Thinking of buying the game

What games is it most similar to?

I've played No Man's Sky, Helldivers 2, and Everspace 2. Played a little of Space Citizen too but it kept crashing. I'm really enjoying Helldivers 2, though I don't know if Elite Dangerous 2 has much first person shooter combat.

The base game is pretty cheap right now on Fanatical (it's $4) though I guess I'd still need to install some of the 10 years of DLC?

Some other questions:

Does it run well with a 9070 XT?

Is a PS5 controller acceptable or do you really need a flight stick?

Is it true they're killing support for VR? I have a Quest 3 and that kind of sucks!

Any other tips before I get started?
 
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What games is it most similar to?
It is like a multiplayer version of Frontier: Elite II from way back in the day.
I've played No Man's Sky, Helldivers 2, and Everspace 2. Played a little of Space Citizen too but it kept crashing. I'm really enjoying Helldivers 2, though I don't know if Elite Dangerous 2 has much first person shooter combat.
I have not played any of those but suspect the similarity is possibly no more than they involve spaceships.
The base game is pretty cheap right now on Fanatical (it's $4) though I guess I'd still need to install some of the 10 years of DLC?
No the only DLC to acquire would be Odyssey, the game only runs the current variant. Odyssey is the thing that allows access to on foot activities and in game access to the most recent ships
Some other questions:

Does it run well with a 9070 XT?

Is a PS5 controller acceptable or do you really need a flight stick?
I would say a full HOTAS but people play with mouse and keyboard or controller.
Is it true they're killing support for VR? I have a Quest 3 and that kind of sucks!
Not killing they just haven’t got it to work acceptably while on foot but according to the people who use it is splendid while flying your ship.
Any other tips before I get started?
Take a lot of time to get the very many bindings so they work for you, go through the training and tutorials in game, and always check the date on guides and tutorials as anything older than the last update could be obsolete or wrong.

Oh and keep in mind it isn’t a short term game.
 
What games is it most similar to?

I've played No Man's Sky, Helldivers 2, and Everspace 2. Played a little of Space Citizen too but it kept crashing. I'm really enjoying Helldivers 2, though I don't know if Elite Dangerous 2 has much first person shooter combat.

The base game is pretty cheap right now on Fanatical (it's $4) though I guess I'd still need to install some of the 10 years of DLC?

Some other questions:

Does it run well with a 9070 XT?

Is a PS5 controller acceptable or do you really need a flight stick?

Is it true they're killing support for VR? I have a Quest 3 and that kind of sucks!

Any other tips before I get started?
Greetings,
Ive played all those games you gave listed, Elite is a space ship simulator, nothing else comes close to its combat or flight system.
Its not a fast paced, cartoony, easy game, Its the best sandbox out there, you can do anything.
What it doesn't do is hold your hand, you have to learn, getting around takes time (no fast travel like NMS).

If you like Lore, exploring, taking your time then this is for you.
It has ground combat but that's a side quest, this isn't an FPS.

My final suggestion is get Odyssey, that's all you need and currently where the game is at the moment.

O7
 
its nothing like helldivers
its a space ship game with an on foot dlc. you cannot build a base like no mans sky, however you can set up shop at a system and actively colonise an unclaimed star system but this is more of a management game where you decide what bases,stations you want then you deliver goods to create it all, also in comparison to nms the ships are customisable with different modules for doing different tasks and they can be engineered to provided extra bonuses, the flight models are so much better. im biased because elite is probably my favorite game series of all time, but for the price of it you really cant go wrong.

Elite dangerous to some people is a trading simulator, to others you can dissapear into the galaxy exploring for months on end, or you can support a player or npc faction and attempt to rule the populated "bubble" by running missions ect to boost your faction. its real good fun.
as for the 9070 XT that will run elite with no worries at all (you will get lower framerates doing the on foot odyssey gameplay)
I play in VR all the time and its 100% hands down the best VR game ive ever played - BUT none of the Odyssey dlc runs in VR, unless you use the 3rd person camera mode, but you cant really do missions ect in 3rd person. instead when you leave your ship/SRV you get put into flat mode projection in VR whilst on foot.
the game has been out a while but its not like 10 years of content is hard to catch up on. its been more of a 10 years of added features which tbh are all easy to get into as a new player
 
Is it true they're killing support for VR? I have a Quest 3 and that kind of sucks!

Not killing they just haven’t got it to work acceptably while on foot but according to the people who use it is splendid while flying your ship.

Quest 3 user here too.
OP, if you are a VR player, then you simply must have this game! By far the best VR experience, read the reviews and top lists: for 10 years now, it's considered the best VR game there is.
 
Is a PS5 controller acceptable or do you really need a flight stick?
A PS5 controller is perfectly fine, and you do not need a flight stick. In fact, some actually prefer a game controller over a HOTAS.

I myself use an Xbox Series X controller, and the game is perfectly fine and comfortable to play with it. I very much prefer it over mouse&keyboard.

(The advantage of an Xbox controller is that Windows supports it directly and natively so you don't need any third-party software or Steam for that.)
 
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Everything mentioned above is good and accurate. I use a x-box controller, i've always had trouble running a sony controller through windows. I use a PowerA Ops V3 and its real nice. You don't need a flight stick set up.

This game is a Milky Way galaxy simulator. The stars in game are real stars. A unique and giant effort went into making Elite's Stellar Forge. Worth investigating on your own. It is not a linear game, you make your own adventure and play your role in this galaxy. It will not hold your hand or tell you what to do. There are no coins to be collected, loot boxes to open, or boss battles, you are your own commander to do what ever you like.

I personally enjoy the ground game quite a bit, Elite has it's own take on it, it feels fresh and fun to me.
 
Hi :)

Any other tips before I get started?

The game is considered by some to have a very steep learning curve for new players. Persevere and one eventually makes some headway.
The golden rule was at one time to be 'Don't buy a ship that you can't cover it's rebuy (ship insurance) cost' with in game credits, but that has changed somewhat nowadays with the introduction of the pre-built ships for purchase with ARX .
Play in *Solo for a while until you've obtained some measure of understanding of the game and it's many features.
You are awarded automatically free ARX based on the amount of time you play the game, but the amount has a weekly limit. You can save up some of these ARX to buy in game cosmetics, ship colour schemes and various other in game items, but they have no real advantages to your ship or your Commanders general skills.

Don't try to run before you can walk! ;)
And remember, there are plenty of forum posters here that can help you with most game problems, computer hardware requirements and a multitude of other game related questions. Some aspects of the game are not immediately obvious. :)

*There are three main game modes in Odyssey, Solo, PG (or private group) and Open.
You will not encounter any other players in Solo, but you will encounter NPC's in various situations.

Jack :)
 
I understand why you asked the specific questions you did, but the answers as you can probably see from those supplied so far, are difficult to evaluate. It's not like any other game, except to say it's something between sandbox games, mmo epics like Eve, and combat flight simulators.

The answer in short, is absolutely you should buy it, own it, play it, be terribly confused, put it down again, pick it up again another day, get more into it, and if you have any interest in a space adventure where you tell your own story, you'll soon find it's your most hours per dollar game in your collection, so it's worth it for that alone.

Any control method is viable. The very best players of the game (pvp combat) are mostly mouse players, however, there are hotas players and even controller players in that top tier. I play with hotas for the immersion, I think it's worth buying an expensive set for elite, something from virpil or vkb (throttle you can cheap out, the thrustmaster TWCS throttle is the best on the market in my opinion, even if it feels cheap, it simply has the best controls and placements on the market).

The FPS gameplay is mediocre as pure FPS, it's not a twitch shooter. FPS combat is acutally surprisingly similar in theorycrafting to the space combat, which is to say it's a chess match and rock paper scissors, much more than a twitch experience. On-foot PvP unfortunately is not very rewarding, as the instance owner has a significant advantage in ping (E-D is peer to peer networking, its greatest weakness, but also a reason why it may be possible to play forever one day after frontier abandon support, so could be its saving grace).

Where the on foot gameplay shines, imo, is in the missions provided by the game, to infiltrate and steal, sabotage or murder things at settlements. There is decent variety in settlement layouts and some of these require meticulous planning and high skill to pull off. Unfortunately, it won't be long til you tried all of the scenarios and know how to beat them, FD needs to add more content in this area, imo.

But, this is a spaceship game, you aren't buying it for the FPS, that's just 'pretty neat'.

Be aware that to get access to all the good stuff takes an inordinate amount of time. When people say Elite is grindy, it's a huge understatement. If like many gamers, you value optimal play, you will be doing quite a lot of grinding. The results usually do pay off though, and it provides reason to play the game for literal years.

PvP ship to ship combat has no skill ceiling, 6 dof combat is very rewarding to get better at, the way the combat system was designed is simply the best of any combat game that I've played.
 
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Just to reiterate what KRISXR said: it's a sim of the entire Milky Way Galaxy. The first time you open the Galaxy Map in game and realise the scale, and every dot is a star that can be visited, with planets you can visit and many you can land on ... it's a hell of an achievement.

And for that scale to be worth it the flight model has to be worth playing, for years, and it is.
 
First and foremost: Don't expect premium FPS action, it is not that kind of game. Can't stress that enough.

That being out of the way, it is hard to compare because ED offers a plethora of activities to choose from. It has no playable story that takes you by the hand or guides you through the game, but an ongoing background plot.

It is, in it's core, a spacehip flying career game. Of the ones you listed I only played NMS, and it doesn't really compare. NMS's approach to space flight is much more simplistic and actually very unimportant compared to Elite. Both games have procedurally generates galaxies, but Elite takes a much more realistic approach both in size and population. There is no fauna in ED, and flora is much more sparse, and not every planet - in fact none of them - is littered with them. NMS is basically Minecraft in space with an esoteric story. ED throws you into an mostly empty galaxy and says "have at it".

There is the occupied space called the "bubble" where the background story takes place, and this is where you would run missions, go mining, go fighting, whatever floats your boat. Or you leave inhabited space and go exploring.

What you make of it is really up to you, the best advice I can give is, however tempting it might be, resist the urge to follow any guides that promise you a best start, to get rich quick or skip content. There is usually nothing but disappointment on the other side of those guides, as there is no "goal" to "win" in this game. It is a career sandbox where you have to make up your own goals, apart from a few stepping stones the game gives you - unlocking engineers, gaining superpower ranks, that kind of stuff.

As for VR, the state of it is not changing for now. Everything in ship is VR, everything on foot is still playable in VR but on a virtual flatscreen displayed in your HMD. It is still more than worth it, flying your ship in VR is amazing and, especially for the first time, an unforgettable experience. I have clocked over 3000 hours in VR now, it is just gorgeous.
 
Oh, also, depending on where you get the game, there are two versions both available to you when you buy it. There is the current version, the "Live" game, which is all base game features plus Odyssey (on foot content) if you buy it, and there is the "Legacy" game, which isn't supported anymore but still kept alive. Both galaxies are seperate and progress between them doesn't carry over. If you start out, make sure you play the current live game - I hear Epic, for instance, still installs Legacy as default? Not sure if that is true anymore.
 
What games is it most similar to?
In terms of anything modern, really not very much at all.

In terms of older games, obviously the three previous games in the series (Elite / Frontier Elite 2 / Frontier First Encounters) but they were singleplayer games of the 80s and 90s so it follows a lot of the theming of those and some of the details of how certain things work are similar, but it has more differences than similarities in how it plays.

Of the games you listed, No Mans Sky is probably the closest, and it's not very close.
- Elite Dangerous focuses way more on the spaceship part of the game. In ED you primarily fly a spaceship, and you can get out of it (with the optional Odyssey expansion) from time to time. In No Mans Sky the spaceship is mainly a means to get between on-foot locations and not much happens in or to the spaceship itself.
- Elite Dangerous has a much more defined location. In NMS it really doesn't matter where you are, and you can go anywhere else very quickly. In Elite Dangerous there's a big difference between inhabited space (a few tens of thousands of systems, mainly very close to Sol) and uninhabited space (the billions in the rest of the galaxy), and even within inhabited space there's more difference between systems than there is between most two NMS systems
- Elite Dangerous has a vertical learning curve and poor-to-non-existent tutorials, and no equivalent at all to NMS' intro storyline. There are community-produced guides to various things, but you probably won't enjoy it if you're not the sort to enjoy figuring stuff out by clicking on buttons to figure out what they do, having bad stuff happen, wondering why that button even exists, then weeks later figuring out a use for it. (Once you've figured out what's going on, the game mostly isn't actually all that difficult, but there's a lot of "it's easy if you know how" in there)
- Elite Dangerous has a much lower personal power cap than NMS. You can still be quite powerful in Elite Dangerous but you're not godlike. It also takes a lot longer to reach that cap in Elite Dangerous than it does in most other games. Elite Dangerous is made to be played for thousands of hours. It is not made to be played for tens of hours. How you get to play it for thousands of hours without first playing it for tens of hours is left as an exercise for the reader.
- Elite Dangerous has an evolving political/economic simulation which changes in response to collective player action, whereas the NMS universe is essentially completely static. You can if you want mostly ignore this and just think "oh, that's cool, now back to flying the spaceship" - it's a lot more abstract and less impactful than an actual political/economic simulator would be - but it will mean that one week you're doing a particular thing ... and then the next week, the situation might have changed and you can't do that thing any more, at least not in that particular place. If you don't like the idea that events will happen outside your control, you can't avoid that part of multiplayer, even though you can easily avoid actually meeting other players face-to-face. Some aspects of this simulation are intended to be deliberately manipulated by players (though generally require a larger group to do so successfully)
- No Mans Sky is openly a fantasy universe in the style of 60s pulp sci-fi cover art. Elite Dangerous tries to present a semi-realistic future universe more in the style of Serious Military 80s Sci-fi. Neither setting actually holds up if you think too hard about it but ED does more to try to stop you noticing that moment-to-moment whereas NMS embraces it. (If you want an actually realistic spaceflight simulator, the old Kerbal Space Program still is the only modern-ish option)

though I guess I'd still need to install some of the 10 years of DLC?
The base game will get you almost everything included, and also most future developments are likely to be part of it. What you won't get is the Odyssey DLC which gives:
- the ability to get out of your ship and walk around on planets (or very limited areas of space stations) and associated missions and encounters
- landing on some of those planets at all (which tend to be the prettier ones) though you do get a lot of landable planets without it
- a few (though increasing) newer ships, which tend to be slightly more powerful than the older ones (though not to the extent you actually need them to progress)

I would say buy the game without it, see if you like it, if you're still playing and not bored of it after 50-100 hours then buy Odyssey the next time it's on sale unless your first hours see you getting really into exploration of uninhabited space - in that case, buy Odyssey sooner because a lot of its better content is on the exploration side of the game and you'll be missing out.
 
Think of it this way, you won't really know if this game is for you until you try it. For the price of a few pints of beer it is well worth buying. Play the game for 100 hours and the cost per hour is low. As has been said, it takes time to learn. There are some old guides out there (I believe that down to earth astronomy [D2EA] left his guides up. They are very useful in the "how to do X" that takes you how do do something in game, like using the cutting tool on the Maverick suit to cut open access panels for doors and then use the energy tool to overload the door controls.

There is no race in the game to get the biggest, most powerful ships, as often using the small/medium ships is more enjoyable.
 
Pick up the game next time it's on sale just the base game. There's loads of cool things to see around the galaxy. I would suggest you do not get the Odyssey expansion. What it adds to the game as far as gameplay isn't much of value. A lot of the activities do have crazy income but that's also somewhat of a bad thing. You don't need to rush through the ships. Very little cool stuff will be locked out without the on foot content. Go play unlock some stuff build some ships visit some stars and then if you get hooked and need easy credits and monotony you can get Odyssey and use exo biology to unlock a carrier. If you enjoy weak shooters you might enjoy the on foot content but I'd suggest simply skipping it at first.

The UI is bad. The game is cryptic but the community can get you past those hurdles so that you can get out and do stuff.
 
Just a warning though, others have told you already the good and cool sides of the game.

This game will also make you grind, like a lot.
Grind to the point where watching paint dry is more interesting than doing something to get things done.

Meeting with friends can sometimes be a hassle where you'd need at least 15 mins (one carrier jump) to meet a buddy somewhere and do some activities. This is the best case scenario.

Get it in sale or lookup some key seller website for some cheap deals if you want to try.

Otherwise stick to No Man's Sky, much more content and creativity if you like space genre.
 
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