What kind of place is the ED universe?

[Stealthie]

Looking at people's replies in other threads, it seems like people have very different ideas about what sort of place the ED universe is.

Do you see it as a lawless, corrupt, "wild west" sort of place, an advanced and regulated "Star Trek" galaxy or something in-between, like Star Wars, where there are orderly bits and lawless parts?

I'm not a huge Star Trek fan but when I play ED I can't help thinking of DS9, where you end up seeing a lot of the "sordid underbelly" of the galaxy, even though it's probably fairly law-abiding overall.

Just wondering how other people imagine the ED universe overall.

 

[signal11th]

Neither because nothing that you do in the universe actually has any kind of short-term/long-term impact. I see it as beautiful and vast but nothing else.

 

[Whitehair]

Home.

 

[Jason S]

Somewhere to fly some ships and look at planet and stars and even land on the barren ones.

As far as the state of law goes in a system when out it the black then it all seems quite lawless to me.
Bit wild west.

But do anything a bit wrong in a station then death sentence for you.

 

[Bran Tse Mallory]

I see it as a place where almost all trace of humanity has left us. Theft and murder go unchallenged for the most part and slavery has once again become a 'thing' and even expanded into debt based slavery. Even those who claim to just 'trade' end up killing to protect their profits. There is still some hope though, all be it jaded by the desire to make money in the form of CG's - turn any crisis into a profit opportunity and watch the money men flock towards it and with them go the dregs of society to kill/rob them.

In all honesty, I hope mankind never reaches this level of selfishness.

 

[Bomba Luigi]

Its a Utopian Future, everybody can get rich easy and everybody can rob and murder without problem. Good or Bad, its Utopia for everyone

 

[verminstar]

Mad max in space springs to mine...set in the backdrop of a beautiful ocean which is sadly only ankle deep at its deepest, with an undercurrent of beige boringness, lifeless, featureless planets by and large and all run by those who have limited experience in designing multiplayer games, while supported by a bunch of 80s rejects.

Right now, I see this game as a placeholder till better (hopefully) games catch my eye. FD seems so enthusiastic about putting placeholders in the game that the result being the irony that the whole game is a placeholder...an unfinsished beta that is still being developed, albeit at the pace a disabled and dying snail makes ^

 

[STARFIRE REVMEUP]

Looking at people's replies in other threads, it seems like people have very different ideas about what sort of place the ED universe is.

Do you see it as a lawless, corrupt, "wild west" sort of place, an advanced and regulated "Star Trek" galaxy or something in-between, like Star Wars, where there are orderly bits and lawless parts?

I'm not a huge Star Trek fan but when I play ED I can't help thinking of DS9, where you end up seeing a lot of the "sordid underbelly" of the galaxy, even though it's probably fairly law-abiding overall.

Just wondering how other people imagine the ED universe overall.

If you are referring to the populated area, its a cross between the cooperate world of "Alien" and the factional worlds of "Dark Matter" The movie and the show sum it up pretty well. both are rooted from earth.

 

[Marc JX8P]

I think Star Wars is the best analogy - just based on the amount of different systems and factions involved alone as well as the room for smuglers, bounty hunters and criminal organizations to go largely unchecked. The stations obviously look more like something out of Babylon 5. As it is a game and combat and piracy has no real consequences other than the loss of some in-game credits (and time spent gathering them), it would be difficult to compare these to real world behaviour in actual societies.

 

[smiths121]

I see it as a place where almost all trace of humanity has left us. Theft and murder go unchallenged for the most part and slavery has once again become a 'thing' and even expanded into debt based slavery. Even those who claim to just 'trade' end up killing to protect their profits. There is still some hope though, all be it jaded by the desire to make money in the form of CG's - turn any crisis into a profit opportunity and watch the money men flock towards it and with them go the dregs of society to kill/rob them.

In all honesty, I hope mankind never reaches this level of selfishness.

Well I could not put it any better than this.

One addition though - there are many, may humans which cheapens the value of life. It also makes individuals powerless, large organisations, whether hereditary, political or corporate have power. All individuals can do is get by, develop and live by their own code - given how meaningless an individual's actions are in the greater galaxy it does tend to lead to selfish codes. Maybe if they get together with other individuals, they can administer some local fleating power.

Probably explains why a lot of people buy ans Asp and just take off.

I think Brian may have been talking about the playerbase rather than the background

Simon

 

[Skyjack]

Elite is Elite...or maybe a Firefly/Star Wars/Aliens cross with 2 drops of Revelation Space in the sense the distances are painfully real. Alan Dean Foster's Commonwealth series is this direction but it's an obscure example.

I always felt Elite to be Firefly Wild West rather than Mad Max - the other option would actually leave me cold model-wise, fixed only by a fascinating story as a reason to get involved.

 

[knowles2]

Looking at people's replies in other threads, it seems like people have very different ideas about what sort of place the ED universe is.

Do you see it as a lawless, corrupt, "wild west" sort of place, an advanced and regulated "Star Trek" galaxy or something in-between, like Star Wars, where there are orderly bits and lawless parts?

I'm not a huge Star Trek fan but when I play ED I can't help thinking of DS9, where you end up seeing a lot of the "sordid underbelly" of the galaxy, even though it's probably fairly law-abiding overall.

Just wondering how other people imagine the ED universe overall.

Somewhere between the Wild West and Star Trek.

 

[Bran Tse Mallory]

You were on the cusp of getting some Rep then this...

Brian

 

[Marc JX8P]

Well, I for one have never fired a shot first (or second) in this game, and have always been making donations when a faction asked because of famine or disease. So either count me as a) one of the few good citizens of galactic civilisation left, b) gullible or c) not a good shot and happy to improve my status without doing much work for it.

I claim a and c.

 

[Cosmo]

The Elite universe is a semi-dystopian, realistic depiction of the distant future. Here's official lore of the Elite Dangerous Role Playing Game:

A Galaxy of Adventure

In the universe of Elite: Dangerous cheap and readily available faster-than-light travel has allowed humanity to explode across the stars, building new colonies, cities, nations and empires. The galaxy is a rich place, filled with a wealth of minerals, water and life bearing planets. The great nations of the Federation, Empire and Alliance grow wealthier every day, and such wealth attracts powerful people who scheme daily to increase their power.

Space travel is common and affordable. The middle classes of the galaxy own spaceships like twentieth-century families own cars. Owning a spaceship grants tremendous freedom – spacecraft owners are courted all across the galaxy by space stations hungry for rare goods and vital supplies. Politics seldom interferes with trade and even very patriotic worlds such as Nanomam are happy to accept goods and services from those who paint the ‘wrong’ flag on the side of their spacecraft.

For those at the bottom of the heap little has changed since the old Earth dark ages. Planet-spanning mega corporations rule unchecked in large parts of the galaxy employing entire nations of people in call centres, factories, tech support hubs or even as humble stockbrokers. On the planet of Zaonce the miserable masses slave for the planet-wide Bank of Zaonce, filling tedious hours buying stocks and shares, selling high and low like robots, receiving none of the gains they make. On revolutionary Eranin the population is expected to perform in weekly parades celebrating their independence from the Federation, even while their leaders ‘redistribute’ the people’s wages into their own back pockets.

This combination of cheap space travel, terrible inequality and a laissez faire attitude towards weapon ownership makes the galaxy a dangerous place. Pirates, mercenaries and political agitators often like to fire first and seldom ask questions later. The police have a terrible arrest rate, but an excellent execution record; in space it’s hard to take prisoners and very few people even try. Add to this the many navigational hazards in space, fierce native creatures on unexplored planets, psychotic cyborg’s with faulty behaviour chips, the terrible greed of the intergalactic elite and even the chance of being interdicted by alien spacecraft, you have a dangerous galaxy just waiting to destroy a wandering space pilot.

To survive you’re going to need the best ship, the best equipment, a strong credit account and the skills to back it all up. For in this dangerous galaxy only the elite survive…

 

[Anthemeia]

The Elite: Dangerous universe is an existential horror.

CMDRs may exist as pawns in the great games played by major and minor factions, with no hope of reaching the other side of the board and converting to another, more powerful piece.

We can be multi-billionaires, but we can own nothing more than the ships that take us from place to indistinguishable place. We can build nothing, leave no legacy, create no meaningful, lasting change. We are but blown onward by solar winds, our individual achievements are untraceable and pass unremarked, our wakes guttering out and lost beyond memory, or, at best scanned and disassembled to extract accidental information. Our use is more in the epiphenomena of our passing than in our unwelcome presence.

Even our most heinous behaviors warrant less notice by the greater part of humanity than blocking a landing pad. We may murder and steal at our whim, then disappear into the cold dark, barely pursued or thought of again. The bounties we carry are perfunctory at best, dwarfed by the profits from a brief effort at ferrying biowaste. Our most dramatic behaviors are literally worth less than excrement.

So shunned are we by galactic society that we are barred from disembarking at landing pads, so every station from Sol to Achenar to Sirius appears the same from our seat at the helm, which is our true and only home. We are disallowed a taste of the local flavor or customs that differentiate systems and regions. Agricultural stations display fruits we will never taste. Factions present non-negotiable terms to ferry or deliver or slay in their name. Our only indication that this Orbis is not that one 500 lighyears away are the automated messages recorded and replayed by algorithm, a handful of voices perhaps long dead, beamed to us without the possibility of response, lest our mere words infect what we assume is civilization and not some grand illusion. In truth, we cannot ever know whether standing up from our chair would cause the universe itself to cease, and this nagging complaint at the back of out voyaging minds fuels our incurable solipsism. We have no comms and we must scream.

 

[TwistedHelix]

Just wondering how other people imagine the ED universe overall.

Mostly Empty.

 

[Cosmo]

CMDRs may exist as pawns in the great games played by major and minor factions, with no hope of reaching the other side of the board and converting to another, more powerful piece.

We can be multi-billionaires, but we can own nothing more than the ships that take us from place to indistinguishable place. We can build nothing, leave no legacy, create no meaningful, lasting change. We are but blown onward by solar winds, our individual achievements are untraceable and pass unremarked, our wakes guttering out and lost beyond memory, or, at best scanned and disassembled to extract accidental information. Our use is more in the epiphenomena of our passing than in our unwelcome presence.

This is about the gameplay. I support player owned outposts, bases, guilds and territory control. It's a matter of waiting for Frontier to add it.

 

[Dad Rock]

A Dangerous Place...

 

[Anthemeia]

This is about the gameplay. I support player owned outposts, bases, guilds and territory control. It's a matter of waiting for Frontier to add it.

In some ways, I hope they never do. I enjoy the idea that all CMDRs may be nothing more than brains in jars somewhere, enduring an experiment that may or may not have a purpose.