Elite Dangerous Catch-All

I launched Elite: Dangerous again tonight. It seemed appropriate for my first real gaming session after a move-inflicted hiatus and various other events and stresses.

Finding out that the Imperial Federalist Labour Party of Veloxi's Vixens is down to negligible influence at Tombaugh Station did hurt a little. On the other hand, the universe is still out there. And just flying a spaceship in E:D still feels good, and the sound design in this game continues to amaze me anew every time I play.

Hey I'm Commander Zoso Ryder on PC and am always looking for friends. I'm in a squadron that is large enough; yet not loud - people chat primarily in a Discord channel. I hoped to find a GWJ squad, but when I came to the game, there were little goodjer pilots flying.

Recently, I'm seeing several of you on my friends' list. I've just finished my first exploration expedition; earning 112million credits from data, and reaching pioneer. Working on enjoying both Kraits that I bought upon returning, as well as my new Alliance Cheiftian.

Going to just mission around the surrounding area of my Squadron's home systems for a while, until I feel like I've got my Phantom's jump range high enough to head out again. My goal is to visit each section of the galaxy, like one might want to pop into each state as they travel the US.

misplacedbravado wrote:

Finding out that the Imperial Federalist Labour Party of Veloxi's Vixens is down to negligible influence at Tombaugh Station did hurt a little.

If it's any consolation, the faction can never be fully booted out of Orcus since it's their home system.
Lukyanenko Enterprise in Asvinici system is the new Tombaugh!

Seems that Galnet is coming back in the form of a new long-term story line with linked community events. About time.

Starting with clearly recycled thargoid attacked station assets (but now they're terrorists duh) isn't what I'd call a strong start, but it's something.

lorenzolio wrote:
misplacedbravado wrote:

Finding out that the Imperial Federalist Labour Party of Veloxi's Vixens is down to negligible influence at Tombaugh Station did hurt a little.

If it's any consolation, the faction can never be fully booted out of Orcus since it's their home system.
Lukyanenko Enterprise in Asvinici system is the new Tombaugh!

All my ships are stored in Tombaugh station so when I finally log in it's going to be really weird not being greeted by the Vixen's representative. I forget his name.

So, I just picked up elite dangerous in a humble bundle. Wow this game is dangerous, I've just dropped 13 hours into it over 3 play sessions in one week around work and a small child with no weekend in there.....

In short having a blast, though my joystick is showing that it was cheap and is very old....

I've done the beginners area, done a few missions and picked up a Cobra MkIII. Where are GWJ members hanging out, where should I head for?

Orcus, and regions nearby is where Veloxi's vixens has station presence. Not sure how many people are active right now but there's fun to be had in the area.

The Vixens aren't that active at the moment, I think a lot of people are waiting for Odyssey at this point.

I'm out in Colonia, so a long ways from the bubble. I have a couple of ships there now.

Orcus and the Vixens faction in it has been mentioned a few times in this forum of late. If there was interest, we could make that the center of a GWJ Days thing. And by "thing" I mean it can be anything between a real interactive meet up and just a shared goal for the weekend with no real socializing.
Weekend of October 10th and weekend of October 17th. More info in this thread.

My main is out at Colonia, but I can fly my alt over.

I'll have to figure out if I can get my HOTAS to work with Windows 10, but otherwise that sounds like fun.

tanstaafl wrote:

The Vixens aren't that active at the moment, I think a lot of people are waiting for Odyssey at this point.

Odyssey + RTX 3080 + Reverb G2.

Once I have all 3 of those things, I am back in.

I have this (according to steam).

What's the tl;dr gameplay description? Is it a fancier EVE Online?

You're in tinier ships than in Eve. I would look at it as a Privateer type thing with no story and a big sandboxy algorithmic galaxy. It's got quite a sim rather than arcadey look and feel. People who like it tend to enjoy the scale and the "make your own way" concept. People who don't feel it's boring and lacks content. I think a lot of us have run out of things to do, but enjoyed their initial play whilst they were trading up to get better ships and the like.

Thanks!

That's a really good description. I once told a friend that if he could enjoy trucker sims, he could enjoy Elite Dangerous.

Anyway I'm in Tombaugh Station right now. Ever since that crazy LTD rush, I've been sitting on about 1.2 billion credits. Enough for any ship I want, but not enough for a fleet carrier. I burned out on mining so I figured I'd help out doing missions for a while, mix it up a bit.

I started back up a few days ago, started up a new run on PC (never got far the first two times I tried.) Put in about 8+ hours in over the last few days. I had been playing NMS and then read some about the Odyssey update, which actually made me want to play this again more than anything. I like the expansive, "spacey" feel of the game.

Just upgraded to a Cobra MkIII last night, and now figuring out what I want to do next. Ultimately, will end up just exploring distant places once I get more comfortable.

Definitely could equate it to a trucker sim the way I've been playing it.

lorenzolio wrote:

Orcus and the Vixens faction in it has been mentioned a few times in this forum of late. If there was interest, we could make that the center of a GWJ Days thing. And by "thing" I mean it can be anything between a real interactive meet up and just a shared goal for the weekend with no real socializing.
Weekend of October 10th and weekend of October 17th. More info in this thread.

Here, I wrote some stuff to get the conversation going about GWJ days.

What?
Join one or both of the following initiatives:

  • A shared community goal for GWJ players in the game Elite Dangerous. This can be enjoyed by everybody, on any time zone, and on any platform.
  • “Peak hours” scheduled where GWJers will have a high chance of encountering one another, doing wing missions, etc while also trying to further the shared community goal. This will probably be more successful if you’re on the PC platform.

When?
For the shared community goal:

  • All day (24 hours) the weekends of October 10-11 and October 17-18

For the “peak hours”:

  • Saturday October 10: TBD
  • Sunday October 11: TBD
  • Saturday October 17: TBD
  • Sunday October 18: TBD

Feedback and more ideas please! For the "online at same time" stuff it's pretty tricky to organize, there really aren't that many players.. maybe a doodle poll would help?

lorenzolio wrote:
...and also wrote:

Orcus and the Vixens faction in it has been mentioned a few times in this forum of late. If there was interest, we could make that the center of a GWJ Days thing. And by "thing" I mean it can be anything between a real interactive meet up and just a shared goal for the weekend with no real socializing.
Weekend of October 10th and weekend of October 17th. More info in this thread.

Here, I wrote some stuff to get the conversation going about GWJ days...

Sounds great! I'd be interested in joining in!

Frontier is making Horizons free for all Elite:Dangerous owners. If you already have it you will get a free paint job.

Probably so they can have a stable base to build Odyssey on and not have to worry if it is installed or not.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/thread...

And is anyone still around who can invite players to the Vixen's private group? So if anyone joins in for the GWJ Days we can add them?

tanstaafl wrote:

Frontier is making Horizons free for all Elite:Dangerous owners. If you already have it you will get a free paint job.

Um can I get some free engineering materials or something useful instead?

And do paint jobs really cost $20? At least something equivalent priced.

tanstaafl wrote:

And is anyone still around who can invite players to the Vixen's private group? So if anyone joins in for the GWJ Days we can add them?

I think that Veloxi would need to do that himself. Unless things have changed lately, private groups are tied to an individual commander. So, we would need to meet in an existing group (like Mobius) if everyone is already a member, or a GWJ organizer could maybe just set up a group for this event.

I've not played at all since December, but might make my way over toward Orcus to hang out with some GWJers for a while. I loaded up the game a few weeks ago when I got a new 3440 x 1440 monitor, and hardly remembered how to control my ship!

That said, I'm paying attention to Odyssey and hoping that there's some gameplay to go with all the neato walking about.

I have to say that I'm still a little confused by what 'Odyssey' actual is.

I infer from the videos Hrdina posted that the game basically remains unchanged, and that what Odyssey does is provide:

1) A new 'layer' through which players can interact with the game. For example, by obtaining missions from 3d-modelled quest givers rather than static screens
2) New planetary locations.

However, what hasn't been added is new gameplay (i.e. a first-person combat against NPCs and - potentially - other players on planetary surfaces).

Is my understanding correct?

If it is, then I wonder whether all this does is make the game take longer. I'm not sure I see the long-term value of spending minutes exiting my ship and walking to a spaceship showroom, rather than seconds opening the spaceship-buying menu.

I suppose a lot will depend on how alive and real these spaceports and settlements feel. Do they feel like St Denis in 'Red Dead Redemption 2'? Or do they feel like The Tower in 'Destiny'. What I saw in those videos look a lot more like The Tower.

It would be fascinating to see what the player numbers are like for Elite: Dangerous. I wonder if a lot of the people who bought/buy the game are like: we buy the game, enjoy it for a while, then tire of the grind and put it down. I'd be surprised if more than a quarter of people who bought the game still play it frequently.

For me, the prospect of Horizons being free isn't a great incentive to return - more ways to grind don't appeal to me. Instead, I'd prefer a bag of credits or a free small ship. And I'd also welcome Frontier offering further incentives in the form of double or triple credit weekends (as other games do with XP).

I can understand players who've earned their credits being annoyed with this on principle, and being concerned about this breaking the in-game economy. However, my view is that no one quits the game because they don't think the galaxy is large enough or beautiful enough, or because the flight model is lacking. They quit because the medium-sized (and larger) ships are staggering expensive to buy and upgrade, and therefore require a prohibitive time commitment.

Yeah Rebel Galaxy Outlaw has you walking around. Although you still choose your destination on station/planet from a menu. The few animated parts like when you sit at the bar and talk to bartender, I click through ASAP anyway.

It's a pointless feature for a space game.

Stele wrote:

Yeah Rebel Galaxy Outlaw has you walking around. Although you still choose your destination on station/planet from a menu. The few animated paris like when you sit at the bar and talk to bartender, I click through ASAP anyway.

It's a pointless feature for a space game.

this is my over-riding feeling about space sims as well, unless there is a purpose to you walking around ah la No Man's Sky or Star Trek: Online or games like that. The space station visits in RG:O are only really there to break up the central game and play a little 8-ball, dice poker (truly, there is no worse in game "game" than dice poker) or the slot machines. I get why it's there but really, there's no need

Yeah I've never seen the worth of space legs in a cost / benefit kind of way - it seems a lot of work for not much fun I would have put all their effort in to atmospheric and water planets instead. I guess it tells you how hard they feel proper earthlike and water planets are to do that they're trying to do this first.

detroit20 wrote:

I have to say that I'm still a little confused by what 'Odyssey' actual is.

I infer from the videos Hrdina posted that the game basically remains unchanged, and that what Odyssey does is provide:

1) A new 'layer' through which players can interact with the game. For example, by obtaining missions from 3d-modelled quest givers rather than static screens
2) New planetary locations.

However, what hasn't been added is new gameplay (i.e. a first-person combat against NPCs and - potentially - other players on planetary surfaces).

Is my understanding correct?

Well, I wouldn't say it hasn't been added, but that it's a detail that they haven't revealed yet. We'll see what comes out in future dev diaries. There was a lot implied in those videos, but a lot that's not going to be stated or shown until they are closer to release.

That's why I wrote that I am "hoping that there's some gameplay to go with all the neato walking about".

I doubt that they can take away any existing functionality that people already have while sitting in their ships. So they're going to have to add new stuff, or at least variations of existing stuff (e.g. new mission types), to convince CMDRs to walk into stations and on planet surfaces.

I really wish they'd put the time to rebalancing and giving reasons to do the good content that already exists. Make all the weapons/damage types useful, make all activities payout reasonably for risk and time(looking at you combat), make it more doable to get all engineering resources by doing the content types you like.
Walking around just doesn't make me forget about all the rebalances the game needs.
Or hells, maybe they could write more story content, run events that aren't just copy pastes.
Sorry i love some aspects of this game but I've gotten pretty salty about some things over the years.

The space legs stuff will be either pointless or fantastic depending on the amount of game play that comes with them and whether those activities are actually rewarding. In the same way you can bounty hunt, pirate, trade or explore in Horizons but the only activity that is worth doing in terms of progression is mining. Also whether they manage to really populate planet surfaces with interesting stuff; running around the same empty brown planet surfaces will get boring really fast.

I was never very enthusiastic about space legs and preferred other features to be prioritised, on the other hand after playing No Man's Sky for a good while, coming back to Elite Dangerous and being bolted into the pilot seat felt incredibly restricting.