretty much gone (don't expect me to catch anything tossed my way) - but VR (at least for me) is still amazingly immersive. I have both the original Vive for gaming on the PC and the new PSVR2. It's not like the old 3D movies where you need both eyes to get the 3D effect. If you ever get a chance to try it out somewhere and see if it will work for you, I highly recommend that you do - there is nothing like sitting in the cockpit of your ship in ED and looking up through the canopy at just how vast the space station your are parked in really is. It's pretty awe inspiring.. it's just a shame about the grind.
you can still experience vr without both eyes, it won't be stereoscopic but it will still be immersive and 360 degrees of viewing and make you feel like you're actually in the ship. I've tested this by closing one eye while wearing an oculus quest 2 headset. Give it a try if you can, you might be surprised. Plus one really cool thing is with certain VR software you can disable the right or left side of the view and get 2x the performance out of the device/your computer.
My guilty pleasure is my old type 7. I love the space trucking element and the sound of that ship, it just felt like you were hauling heavy cargo and that the ship was almost shaking itself to bits as you hear it creaking as you accelerated. It's just a shame that when I last played a few years ago, it wasn't as profitable as other methods (mining). I don't regret my time playing, and it is a game to not rush but take your time with (hurry up slowly) and get to appreciate the different ships as you get them. Some locations are truly beautiful. Engineering is a massive pita tho, I unlocked a few bits and it's the thing that made me leave the game in the end. Devs could easily have implemented a progression system for this tied into the different tiers of ships where you unlock basic engineering mods as you get into the bigger and better ships, and then maybe (once you have a ship with a half decent jump range) then switch to more of the current method of grinding in farther away locations for the final higher tier engineering mods.
can you own a ship about the size of the millenium falcon? If so can you walk around the interiors/customize , customize over all look of a ship? Looking for something like a cargo ship type game that I can chill with friends delivering goods from place to place. Basic Han Solo / guardians of the galaxie fantasy. Is that possible with this game?
@@jubeibob Unfortunately can't walk around the inside of your ship - but there's plenty of ships around that size (as well as bigger and smaller ones). The game still has by far the best and most intuitive UI for a space sim - even beating Star Citizen (where you can walk around your ship, but the UI and controls feel much more clunky and dysfunctional in comparison) You can multicrew ships though. Had a lot of fun getting a mate into the game who manned the little snub fighter I had in my ship. Honestly, I'm very tempted of getting back into the game, do some mining, exploring etc.
I've been playing for years, and when I made the jump to VR it caught me off guard on how much better it made the game. I honestly can never go back to mo itor play. THEN I made a hulk leap and built a sim chair... Yeah.. I can't ever play this game without any of my gadgets .. but the devs need to sell this to another company that will give this game more love
Been in the black in my Beluga since 17 December 2018 and am on my way back. Im looking forward to cashing out, changing ships and seeing all of the changes since I left the bubble.
It's worth pointing out.... All of the footage was done on PC. As for console, it goes as far as horizons... That's it... It's a shame they discontinued the updates for consoles... I really enjoy this game
Played the original and was a beta backer with a lifetime pass, Played the beta and submitted over 10 gigs of bug data. Absolutely loved it and this game has cost me a fortune. I bought a Thrustmaster HOTAS and built a button box to make things easier and then upgraded to TrackIr and then a Rift CV1 and then a Rift S. So that's about a grand or more but, VR in this game is mind blowing especially as you say in the shit yourself moments, like taking your eye off the ball when fuel scooping and them Neutrons. Grinded away with the engineers and pimped some pretty tasty upgrades for several ships, so much so a well known griefer from Hogwarts got his bollocks kicked in :). Elite in trading and just off Elite in combat and exploration I think I was. Burnt out after 7 years when odyssey dropped, the wing I was in fell apart due to real life and for me the controls changed. Playing in VR I had a macro program running in the background so a single press on a button on my throttle would perform stuff like permission to dock and the auto dock with out having to go though all the UI menus and loads of others like different power modes. I might have another go sometime, but the game is a massive time suck and you're right about Inara and the third party apps, they are a necessity to guide you, back in Beta you had fuck all and was flying blind. It is a great game with a steep learning curve, but if you take it at your own pace and not try to rush things the grind becomes OK. Oh and if you like mining you should have tried the original mining it was shit, nobody done it and complained like fuck about it, that's why it was changed, the newer mining was far far better. Still is the best space game of this genre although Mass Effect was great and the upcoming Starfields looks interesting, but Elite will always have a place in my heart as I love it and remember the fond times playing it back in 84. I retire soon, so I might pick up where I left off and go for triple Elite.
I've logged over 5,000 hours in this game and I still enjoy it quite a bit! I was braced for a scathing, jaded review, but I found yours to be refreshingly fair, with roughly the same gripes and praises that I do. I really do hope that FD will treat Odyssey similarly to Horizons, in that the features will grow and mature over the DLC's lifetime.
I’m currently stuck into NMS. I’ve also done a lot on SC. Bit something about elite continually draws me back. I sometimes wonder if the developers themselves know of the huge potential this game still has. Appreciate the comments commander Wolf!
I think the reason why I love Elite dangerous is the VR capability I haven't played the newest version of the game since I heard VR support is super bad but nothing compares to the sense of scale and immersion you get when you're actually sitting in the cockpit of your viper Mark 3 chasing bounties down in belt clusters
Hard agree. Nothing comes close to the immersion. The vibrations of the reactor, the shadows coming through the cockpit, the subsystems humming away... You. Are. There.
@@michaelmackebon1000 the only thing that would make it better is if I owned that motion Sim called the yaw that actually physically moves you around in the chair to simulate momentum and movement other than that though a nice comfy office chair with a hotas works well
Oh boy this one is difficult to comment on. Back in the day with the Thargoid introduction this game gave me some of the most most unique experiences I've ever had in gaming. The way that Frontier rolled out these elements, with basically little warning or spoiler material for you to encounter on your own was mind blowing at times. I STILL remember my first hyperdiction, very early on before the hype reached YT even. I was genuinely kind of terrified lol. We all know the frustrations since then, the arguments are all too familiar and largely justified. What this game could have been man! oh boy.
Coincidentally agree with 99.5 % of your well presented, heart-felt observations 👍 Finally learning to be a Thargoid killer after being a lover rather than a fighter over the previous 8000+ hours. Plans and player numbers suggest the game is not yet in decline but the player base needs a few studio wins to feel positive again.
steamcharts say 2000-5000 players. not dead, but pretty much an all time low. doesnt account for console and non steam players but still. i only had about 1000 hours but i got tired of the same shit over and over again and any criticism on the forums just leads to censorship so i gave up on fdev.
@@PatrickRatman Steam says higher than the numbers you give these days, increasing, and in no way an -all time low- New 'shit' incoming with thargoid (invasion?) I have to respect your 'give up on Fdev' position. Personally though it seems too dogmatic and emotional. I think they are showing some ability to learn... Two steps forward, one backward maybe. But the studio is sort of getting better since Odyssey reaction slap in face
@@thelionsam by new shit you mean the same shit we've had for the last 2-3 years with a different paint job? Maybe you get some other BS grind to get the same but slightly different weapons the thargs can't disable and that's probably it? Maybe we get the same garbage ground combat with reskinned thargoid enemies? No new ships, no new game mechanics. All of you fdev cultists spewing the same excuses up to and including "if you don't like it then why do you have x number of hours/don't you leave?" Essentially enabling a company that would have great potential to continue to suck while charging extra to suck even harder lmao. Yeah I've given up on fdev, just as much as I've given up on you people to actually be able to hold them accountable for their BS. I'll come back when they show they're actually willing to change and not just throw out excuses like they always have.
@@thelionsam the thing is that they genuinely care about the game. even if investors and shareholders probably pulled most of the money plug you can still see it crawling ahead.
@@sentry1009 I agree. I feel secure about the immediate-medium term future. I still feel engaged. I do believe they are to some degree capable of learning from their mistakes even if the learning curve is not what we players might want...
the problem with "the grind" is that its seem to be a common thing "make money fast" "rank up fast" "best weapons fast" ... well that mindsets are somewhat the main theme in the socials surrounding the game, in reality, this isn't the case, if you just play and enjoy the game, most materials come to you during whatever gameplay you choose, but if short attentionspan and instant gratification is a issue, elite does become VERY Grindy. the engineers tree is designed to "make you" experience other aspects of the game aspects one would never had even looked into. as example to get G4+G5 on Thrusters you will need to switch to another engineer, and this requires you to do things you would not have done if not forced to do them, this is not to make you mad, this is to make you experience another part of the game, so you can just do this .. and get your G5 mod, but while you are doing it, you will maybe find another thing you may or may not enjoy doing, the rest of the stuff comes to you anyway. like the 5k LY Requirement for unlocking .. everyone is like "woooow this is going to take forever!!" but in reality it encourages you to build aa ship for this purpose, which turns out to be pretty easy to do, then interact with the galaxy map in a new way (as you have to make a trip for a purpose) then execute it, the execution itself is not grindy, sure it shoulds "holy shit" when you read it, but when you actually doing it, its like the greatest thing ever saying .. "wow I just made a 5k LY trip in a 300k ship" and it felt like it was over in 10 minutes. that is what makes the game great, having the wrong exceptions to be at the end game within the return-policy-time is what makes the game a Job rather than a experience.
What can I say ...when people say "grindy" I recommend them to play Lineage 2. Crafting ammo set (4-5 items) will easy make you grind 6 months. Then you will want enchant it (engineering) - +3 will take you 1-2 more months. To go over +3 and get bonuses, you will have 60% chance to succeed or 40% to break item -> back to craft. I was playing that game like 10 years and had +4 set only once on x15 rates server which took me only 2 months for +4 set. That is The Grind. Or how do you like leveling soul crystals for 80+ levels ? - Room opens 1 per hour by the clock. You enter there, sit in shadows. Room switch once per 8 mins. You don't fight because loot is trash for you already. So you may have 5-6 rooms during the hour. One of them MAY be raid boss, which should be killed and MAY level soul crystal with 5% chance by +1. You need to do +3 there ... takes 3 months or so this way. Just 10-12 hrs sitting in shadows and reading books while time passes.
If you think about it, it's a sandbox game so just play around figure out what you like about the game and then do that. The journey is the destination and that's kind of the point. If you make it a grind it will be a grind but I'd you take your time and do what you want and don't treat it like "I have to unlock everything" then it's just pure fun. And the thing is, when you unlock everything does it change the game? 🤔 Have you beaten the game then? No. life goes on and things are just easier, but easier isn't always more fun. So remember you're not unlocking more fun at the end of the tunnel. Just more options.
It's weird that I never found Elite grindy at all. Have people never played classic MMOs? I mean, I know Elite isn't a "real" typical MMO, but in most if not all MMOs, end game gear takes weeks per piece if even that. In Elite I can fully engineer a ship in a single play session of gathering mats (say 2-4 hours). The method of gathering those mats is repetitive and terrible though, but you can also opt to gather them the "correct" way, albeit it'll take a lot longer.
Anything can be a grind, if people only care to rush through a game as fast as possible before moving on to do the same with the next game (and start complaining again).
I played like 600 hours total before and after the Horizons update. Honestly the only things that kept me going that long were initially the novelty of a flying game with a HOTAS as this was my first, and later some friends I had made. The game itself though was just an empty-feeling grind-fest. I appreciated that the gameplay worked and I wasn't dealing with bugs like I would in SC, but still it was really just a stand-in for the game I really want. I still enjoy flying in other games, but a game where flying is the point is no longer something I can get into.
Me laughing about the complaints about being on foot when I play star citizen and constantly get stuck in elevators, can’t leave space stations and can’t equip gear lol I gotta get back into elite
This action packed trailer really is not a fair reflection of the game. It is amazingly slow and multiplayer doesn't really work that well. It can be lonely and boring as hell. Still got the magic, that keeps me coming back, but the on-foot stuff looks awful and I've yet to even want it.
As a console player, the game is still one I love to play despite everything that's going to happen with console elite, while I'm working my way to become a thargoid hunter now I usually spend my time helping out new commanders, the game has so much potential, but frontier keep making the worst decisions at times. Will we ever get new ships? probably not
PowerPlay was an objective failure. Engineering wasn't fully thought out. Lots of weapons and modules need tweaking/rebalancing/redoing entirely. Lots of lore locations need editing/fixing, or remodeling. New gameplay features need to be sprinkled in all over the place (both base game and Odyssey) (EVAs, Base Building, Ship Interiors, etc as examples). Carrier CMDRS need more modules to choose from to add or not to their carriers (Pioneer Supplies badly needs a purpose onboard carriers to give CMDRs a reason to choose them over stations). My two cents.
I was an original backer back in the day but you hit the nail on the head when you said it's just grindy grindy grindy. I lost interest 6 years ago and want to get back into it but it's just exactly the same. I went straight to SOL when I bought the game and haven't ventured more than half a dozen jumps since. Every time I load it I get the same gameplay.
How is visiting Sol the first thing you did? Everyone else needs a Sol permit acquired by reaching Petty Officer rank in the Federation Navy to enter the system. Your first thing couldn't have been visiting Sol. Make it make sense.
@@horrgakx I went looking for it and Alpha and Beta backers were granted a Sol permit. So I guess your story makes sense now. It's a shame you never left the bubble because there's a big Milky Way galaxy to get lost in and explore. Some of my favorite moments in game I was hundreds of light-years from the nearest station in the middle of nowhere seeing stars no one had ever bothered to visit. Or just chilling in a low sec gas giant ring and scanning for pirates to bounty hunt. It's only a grind if you're not enjoying what you're doing.
The developers are the worst idiots in history. Anyone else being in charge of it would make this game one of the best mass multiplier experiences in no time.
@@cockneygamer The people who design the game itself are utterly useless too. It takes nothing for them to change a couple of numbers and decrease the grind or to spawn a bit more ships and make assassinations (just one example) more difficult. Simple number changes can rebalance the game and make it less painful and overall better but they can't/won't do it. Nah, we are not talking just greed here, this is about stupidity and inadequacy on every level.
can you own a ship about the size of the millenium falcon? If so can you walk around the interiors/customize , customize over all look of a ship? Looking for something like a cargo ship type game that I can chill with friends delivering goods from place to place. Basic Han Solo / guardians of the galaxie fantasy. Is that possible with this game?
I bought the game back in 2015 and have played it for insane hours (5,000+). In many ways it's a gorgeous and compelling world. However: The frustration of not being able to fully experience the game without endless grinding for engineering (e.g. not possible to fight aliens or properly support teammates) was bad enough, and then Odyssey nearly made me give up. The on-foot combat is *so* dumb. How do you have a space sim with a complex and stunning approach to zero-G ship fights, and then have shooter combat that's just a bunch of hopping around interchangeable bases? A truly uninspired and boring addition, that used resources which could have improved other aspects of the game. BUT, bitching aside, I do still play. There's still a thrill from realizing that every star in the sky represents an actual system that I can jump to, and I still love the moments of nailing some acrobatic dogfight move. My feeling is that it should be possible to just buy improved items, via normal earnings, instead of a specialized grind. Or alternately, use some of your space dollars to hire NPCs to create passive income or accomplish fetch-y stuff. People who can't afford (or fit) a full flight control setup might be interested to know that I've had pretty good results combining keyboard controls with a rollerball style mouse (I'm currently using a Logitech MX Ergo).
Wow - my first "Reggie" video but certainly now the first of many!!! OMG thank you so much. You seem to capture (in your own super inimitable accent and way) EXACTLY my thoughts. I am an original Elite player for the 80s and played Elite 2 etc and almost soiled myself in anticipation of the 2014 kickstarter game. And when it came.. disaster... with no HOTAS I tried many times to complete the dull and exacting tutorial tasks and when FINALLY I managed to get into the game I simply could not bridge the chasm between my ignorance of the key bindings and techniques and the games demands... I stopped playing and did not return for FIVE YEARS!!!! After hearing about Horizons, I decided to buy a cheap HOTAS and with the many TH-cam tutorials (Massive thanks to Obsidian Ant and to CMDR Exigeos (and by God I miss his vids now on ED) I managed to scramble up the steep learning curve. 3 years later I am ELITE as an explorer - having grinded my ass off for hours beyond count doing the road to riches and deep space exploration projects - but can barely hold my own in any combat situation, am totally baffled by all this Thargoid nonsense - and only recently recognising the need for mods and sites such as INARA. WTF - Odyssey !!! I still find it next to impossible to complete the tutorial - it tells you FA and has no context help and has nothing to offer my explorer heart other than crappy exo biology which is sooo badly thought out my ONLY reason for pursuing it is to relieve the monotony of deep space grind and the beauty of the planets... So - like you Reggie - I totally love this game and have done ever since I played on a BBC home computer. But oh... with a bit more focus by FDev ... this game could be superlatively outstanding... Meanwhile, I thank you Reggie, my next challenge is to have a go at mining ... and get VR - any suggestions as to the best VR for a newbie?
Lovely write up my good man! Thank you in particular for the recommendations on the two TH-camrs… they are EXCELLENT and also my go to for when I need help. I also quite enjoy the opinions of Yamiks. As for VR, I’d go simple with the Quest 2 and a cable connection if at all possible. However, it can take time getting use to and set up, but if you have the rig for it, it’s just a magical experience. Scooping near a sun is genuinely a scary moment. Thank you for the support lad, I do warn you though that not all my videos will be space or elite themed, but this is definitely an area of huge interest for me!
@@cockneygamer Many thanks Reggie for the VR advice and YES a very honourable mention to Yamiks - I love his Eastern European twang and wicked humour - they are a great combo! And yes - I realise your channel is much more than ED!! So having subscribed I will certainly watch with interest - keep up the good work!
Ah thank you mate, means a lot to me to hear you all speak like this as it pushes me forward. I’m actually going to do a video on VR in elite dangerous in the coming weeks once I can clear out some of the backlog of games about to hit us (cities skylines, Forza, cyberpunk dlc etc). But fear not, more Elite content will be coming this year.
Just swapped from PS4 to PC. Had a flight stick already since I play Warthunder, and I'm falling in love all over again. I just wish I had some friends who could help me out, lol.
Playing on PC since 2016 here, nearing 14000 hours played. What keeps me going is the BGS (Background Simulation). Building an Empire with your PMF (Player Minor Faction), competing against other Squadrons interfering with your Plans to get their own done, all the while having a wonderful group of people behind you.
the ground game grind does suck, the regular engineering is ok. now that the thargoid invasion has started, there is even more end game to fight or provide rescue or support supplies.
Not being able to to hold my own in dog fights l tended to be a solo player which made the game a lonely affair especially as l was an explorer and would head of into the dark unknown to scan systems & planets for weeks on end before returning to the bubble to collect my money. What l would really like is a storyline woven into the game, the original had it in a way as once you reached a milestone you got a Boss unit to fight & l feel this would appeal to many players. My idea would be as follows; you go exploring, once you had a number of new planets scanned you got a mission to explore a planet that would open another mission once you had scanned a number of planets & eventually find a fully engineered upgrade
Played regularly for years, all in VR. Don't bother with Odyssey, it was coded after anyone at FDEV that knew what they were doing with their engine had long since left. The best thing that could happen to it now is for another company to buy it and convert it to UE5, sadly FDEV stopped really caring about it long ago.
As someone who plays both elite and Star citizen, can’t say one is better than the other….. Star citizen despite not being a released game still is a fully playable and functions better than a lot of other games That had been released… is my preferred game and soon will be on another level I think, it’s nice to be able to live on my ship
Thank you for the advice Yamiks lad, appreciate this. And also a big thank you personally, your videos have been a huge help to me as I started on my Elite journey.
@@TheYamiks Yes absolutely you are. I mentioned it in another comment somewhere here but if it's ok I'll update the description on the channel to link to you. Thanks again and keep up the great work!
Identical looking stations, similar planets, no new ships, under developed multicrew features, no ship interiors, procedural same lookalike environments...
exactly my point of view, from the moment i was struck with Elite virus, i'm always saying this to friends, this game you will love and hate at the same time FDEV needs to listen to their playerbase, fuck the other games they have, ED should be their main focus also with the VR thing, i only came back to elite just for VR experience and i'm bamboozled with the fact how odyssey didn't implement it properly i've also few ideas about elite but who cares, like : -specialized npcs on your ship, better than only one fighter crew npc ( exo biologist, astro miner, trade specialist ) just to name some, with perks like for instance exo biologist could operate a remote drone to help you with finding plants on planets, astro miner could have expertise about asteroid fields, also could operate a fighter-like drone to prospect guaranteed better asteroids, trade specialist could refresh trade routes with high profit on your galaxy map to name good value markets... and that's the one thing that could make your big ship feel more alive
Generally speaking on most planets (the ones you can land on anyway). You can also walk around in starports (they all look similar though) and on your freighter. You can’t walk around your own ship. And generally speaking from walking to ship it is not seamless but rather like a load in screen (not sure if that bothers you or not). For me the walking elements could have been great if they invested more time into it. If they did allow you to walk around your own ship and just had more stuff to do on planets in general, then maybe they were into something. As it is, it’s a novelty feature that gives you about 5 mins of fun.
@@cockneygamer I like to know either way, so can live with compromise. I can only imagine what modders could do if given the chance. As modders have a knowledge and passion for a game that possibly gets lost after a few years by devs. Kudos
I just came back to ED after over a year away after being extremely disappointed by the Odyssey flop. I find it to be such a great way to relax. It’s a brilliant game with so much to enjoy.
I can so very much support your assessment and would advise everybody new to the game to merely get the base game and forget about Odyssey. My reasoning behind that: - The space part is simply awesome, second to none. - The on-foot part, just as said in the video, is rather weak. It's a mediocre FPS shooter bolted on to an awesome space game. - Arguably a lot of graphics actually look better on Horizon than on Odyssey. But that might also be a matter of taste. The pure fact is that they changed a lot of things in the engine. An important thing there being, that the old planetary surface was completely seeded, while the new system assembles a planets surface from tiles. Which means that after a while you learn to see the repeated patters of those tiles and at some range distances over the ground you can see ugly overlap-patterns where the tiles get merged together. - Horizon is not plagued by all the stability issues of Odyssey. When Odyssey launched, for the first 6 months i barely managed to scratch two digit FPS. Then they finally fixed the problems for my specific hardware and i am back to 90+ FPS, but there's still plenty of reliable reports of people out there, who a year after launch have serious problems. And this is not limited to old hardware, but seems to be all over the place. You might just have a "too new and powerful" GPU, for which they messed up the settings and it again starts to do messy stuff. * - The game indeed is best played on a HOTAS (HOTAS = Hands on Throttle And Stick, means a setup with joystick and throttle) in my eyes. But as it was said in the video, keyboard and mouse or a controller also work perfectly fine. Except: if you play Odyssey. The reworked version of the galaxy map still kind of -can- be used with a HOTAS or controller, but it requires many more inputs to achieve the same goal. It is a good deal more cumbersome to use. (I personally feel that whoever designed the old menus spent a lot of time planing for all kinds of input devices and did a good job at that. For the galaxy map, he either naturally came to a good conclusion, or he actually watched a pilot instruction video on how to use the navigation system on a modern day airliner. The guy who designed the new interface seems to have plenty of experience in designing smartphone games, so he arranged the buttons in a way which is most useful on a touch screen, without considering how it would be used with HOTAS or a controller. ) And i have found at least two menu points in the new version of the station interface, which you can not reach with the up/down/left/right navigation of a HOTAS or controller. They only are there, on the top of the list, when the station is in specific states. But if you then want to go up to use that option, your selection instead jumps to the bottom of the list. Yes, they are conditional things, they happen rarely. But they can be there, and up to now the only way i found to access them is by switching to the mouse. *: Examples: 1. When Odyssey launched, it always rendered everything. Starting with the characters eyeballs, hair, facial features, body, etc... then the whole interior of the cockpit, then everything outside of it. In a 360° arc. And only after rendering everything, it cut it down to what you actually see. Now compare to the video above, when doing stuff in game, how often do you see those things? (Or also, how many people see their own eyeballs, face and hair all of the time? ) And it was not the developers who found that. It was the community who reported it to them, along with a list of hardware where they found the issues. Then over several patches, always one entry of the list suddenly did not have the problem again. So the community asked what about the rest of the list. So the next patch, one or two more entries of the list were fixed. So the community had to bitch-slap them again, ask again for the rest of the list. Over months. It seems (have to emphasize that... i have no insight into the code, but the way how things were successively were fixed one by one gives that impression) like the game engine has a problem on the default setting on its rendering routine. And instead of fixing the root problem, they step by step implemented workarounds for each piece of hardware reported. So, if you have a GPU which was not reported often enough by the community that it was fixed already, you have a good chance to still have issues. 2. Level of detail scaling for quite a while was non-functional and in some cases even reverted. Which means, depending on what hardware the game was running on, you might have been lucky and everything was rendered at high quality, no matter the distance. So, far away objects were rendered in full quality, to then be cut down to two pixels. In worse cases, it was even reverted, so far away objects were rendered in full quality and took up a lot of GPU power, while objects nearby were rendered in low-quality, looking terribly bad. 3. Only a few weeks ago, the community found another thing. Depending on quality settings a volumetric effect is normally applied to a scene between 3 to 10 times, depending on quality setting. Except on some hardware it is run over 170 times, but only when quality is set to "medium". And Odyssey, a year after launch, seems to still be full of such issues. If all parts of your computer are absolute mainstream, you by now should be fine enough. But if you have just one item in your PC which is not exactly what FD expects to be there, chances are that your will experience bad performance issues. :( So yea, unless you for some reason want to also play a very weak FPS or care for the Thargoid story line, which at least up to today still is nothing else than one video (which you also see in the Horizon game), some sounds inside a signal scanner and a lot of text going on on Galnet (which is best read on an internet browser and not in-game), there is nothing really of value yet in Odyssey. (On actual combat against Thargoids: it's still the very same as before Odyssey has launched. Nothing changed there, you can experience it just as well on the base game. ) While the base game, including the Horizon expansion, provides you with an experience second to none. I really recommend to check that part out.
I tried to play this with a controller and thought it was extremely difficult. I recently got a flight stick for another game and was told to try ED with it. I'm excited to see how this goes
well now that they aren't developing a new dcl, hopefully they turn more of their focus on what's already their and needs improving (though new thing with the thargoids is pretty interesting i will admit)
Yes I will say and something that wasn't mentioned here in my review is that the new Thargoids interaction could open up a new chapter if they play it well. We shall see! Thank you for noting it Mr Exists!
fixing somethings that has ben sold already doesn't create immediate profits, so no, they wont. this days, Frontier isn't really in the game development business, they just moving boxes that do contain games made by people that happen to be in the vicinity of them.
@@nullx8 it is a "live service game" money could still be made off it through arx and cosmetics, if they keep improving the game, that'd bring more people in and keep more people, and the more people that join, the more likely that some of those people are willing to spend money on arx. just look at that diablo game, people spending thousands on pixels,
As much fun as I've had with this game, it was too rough to watch the dev team ignore their playerbase over and over, especially when doing things like they've killed supporting VR for a below-average fps. This was the first time I got burned with a DLC and just kept hoping they'd change until realizing they just don't care about the people that contribute the money for their paychecks. And that really hurts after spending $500 for equipment just to play this game in all its VR glory with a flight stick.
I loved this game but haven't played it in years. Still it's one of the best PC games I've played, I even bought it on PS4 and played it there in hope for future psvr support. Alas it did not come to be. I can't even remember what I was doing when I quit on PC. On PS4 I'm getting closer to Sagittarius A*
Star Citizen has nailed the immersion side of things, primarily with its ability to walk onto and around interactive ship interiors. No stupid 'no mans sky' like teleportation. Frontier stated that it wasnt wanted by players and that it would detract from gameplay ... truth, it was because they couldnt be bothered to create the short animations and remodeling of the cockpits. It pisses me off coz Ive experienced the difference it makes for a truely immersive experience. Im gona come back to elite for a bit though, at least while SC implements and improves it new server meshing and persistent entity streaming tech. 👍
It is a good argument, that eventually you'd feel like you have to walk for too long to your ship. But the alternative is, that since most ships have two entrances, the front entrance would be the shortcut to cockpit, while back entrance would let you go through your entire ship. The real reason they don't want to do interiors, is that it's a huge labour to create individual interiors to every ship that's already there, and set a standard that every future ship needs the same treatment. On top of that, balancing ships would no longer be a case of adding another compartment slot, or reducing it, you would need to do some changes to the interior to make it work too. Teleporting still would probably be a necesity, even if hidden like with elevators. You see, any physics engine starts to go crazy once your character stands on a moving vehicle. Sometimes you will straight up die, sometimes you will get ragdolled and fall, sometimes your character will start vibrating and than pass through the vehicle or get launched into space. Most games fix it, by turning vehicle interiors into something like a separate instance. For example in Warframe, railjack interior is a separate map, that's just linked to a remote controlled vehicle. by approaching this vehicle, you are teleported to the static interior with windows that work like portals, so you get immersive view on the outside of the moving ship. It also allows them to easily change the size of the interior without touching the main ship! Now RSI said they don't care about optimization, and decided to make all ships hollow with physically integrated interiors, so now 8 years later you can still easily break your legs for no reason or phase through ship walls if it's even mildly rotating...
@@WwZa7 All good points, its just a shame its such a difficult task to create this seamless aspect that really transforms gameplay. SC is FAR from stable, granted, so im leaving them to it for a while to improve overall and ive come back to ED Odyssey. TBH I havnt minded the TP'ing into the ship too much, just being picky and wanting something that isnt quite available or possible yet. We'll get the 'perfect' game one day!
@@WwZa7 Which is exactly why Star Citizen even in the state of Alpha is a far better Space Sim. Ive played both since the early days and up until this year SC could not hold a candle to ED. Now it has reversed itself. Now SC is a better game that really puts a person in that universe. I havent logged into ED in months but am now playing SC every single day.
@@WwZa7 For me better in nearly every way, While ED has this literally infinite system its lifeless and hollow, the ships are not even in the same league as SC at all, Where ED was always built around being in a ship at all times and now they are trying to change that SC was always built even in the early days of you being a person and the ships a tool. walking out to a ship and then boarding it never ever gets old. the newer ships are even better now having all the systems accessible and panels you can open or use storage etc. To me that puts me in the world. The gun play and the weapons are all in a totally different leage as well. the polish even on a base model sub machine gun is literally decades ahead of the new very basic and ugly weapons of the latest ED expansion even shown in this video.. they look terrible and are uninspired ( which is how I feel about most of the older ships in ED as well) they are ugly and plain and dont inspire me to really love it.. Where every single time I fly my RSI Scorpius, or any other other of the warships in SC I literally am drooling how good they look and give a sense of pride of ownership. Where in ED I hardly EVER wanted to use 3rd person to stare at my ship.. The art style just works for me.. same with ground vehicles. look at the vehicles there and then look what we have in ED.. very uninspired Id have fired the art/design team a long time ago myself.. This part may be a negative to most of you. But I also like the fact I can spend real dollars and get what I want right now.. instead of having to grind. I personally like being able to pay to get the equipment I want with real money. and finally events like Jump Town. where the entire server is focused on 1 little facility bringing massive ground and air warfare and epic huge battles. tanks, Anti-air, Cargo haulers bringing in those vehicles with fighters and Corvettes flying cover for them.. its just freaking unreal. huge fighter wars in atmosphere while there is a ground siege going on below is really amazing and shows what the future holds where there are 1000s of people in 1 area. Nothing I've done over the years in ED is even close.
I fell in love with the original Elite in 1984, so in my view (and I may be wrong) Elite Dangerous should have been a realistic space flight trading/combat/exlporation sim first. By this, I mean Frontier should have concentrated on the base gameplay of what made the original Elite so good. Basically they should have aimed for a game that had all the features of Frontier Elite 2, trading, exploration, combat, atmospheric planets, Thargoids, missions (maybe even some single player story missions and rpg elements and multiplayer trading, exploration and combat missions) and competent space pirates... Then they should have added space weather, more types of aliens, planetary weather (snow, rain, sand storms, etc) and everything that you'd want to see in a realistic space flight sim... and then when that was all done, they should have added the PvP stuff like fighters, multicrew and the space-legs FPS stuff. I think Fdev tried to do too many things, which resulted in a hodge-podge of a game where nothing really works all that well... They should have concentrated on getting the core right, and then added more flashy stuff later.
If they allowed me to be in different ships at different times, Elite would actually be really fun. I hate the fact that if I go into deep space, I'm stuck. That's it. Until you travel back to the bubble, you can't do anything else. So boring. I want to put a ship into deep space, while still being able to do combat, mining or transportation missions. Unbelievably dumb game mechanic.
I’ve had this game for several years on my Xbox one. I am in the process of transferring that data to PC. I hope I get to keep all of my ships and progress. I had to decommission my carrier. I have 41 ships that are engineered.
I watched my dad play this a few years back, I recently wanted to play ot myself but saw the negative reviews so I'm here to figure out if it's worth it
Honestly mate, if on PC the base game (which includes horizons) is worth it for the $10 or less that you can get it for off numerous sites. Totally worth it and very little risk, but potentially HUGE reward. The issues us players have really revolves around the recent DLC and just the general lack of support in recent years. But still jolly good fun.
Couldn’t agree more here. With all its faults it’s still wonderful to step back in. I find myself going back every couple of months and enjoying it all over (and forgetting my control setup)
Well I know I've been traveling across the Galaxy for three Earth days. And have not found nothing yet. Thank God for the fuel scoop. But I do like exploring. Trust me I'll be all over that Galaxy before it said done. Even though it's going to take forever. But game on my friends.
Elite is still a thing and Fdevs are continuing the story. The console version to be honest was a cash grab that should have never happened. A game on the scale of Elite can't be developed for console with out major short cuts that will just piss off your PC players. Which fdevs did that and more. 😄FDEVS did take some major short cuts by removing some major features. Oringnally Elite was going to almost as good as Star Citizen. Fdevs planned to have players board their ships just like star citizen and walk around kn them. There were plans for Earth like planets you could land on and One player discovered code that would allow players to build bases on certain planets but all of that disappeared when the console version was announced. Even with those major short cuts Fdevs had choose between a,major feature or continued support on console. Which is why CIG made Star Citizen a PC only game they knew it was not possible to do what Fdevs were trying to do. Has Fdevs made some mistakes?? 😄 yeessssss but now they're slowly getting back on track with the pc only Elite. Today in Fdevs financial reports Frontier is saying they are now focused on growing the Elite dangerous community. So Elite will be around for years to come. It may not be what certain players want it to be but Elite Dangerous will still be a thing in the future.
Is there a way to mod so it shows you where to go to get the engineering materials? Like in game. I went back to try engineering and was such a grind and constantly needing to load up another screen to see what I needed was annoying and time consuming. I just want to log in farm some materials and buy new weapons. The grind just kills the game and the need to use mods or websites to find out what to do is ridiculous
I would say things are getting very interesting, death star goids bearing down on the bubble. Mega ships blowing up, massive death beams being corrupted and black paint.
I’ve certainly been ganked a lot yes! Battles do take place for sure, but it takes a long time to get a ship battle ready these days. But it’s fun, and honestly for the case game which includes horizons, it’s a no brainer at what they sell it for.
i wanna love it. but i feel like the focus of the development is too much on things that dont really matter to the common gamer. the one thing i need is fluid gameplay and seamless missions and such and this game doesnt have either imo. you accidentally attack one wrong npc or they get in the way and you hit em once and 2 hours later you might be back to killing.... its just a massive super slow time sink with very little reward. and lets not even get into simply setting up a hotas.... gl though i hear a few people truly love this game and most of them are the development team.
i have played grind games i like them but elite is more than grind you need one life to get engineering and thats shit if you play solo and the biggest problem is the game is complicated as hell you cant play with out 3rd party sites or tutorial of internet because the design of this game ruins the expirience to the worse after you realise what you have to do to get a good ship..
I haven't played ED for over 2 years, ever since I bought a new computer. I had put a couple of hundred hours in on it and had a healthy bank balance. I am upgrading again I am wondering if it still worth reinstalling the game. I didn't mind the grind to be honest, it was relaxing espeically doing the long haulage routes, or mining. I always knew that if I wanted a bit of action I could always do a bit of bounty hunting, but I would like some input from those who have continued with the game. Has the recent updates improved game play or have been detrimental?
I've tried a few times to get into the game-play. I think this video helped me a little. I usually hate games with no path or goal. Even X-4 Foundations has paths and goals even though they may not be spelled out clearly. I'll need to try again and just explore. Worry less on what to do and just learn to do things well. Good video. Thanks .
I'm with you. I played for probably 50+ hours. There are aspects that are fun but it just felt like too much repetition without purpose. I am a big flight sim fan so I get the pleasure of VR in a cockpit. I still remember the Holy Crap! moment the first time I strapped on a VR headset and got into the cockpit of an FW190. I imagine doing that in a space ship is just as good (I got the VR headset after I left ED behind so I have never used VR in ED). Still, just not for me. I guess I need an actual game in my game 😀
Yeah that's why SC is such a better game. If you're gonna base your whole game on nothing but flying and exploring you can't have a bunch of planet that all look the same and add the ability to actually leave your spaceship so late into the game, so badly done and for PC only
i dont play elite anymore because i dont play just space sims, but i have spend much more than 1k hours in it and i dont regret any of it. I have all the ships, full engineered ships for anything thats comes in mind. i was a miner, a player pirate, a member of ANTIZENO, done prety much everything other than fuel rats and sometimes i miss it so much. I was playing with HOSAS and if they were still usable i guess i would still be playing. Anyway, i definently recomend this game. you ll have at least 100 good hours in it even if you like just one thing from all the things it has to offer.
I love the game but if they don't go pack to developing VR I will spend no more money on it. I am over 2000 hours in this game. Ody is still an unfinished game and always will be till they put VR in it like they promised.
I bought the game back in 2014 and have been playing off and on at least once a month since. FDEV's biggest mistakes were not following through with original ideas pitched since 2012, implementing power play, and engineers, lurching and haphazard implementation of thargoid war, ignoring and not communicating with the community, reliance on third party services vs developing useful in-game functionality, and making EDO more of a space marine/ground pounder and generic fps tacked onto a space sim. But yeah....typical sloppy live service game.
Wow .well spoken. I too feel your hurt ,they hurt us first. Played since 2016.. i left the game with 6 billion in credits. And i can't stop thinking of all the hrs. Of game play wasted....if they would have just stayed on track..i would still be there..as would so many players..our klan was over 200 players..we were RAXXAL...MISS YOU GUYS...SEEKER OUT...
Not for consoles. The game isn't going to get anymore content updates for consoles. We have been left in the dirt. Only security updates will Elite Dangerous get on consoles... So, if you thinking of buying this on console then I'd advise against it.
i dont hate that i love this game. im glad the game existed and i got to experience it. i wouldnt want to live in a world without elite dangerous. its one of the few games that i always find my back to. ive been plying since 2014 when it was in early access.
I put in over 1000 hours in 12 months... Got all the ships I wanted.. All maxed to grade 5... Plus a couple of billion in the bank... Took trips out to Sag A and colonia.... Then Odyssey was released... I never played another hour... Well done Frontier (dicks!) .... My Ps4 and I moved on to other things....
Spoken from a true fan that. It’s actually sad how far this game fell when it was so good at one point. They should almost scrap it entirely, and just work on an entirely new sequel of sorts and start again.
It's one of the best space game i have played so many helping community like fuel rats and others so many helping discord servers if i find a friendly player who helps u understand the starting it will be best experiance u can ever have i will suggest it to all space loving players 100/100 ♥️♥️
It’s a very solid experience mate! Not sure how big your hard drive is but it’s not massive massive! It was released as a PlayStation game afterall. Usually you can find the base game for under $10. It takes a few hours to learn but then it’s VERY addictive.
I have over 3k hrs into ED back when VR first came out. Just built a new PC and I keep thinking about ED. Should I come back? Whats it like now days? Are all these features still VR friendly?
NEW VIDEO HERE: th-cam.com/video/0tHKx3-N6EM/w-d-xo.html
Even with all it's issues, I'm nearing my 400 hours and just can't seem to put it down. I just wish the developers were in touch with the community more. Still an Elite fan?
Excellent review, and you nail it... in your own special way! I'm someone that played the original Elite on the first generation of microcomputers back in the 80s. Man I played that game to death, back then there was just nothing else like it. I got into ED on PS4 back in 2017. It's a sorrow to me that I've never experienced the game in VR, but I've just never had the time/opportunity/money to get a gaming PC and collect all the necessary bits and pieces. I actually had to sell my PS4 and move to a different country in 2019, but I made a promise to myself to get a PS5 when ED was updated for the next generation of consoles. So you can imagine how I felt about the news that it was NEVER going to be. A freaking disgrace, of which Frontier should be ashamed. So I ended up buying a second-hand PS4 and playing the game again from scratch, just for nostalgia really. Like you I discover the moments of greatness again... and the deep suckiness of the grind and the course of recent events. Perhaps there is still hope, perhaps Frontier will pull off a No Man's Sky and realize what a piece of greatness ED is. Gotta be honest though, I look at all that running around and shooting with _Fifth Element_ style guns in the Odyssey videos and feel utterly underwhelmed. I actually detest FPS games, sad to see ED turning into one.
@@Raygo. you are exactly the sort of player that made elite dangerous such a special community who frontier left behind. It’s a real shame. But thank you if for sharing your story lad. Totally appreciate it!
400 hours? I have over 5k and I'm still going.
@@tweaked7476 you have a much bigger penis lad
I got ED for free late 2020 with epic launcher, i downloaded the game by curiosity and fall in love minutes later during the tutorial. Almost 2 years later I have something like 1.5k hours and I keep coming back from time to time, especially for the current storyline.
I wish frontier development put more money in the game to fill the lack of gameplay here and there and to answer the expectations of the players. But it's still a good space game that, I hope, will have a very successful future.
The thing to consider about ED is that there is no GRINDING if you can just get out of the HURRY HURRY RUSH RUSH to the final boss and end credits. It's only a grind if you get in a hurry. I've logged over 12,000 hours playing ED. I have all the ships, and the fleet carrier. I have Elite rank in Trade, Exploration, as well as Combat. The parts you don't like, you can simply ignore.
what can you suggest to a new player to avoid the grindfest? we are adults now with limited time, I love exploration, will it suffice?
@@Lothaii just do what you like doing. You can go from the starter Sidewinder to flying an Anaconda in under 20 hours of game play doing absolutely nothing but exploring. And go a very long way to completing the GRIND for either Empire or Federation rank to unlock ships in the process. Only needing to complete the various rank up missions. Bounty Hunting is an excellent means of collecting both data and manufactured mats if you use a ship with limpets and a collection limpet controller. And make decent credits in the process. Up to you how much risk you take. Mining is a great way to make money relatively fast once you get the hang of it. But just putting a single mining laser and collector limpet controller on your ship you can pick up Raw mats from any asteroid ring or belt. You can get by without the collector limpets but it's a lot more work.
While trekkiing out to unlock the various Guardian modules or farm the high level raw mats can feel all grindy and stuff. Bringing a friend along (operating as a Wing) can result in quite a bit of pure fun and shenanigans in the process of getting the stuff you went there for. Enough fun to make you forget it was supposed to be a boring assed grind to do.
Strictly Exploring can take a bit longer if you're just sort of doing it hit or miss. If you really want to go that route there are guides written and researched and videos posted to go from that starter Sidewinder to flying an Anaconda. While completing almost all of the rank grind to unlock either the Federal Corvette or the Imperial Cutter in right at 14 hours of game play. And having something akin to a billion credits to your name in the process.
Exactly. What people REFUSE to understand is that you're not meant to be in a Federal Corvette in a week or even a month. A lot of this stuff is meant to take time. It's why a Power Play module takes 4 weeks to unlock.
Progression is supposed to take REAL time. If you collect mats as you "live your life" you'll gradually start unlocking stuff.
You'll have a lot more fun if you just set yourself some personal goals and complete them without always worrying about when you're getting end game ships.
The people who complain about the grind are doing it to themselves. In the 6 years I've been playing, I haven't had to grind a day in my life.
1) Abandon the fps side (keep space legs and stations)
2) Focus on making the space flight part richer and deeper with engaging multi layered narrative and interesting things to do, discover and influence.
3) Incorporate VR across everything
4) Develop ship interiors.
Nailed it Tom lad. That’s what us fans crave.
One of my drop dead number one favorite moments in my limited Star Citizen alpha playtime was flying my Freelancer out to a derelict station, getting up out of the seat, walking back into the cargo hold, manually opening the rear ramp and EVAing out into space, maneuvering myself into the station via jetpack and then around the interior. That's the kind of comprehensive space sim experience I want and it doesn't seem like ED is ever going to deliver that.
We have been saying this since 2014 unfortunately with how the game works ships are place holders they arent physical things in the game outside of a collision box. They would have to rework the entire game.
If you were really Tom Bombadil you would have made a song out of this.
this is all i want mate
What appeals to me about Elite Dangerous is that I feel insignificant. I’m a nobody with a starship in a universe of nobodys with starships. Anything I do is because I want to do it and it only *really* benefits me. Sure I can add my drop of water to the ocean of community goals and stuff, but I only do them when I want to. I forge my own path, and at this point mainly to spite frontier.
once you play elite in VR, you can NEVER go back. I'm waiting for VR to be implemented in odysse on foot so i return
I went from VR to 2k screen. It was just too messy for me to handle things like Discord (I am in a playergroup that has a PMF in the game) when in VR. And I do not miss the VR to be honest. It gets old quite quickly and the hazzle with the headset, cables etc is just not for me. It is a great experience the first 2-3 hours though.
That will never happen. VR was killed after Odyssey release.
i agree, Elite is 100% a VR game, there is just no way I play this game without a headset. i do miss a few things like external tools and its a pain to take the headset off just to lookup somethings on inara because the donkeys at frontier are unable to provide essential stuff in-game, but hey still, I would never go back to flat game.
I'm also a huge fan of using Voice Attack with the game. Yes, it's a paid product, but the ability to verbally command your ship is so nice (ESPECIALLY with the number of controls this game has). I pair it with the HCS Voice Packs, so I get voices like Tom Baker or Brian Blessed as ship systems. Helps tremendously with the immersion, in my opinion.
@@sose6255 your family hates you
@@sose6255 dude is really in an elite dangerous 2022 review calling people nerds
@@sose6255 I fully endorse it, this sounds so fun
@@sose6255 simp
@@sose6255 cracker
CMDR Smorgasmorgue 1700+ hours in Horizons and I just bought Odyssey a couple weeks ago so I'm trying to figure that out. You are right on that this game is a mile wide and an inch deep. SOOOO much potential in Elite and so many wasted opportunities by the developers. I wish I could try VR but I lost my right eye in 2006 and the left is damaged, so no 3D vision anymore. On the bright side, playing this game while wearing an eyepatch really makes you feel like a pirate!
Great review! I subscribed.
Thank you T-Bone lad, your support is always appreciated from Reggie and the boys. So sorry to hear about your vision situation, but you're one of the gang now and we got your back.
@T Bone I too am blind in one eye and need a contact lens in the other - so normal depth perception is pretty much gone (don't expect me to catch anything tossed my way) - but VR (at least for me) is still amazingly immersive. I have both the original Vive for gaming on the PC and the new PSVR2. It's not like the old 3D movies where you need both eyes to get the 3D effect. If you ever get a chance to try it out somewhere and see if it will work for you, I highly recommend that you do - there is nothing like sitting in the cockpit of your ship in ED and looking up through the canopy at just how vast the space station your are parked in really is. It's pretty awe inspiring.. it's just a shame about the grind.
you can still experience vr without both eyes, it won't be stereoscopic but it will still be immersive and 360 degrees of viewing and make you feel like you're actually in the ship. I've tested this by closing one eye while wearing an oculus quest 2 headset. Give it a try if you can, you might be surprised. Plus one really cool thing is with certain VR software you can disable the right or left side of the view and get 2x the performance out of the device/your computer.
My guilty pleasure is my old type 7. I love the space trucking element and the sound of that ship, it just felt like you were hauling heavy cargo and that the ship was almost shaking itself to bits as you hear it creaking as you accelerated. It's just a shame that when I last played a few years ago, it wasn't as profitable as other methods (mining). I don't regret my time playing, and it is a game to not rush but take your time with (hurry up slowly) and get to appreciate the different ships as you get them. Some locations are truly beautiful. Engineering is a massive pita tho, I unlocked a few bits and it's the thing that made me leave the game in the end. Devs could easily have implemented a progression system for this tied into the different tiers of ships where you unlock basic engineering mods as you get into the bigger and better ships, and then maybe (once you have a ship with a half decent jump range) then switch to more of the current method of grinding in farther away locations for the final higher tier engineering mods.
Have you ever tried Type 10? I just recommend if you want to feel something really big rig behind you. And you can put a fighter bay into it... 😉
can you own a ship about the size of the millenium falcon? If so can you walk around the interiors/customize , customize over all look of a ship? Looking for something like a cargo ship type game that I can chill with friends delivering goods from place to place. Basic Han Solo / guardians of the galaxie fantasy. Is that possible with this game?
@@jubeibob Unfortunately can't walk around the inside of your ship - but there's plenty of ships around that size (as well as bigger and smaller ones).
The game still has by far the best and most intuitive UI for a space sim - even beating Star Citizen (where you can walk around your ship, but the UI and controls feel much more clunky and dysfunctional in comparison)
You can multicrew ships though. Had a lot of fun getting a mate into the game who manned the little snub fighter I had in my ship. Honestly, I'm very tempted of getting back into the game, do some mining, exploring etc.
@@Volkaer Awesome thanks a ton for your comment. Gives me alot to think about!
I've been playing for years, and when I made the jump to VR it caught me off guard on how much better it made the game. I honestly can never go back to mo itor play. THEN I made a hulk leap and built a sim chair... Yeah.. I can't ever play this game without any of my gadgets .. but the devs need to sell this to another company that will give this game more love
Been in the black in my Beluga since 17 December 2018 and am on my way back. Im looking forward to cashing out, changing ships and seeing all of the changes since I left the bubble.
It's worth pointing out.... All of the footage was done on PC. As for console, it goes as far as horizons... That's it... It's a shame they discontinued the updates for consoles... I really enjoy this game
I feel for the console players so much. It really is a shame it happened. Maybe we will see a next gen release one day.
Indeed. Didn't even get PSVR support.
Played the original and was a beta backer with a lifetime pass, Played the beta and submitted over 10 gigs of bug data. Absolutely loved it and this game has cost me a fortune. I bought a Thrustmaster HOTAS and built a button box to make things easier and then upgraded to TrackIr and then a Rift CV1 and then a Rift S. So that's about a grand or more but, VR in this game is mind blowing especially as you say in the shit yourself moments, like taking your eye off the ball when fuel scooping and them Neutrons. Grinded away with the engineers and pimped some pretty tasty upgrades for several ships, so much so a well known griefer from Hogwarts got his bollocks kicked in :). Elite in trading and just off Elite in combat and exploration I think I was. Burnt out after 7 years when odyssey dropped, the wing I was in fell apart due to real life and for me the controls changed. Playing in VR I had a macro program running in the background so a single press on a button on my throttle would perform stuff like permission to dock and the auto dock with out having to go though all the UI menus and loads of others like different power modes. I might have another go sometime, but the game is a massive time suck and you're right about Inara and the third party apps, they are a necessity to guide you, back in Beta you had fuck all and was flying blind. It is a great game with a steep learning curve, but if you take it at your own pace and not try to rush things the grind becomes OK. Oh and if you like mining you should have tried the original mining it was shit, nobody done it and complained like fuck about it, that's why it was changed, the newer mining was far far better. Still is the best space game of this genre although Mass Effect was great and the upcoming Starfields looks interesting, but Elite will always have a place in my heart as I love it and remember the fond times playing it back in 84. I retire soon, so I might pick up where I left off and go for triple Elite.
I've logged over 5,000 hours in this game and I still enjoy it quite a bit! I was braced for a scathing, jaded review, but I found yours to be refreshingly fair, with roughly the same gripes and praises that I do. I really do hope that FD will treat Odyssey similarly to Horizons, in that the features will grow and mature over the DLC's lifetime.
I’m currently stuck into NMS. I’ve also done a lot on SC. Bit something about elite continually draws me back. I sometimes wonder if the developers themselves know of the huge potential this game still has. Appreciate the comments commander Wolf!
I think the reason why I love Elite dangerous is the VR capability I haven't played the newest version of the game since I heard VR support is super bad but nothing compares to the sense of scale and immersion you get when you're actually sitting in the cockpit of your viper Mark 3 chasing bounties down in belt clusters
Hard agree. Nothing comes close to the immersion. The vibrations of the reactor, the shadows coming through the cockpit, the subsystems humming away...
You. Are. There.
@@michaelmackebon1000 the only thing that would make it better is if I owned that motion Sim called the yaw that actually physically moves you around in the chair to simulate momentum and movement other than that though a nice comfy office chair with a hotas works well
@@jaredflynn3750 That's been a bucket list item of mine for a few years now!!
One day! Haha
Oh boy this one is difficult to comment on. Back in the day with the Thargoid introduction this game gave me some of the most most unique experiences I've ever had in gaming. The way that Frontier rolled out these elements, with basically little warning or spoiler material for you to encounter on your own was mind blowing at times. I STILL remember my first hyperdiction, very early on before the hype reached YT even. I was genuinely kind of terrified lol. We all know the frustrations since then, the arguments are all too familiar and largely justified. What this game could have been man! oh boy.
Coincidentally agree with 99.5 % of your well presented, heart-felt observations 👍
Finally learning to be a Thargoid killer after being a lover rather than a fighter over the previous 8000+ hours.
Plans and player numbers suggest the game is not yet in decline but the player base needs a few studio wins to feel positive again.
steamcharts say 2000-5000 players. not dead, but pretty much an all time low. doesnt account for console and non steam players but still. i only had about 1000 hours but i got tired of the same shit over and over again and any criticism on the forums just leads to censorship so i gave up on fdev.
@@PatrickRatman Steam says higher than the numbers you give these days, increasing, and in no way an -all time low-
New 'shit' incoming with thargoid (invasion?)
I have to respect your 'give up on Fdev' position. Personally though it seems too dogmatic and emotional.
I think they are showing some ability to learn... Two steps forward, one backward maybe. But the studio is sort of getting better since Odyssey reaction slap in face
@@thelionsam by new shit you mean the same shit we've had for the last 2-3 years with a different paint job? Maybe you get some other BS grind to get the same but slightly different weapons the thargs can't disable and that's probably it? Maybe we get the same garbage ground combat with reskinned thargoid enemies? No new ships, no new game mechanics. All of you fdev cultists spewing the same excuses up to and including "if you don't like it then why do you have x number of hours/don't you leave?" Essentially enabling a company that would have great potential to continue to suck while charging extra to suck even harder lmao. Yeah I've given up on fdev, just as much as I've given up on you people to actually be able to hold them accountable for their BS. I'll come back when they show they're actually willing to change and not just throw out excuses like they always have.
@@thelionsam the thing is that they genuinely care about the game. even if investors and shareholders probably pulled most of the money plug you can still see it crawling ahead.
@@sentry1009 I agree. I feel secure about the immediate-medium term future. I still feel engaged.
I do believe they are to some degree capable of learning from their mistakes even if the learning curve is not what we players might want...
Fdevs said programming is hard, so they quit. Fuck ED.....
the problem with "the grind" is that its seem to be a common thing "make money fast" "rank up fast" "best weapons fast" ... well that mindsets are somewhat the main theme in the socials surrounding the game, in reality, this isn't the case, if you just play and enjoy the game, most materials come to you during whatever gameplay you choose, but if short attentionspan and instant gratification is a issue, elite does become VERY Grindy. the engineers tree is designed to "make you" experience other aspects of the game aspects one would never had even looked into.
as example to get G4+G5 on Thrusters you will need to switch to another engineer, and this requires you to do things you would not have done if not forced to do them, this is not to make you mad, this is to make you experience another part of the game, so you can just do this .. and get your G5 mod, but while you are doing it, you will maybe find another thing you may or may not enjoy doing, the rest of the stuff comes to you anyway. like the 5k LY Requirement for unlocking .. everyone is like "woooow this is going to take forever!!" but in reality it encourages you to build aa ship for this purpose, which turns out to be pretty easy to do, then interact with the galaxy map in a new way (as you have to make a trip for a purpose) then execute it, the execution itself is not grindy, sure it shoulds "holy shit" when you read it, but when you actually doing it, its like the greatest thing ever saying .. "wow I just made a 5k LY trip in a 300k ship" and it felt like it was over in 10 minutes. that is what makes the game great, having the wrong exceptions to be at the end game within the return-policy-time is what makes the game a Job rather than a experience.
What can I say ...when people say "grindy" I recommend them to play Lineage 2. Crafting ammo set (4-5 items) will easy make you grind 6 months. Then you will want enchant it (engineering) - +3 will take you 1-2 more months. To go over +3 and get bonuses, you will have 60% chance to succeed or 40% to break item -> back to craft. I was playing that game like 10 years and had +4 set only once on x15 rates server which took me only 2 months for +4 set. That is The Grind.
Or how do you like leveling soul crystals for 80+ levels ? - Room opens 1 per hour by the clock. You enter there, sit in shadows. Room switch once per 8 mins. You don't fight because loot is trash for you already. So you may have 5-6 rooms during the hour. One of them MAY be raid boss, which should be killed and MAY level soul crystal with 5% chance by +1. You need to do +3 there ... takes 3 months or so this way. Just 10-12 hrs sitting in shadows and reading books while time passes.
so elite is not as grinding as L2 right? is that what are you saying?
@@Lothaii yes...Elite cannot be called "grind" at all.
I totaly love this explanation of grind and i absolutly agree with it😁
If you think about it, it's a sandbox game so just play around figure out what you like about the game and then do that. The journey is the destination and that's kind of the point. If you make it a grind it will be a grind but I'd you take your time and do what you want and don't treat it like "I have to unlock everything" then it's just pure fun. And the thing is, when you unlock everything does it change the game? 🤔 Have you beaten the game then? No. life goes on and things are just easier, but easier isn't always more fun. So remember you're not unlocking more fun at the end of the tunnel. Just more options.
It's weird that I never found Elite grindy at all. Have people never played classic MMOs? I mean, I know Elite isn't a "real" typical MMO, but in most if not all MMOs, end game gear takes weeks per piece if even that. In Elite I can fully engineer a ship in a single play session of gathering mats (say 2-4 hours). The method of gathering those mats is repetitive and terrible though, but you can also opt to gather them the "correct" way, albeit it'll take a lot longer.
Anything can be a grind, if people only care to rush through a game as fast as possible before moving on to do the same with the next game (and start complaining again).
I played like 600 hours total before and after the Horizons update. Honestly the only things that kept me going that long were initially the novelty of a flying game with a HOTAS as this was my first, and later some friends I had made. The game itself though was just an empty-feeling grind-fest. I appreciated that the gameplay worked and I wasn't dealing with bugs like I would in SC, but still it was really just a stand-in for the game I really want. I still enjoy flying in other games, but a game where flying is the point is no longer something I can get into.
Me laughing about the complaints about being on foot when I play star citizen and constantly get stuck in elevators, can’t leave space stations and can’t equip gear lol I gotta get back into elite
This action packed trailer really is not a fair reflection of the game. It is amazingly slow and multiplayer doesn't really work that well. It can be lonely and boring as hell. Still got the magic, that keeps me coming back, but the on-foot stuff looks awful and I've yet to even want it.
As a console player, the game is still one I love to play despite everything that's going to happen with console elite, while I'm working my way to become a thargoid hunter now I usually spend my time helping out new commanders, the game has so much potential, but frontier keep making the worst decisions at times. Will we ever get new ships? probably not
I came from Xbox and I was surprised how easy it was to transfer my account and game saves to PC.
PowerPlay was an objective failure.
Engineering wasn't fully thought out.
Lots of weapons and modules need tweaking/rebalancing/redoing entirely.
Lots of lore locations need editing/fixing, or remodeling.
New gameplay features need to be sprinkled in all over the place (both base game and Odyssey) (EVAs, Base Building, Ship Interiors, etc as examples).
Carrier CMDRS need more modules to choose from to add or not to their carriers (Pioneer Supplies badly needs a purpose onboard carriers to give CMDRs a reason to choose them over stations).
My two cents.
I was an original backer back in the day but you hit the nail on the head when you said it's just grindy grindy grindy. I lost interest 6 years ago and want to get back into it but it's just exactly the same. I went straight to SOL when I bought the game and haven't ventured more than half a dozen jumps since. Every time I load it I get the same gameplay.
How is visiting Sol the first thing you did? Everyone else needs a Sol permit acquired by reaching Petty Officer rank in the Federation Navy to enter the system. Your first thing couldn't have been visiting Sol. Make it make sense.
@@ericpitts4979 Couldn't it be bought? I remember something about getting a pack which included a licence.
@@horrgakx I went looking for it and Alpha and Beta backers were granted a Sol permit. So I guess your story makes sense now. It's a shame you never left the bubble because there's a big Milky Way galaxy to get lost in and explore. Some of my favorite moments in game I was hundreds of light-years from the nearest station in the middle of nowhere seeing stars no one had ever bothered to visit. Or just chilling in a low sec gas giant ring and scanning for pirates to bounty hunt. It's only a grind if you're not enjoying what you're doing.
The developers are the worst idiots in history. Anyone else being in charge of it would make this game one of the best mass multiplier experiences in no time.
It does feel like the people who didn’t recognise it’s HUGE potential were indeed the publishers and money men at the top
@@cockneygamer The people who design the game itself are utterly useless too. It takes nothing for them to change a couple of numbers and decrease the grind or to spawn a bit more ships and make assassinations (just one example) more difficult. Simple number changes can rebalance the game and make it less painful and overall better but they can't/won't do it. Nah, we are not talking just greed here, this is about stupidity and inadequacy on every level.
@@heavybattle6650
"Stupidity and inadequacy on every level."
FDev still wants $50+Cdn for Odyssey.
The absolute lunatics.
@@snarkymoosesshack8793 There is no way this game costs 50 dollars right now.
can you own a ship about the size of the millenium falcon? If so can you walk around the interiors/customize , customize over all look of a ship? Looking for something like a cargo ship type game that I can chill with friends delivering goods from place to place. Basic Han Solo / guardians of the galaxie fantasy. Is that possible with this game?
Frontier should rebrand this game to: Space Trucker Simulator.
I bought the game back in 2015 and have played it for insane hours (5,000+). In many ways it's a gorgeous and compelling world. However: The frustration of not being able to fully experience the game without endless grinding for engineering (e.g. not possible to fight aliens or properly support teammates) was bad enough, and then Odyssey nearly made me give up. The on-foot combat is *so* dumb. How do you have a space sim with a complex and stunning approach to zero-G ship fights, and then have shooter combat that's just a bunch of hopping around interchangeable bases? A truly uninspired and boring addition, that used resources which could have improved other aspects of the game. BUT, bitching aside, I do still play. There's still a thrill from realizing that every star in the sky represents an actual system that I can jump to, and I still love the moments of nailing some acrobatic dogfight move.
My feeling is that it should be possible to just buy improved items, via normal earnings, instead of a specialized grind. Or alternately, use some of your space dollars to hire NPCs to create passive income or accomplish fetch-y stuff.
People who can't afford (or fit) a full flight control setup might be interested to know that I've had pretty good results combining keyboard controls with a rollerball style mouse (I'm currently using a Logitech MX Ergo).
Wow - my first "Reggie" video but certainly now the first of many!!! OMG thank you so much. You seem to capture (in your own super inimitable accent and way) EXACTLY my thoughts. I am an original Elite player for the 80s and played Elite 2 etc and almost soiled myself in anticipation of the 2014 kickstarter game. And when it came.. disaster... with no HOTAS I tried many times to complete the dull and exacting tutorial tasks and when FINALLY I managed to get into the game I simply could not bridge the chasm between my ignorance of the key bindings and techniques and the games demands...
I stopped playing and did not return for FIVE YEARS!!!!
After hearing about Horizons, I decided to buy a cheap HOTAS and with the many TH-cam tutorials (Massive thanks to Obsidian Ant and to CMDR Exigeos (and by God I miss his vids now on ED) I managed to scramble up the steep learning curve.
3 years later I am ELITE as an explorer - having grinded my ass off for hours beyond count doing the road to riches and deep space exploration projects - but can barely hold my own in any combat situation, am totally baffled by all this Thargoid nonsense - and only recently recognising the need for mods and sites such as INARA. WTF - Odyssey !!! I still find it next to impossible to complete the tutorial - it tells you FA and has no context help and has nothing to offer my explorer heart other than crappy exo biology which is sooo badly thought out my ONLY reason for pursuing it is to relieve the monotony of deep space grind and the beauty of the planets...
So - like you Reggie - I totally love this game and have done ever since I played on a BBC home computer. But oh... with a bit more focus by FDev ... this game could be superlatively outstanding...
Meanwhile, I thank you Reggie, my next challenge is to have a go at mining ... and get VR - any suggestions as to the best VR for a newbie?
Lovely write up my good man! Thank you in particular for the recommendations on the two TH-camrs… they are EXCELLENT and also my go to for when I need help. I also quite enjoy the opinions of Yamiks.
As for VR, I’d go simple with the Quest 2 and a cable connection if at all possible. However, it can take time getting use to and set up, but if you have the rig for it, it’s just a magical experience. Scooping near a sun is genuinely a scary moment.
Thank you for the support lad, I do warn you though that not all my videos will be space or elite themed, but this is definitely an area of huge interest for me!
@@cockneygamer Many thanks Reggie for the VR advice and YES a very honourable mention to Yamiks - I love his Eastern European twang and wicked humour - they are a great combo! And yes - I realise your channel is much more than ED!! So having subscribed I will certainly watch with interest - keep up the good work!
Couldn't agree more. New to the Reggie as well but he's got my vote!
Ah thank you mate, means a lot to me to hear you all speak like this as it pushes me forward. I’m actually going to do a video on VR in elite dangerous in the coming weeks once I can clear out some of the backlog of games about to hit us (cities skylines, Forza, cyberpunk dlc etc). But fear not, more Elite content will be coming this year.
Just swapped from PS4 to PC. Had a flight stick already since I play Warthunder, and I'm falling in love all over again. I just wish I had some friends who could help me out, lol.
Add XG99 in-game (Odyssey only). That's my alt based around Mainani for - mostly - bounty-hunting.
@@Sighman Unfortunately I don't have Odyssey yet, it's on my bucket list though.
Playing on PC since 2016 here, nearing 14000 hours played. What keeps me going is the BGS (Background Simulation). Building an Empire with your PMF (Player Minor Faction), competing against other Squadrons interfering with your Plans to get their own done, all the while having a wonderful group of people behind you.
So you play over 6 hours per day?
@@Molotov49Playtime waxes and wanes depending on Workload, Vacation time etc. Weekends naturally more then during the week.
I go there every day sometimes mine sometimes trade sometimes fight and sometimes pick a star far away and explore. I ❤️ it
the ground game grind does suck, the regular engineering is ok.
now that the thargoid invasion has started, there is even more end game to fight or provide rescue or support supplies.
The title should say: The Game you LOVE to LOVE
Not being able to to hold my own in dog fights l tended to be a solo player which made the game a lonely affair especially as l was an explorer and would head of into the dark unknown to scan systems & planets for weeks on end before returning to the bubble to collect my money. What l would really like is a storyline woven into the game, the original had it in a way as once you reached a milestone you got a Boss unit to fight & l feel this would appeal to many players. My idea would be as follows; you go exploring, once you had a number of new planets scanned you got a mission to explore a planet that would open another mission once you had scanned a number of planets & eventually find a fully engineered upgrade
Played regularly for years, all in VR. Don't bother with Odyssey, it was coded after anyone at FDEV that knew what they were doing with their engine had long since left.
The best thing that could happen to it now is for another company to buy it and convert it to UE5, sadly FDEV stopped really caring about it long ago.
lol, "slow down lad".
just started playing, love this game.
For a new player it can be fun the issues really become apparent with late game grinds and activities
I wish I had that new player feel again.
As someone who plays both elite and Star citizen, can’t say one is better than the other….. Star citizen despite not being a released game still is a fully playable and functions better than a lot of other games That had been released… is my preferred game and soon will be on another level I think, it’s nice to be able to live on my ship
SC playable? the last time i tried it with my 3060ti the average fps was around 20fps
hmmm.. might need some better BG music transition than in-game audio.. especially get rid of traielr sound.. it can and mostly IS content-IDd
Thank you for the advice Yamiks lad, appreciate this. And also a big thank you personally, your videos have been a huge help to me as I started on my Elite journey.
@@cockneygamer I suspected they could have been one of the ones you mentioned.
hehe I wonder if my hyper criticals were those =}
@@TheYamiks Yes absolutely you are. I mentioned it in another comment somewhere here but if it's ok I'll update the description on the channel to link to you. Thanks again and keep up the great work!
@@cockneygamer hehe oh dude no need to link it, I was just wondering which of my things were more influential , since you mentioned, that's all =}
uhm someone help am about to run out of fuel and i dont have a fuel scope thingy, how to find a nearest station, with this new update am lost
Identical looking stations, similar planets, no new ships, under developed multicrew features, no ship interiors, procedural same lookalike environments...
exactly my point of view, from the moment i was struck with Elite virus, i'm always saying this to friends, this game you will love and hate at the same time
FDEV needs to listen to their playerbase, fuck the other games they have, ED should be their main focus
also with the VR thing, i only came back to elite just for VR experience and i'm bamboozled with the fact how odyssey didn't implement it properly
i've also few ideas about elite but who cares, like :
-specialized npcs on your ship, better than only one fighter crew npc ( exo biologist, astro miner, trade specialist ) just to name some, with perks like for instance exo biologist could operate a remote drone to help you with finding plants on planets, astro miner could have expertise about asteroid fields, also could operate a fighter-like drone to prospect guaranteed better asteroids, trade specialist could refresh trade routes with high profit on your galaxy map to name good value markets... and that's the one thing that could make your big ship feel more alive
Great video, i bought a C64 to play the original many years ago, i may have to give this a try
In Elite Odyssey where can you actually WALK, as with legs, and where can you not?.
Generally speaking on most planets (the ones you can land on anyway). You can also walk around in starports (they all look similar though) and on your freighter. You can’t walk around your own ship. And generally speaking from walking to ship it is not seamless but rather like a load in screen (not sure if that bothers you or not).
For me the walking elements could have been great if they invested more time into it. If they did allow you to walk around your own ship and just had more stuff to do on planets in general, then maybe they were into something. As it is, it’s a novelty feature that gives you about 5 mins of fun.
@@cockneygamer I like to know either way, so can live with compromise. I can only imagine what modders could do if given the chance. As modders have a knowledge and passion for a game that possibly gets lost after a few years by devs. Kudos
I just came back to ED after over a year away after being extremely disappointed by the Odyssey flop. I find it to be such a great way to relax. It’s a brilliant game with so much to enjoy.
I can so very much support your assessment and would advise everybody new to the game to merely get the base game and forget about Odyssey.
My reasoning behind that:
- The space part is simply awesome, second to none.
- The on-foot part, just as said in the video, is rather weak. It's a mediocre FPS shooter bolted on to an awesome space game.
- Arguably a lot of graphics actually look better on Horizon than on Odyssey. But that might also be a matter of taste. The pure fact is that they changed a lot of things in the engine. An important thing there being, that the old planetary surface was completely seeded, while the new system assembles a planets surface from tiles. Which means that after a while you learn to see the repeated patters of those tiles and at some range distances over the ground you can see ugly overlap-patterns where the tiles get merged together.
- Horizon is not plagued by all the stability issues of Odyssey. When Odyssey launched, for the first 6 months i barely managed to scratch two digit FPS. Then they finally fixed the problems for my specific hardware and i am back to 90+ FPS, but there's still plenty of reliable reports of people out there, who a year after launch have serious problems. And this is not limited to old hardware, but seems to be all over the place. You might just have a "too new and powerful" GPU, for which they messed up the settings and it again starts to do messy stuff. *
- The game indeed is best played on a HOTAS (HOTAS = Hands on Throttle And Stick, means a setup with joystick and throttle) in my eyes. But as it was said in the video, keyboard and mouse or a controller also work perfectly fine. Except: if you play Odyssey.
The reworked version of the galaxy map still kind of -can- be used with a HOTAS or controller, but it requires many more inputs to achieve the same goal. It is a good deal more cumbersome to use. (I personally feel that whoever designed the old menus spent a lot of time planing for all kinds of input devices and did a good job at that. For the galaxy map, he either naturally came to a good conclusion, or he actually watched a pilot instruction video on how to use the navigation system on a modern day airliner. The guy who designed the new interface seems to have plenty of experience in designing smartphone games, so he arranged the buttons in a way which is most useful on a touch screen, without considering how it would be used with HOTAS or a controller. )
And i have found at least two menu points in the new version of the station interface, which you can not reach with the up/down/left/right navigation of a HOTAS or controller. They only are there, on the top of the list, when the station is in specific states. But if you then want to go up to use that option, your selection instead jumps to the bottom of the list. Yes, they are conditional things, they happen rarely. But they can be there, and up to now the only way i found to access them is by switching to the mouse.
*: Examples:
1. When Odyssey launched, it always rendered everything. Starting with the characters eyeballs, hair, facial features, body, etc... then the whole interior of the cockpit, then everything outside of it. In a 360° arc. And only after rendering everything, it cut it down to what you actually see. Now compare to the video above, when doing stuff in game, how often do you see those things? (Or also, how many people see their own eyeballs, face and hair all of the time? )
And it was not the developers who found that. It was the community who reported it to them, along with a list of hardware where they found the issues. Then over several patches, always one entry of the list suddenly did not have the problem again. So the community asked what about the rest of the list. So the next patch, one or two more entries of the list were fixed. So the community had to bitch-slap them again, ask again for the rest of the list. Over months.
It seems (have to emphasize that... i have no insight into the code, but the way how things were successively were fixed one by one gives that impression) like the game engine has a problem on the default setting on its rendering routine. And instead of fixing the root problem, they step by step implemented workarounds for each piece of hardware reported. So, if you have a GPU which was not reported often enough by the community that it was fixed already, you have a good chance to still have issues.
2. Level of detail scaling for quite a while was non-functional and in some cases even reverted. Which means, depending on what hardware the game was running on, you might have been lucky and everything was rendered at high quality, no matter the distance. So, far away objects were rendered in full quality, to then be cut down to two pixels. In worse cases, it was even reverted, so far away objects were rendered in full quality and took up a lot of GPU power, while objects nearby were rendered in low-quality, looking terribly bad.
3. Only a few weeks ago, the community found another thing. Depending on quality settings a volumetric effect is normally applied to a scene between 3 to 10 times, depending on quality setting. Except on some hardware it is run over 170 times, but only when quality is set to "medium".
And Odyssey, a year after launch, seems to still be full of such issues. If all parts of your computer are absolute mainstream, you by now should be fine enough. But if you have just one item in your PC which is not exactly what FD expects to be there, chances are that your will experience bad performance issues. :(
So yea, unless you for some reason want to also play a very weak FPS or care for the Thargoid story line, which at least up to today still is nothing else than one video (which you also see in the Horizon game), some sounds inside a signal scanner and a lot of text going on on Galnet (which is best read on an internet browser and not in-game), there is nothing really of value yet in Odyssey. (On actual combat against Thargoids: it's still the very same as before Odyssey has launched. Nothing changed there, you can experience it just as well on the base game. )
While the base game, including the Horizon expansion, provides you with an experience second to none. I really recommend to check that part out.
I tried to play this with a controller and thought it was extremely difficult. I recently got a flight stick for another game and was told to try ED with it. I'm excited to see how this goes
how’d it go?
Nice honest appraisal. Maybe worth a punt for 6 squid. Thanks.
Totally worth a punt lad. Price of a pint in London and you’ll get plenty out of it.
well now that they aren't developing a new dcl, hopefully they turn more of their focus on what's already their and needs improving (though new thing with the thargoids is pretty interesting i will admit)
Yes I will say and something that wasn't mentioned here in my review is that the new Thargoids interaction could open up a new chapter if they play it well. We shall see! Thank you for noting it Mr Exists!
fixing somethings that has ben sold already doesn't create immediate profits, so no, they wont.
this days, Frontier isn't really in the game development business, they just moving boxes that do contain games made by people that happen to be in the vicinity of them.
@@nullx8 it is a "live service game" money could still be made off it through arx and cosmetics, if they keep improving the game, that'd bring more people in and keep more people, and the more people that join, the more likely that some of those people are willing to spend money on arx. just look at that diablo game, people spending thousands on pixels,
Love your style of review, very entertaining while effectively releasing the knowledge, thanks!
Wonderful feedback mate, really appreciate that. Thank you!
As much fun as I've had with this game, it was too rough to watch the dev team ignore their playerbase over and over, especially when doing things like they've killed supporting VR for a below-average fps. This was the first time I got burned with a DLC and just kept hoping they'd change until realizing they just don't care about the people that contribute the money for their paychecks. And that really hurts after spending $500 for equipment just to play this game in all its VR glory with a flight stick.
I’m actually working on a video around the VR aspect of this game. Should be out in the next few weeks!
I have played it for 2 years on pc and now im thinking of buying it on ps4 is that the right choise
I loved this game but haven't played it in years. Still it's one of the best PC games I've played, I even bought it on PS4 and played it there in hope for future psvr support. Alas it did not come to be.
I can't even remember what I was doing when I quit on PC. On PS4 I'm getting closer to Sagittarius A*
What game is better Elite Dangerous or X4?
Star Citizen has nailed the immersion side of things, primarily with its ability to walk onto and around interactive ship interiors. No stupid 'no mans sky' like teleportation. Frontier stated that it wasnt wanted by players and that it would detract from gameplay ... truth, it was because they couldnt be bothered to create the short animations and remodeling of the cockpits. It pisses me off coz Ive experienced the difference it makes for a truely immersive experience. Im gona come back to elite for a bit though, at least while SC implements and improves it new server meshing and persistent entity streaming tech. 👍
It is a good argument, that eventually you'd feel like you have to walk for too long to your ship. But the alternative is, that since most ships have two entrances, the front entrance would be the shortcut to cockpit, while back entrance would let you go through your entire ship.
The real reason they don't want to do interiors, is that it's a huge labour to create individual interiors to every ship that's already there, and set a standard that every future ship needs the same treatment. On top of that, balancing ships would no longer be a case of adding another compartment slot, or reducing it, you would need to do some changes to the interior to make it work too.
Teleporting still would probably be a necesity, even if hidden like with elevators. You see, any physics engine starts to go crazy once your character stands on a moving vehicle. Sometimes you will straight up die, sometimes you will get ragdolled and fall, sometimes your character will start vibrating and than pass through the vehicle or get launched into space. Most games fix it, by turning vehicle interiors into something like a separate instance. For example in Warframe, railjack interior is a separate map, that's just linked to a remote controlled vehicle. by approaching this vehicle, you are teleported to the static interior with windows that work like portals, so you get immersive view on the outside of the moving ship. It also allows them to easily change the size of the interior without touching the main ship!
Now RSI said they don't care about optimization, and decided to make all ships hollow with physically integrated interiors, so now 8 years later you can still easily break your legs for no reason or phase through ship walls if it's even mildly rotating...
@@WwZa7 All good points, its just a shame its such a difficult task to create this seamless aspect that really transforms gameplay. SC is FAR from stable, granted, so im leaving them to it for a while to improve overall and ive come back to ED Odyssey. TBH I havnt minded the TP'ing into the ship too much, just being picky and wanting something that isnt quite available or possible yet. We'll get the 'perfect' game one day!
@@WwZa7 Which is exactly why Star Citizen even in the state of Alpha is a far better Space Sim. Ive played both since the early days and up until this year SC could not hold a candle to ED. Now it has reversed itself. Now SC is a better game that really puts a person in that universe. I havent logged into ED in months but am now playing SC every single day.
@@CVSiN Better in what way?
@@WwZa7 For me better in nearly every way, While ED has this literally infinite system its lifeless and hollow, the ships are not even in the same league as SC at all, Where ED was always built around being in a ship at all times and now they are trying to change that SC was always built even in the early days of you being a person and the ships a tool. walking out to a ship and then boarding it never ever gets old. the newer ships are even better now having all the systems accessible and panels you can open or use storage etc. To me that puts me in the world. The gun play and the weapons are all in a totally different leage as well. the polish even on a base model sub machine gun is literally decades ahead of the new very basic and ugly weapons of the latest ED expansion even shown in this video.. they look terrible and are uninspired ( which is how I feel about most of the older ships in ED as well) they are ugly and plain and dont inspire me to really love it.. Where every single time I fly my RSI Scorpius, or any other other of the warships in SC I literally am drooling how good they look and give a sense of pride of ownership. Where in ED I hardly EVER wanted to use 3rd person to stare at my ship.. The art style just works for me.. same with ground vehicles. look at the vehicles there and then look what we have in ED.. very uninspired Id have fired the art/design team a long time ago myself.. This part may be a negative to most of you. But I also like the fact I can spend real dollars and get what I want right now.. instead of having to grind. I personally like being able to pay to get the equipment I want with real money. and finally events like Jump Town. where the entire server is focused on 1 little facility bringing massive ground and air warfare and epic huge battles. tanks, Anti-air, Cargo haulers bringing in those vehicles with fighters and Corvettes flying cover for them.. its just freaking unreal. huge fighter wars in atmosphere while there is a ground siege going on below is really amazing and shows what the future holds where there are 1000s of people in 1 area. Nothing I've done over the years in ED is even close.
I fell in love with the original Elite in 1984, so in my view (and I may be wrong) Elite Dangerous should have been a realistic space flight trading/combat/exlporation sim first. By this, I mean Frontier should have concentrated on the base gameplay of what made the original Elite so good.
Basically they should have aimed for a game that had all the features of Frontier Elite 2, trading, exploration, combat, atmospheric planets, Thargoids, missions (maybe even some single player story missions and rpg elements and multiplayer trading, exploration and combat missions) and competent space pirates... Then they should have added space weather, more types of aliens, planetary weather (snow, rain, sand storms, etc) and everything that you'd want to see in a realistic space flight sim... and then when that was all done, they should have added the PvP stuff like fighters, multicrew and the space-legs FPS stuff.
I think Fdev tried to do too many things, which resulted in a hodge-podge of a game where nothing really works all that well... They should have concentrated on getting the core right, and then added more flashy stuff later.
If they allowed me to be in different ships at different times, Elite would actually be really fun. I hate the fact that if I go into deep space, I'm stuck. That's it. Until you travel back to the bubble, you can't do anything else. So boring. I want to put a ship into deep space, while still being able to do combat, mining or transportation missions. Unbelievably dumb game mechanic.
I’ve had this game for several years on my Xbox one. I am in the process of transferring that data to PC. I hope I get to keep all of my ships and progress. I had to decommission my carrier. I have 41 ships that are engineered.
Indeed you can sir. There was a window of opportunity to do so… not sure if it’s still active though
I watched my dad play this a few years back, I recently wanted to play ot myself but saw the negative reviews so I'm here to figure out if it's worth it
Honestly mate, if on PC the base game (which includes horizons) is worth it for the $10 or less that you can get it for off numerous sites. Totally worth it and very little risk, but potentially HUGE reward. The issues us players have really revolves around the recent DLC and just the general lack of support in recent years. But still jolly good fun.
@cockneygamer I'd be playing on Xbox, is it a broken mess on consoles?
Issue on consoles isn’t that it’s broken per se, but rather the developers have pulled support on it entirely. So no more updates/life changes.
@@cockneygamer I see, but as is, it sounds like it's a solid core experience still
@@traumachild1737 exactly that mate
Basically with all of its flaws it's still fun as hell to play. And if you love playing a game why stop.
Couldn’t agree more here. With all its faults it’s still wonderful to step back in. I find myself going back every couple of months and enjoying it all over (and forgetting my control setup)
Well I know I've been traveling across the Galaxy for three Earth days. And have not found nothing yet. Thank God for the fuel scoop. But I do like exploring. Trust me I'll be all over that Galaxy before it said done. Even though it's going to take forever. But game on my friends.
Elite is still a thing and Fdevs are continuing the story. The console version to be honest was a cash grab that should have never happened. A game on the scale of Elite can't be developed for console with out major short cuts that will just piss off your PC players. Which fdevs did that and more. 😄FDEVS did take some major short cuts by removing some major features. Oringnally Elite was going to almost as good as Star Citizen. Fdevs planned to have players board their ships just like star citizen and walk around kn them. There were plans for Earth like planets you could land on and One player discovered code that would allow players to build bases on certain planets but all of that disappeared when the console version was announced. Even with those major short cuts Fdevs had choose between a,major feature or continued support on console. Which is why CIG made Star Citizen a PC only game they knew it was not possible to do what Fdevs were trying to do. Has Fdevs made some mistakes?? 😄 yeessssss but now they're slowly getting back on track with the pc only Elite. Today in Fdevs financial reports Frontier is saying they are now focused on growing the Elite dangerous community. So Elite will be around for years to come. It may not be what certain players want it to be but Elite Dangerous will still be a thing in the future.
Is there a way to mod so it shows you where to go to get the engineering materials? Like in game. I went back to try engineering and was such a grind and constantly needing to load up another screen to see what I needed was annoying and time consuming. I just want to log in farm some materials and buy new weapons. The grind just kills the game and the need to use mods or websites to find out what to do is ridiculous
I would say things are getting very interesting, death star goids bearing down on the bubble. Mega ships blowing up, massive death beams being corrupted and black paint.
So I'm thinking of playing this game for the first time I want pvp and base battles do alot people do this today?
I’ve certainly been ganked a lot yes! Battles do take place for sure, but it takes a long time to get a ship battle ready these days. But it’s fun, and honestly for the case game which includes horizons, it’s a no brainer at what they sell it for.
Love your accent! Thanks for reviewing this even though I didn't see it until a year later.
You are most welcome Smoocher. Appreciate you dropping in!
you forgot to mention the stargoid(s) (plz look it up, as a personal favour)
we need pilots to help counter this very serious virtual menace
i wanna love it. but i feel like the focus of the development is too much on things that dont really matter to the common gamer. the one thing i need is fluid gameplay and seamless missions and such and this game doesnt have either imo. you accidentally attack one wrong npc or they get in the way and you hit em once and 2 hours later you might be back to killing.... its just a massive super slow time sink with very little reward. and lets not even get into simply setting up a hotas.... gl though i hear a few people truly love this game and most of them are the development team.
How do I get rid of the bounies
By drinking a bo'oh'o'wo'er
You sound like the late, great Howard Lew Lewis🏆. Fuckin' loved that bloke👍. Especially the way he talked🗣. Cheers🍺 for the cockney upload😁.
Thank you Rob lad, appreciate the comment and kind words here.
i have played grind games i like them but elite is more than grind you need one life to get engineering and thats shit if you play solo and the biggest problem is the game is complicated as hell you cant play with out 3rd party sites or tutorial of internet because the design of this game ruins the expirience to the worse after you realise what you have to do to get a good ship..
No. It never was once star citizen entered it's 3.0+ updates and no no man's sky redeemed itself
I haven't played ED for over 2 years, ever since I bought a new computer. I had put a couple of hundred hours in on it and had a healthy bank balance.
I am upgrading again I am wondering if it still worth reinstalling the game.
I didn't mind the grind to be honest, it was relaxing espeically doing the long haulage routes, or mining. I always knew that if I wanted a bit of action
I could always do a bit of bounty hunting, but I would like some input from those who have continued with the game.
Has the recent updates improved game play or have been detrimental?
Did Redgy come here for a proper fuckin shoot out or what lads!
Proper fucking lads!
I've tried a few times to get into the game-play. I think this video helped me a little. I usually hate games with no path or goal. Even X-4 Foundations has paths and goals even though they may not be spelled out clearly.
I'll need to try again and just explore. Worry less on what to do and just learn to do things well. Good video. Thanks .
I'm with you. I played for probably 50+ hours. There are aspects that are fun but it just felt like too much repetition without purpose. I am a big flight sim fan so I get the pleasure of VR in a cockpit. I still remember the Holy Crap! moment the first time I strapped on a VR headset and got into the cockpit of an FW190. I imagine doing that in a space ship is just as good (I got the VR headset after I left ED behind so I have never used VR in ED). Still, just not for me. I guess I need an actual game in my game 😀
Yeah that's why SC is such a better game. If you're gonna base your whole game on nothing but flying and exploring you can't have a bunch of planet that all look the same and add the ability to actually leave your spaceship so late into the game, so badly done and for PC only
6:24 - ED in a nutshell.
i dont play elite anymore because i dont play just space sims, but i have spend much more than 1k hours in it and i dont regret any of it. I have all the ships, full engineered ships for anything thats comes in mind. i was a miner, a player pirate, a member of ANTIZENO, done prety much everything other than fuel rats and sometimes i miss it so much. I was playing with HOSAS and if they were still usable i guess i would still be playing. Anyway, i definently recomend this game. you ll have at least 100 good hours in it even if you like just one thing from all the things it has to offer.
i buyed it and it sucks because everthing is confusing. i played since 25 years playstation and cant figure out how to open messanges.
I have over 3k hrs in ED 2016 VR. Are all these new features VR friendly?
I love the game but if they don't go pack to developing VR I will spend no more money on it. I am over 2000 hours in this game. Ody is still an unfinished game and always will be till they put VR in it like they promised.
I bought the game back in 2014 and have been playing off and on at least once a month since. FDEV's biggest mistakes were not following through with original ideas pitched since 2012, implementing power play, and engineers, lurching and haphazard implementation of thargoid war, ignoring and not communicating with the community, reliance on third party services vs developing useful in-game functionality, and making EDO more of a space marine/ground pounder and generic fps tacked onto a space sim.
But yeah....typical sloppy live service game.
Wow .well spoken. I too feel your hurt ,they hurt us first. Played since 2016.. i left the game with 6 billion in credits. And i can't stop thinking of all the hrs. Of game play wasted....if they would have just stayed on track..i would still be there..as would so many players..our klan was over 200 players..we were RAXXAL...MISS YOU GUYS...SEEKER OUT...
Not for consoles. The game isn't going to get anymore content updates for consoles. We have been left in the dirt. Only security updates will Elite Dangerous get on consoles... So, if you thinking of buying this on console then I'd advise against it.
I wish they would stop the "online only" there is no reason any game needs this.
i dont hate that i love this game. im glad the game existed and i got to experience it. i wouldnt want to live in a world without elite dangerous. its one of the few games that i always find my back to. ive been plying since 2014 when it was in early access.
6+ years old and still better than star citizen
If the Chimney Sweep from Mary Poppins reviewed games. :D
Winds in the East, Mist coming in!
I put in over 1000 hours in 12 months... Got all the ships I wanted.. All maxed to grade 5... Plus a couple of billion in the bank... Took trips out to Sag A and colonia.... Then Odyssey was released... I never played another hour... Well done Frontier (dicks!) .... My Ps4 and I moved on to other things....
Spoken from a true fan that. It’s actually sad how far this game fell when it was so good at one point. They should almost scrap it entirely, and just work on an entirely new sequel of sorts and start again.
The universe also needs new ships and a graphical update to increase the variety of the stuff generated.
It's one of the best space game i have played so many helping community like fuel rats and others so many helping discord servers if i find a friendly player who helps u understand the starting it will be best experiance u can ever have i will suggest it to all space loving players 100/100 ♥️♥️
"NO POINT NO, FIVE PERCENT" incredible accent, Glad I can understand perfectly
I love you lad
It's alright son, not everyone can be a Cockney. You're sweet as a nut just as you are me old china.
Marcus lad, I’d take you out for a Ruby if I could. You deserve it sunshine.
@@cockneygamer Cheers. I could go a nice Korma. I'll just imagine a virtual one here.
I might need to buy a bigger hard drive. I'm now seriously considering buying this game since I've always dreamed of exploring the stars.
It’s a very solid experience mate! Not sure how big your hard drive is but it’s not massive massive! It was released as a PlayStation game afterall. Usually you can find the base game for under $10. It takes a few hours to learn but then it’s VERY addictive.
As an explorer, I wish they would add more content. Add more undiscovered stuff. Everything I find has already been found(
Stick, & Throttle w/lots of buttons is best
Is there any joystick works and compatible of this PS5 game ?
I have over 3k hrs into ED back when VR first came out. Just built a new PC and I keep thinking about ED. Should I come back? Whats it like now days? Are all these features still VR friendly?
One error, its 99.95 still there to discover, not 99.5, just to note, love the vid, cheers.
Thank you…. And yes in Space terms that’s actually a huge difference!
I worry about the servers getting shut off at somepoint