Now you might not be able to tell from my name, but I'm a huge Freelancer fan. I almost specifically bought this game because I was hoping for something like the Discovery or Crossfire multiplayer mods being implemented as a full MMORPG that I could play with hundreds or thousands of others. And I'm somewhat disappointed.
The graphics and art are simply exquisite. No questioning the amount of work that went into the details given to the ships, their interiors, stars, black holes, planet surfaces and their rings and the stations.
The actual gameplay leaves a bit much to be desired though. Where Freelancer plays like a space sim RPG (and a good free MMORPG with multiplayer mods like Discovery and Crossfire) that was a few years ahead of its time, Elite: Dangerous plays like a grindfest MMO crossed with a trucking sim set in space.
Let me clarify before anyone starts to rage and start breathing flames.
The grindfest bit comes from the monetary acquisitions portion of the game, which is basically a direct equivalent to your "player level" in other MMO's. Currently, the regular trading/exploring/mining/bounty hunting missions are only adequate for the first 6-12 hours of gameplay (depending on whether you play solo or like getting ganked by Asps, Pythons and Anacondas), getting from a Sidewinder to a basic Hauler or Viper (what you want A rating stuff on your ship? that'll be another couple of hours), depending on the direction you've chosen. From that point, your only real option is trading rares. Mining, bounty hunting and trading between stations gets you a few ten to fifty thousand credits per hour, which is a long ass time to be grinding for the 1 million to get to the Type 6 (good luck if you want to outfit your new ship with A stuff) and 6 million for the Asp.
As soon as I got the Hauler, and learned that there were no high risk/high reward trade routes for Gold, Palladium, Slaves or anything, I googled to find the best trades and discovered that there even were rare goods in the game at all. So, I set up a route going from the few places around Lave, down to Momus Reach and the few rare goods stations around it, and back through CD-75 661.
It took about 3-4 hours, while listening to D&D podcasts the entire time, because my god is flying tedious and boring in this game (This is where the space trucking description of this game comes from), but I managed to get myself a Type 6 and begin running my Rare Goods route with a bigger hold, for more profit per run. At the moment, I'm at about 1.7 million in profits per 1 and 1/2 hour run through about 14 rare good stations all close to their stars beacons for maximum efficiency (I have done the math to make my run as good as possible).
That means at my current rate, it'll take me about 40 hours to get to the Type 7, and unless a more efficient grinding system is put into place, that means it'll take about 87 hours of pure monotonous flying to get the Anaconda, and that's without any weapons or systems upgrades, which will probably be another 20 or so hours, plus I'll need spare cash in case it gets destroyed, because there is no way in hell I'm going back to a Sidewinder after all that work because the insurance doesn't scale with your ship cost. So, about 115 hours of monotonous flight and trying to find new podcasts to distract me from my boredom just to have the (currently) best ship in the game.
You can get the Titan in Freelancer in less than 30, easy. The MMO mods at least have good trade routes (that are accurate in the info they give) set up so that if you want to grind for the best ships and weapons, it won't cost you four days of your life.
If I could somehow just add Elite: Dangerous modern tech to the Freelancer MMO mods....
Well, I think i'm just going to fly to the outermost star in our arm of the Galaxy and then let my ship sit there until some more improvements are added.
