What games is it most similar to?
In terms of anything modern, really not very much at all.
In terms of older games, obviously the three previous games in the series (Elite / Frontier Elite 2 / Frontier First Encounters) but they were singleplayer games of the 80s and 90s so it follows a lot of the
theming of those and some of the details of how certain things work are similar, but it has more differences than similarities in how it plays.
Of the games you listed, No Mans Sky is probably the closest, and it's not very close.
- Elite Dangerous focuses way more on the spaceship part of the game. In ED you primarily fly a spaceship, and you can get out of it (with the optional Odyssey expansion) from time to time. In No Mans Sky the spaceship is mainly a means to get between on-foot locations and not much happens in or to the spaceship itself.
- Elite Dangerous has a much more
defined location. In NMS it really doesn't matter where you are, and you can go anywhere else very quickly. In Elite Dangerous there's a big difference between inhabited space (a few tens of thousands of systems, mainly very close to Sol) and uninhabited space (the billions in the rest of the galaxy), and even within inhabited space there's more difference between systems than there is between most two NMS systems
- Elite Dangerous has a vertical learning curve and poor-to-non-existent tutorials, and no equivalent at all to NMS' intro storyline. There are community-produced guides to various things, but you probably won't enjoy it if you're not the sort to enjoy figuring stuff out by clicking on buttons to figure out what they do, having bad stuff happen, wondering why that button even exists, then weeks later figuring out a use for it. (Once you've figured out what's going on, the game mostly isn't actually all that difficult, but there's a lot of "it's easy if you know how" in there)
- Elite Dangerous has a much lower
personal power cap than NMS. You can still be quite powerful in Elite Dangerous but you're not godlike. It also takes a lot longer to reach that cap in Elite Dangerous than it does in most other games. Elite Dangerous is made to be played for thousands of hours. It is not made to be played for tens of hours. How you get to play it for thousands of hours without
first playing it for tens of hours is left as an exercise for the reader.
- Elite Dangerous has an evolving political/economic simulation which changes in response to collective player action, whereas the NMS universe is essentially completely static. You can if you want mostly ignore this and just think "oh, that's cool, now back to flying the spaceship" - it's a lot more abstract and less impactful than an actual political/economic simulator would be - but it will mean that one week you're doing a particular thing ... and then the next week, the situation might have changed and you can't do that thing any more, at least not in that particular place. If you don't like the idea that events will happen outside your control, you can't avoid
that part of multiplayer, even though you can easily avoid actually meeting other players face-to-face. Some aspects of this simulation are intended to be deliberately manipulated by players (though generally require a larger group to do so successfully)
- No Mans Sky is openly a fantasy universe in the style of 60s pulp sci-fi cover art. Elite Dangerous tries to present a semi-realistic future universe more in the style of Serious Military 80s Sci-fi. Neither setting actually holds up if you think too hard about it but ED does more to try to stop you noticing that moment-to-moment whereas NMS embraces it. (If you want an actually
realistic spaceflight simulator, the old Kerbal Space Program still is the only modern-ish option)
though I guess I'd still need to install some of the 10 years of DLC?
The base game will get you
almost everything included, and also most future developments are likely to be part of it. What you won't get is the Odyssey DLC which gives:
- the ability to get out of your ship and walk around on planets (or very limited areas of space stations) and associated missions and encounters
- landing on some of those planets at all (which tend to be the prettier ones) though you do get a lot of landable planets without it
- a few (though increasing) newer ships, which tend to be slightly more powerful than the older ones (though not to the extent you actually
need them to progress)
I would say buy the game without it, see if you like it, if you're still playing and not bored of it after 50-100 hours then buy Odyssey the next time it's on sale
unless your first hours see you getting really into exploration of uninhabited space - in that case, buy Odyssey sooner because a lot of its better content is on the exploration side of the game and you'll be missing out.
