An Obituary for Elite Dangerous

Elite Dangerous is what happens when the game developers don’t understand their own meta. It has some shining moments – exploration has some truly sublime moments and combat is solid, if unbalanced. However the game design as a whole is shallow and poorly thought out. There are three categories of gameplay: Profitable, fun, and filler. Profitable parts of the game are those where the player earns a lot of experience points, new ships, new technology, valuable items, etc. Fun parts of the game are those that players would do even without any profit – activities that are emotionally rewarding and enjoyable. Filler is any part of the game that’s neither fun nor profitable, and sadly, Elite Dangerous is 75% filler, and there is no overlap between profitable and fun activities.

There are only a few profitable activities. Mining optimal materials can earn 200 M credits per hour, but is tedious. Running optimal passenger missions can get you 60 M credits, Exploration get earn 10 M if you follow a predetermined optimized route (aka taking all the fun out of exploration). Trying any non-optimized gameplay drastically reduces earnings – usually 80% or more. You can’t just mine any material and hope to make millions an hour. You have to go to a specific planet and mine a specific resource. Same with passenger missions – pick the wrong system and earnings goes from 60 million an hour to 6 million. There is a huge discrepancy between people who use third party websites to optimize and those who do not. The former will easily be able to get top tier ships in a day, those who do not will still be kicking around in low tier ship after a week. Basically requiring players to use third party resources to be remotely effective in a MMO is very poor game design. Having only one or two viable profitable activities in a game with dozens of mission types is also a poor design choice.

Combat, the most fun activity in the game, earns maybe a couple million an hour and requires a lot of effort to get to that level of earning. Furthermore, it is the highest risk way to earn credits and getting killed by an NPC can set you back 20 mil+ easily, undoing an evening’s worth of grinding in a single mistake. PvP is an option, but with one large caveat – in order to be competitive, you need engineering modules, which entails a $30 DLC and a large grindwall, which makes it very pay to win. Furthermore, PvP is an all or nothing affair. If you’re running the ship and build needed to be competitive, you can’t do much else, so if you want to do any activity that isn’t pure fighting, you’re not going to be able to hold up in a fight against someone who is, leading to mostly lopsided fights. I enjoy multiplayer PvP as much as the next person, but Elite is just not set up for a good PvP environment.

The reason I titled this review an obituary is that I just don’t see any compelling content being added to Elite for the rest of the development cycle. It’s an old game, 5 and a half years at the time of this review and while the Thargoid (alien invasion) content seemed pretty cool, the devs don’t seem to have added anything new in a long time and the latest patch only caters to the very richest longest playing commanders and doesn’t seem to involve any interesting gameplay. Games this old can be good, but unless the devs are adding good plot lines or doing some world building, it’s rare. At this point, Elite looks like it’s in the “milking whales” phase. If you like space games and are looking to kill 20-30 hours learning the ropes on one, I’d still recommend it. Exploration is a particular highlight since the game boasts a fairly accurate scale model of the Milky Way, but overall this game looks pretty dead.