I was playing in standard beta. And yet when I play now, I still have moments of shock at some of the things happening around me in game.
The 1:1 scale galaxy we have right now still stuns me when I think about it. The sheer quantity of data in the galaxy map, the actually functioning orbits and planet rotations that you can observe in real time, the glorious daunting beauty of it all... and when I realised the starfield I saw in each system was correct... that each star I saw was in the right place around me and I could even select them and single them out using my ship's navigation computer... that I could sit at a station and watch the planets and moons dance around their sun... sit in a planetary port and watch that sun rise and set... that achievement alone deserves to be commemorated.
But on top of that there's a flight model that is absolutely to die for. The sheer visceral joy of flying your ship, a ship that handles like it has weight, that puts enough realism on the back burner to give an experience that feels like some insane cross between World War 2 dogfighting, Star Wars space combat and a strategy game where every few seconds you are called on to make some desperate life-and-death decision that is nuanced by timing, judgement and experience. Use chaff... now. Hit silent running... now. Keep the engine capacitor up, but bleed enough into the weapon capacitor to fire everything when the target comes into view. Frontier learned 20 years ago about the limits of realism when it came to fun combat gameplay... an advantage of painful experience that they drew lessons from.
Those knife-fights in the void and through planetary rings just got more and more ridiculously fun the more I played. I started reading about fighter tactics in the age of dogfighting. I tried using evasive manoeuvres described in them, and they worked. I discovered lead, pure and lag pursuits and found out they actually helped me keep my nose on targets in the game. Until one day I found myself trying to out-turn an enemy while we were drifting through the rings of a planet, saw him doing the same and realised we were executing a rolling scissors manoeuvre against each other, both with shields down, with pretty much instant death for the first person whose roll intersected with an asteroid.
I still remember the pure pounding joy of that moment. I felt like my heart was going to explode.
The appearance of this game is simply astonishing. Frontier seem to have started with the philosophy that they want above all else to make you feel like you are sitting in the cockpit of a ship. Have you seen the texturing in the ship cockpits? Or on the ship exterior? I can see where the paint has dried unevenly on the metal when a star's light reflects off it. It's absurd. And the look of everything else is absurdly beautiful. There's a reason it's become a running joke that half the posts on the front page are of players who just want to share an incredible screenshot they've taken.
And as for the sound... well.
Frankly, the sound design in this game... I don't think I can say anything that does it justice.
If I say that it's literally the most immersive, most beautifully detailed and realised sound design I have ever heard in any game (maybe anywhere, music, movie, anything), then that just seems flat compared to how I feel about it.
Think about this. Every single ship has its own look. Every single ship has its own flight model. It handles differently. It flies differently. It handles power differently.
But the sound... every single ship sounds different. And I don't mean just an engine noise. The noise each ship makes is unique based on which controls you are applying at any time. Pitch, yaw, roll, accelerate, declerate, vertical thrust, horizontal thrust... even the boost. And they're not just one sound. They vary in how they change as you move from full thrust to none. And then on top of that there are 'sweeteners', sounds unique to each ship.
In this game, you can close your eyes and know what flight control you're applying by just listening. You can know what ship you're flying just by listening.
It still completely blows me away.
And then... you listen to planets. Stations. Different parts of each station. The background radiation of the galaxy rumbles. The sound of the discovery scanner echoing into the void. The scan of a planet or sun making a shimmery sound as it nears completion. The little clicks of your scope as it picks up and loses contacts. The varying pitch of a multicannon as it spins up. The juddering spin-down of your frame shift drive as you finish a jump. The sharp snap when a distant ship jumps away.
It's so beautiful.
Their attention to these details even extended to the SRV.
It still seems almost insane what we got with the Scarab. By all rights, they should have made some simple thing for driving around planets.
Instead we got this... piece of utter perfection. It looks glorious - fragile, bug-like, its wheels on legs to give high ground clearance. The more I drove it, the more I realised that an entire driving model had been built for it, rewarding skill, varying your throttle, controlling skids. And the detail inside that little bubble of a cockpit. On the wheels. The lights. And the sounds. Oh god the sounds.
The biting of tires into dust or ice... you can listen and know which. That little electric drive whirring and straining its little heart out to do what you want it to. The sound when you roll is like a fibreglass boat hull being thrown across the ground. The creak and strains with every shift of weight.
And then the tracks.
I was on an ice world, with the sun low and behind me. I was driving too fast, lost control and skidded around. A cloud of white ice dust flew up around me, but what captivated me was here and there a couple of tiny ice flakes flew up in 0.1G and drifted down right in front of the cockpit. And when the cloud cleared, I looked back along my tracks and the sun glistened on the raised parts of them, while all around me ice glittered or glowed blue within from the shadows.
I am still absolutely staggered by the level of detail they put into the SRV. It's better than any driving game I know. And it really should have just been a small side project. I've found that if one spinning tire hits the ground after jumping, it spins you exactly like it should. I've found you can twist your tires back and forth to climb slopes you can't in a straight line.
But here's the thing...
Unlike any other driving game, I can take that perfect little buggy to any of millions of worlds, and drive on each. I can pick any spot on those worlds and land on it and drive where I like.
That is insane.
And getting to the point... that's why I agree. That's why I loved it when Sandro said in the streams that they have nothing to show yet about any further SRV's.
I'm half-convinced that one of the reasons 2.1 took so long was perfecting the Scarab.
And if that's what they do when they want to make a ground vehicle... I want them to take all the time they need when they do it again. I don't want them to rush. I want them to do the amazing, absurd thing they did when they were just designing the tiny little ground vehicle you drop out of your ship onto planets.
I will wait. Whatever imperfections there are in the game (like releasing Engineers without module storage, for example), for me they're massively outweighed by what they've already done.
To me, they've proved they can do what doesn't just seem impossible, but beyond comprehension. They said way back that they wanted to take their time and do it properly. And I can see it. It's like watching a canvas of some colossal painting being slowly filled in with the most detailed brushwork imaginable, and as you step back, you take in the vision that is their aim and your heart just jumps. They've earned my trust with what they've given me so far many times over.
In the meantime, I'll just keep playing the most perfect recreation of the original Elite game there is. I'll keep flying. And I'll be looking forward to watching each part of that canvas being filled in.
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