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Elite: Dangerous


radiofloyd
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I've been talking to @radiofloyd on the discord about this game. We touched upon the sound design, which quite frankly is completely insane in this game.

 

 

That video doesn't even begin to cover it. Each body has it's own signature soundscape that you can monitor from space through all the banging and other space rumbling.

 

Each ship has it's own note which changes as you upgrade and engineer it. Although it might not seem like it, you get to know which ships are which, which ones you know you can take down and which ones you should avoid at all costs.

 

 

There's loads of incidental stuff as well, like if you kill a ship you can hear radio transmissions fade out as the ships debris scatters across the black of space. If it's witnessed radio calls go back and forth over who gets dibs on the salvage.

 

When you land in an orbital your ship makes plinking noises as it cools down, there's hubbub coming over the tannoys on how to behave and warnings of what's out there waiting for you if you're in a system with a bad reputation or if a system is in the throws of war. Some systems Coriolis' stations might even beg you to join their forces.

 

Sound design in games is phenomenal now. At one point there were only really a few studios that got it. Bungie and DICE were the kings of sound design. Since the late 00's everyone has becomes superstars at it. Something like Rainbow 6 Siege has to be experienced to be believed. It's so full and distinct.

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This is the kinda shit that makes me want to play this game (but fuck that, I'm not learning that one!)

 

https://kotaku.com/elite-dangerous-players-are-rescuing-a-player-whos-been-1832727827?utm_medium=Socialflow&utm_campaign=Socialflow_Kotaku_Facebook&utm_source=Kotaku_Facebook

 

Basically, some dude got himself stranded in space back in November so the rest of the community are trying to rescue him. It just astounds me how much of a team spirit runs through this game.

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Nah. As you know I just started playing on PC. I couldn't do the mouse and keyboard controls as they're kinda, I dunno, it's not like you point the nose of the ship where you want and that's it. With the controller you do just that. You have finer movement control with the mouse and each key does something. Pointing the nose works like depending on how far you slide the mouse the thrusters positions on your ship go from 0 to 100% on in a smoother gradient, which means if you don't return the mouse to the neutral position you're likely to have one or more thrusters at 1% somewhere. It's too finicky.

 

The worst part for those thinking about returning is that they've done some altering, most of it streamlining but there's stuff like the SRV having handbrake on A/X (not circle or B like before) and then swapping the main turret controls to the left click. Not that it matters, you can go into the controls and change practically anything you could think about. For me I was back into my space legs in less than 5 minutes, and that's with the added confusion of transferring from a PS4 pad to an Xbox One pad.

 

What I'd really like is to buy a HOTAs and play it like that. I bet that would take a lot of getting used to but after spending a lot of time playing like that going back to anything less would be a major step back.

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  • 3 weeks later...

This game's fucked my arse tonight. It's chucked me to 3 rebuy screens after being absolutely drilled by a Master rated pirate in a Python. My little Adder stood no chance. Shredded into scrap in less than seconds. Ended up paying out maybe 100k for insurance as well as been fined to the tune of 100k as well.

 

I took another step into the Imperial Eagle and started bounty hunting to break the trading up a bit. It's not a great ship, but then again what is at this level? I'm going through all the ships in order of cost just to set myself a goal. I have the Viper to go through before I get to the first "good" ship in the game. There's going to be plenty of felons I scalp before then.

 

Still amazed at how well this runs and looks. Beautiful game.

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  • 1 month later...

I keep watching YouTube streams and videos of this, it's very relaxing. I ended up watching the record of the Twitch stream where the fuel rats rescued that stranded dude, it was simultaneously the most calm/dull and thrilling thing at the same time.

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Just now, Sly Reflex said:

Get it and learn to explore or mine. It's so Zen. It's like going for a drive just because you can.

I keep looking at the PS4 version, but want to hang on in case this gaming pc ever happens.

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Just get the PC version. It's future proofed because you have no idea if ED will make the jump to the next gen or if it will have cross gen accounts. Plus you have a chance at maybe playing the VR version on PC if you fancy going down that avenue. 

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8 minutes ago, Sly Reflex said:

Just get the PC version. It's future proofed because you have no idea if ED will make the jump to the next gen or if it will have cross gen accounts. Plus you have a chance at maybe playing the VR version on PC if you fancy going down that avenue. 

But it means waiting until I have my pc as my laptop would never run it.

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I've been thinking about this newbie friendly update and while I do think the on ramp needs to be less of an incline, I don't think this is the right way to go about it. From a design perspective on Frontiers behalf, it's the least amount of work they could have done, and in the long run it could cause players eased in by this update long standing issues.

 

Adding computers that land and take off is all well and good, but it's not learning you anything. For the uninitiated if you don't have a computer and you want to dock, you have to ask for docking permission and then find your own way to the allotted landing pad. You have to do a few things to make your life easier here. Coming out of super cruise facing the slot you've to fly through is something you're not going to learn, general orienteering yourself is something you pick up as you play. Sure, that means flying around a station for a bit to familiarise yourself where the slot is, but it's that time where you need to pay attention to what you're doing. When you have a docking computer as soon as you request and are granted a landing pad the computer takes over and it does everything for you. You're losing two important lessons right there.

 

The docking computer then lets you out. Now there's NPC and real player ships in the game, and sometimes the insides of those orbiters can get a bit crowded, especially when you have people coming in and out at the same time. Same as going into the slot, coming out of the slot has rules you need to follow. Don't go too fast. Keep an eye on traffic. Stay to the green side and all that. Again this is been taken from players that might just use the auto docking feature.

 

Now it looks like all ships are getting an extra outfitting slot (or two in the case of small ships) to accommodate this new advance docking module. The module is going to be really handy for those big fuck off large ships like the Anaconda, flying those are not too bad but navigating to a landing pad can be hard since you've to get through the slot, which gets harder and harder the bigger your ship is.

 

It sounds like there's no problem, right? It's going to be the first thing a lot of layers buy, just throw one in when you get a new ship. It's not going to cause any issues.Wrong. The auto docking module can be damaged. If this happens and players have no experience in landing manually, then they are fucked. Depending on how long that takes, it could be Sidewinder they end up dinging, or it could be something like a Vulture or a Python. It could even be a bigger ship than those.

 

Similarly, when I mentioned approaching the slot via planned navigation, there's a reason you do that as well. It cuts down on your time and makes it easier to request landing and drop right in. If you are new, then it's likely that you're going to get into dings and scrapes out there, this can end up breaking the cockpit glass of which your heads up display is projected onto. This in itself isn't going to hinder the auto docker, but it's still something you need to take into account. If you bust your canopy, life support kicks in and you have a fixed amount of time to get back to somewhere with ozone so you don't end up facing a rebuy. If you end up at a station with a few minutes on the clock and then you have to re-orientate yourself and then fly at the minimal speeds auto docker does, you're going to end up failing.

 

The way I see it treating things that are meant for convenience being treated as crutches is a bad way of going about it. Eventually players will get bitten in the arse and then it's too late, they're already in a ship that's costing them millions to rebuy, but people won't be willing to go back to the Sidewinder or something smaller to just learn what they should have done in the first place. I understand it as well, learning to land sucks. It's so difficult when you start. But it's worth learning to do. When you know what you're doing it's much quicker to do it manually. I've done this myself with someone on PS4 that couldn't be bothered to learnt o land and use the auto docker and I could be turning my ship around by the time they were coming in.

 

I honestly think the best thing Frontier could have done is have specific scenarios that learn you something important. Like when Gran Turismo started with the license tests, those were there for a reason. Elite Dangerous needs that. It needs you to learn how to land. It needs you to learn how to navigate. It needs you to learn how to read a star chart. It needs you to learn planetary landings while being under stress. It needs to learn you what to do when being interdicted. It needs to show you what running cool is for and how you can work it into your jobs. It needs to learn you how to cope when you are heavily outgunned and need to high wake out of there. Everything from scooping stars to taking down ships with the space lasso, everything needs its own little license test. The game adding auto docking and super cruise control isn't doing anyone any favours because when those are kicked out from underneath you you're going to be completely shagged. As a player coming in you're disadvantaging yourself if you don't at least try to learn that stuff.

 

Thoughts from people that have played? Even those that bounced off it because of the difficulty?

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Moved up from the Imperial Eagle to the Viper MkIII. Still bounty hunting pirates and other ne'er do wells, the step up in firepower is pretty noticable, but it comes with a caveat I don't like at all. The heavier hardpoints are on the underside of the craft while the window faces upwards. When you're tailing a target it's really hard to keep the more damaging firepowers beads where they should be..

 

The Viper sounds awesome though, really throaty, when you throttle down it sounds like someone dragging futuristic slabs over tarmac.

 

Not that I'm done with the Viper just yet, but the Cobra MkIII is up next. I think I'm going to outfit it for smuggling since it';s a multipurpose ship and try to unlock the Dweller. I've been doing whatever the main role of the ship is, but they've mostly been transit or fighters. Having something that will allow me to break bad and start making inroads on one of the engineers is going to help loads. I've only got Tod and Felicity open right now, Tod is pointless as I don't use multicannons and Farseer is so far out of the way that I'm not going to get a chance to get to her until I get a better ship that's going to allow me to get her some meta alloys.

 

I'm going to have to plan ahead with getting Imperial and Federation rank too, if I'm going to go through each ship in order of cost eventually I'm going to be locked out by the ones where you need. I'm not really sure how I'm going to go about that yet.

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Today I broke bad. I switched out the Viper for a Cobra, had a quick plan about which black markets I was going to hit up and then went for it. A few runs selling Imperial salves has made a dent in my final earnings, but it's pimped out my Cobra A rated apart from the parts that only need D rating. Smuggling is scary, but my god if it isn't ridiculously profitable. Look at the spike in earnings! I made a few million yesterday as a Bounty Hunter, but it was spread over a long time and had a little bit of risk with losing the ship. Here I can hopefully avoid those confrontations and line my account and assets into silly numbers.

elite dangerous earnings.png

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I took a break from smuggling to unlock one of the other engineers. I went all the way out to the Pleiades to buy a meta alloy so I could unlock Felicity Farseer, but as soon as I showed up I got an emergency mission from The Federation asking me to go reclaim a blackbox from a ship that went dark.

 

Now if you don't know, the Pleiades is where the Thargoids are from, or somewhere around that neck of the galaxy. I am scared of these aliens. I've never met them and I intend to keep it that way for as long as I can. I did a scan and pulled 105 cases of Thargoid activity. That is insane. The threat level went right up to 9. I thought it stopped at 5, but now I know better.

 

Anyway I found where the black box was. I was super hesitant. Right in the middle of a Thargoid attack.

 

I went in and managed to get the black box and then got the fuck out of there as quickly as I could. I was shitting my pants trying to scoop the box and get out of there before anyone showed up. I got masslocked by the debris of the destroyed ship so that made me sweat a bit.

 

I managed to get everything out and land while holding onto the hot potato. All space salvage is considered illegal so I had to smuggle it into the port I was told to hand in at. Got a nice reward and a cool story to tell though.

20190421141652_1.jpg

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