I'm a prospective player, waiting to hear a little more freeback to actually get into Elite Dangerous.
The first space-sim I ever played before was X3 and it was terribly disappointing : Lots of time in your cockpit, doing what I call : "the space-flight simulator", where you spend most of your time in auto pilot looking at the beautiful environment listening to the ambient music. I'm not saying its bad, its actually good for relaxing and some games are beautiful. But if like me, you value your playtime by what you are actually doing and achieving each hour you play, this becomes quite a problem.
As of late, I came up to be interested in the whole genre with the recent hype around star citizen and Elite and I decided to drown myself into its history, especially the early days, the game I never had the chance to play : The Wing Commander Saga and more specifically, the first Privateer game. What surprised me with the first Wing Commander and its sequel is that you could get into action very quickly and get into the meat of the game aka the dogfighting, you just had to press A for the auto-pilot to "teleport" you to the next point of interest. The same happened in privateer, where you could travel from one point to another very quickly if you didn't encountered anything hostile, it helped to keep the pace of the game intact and I felt like I was actually doing something each hour I played.
I really want to insist on that "playtime/things actually happening" aspect, because from what I've seen on youtube about Elite, there seem to be a lot of slow paced traveling, sure the graphics are amazing and the ambiance as well, but will this sensation of amazement last after a few hundred hours if you are trading and patrolling into the same aeras ? I'm sure a lot of people here played Skyrim and know what I mean, the beauty of the environment and the feeling of freedom lessened the more you played and went back and forth at the point it became tedious and it felt like you could do so many more interesting things instead of walking.
This problem is sometimes linked to a lack of balance between the actual size of the game world and the traveling speed of the player, but if I'm not incorrect elite promises to have an gigantic galaxy, so I'm wondering how its going to manage the actual time spent traveling versus the time spend doing something. Are people already experiencing this problem ?
The first space-sim I ever played before was X3 and it was terribly disappointing : Lots of time in your cockpit, doing what I call : "the space-flight simulator", where you spend most of your time in auto pilot looking at the beautiful environment listening to the ambient music. I'm not saying its bad, its actually good for relaxing and some games are beautiful. But if like me, you value your playtime by what you are actually doing and achieving each hour you play, this becomes quite a problem.
As of late, I came up to be interested in the whole genre with the recent hype around star citizen and Elite and I decided to drown myself into its history, especially the early days, the game I never had the chance to play : The Wing Commander Saga and more specifically, the first Privateer game. What surprised me with the first Wing Commander and its sequel is that you could get into action very quickly and get into the meat of the game aka the dogfighting, you just had to press A for the auto-pilot to "teleport" you to the next point of interest. The same happened in privateer, where you could travel from one point to another very quickly if you didn't encountered anything hostile, it helped to keep the pace of the game intact and I felt like I was actually doing something each hour I played.
I really want to insist on that "playtime/things actually happening" aspect, because from what I've seen on youtube about Elite, there seem to be a lot of slow paced traveling, sure the graphics are amazing and the ambiance as well, but will this sensation of amazement last after a few hundred hours if you are trading and patrolling into the same aeras ? I'm sure a lot of people here played Skyrim and know what I mean, the beauty of the environment and the feeling of freedom lessened the more you played and went back and forth at the point it became tedious and it felt like you could do so many more interesting things instead of walking.
This problem is sometimes linked to a lack of balance between the actual size of the game world and the traveling speed of the player, but if I'm not incorrect elite promises to have an gigantic galaxy, so I'm wondering how its going to manage the actual time spent traveling versus the time spend doing something. Are people already experiencing this problem ?
