wreckreation.org

Kicking ass and making games.

Back In It

Well, sorta. As you can probably guess my gaming (let along online-post-writing) has been pretty sporadic and brief since my daughter was born.

That’s not a complaint.

 

Between work, the baby, the farm, and the house there’s barely time to eat and sleep, let alone play games. However, I’ve had time to try a number of titles over the past year, and a few of them I stuck with for a surprising amount of time. I still don’t feel that I’ve really spent much time playing anything since I had a surge of play back in February, of last year.

One of the games that I’ve picked up just recently, mostly pulled in by the videos I had been seeing and the promise of an Eve-like experience without the monthly subscription fee, is Elite: Dangerous. I’ve only spent a few hours with the game, but have been taken away with the depth and detail provided. Being able to sit in the cockpit and pilot around the galaxy proves to be an extremely fulfilling experience.

 

I’ve been ignoring combat, trading, and mining entirely — and haven’t even been playing online instead choosing the “Solo” option I was excited to find in the menu — and focusing all of my efforts on exploration, which I’m still getting the hang of. I will say there are two big wins here that will likely keep me hooked for some time to come:

  1. The galaxy is vast, and beautiful, as can be seen in the videos below
  2. Exploration, in and of itself, is wrapped in a rewarding gameplay mechanic making it an entirely feasible play style choice

In Eve exploration boils down to a mini-game which allows you to hack your way into space ruins to discover loot, which is then typically sold or used in manufacturing, with the ever-present threat of combat. At least, that’s how it was when I canceled my accounts over a year ago (note I still watch the regular updates, hoping I can pick it up again in the future). Here, I can literally just spend time flying around to discover what each of the 400 billion systems contains, then sell that scanned content back to stations for profit. In essence, I get to play the role of a space cartographer.

It’s like a dream come true…

 

 

There are tradeoffs, and content I severely miss from Eve, but the unique offerings provided here are quite captivating. For one, space is pretty empty. I miss the intense structures waiting to be found in Eve, and the other player and NPC ships marking trade routes, populating stations, and taking part in this epic space opera. I’m assuming that this will come to Elite with time. In the mean time I’ll keep puttering around until I have enough to upgrade my ship, and eventually check out the mining, trading, and combat.

 

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