Elite: Dangerous - Space Truckin'

I'm obsessed with space. If you're one of the twelve-ish people who read my short-lived series of blogs covering my time with Kerbal Space Program, you already know this. I am so riddled with space madness that I once shook hands with Arjun (perhaps you know him as arjybarjy) in agreement that we would both sign up to Eve Online. Thankfully, I have so far reneged on that promise - I don't need more spreadsheets in my life, my day job more than satisfies that quota. Meanwhile, the concept of Kerbal fascinated me, but its realistic physics and rulesets ultimately limited my ability to interact with it. My ideal space game, should it ever arrive, needed to deliver the mindblowing vastness of the cosmos with the comparatively mundane tools of, say, a Euro Truck Simulator-style open world.

Enter, stage Space, Elite: Dangerous.

Where to begin? Elite: Dangerous is a the latest in a series of space sims that dates all the way back to 1984. The gameplay all takes place from the perspective of the cockpit in your super sleek spaceship, although apparently walking around on planets and space stations will eventually be introduced to the game. For now however, the action involves the pure experience of flying around a vast sandbox, occasionally taking a break to shoot some lasers at the neighbourhood space-highwayman or repeatedly crash into the side of a space station slowly and safely park your ship while remembering to check your blindspot.

Did I mention this game is vast? I did? Well it bears repeating. This is a 1:1 simulation of the entire Milky Way galaxy. Literally billions of stars. It's a massively multiplayer game that brings a new meaning to the word massive. It's set in the year 3301, by which point we have thankfully done away with minor inconveniences like not being able to move faster than light (shut up, Science). There are three distinct modes of travel based on how fast you need to get around: the slowest mode (top speed ~300 m/s that I've seen) is used for precise manoeuvres like docking at a station, engaging in combat, mining asteroids and so on. Chances are however, that just flying to another planet in the same system at that rate will take more than a year. To traverse these distances you use the game's mid-speed mode, called "supercruise" - here you'll often hit speeds over 100 times the speed of light. Finally, travel between systems involves spending ten or so seconds in a trippy Star Wars-style hyperspace. The weird paradox of this three lane highway is that the middle lane feels the slowest - jumping five light years to another system is practically instantaneous, but using supercruise to get from A to B inside a system can take several minutes - you can't use hyperspace to get from the star to that outpost orbiting a distant planet.

But hey, why not use that time you'll be spending puttering along to a station 80,000 light seconds away to get acquainted with the map screen. Once again, the scale of this game is mindblowing. Fourteen-year-old me thought GTA III had a big world. Years later, Just Cause 2 seemed to be twice the size of Texas. Take a look at some screenshots of me gradually unzooming the galaxy map in Elite: Dangerous. Every ball of colour is a star system. It's overwhelming. In a really fucking good way.

OK, let's see, if I take that left turn at Albuquerque...

OK, that's a lot of stars.

I can only assume the Coalsack is a really cool bar in space, but will get there before I turn eighty?

I have a tendency to 100% open world games. Maybe I shouldn't get my hopes up here.

Phew. Let's come back down to the real world. Obviously the developers Frontier have not individually crafted every single stellar object. There's a lot of copy-and-pasting going on here, particularly of the space stations I've spent the last two weeks flying to and from. I knew when I bought the game that this would be the case, and I think anyone who buys it needs to be ok with seeing the same high-tech, rotating, dripping with sci-finess, awesome space station interior a million times. Because there's some stuff to be done in this game, and depending on your tolerance for repetition, it can be pretty damn rewarding.

Docking inside a giant futuristic wind tunnel never gets old.

A bit like Euro Truck, Elite: Dangerous doesn't have a story as such. There are a number of roles (or maybe "classes", considering this is ostensibly an MMO) available to the player pretty much from the start. You can be a trader, buying low and selling high. You can be a courier, transporting cargo from one station to another for a fee. You can mine space rocks for gold and other resources. You can be a dirty scoundrel of a space smuggler/pirate. You can hunt said scoundrels for bounty money. You can be a pioneering explorer. There are a few other variants but that's about it.

At face value, that list looks a bit short. What impressed me, however, is how much depth each role has to it and how easy it is to switch from one to another. In my 20-30 hours with the game so far, I've tried a bit of all of these, with the exception of mining. Switching to a new role simply meant trading in my current ship and buying a different model. My goal was to earn enough in game money to afford a ship that would be really useful for exploring, an endeavour I didn't want to go halves on. I read up on the equipment I needed for this and wrote it down in front of my monitor: the total was 690,000 credits. For reference, the early quests I was taking would net me about 3-5 grand each. I had some way to go.

I started as a courier, which is definitely the easiest role for a newcomer. A randomly generated mission while docked at a space station gives you, say, 5 units of algae that are apparently desperately needed in another space station. These are a good introduction to the game - they fit the standard RPG quest mechanic, and they get you familiar with the various commodities available to buy and sell without having to wrap your head around the in game economy (more on that later). Equipment isn't a barrier to entry: the ship you're given free at the start is adequate for roleplaying a galactic FedEx employee.

The rewards are fairly meagre though, so once I'd saved up enough I bought a ship geared more towards combat. My shiny new vessel came with a side order of responsibility: the free Sidewinder starter ship would respawn upon destruction, whereas if I blew up my Eagle I would have to pay 5% of its value to get it back. Simulating the excess charges of an insurance policy is surely the epitome of fun! I kid of course, but knowing my actions had consequences added an engaging balance of risk and reward as I went bounty hunting. By this point I had enough of a grip on the controls that space-dogfighting came pretty naturally, although I was certainly more of a Hot Dog than a Starbuck (I make no apologies for that reference). Being a space vigilante was certainly more profitable, but wanted criminals weren't exactly around every corner. Flying around looking for a fight, and subsequently engaging in said fight, became more and more time-consuming. After a few aimless sessions flying around locations the Internet informed me were chock-full of pirates, none of whom apparently wished to come out and play with my space lasers, I reluctantly decided that I had to switch to the role I'd heard was the most lucrative per hour: trading.

When I sold the Eagle and bought a Hauler, I felt like I'd traded in a Jag for a Fiat Multipla. Finding decent bargains at first was not easy - I unfortunately do not have an eidetic memory for the price of fish in each station I visit. Every outpost, big and small, in every system, has a marketplace where one may buy and sell a selection of the fifty-odd resources present in the game, from silver to pesticides to good old-fashioned liquor. Prices fluctuate according to the type of economy the outpost mostly deals in, so for example coffee will fetch a higher price in a refinery-type system, while raw metals and minerals go for a lot more in tech-producing systems. Additionally, player activity can affect prices, so if a number of people operate the same trade route, it can become less profitable, or the markets may simply run out of product. Couple this with a three-dimensional galaxy map which, I will reiterate, brings new meaning to the word overwhelming, and you have a recipe for confusion.

Beer, a narcotic agent? The future is such a lightweight.

Fortunately, I found a website that helped me no end, although some might find this immersion breaking. elitetradingtool.co.uk provides the handy service of telling you what to buy if you're off for a journey from star X to star Y, with filters for the size of your cargo hold and how much you're willing to pootle about from station to station. The immediate advantage of this was that when taking on a mission to, say, source 8 units of uranium for a fee of 12,000 credits, I could fill up my spaceship's boot along the way and make some extra profit on the side. It also helped me get a handle on finding profitable trade routes, so that instead of painstakingly flying from one station to another and noting down the price of every resource worth trading in, I could now just type two locations into my brower and get the Cliffnotes version. During my first afternoon with the Hauler I raked in over 300,000 credits, which I would later find out was a tad lucky as I scrimped and saved my way to my target of 690,000. I recently hit that mark and purchased the Cobra Mark III I'd been salivating over.

It can do the Polaris run in less than fifty hectares.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, the real Elite: Dangerous begins. Exploring the cosmos will involve jumping from star to star, scanning everything in sight, and turning in cartographic data for cashola. I'm told it's not as profitable as trading, but there is one aspect to this class that is right up my alley, and was perhaps the greatest motivating factor during my thirty or so hours of grinding. The first player to scan a planet, or if you're super lucky, a star, and sell the map data, gets credited on the map screen with a "Discovered by...." tag. There are literally billions of stars, and although the game is something of an underground hit, not every player wants to be an explorer. Take another look at the image above of the entire galaxy: there's got to be some untrodden paths out there. Trading was more engaging than I expected it to be (the details of which will have to wait for a later blog post; this is getting long), but the prospect of making a mark on this universe, albeit a virtual one, is incredibly appealing to me.

I'm still in the process of forming an opinion on Elite: Dangerous, but at this point I think I would cautiously recommend it, with a few caveats. Repetition is a mainstay of the experience: in this respect it is a typical MMO. The next ship I'd like to upgrade to, an Asp, costs over 6.5 million credits, and the least slow way to get there involves doing the same thing many times - even being a space pioneer involves jumping, scanning, refueling, rinse and repeat. What makes it worth it is the sense of a living galaxy full of so many possibilities and ambitions, even if the gameplay itself is lacking in variety. I may have been alt-tabbing to the trading tool website every five minutes, and I may have been listening to podcasts while waiting to arrive at my next destination, but somehow my immersion was never broken. If you also suffer from space madness, you should consider exploring with me.