Elite Dangerous is the Best Unfinished Game of Last Year - Review by RockPaperShotgun
Massively Multiplayer Misadventures
Why Frontier rushed this out before Christmas when many of the features vital to a multiplayer game remained unfinished is a complete puzzle, but whatever the reason, it’s a move that may prove woefully misjudged. It means that many people’s first impressions are of a brilliant game, but one that is incomplete and riddled with infuriating gremlins. For example, the holiday period included, for many, a server-side malfunction that left folks either losing hundreds of tonnes of cargo or being given billions of credits compensation by mistake. Not only is this straight-up bad in terms of enjoying your time in space, it also has ridiculous economic implications. Some of the luckier beneficiaries of these errors have been buying Palladium – an expensive metal – and flushing the cargo into space for their fellow players, effectively flooding the galaxy with freshly-printed creds, like a chaotic millionaire sprinkling banknotes from his skyscraper apartment.
I was playing with a friend in a different part of space when this same server maelstrom passed over the galaxy. And at the risk of sounding like an Upworthy headline, what happened next was lunacy. My pal parked his transport ship, full of cargo, and bought a smaller Viper as an extra to try out. In the meantime, the game pulled a wobbler and when he sought to retrieve his cargo ship he discovered that, not only had the ship been mysteriously warped to a system 15 light years away, but the station it was being held in did not even have a shipyard. Without this option in the starport menu, his ship was impossible to get back. The game had essentially towed him. At time of writing, he is still waiting for his ticket to technical support to be sorted out.
Stories like this are a huge pity. They give a great game a bad reputation. But from what I have myself experienced, it is a deserved reputation. Most of the time, Elite works. The excitement, even the boredom, of the game is still preserved for me as something I am happy to have paid for. But it would be a poor reviewer indeed who did not mention that the sim’s rough edges have not been satisfactorily sanded down. I would be equally naive if I did not suspect that the Kickstarter mentality of constant development (“we can fix that later in a patch”) is partly to blame. All this means is that the game being sold on Frontier’s website does not feel like Elite 1.0. It still feels like Elite 0.9.
The visual splendour of the galaxy is recreated wonderfully, the feel and look of the ships make piloting and dogfighting a joy, and even the limited spread of occupations, from explorer to smuggler, gives you enough to play around with. The game is at its finest when you set your own challenges: pirate a Type-9, reach the Horsehead Nebula, smuggle slaves into a Federation port. If, hearing these possibilities, you can already see yourself flipping switches and tenderly pressing buttons on a flight stick, then I have no problem recommending it to you.
I just feel everyone should be aware of what they’re getting when they buy Elite. The best unfinished game of last year.
See the full review.
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My opinion: the general consensus is Elite Dangerous was rushed to release with Christmas time last-year. This meant that it lacked important multiplayer content, features and sufficient depth. That lowered ED's average review score.
Frontier can still make Elite Dangerous a masterpiece by adding sufficient content, features and depth to get 9/10, A+ scores when people review ED with the first expansion.
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