Pioneer looks amazing! I'd never heard of it before, so thanks for bringing it to my attention - it's going to be this weekend's investigative entertainment
Is Elite Dangerous a simulator to you?
- Thread starter rootsrat
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Pioneer looks amazing! I'd never heard of it before, so thanks for bringing it to my attention - it's going to be this weekend's investigative entertainment
Arcade simulatorWould it be considered a simulation or arcade if a program were to simulate arcade to each and every detail?
You Cmdr, are bloody scholar, what what.Would it be considered a simulation or arcade if a program were to simulate arcade to each and every detail?
Keep up the good work.
Toodly pipsky
For me, its kind of hybrid scifi-spacesim/rpg.
Speaking as a cargo pilot, ED is simulator enough to keep me from trading. Feels too much like work.
Flight sim? no. It's an immersive experience in a flight environment that mimics neither real flying nor space travel. Speed limiters kill the dangerous aspect of the process. In a flight sim, you can get into trouble quickly if you don't adhere to the rules of flight and often cannot recover. In space you'd be in a lot of trouble if you boosted out of a station and suddenly lost thrust.
With VR things feel more simulation like, but there's more left to the imagination than is left to the software.
With VR things feel more simulation like, but there's more left to the imagination than is left to the software.
To me ED was always a sim type of game in the first place. It's also a sandbox, RPG, adventure... and a few other genres, but ultimately this was always a simulator for me. FE2, FFE and ED.
Someone seemed surprised in another thread today when I said Elite is a simulator, so I started wondering is it really a sim? It seemed to be heading in that direction at first, with BGS, Powerplay and delayed ship transfer... But then we got nonsensical Telepresence, which is contradicting itself within its own rules (SLF TP range is circa 25 km and yet I can also use TP to my friend's ship who's at Beagle Point... right.). Quite a few other things that I would consider to be also truly simulated - like persistent mission related NPC's etc. - are not.
So I went onto the Elite Dangerous official website today to check if Frontier advertises Elite as a sim and guess what - nowhere on the whole website (I checked all of the pages and searched for the word) FDEV mentions "sim". I also checked PC manual. Nope. Nowhere to be found.
I must say this came as a surprise. I always assumed that Elite was advertised as a simulation type of game, but the only places it refers to it as such are:
1) In relation to planetary landings on Horizons Season description page:
2) In the PC manual:
The main advert blurb on the main page says (and note it still mentions "Seasons"):
I wonder how many other people treat Elite Dangerous as a simulation type of game in the first place... Let me know!
The background, including Stellar Forge output and BGS I consider a simulation. Most other bits I consider game elements. ED is a bit of a hybrid indeed.
S
If there was no FA-off, I could not bring myself to play ED.
What keeps the frustration is what you mentioned about full 0-g sim. ED is so close, but FD just forced that artificial flight model upon it, because it's "more fun".
Exactly, there are many types of simulation and many levels of fidelity - not all of them require a real world equivalent nor exact modelling of real-world science or equipment/systems to the n-th degree.
ED is most certainly a simulation/simulator first and foremost IMO. There are a substantive number of elements that are modelled on the real world/galaxy/universe and just because there are elements of "artistic license" used does not change that. There are some areas that could do with improvement in terms of implementation but that is another matter for another thread.
To me, it's anything you want it to be, but built on a magnificent piece of software called the stellar forge. You can literally do anything, trading, exploring, fighting, spying, politics, alien hunting, puzzle solving, mystery trails...but that can all be done in Solo mode.
It's tricky playing with friends in open, because it's a vast space to play in, and tricky enough to find each other before you start doing missions together, but I can see how these new Fleet Carriers can be a massive help, especially if you tie it in to squadrons. When they come live (FC) and you're in an active squadron (say, the Elite Dangerous Explorers Xbox Group), hopefully there'll be a mechanism where the squadron can pay into a common pot and buy a Carrier, if not, a wealthy benefactor can buy it. The whole squadron can be on the FC, fly off 500ly, find somewhere nearby for the miners to fill reserves, explorers head out etc.
Then there's playing the BGS, where you can aid player factions - again, finding info on superb third-party sites/apps (all of them findable from this forum, if you look for it.)
Powerplay, although it is utterly beyond me, is next level political machination deep state rpg, and to be honest, fair play to those that can!
So, Elite for me is the board game that every other game can be played on, and the 3rd party knowledge and activities are, to stretch the analogy, the DM books, the strategy guides, the board pieces.
Elite is what you make of it, no more, no less.
It's tricky playing with friends in open, because it's a vast space to play in, and tricky enough to find each other before you start doing missions together, but I can see how these new Fleet Carriers can be a massive help, especially if you tie it in to squadrons. When they come live (FC) and you're in an active squadron (say, the Elite Dangerous Explorers Xbox Group), hopefully there'll be a mechanism where the squadron can pay into a common pot and buy a Carrier, if not, a wealthy benefactor can buy it. The whole squadron can be on the FC, fly off 500ly, find somewhere nearby for the miners to fill reserves, explorers head out etc.
Then there's playing the BGS, where you can aid player factions - again, finding info on superb third-party sites/apps (all of them findable from this forum, if you look for it.)
Powerplay, although it is utterly beyond me, is next level political machination deep state rpg, and to be honest, fair play to those that can!
So, Elite for me is the board game that every other game can be played on, and the 3rd party knowledge and activities are, to stretch the analogy, the DM books, the strategy guides, the board pieces.
Elite is what you make of it, no more, no less.
FTL travel, aliens, visible lasers, kinetic weapon ranges, scooping tons of fuel from stars in seconds, galaxy wide module storage limit, no nukes, sound in space, etc.To me ED was always a sim type of game in the first place. It's also a sandbox, RPG, adventure... and a few other genres, but ultimately this was always a simulator for me. FE2, FFE and ED.
Someone seemed surprised in another thread today when I said Elite is a simulator, so I started wondering is it really a sim? It seemed to be heading in that direction at first, with BGS, Powerplay and delayed ship transfer... But then we got nonsensical Telepresence, which is contradicting itself within its own rules (SLF TP range is circa 25 km and yet I can also use TP to my friend's ship who's at Beagle Point... right.). Quite a few other things that I would consider to be also truly simulated - like persistent mission related NPC's etc. - are not.
So I went onto the Elite Dangerous official website today to check if Frontier advertises Elite as a sim and guess what - nowhere on the whole website (I checked all of the pages and searched for the word) FDEV mentions "sim". I also checked PC manual. Nope. Nowhere to be found.
I must say this came as a surprise. I always assumed that Elite was advertised as a simulation type of game, but the only places it refers to it as such are:
1) In relation to planetary landings on Horizons Season description page:
2) In the PC manual:
The main advert blurb on the main page says (and note it still mentions "Seasons"):
I wonder how many other people treat Elite Dangerous as a simulation type of game in the first place... Let me know!
The only sim aspect is the galaxy itself. The flight model is sim-ish but not really.
To be short, no. I love the fact that it does simulate some things but I also like that FD puts gameplay in front of simulation. Though there are some parts of the game where I'd be happy if the simulation part was more accurate - like the smallest of the engines lifting ships from 10g planets and such.To me ED was always a sim type of game in the first place. It's also a sandbox, RPG, adventure... and a few other genres, but ultimately this was always a simulator for me. FE2, FFE and ED.
Someone seemed surprised in another thread today when I said Elite is a simulator, so I started wondering is it really a sim? It seemed to be heading in that direction at first, with BGS, Powerplay and delayed ship transfer... But then we got nonsensical Telepresence, which is contradicting itself within its own rules (SLF TP range is circa 25 km and yet I can also use TP to my friend's ship who's at Beagle Point... right.). Quite a few other things that I would consider to be also truly simulated - like persistent mission related NPC's etc. - are not.
So I went onto the Elite Dangerous official website today to check if Frontier advertises Elite as a sim and guess what - nowhere on the whole website (I checked all of the pages and searched for the word) FDEV mentions "sim". I also checked PC manual. Nope. Nowhere to be found.
I must say this came as a surprise. I always assumed that Elite was advertised as a simulation type of game, but the only places it refers to it as such are:
1) In relation to planetary landings on Horizons Season description page:
2) In the PC manual:
The main advert blurb on the main page says (and note it still mentions "Seasons"):
I wonder how many other people treat Elite Dangerous as a simulation type of game in the first place... Let me know!
Well I hate to say it OP, but Elite Dangerous is
NOT A [FLIGHT] SIMULATOR
I've only just realized this in a big, bold font way. You see, I've been learning how to fly my newly-constructed Krait in Space Engineers, and holy freaking cow is that hard! In SE, weight and mass (two different things depending if I'm over a 1G planet or in space), inertia, ship orientation all matter greatly. This thing drifts way worse than the Dropship and takes much longer to slow down than a Cutter. I basically need to flip around like The Expanse if I want to slow down "quickly" by using the main thrusters for braking. In gravity it's even harder to fly. If I point the nose at a down angle while flying over a normal-size planet, I will pick up forward velocity because the braking thrusters cannot counter the weight of the ship. The vertical thrusters barely keep the ship in the sky, and if I fill my cargo bay to the max, they actually won't! If I turn upside-down, I will start to fall. As for routine things like docking, lining up with a docking collar takes serious precision, time, and practice. And then there is combat - engagements feel more like Navy ship battles than jet fighters in space (unless I'm using an actual 'jet fighter' SLF). Big ships do not turn and flip like they magically do in ED.
And then there is power management, which is much more involved than ED. I can burn through a quarter of my fuel just landing, and if I'm not careful my batteries can give out causing my atmospheric vertical thrusters to die, at which point my Krait falls from the sky like a brick. To manage fuel and power, I have "pips" for all the various class of thrusters - main thrusters, vertical thrusters, lateral thrusters, braking thrusters, and atmospheric thrusters, all of which I toggle on and off to save fuel. Flying FA-Off is pretty much a requirement except for docking and course correction, as FA-On consumes way more fuel and power.
While all this probably sounds like a nightmare to the average ED player, I personally LOVE it. It makes flying challenging, fun, and realistic. After all, I'm flying a freaking factory-sized building with "wings", not Bruno Stachel's aerobatic airplane. This along with well-implemented space legs gives a way better sense of scale, which is ironic since I play SE on a laptop screen and ED in VR. Let me say it again, the Krait is a freaking BIG ship - bigger than the factory I used to build it! In SE, it feels properly big. In ED it does not, even in VR.
So yeah, my lego / Minecraft space game is much more of a simulator (even though it's not truly a simulator) than ED is. ED is a complex arcade game in comparison, a truth I only recently have come to learn...
NOT A [FLIGHT] SIMULATOR
I've only just realized this in a big, bold font way. You see, I've been learning how to fly my newly-constructed Krait in Space Engineers, and holy freaking cow is that hard! In SE, weight and mass (two different things depending if I'm over a 1G planet or in space), inertia, ship orientation all matter greatly. This thing drifts way worse than the Dropship and takes much longer to slow down than a Cutter. I basically need to flip around like The Expanse if I want to slow down "quickly" by using the main thrusters for braking. In gravity it's even harder to fly. If I point the nose at a down angle while flying over a normal-size planet, I will pick up forward velocity because the braking thrusters cannot counter the weight of the ship. The vertical thrusters barely keep the ship in the sky, and if I fill my cargo bay to the max, they actually won't! If I turn upside-down, I will start to fall. As for routine things like docking, lining up with a docking collar takes serious precision, time, and practice. And then there is combat - engagements feel more like Navy ship battles than jet fighters in space (unless I'm using an actual 'jet fighter' SLF). Big ships do not turn and flip like they magically do in ED.
And then there is power management, which is much more involved than ED. I can burn through a quarter of my fuel just landing, and if I'm not careful my batteries can give out causing my atmospheric vertical thrusters to die, at which point my Krait falls from the sky like a brick. To manage fuel and power, I have "pips" for all the various class of thrusters - main thrusters, vertical thrusters, lateral thrusters, braking thrusters, and atmospheric thrusters, all of which I toggle on and off to save fuel. Flying FA-Off is pretty much a requirement except for docking and course correction, as FA-On consumes way more fuel and power.
While all this probably sounds like a nightmare to the average ED player, I personally LOVE it. It makes flying challenging, fun, and realistic. After all, I'm flying a freaking factory-sized building with "wings", not Bruno Stachel's aerobatic airplane. This along with well-implemented space legs gives a way better sense of scale, which is ironic since I play SE on a laptop screen and ED in VR. Let me say it again, the Krait is a freaking BIG ship - bigger than the factory I used to build it! In SE, it feels properly big. In ED it does not, even in VR.
So yeah, my lego / Minecraft space game is much more of a simulator (even though it's not truly a simulator) than ED is. ED is a complex arcade game in comparison, a truth I only recently have come to learn...
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I would never have predicted any of this from decades of arguments over Traveller.
I think it's more of a game than a simulator as it is quite arcadey.