It's been over two years since my last blog post about Elite: Dangerous. Hundreds of hours and thousands of faster-than-light jumps later, I have done some things, and had some thoughts. If you wish to know some of those things and thoughts, continue reading!
Oh, and if you haven't already, you can find my first thoughts on this game here, and the second blog post here. I also gave ED my Game of the Year for 2015. Anyway, let's get on with this,
To the Centre and Back
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| "LIBERA TUTEMET EX INFERNIS" |
As my last post stated, in 2015 I embarked on a journey to the quite enormous black hole at the centre of the Milky Way: Sagittarius A*. I got there, and what's more, I came home safely! That round trip exceeded 50,000 light years, not including short detours, of which I definitely recall a few. A conservative estimate would put my time spent on that endeavour at around 80 hours; it may well have been over 100. To put it lightly, it took a lot of commitment and focus to cover such a distance one 25-30LY jump at a time. I don't think it's hyperbolic to describe that as the largest single goal I've ever accomplished in a video game. Several real world months after setting off, I eventually got back to a space station, and thankfully remembered how to land the ship. Cue a lot of punching the air, and a big smile.
Oh, and my current self-appointed task actually more than eclipses the journey to the centre... but more on that later.
Perhaps this would have merited a separate post at the time, but I'm not sure what more needs to be said on it, beyond emphasising how long it took and the sense of achievement it gave me. After such a test of endurance, and not wanting to burn out on a game I've come to love, Elite: Dangerous and I were on a break.
Cheating on Elite with No Man's Sky
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| I didn't bother to re-install this for the sake of one screenshot, so this is plagiarised from google images. |
In August 2016, No Man's Sky came out. I probably don't need to tell you about its reception, but just in case, let's put it briefly. There were some pretty massive expectations and a great deal of hype in the lead up to its release, and a lot of players were disappointed in the final product. At one point I considered writing a post comparing it to ED, but I never got further than a few sentences. I would only have added another matchstick to a very large flamewar on the topic, plus I'd rather not shit all over a game that some people, bless 'em, genuinely enjoy. Nonetheless, I'll summarise my criticisms of NMS in the most concise form possible: bullet points.
- Inventory management is pretty much never fun.
- It all felt too 'safe', like riding a bike with training wheels. It was almost impossible to crash your ship!
- Crafting fuel was unintuitive and had too many steps - I found it not necessarily challenging, just pretty annoying.
- I couldn't help comparing it to Elite: Dangerous.
That last one stands in place of pretty much every other problem I had with NMS. At the end of the day it's not Elite - nor was it trying to be, nor should it have been, but my reaction to the game was inevitably coloured by this. From the way the world was procedurally generated, to the way the game looked, to the moment-to-moment action of the game, all of it started off on the wrong foot with me, and to this day feels inferior. Worst of all, the overarching goal of NMS and primary motivation to keep playing, was to gradually make your way to the centre of a galaxy! I had already done that of my own volition in ED, which again isn't the fault of NMS, but it certainly couldn't inspire the enthusiasm in me it otherwise should have.
I spent about 20 hours on No Man's Sky in the end. Rather than hating it like many players, it instead brought into sharp relief what I loved about the other space game in my life.
A New Absurdly Long Journey
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| Pictured: ALL THE MONEY |
So I went crawling back to Elite: Dangerous. The game hadn't changed whole cloth while I was gone, but one alteration in particular was hard to miss: being an Explorer was suddenly much more profitable! Scans of terraformable and Earth-like worlds had increased in value roughly tenfold; if you've read my previous post, you might know that looking for just those categories of planet is basically my raison d'etre as an Explorer. As a result, an 8,000 LY journey netted me over twice the number of credits I got for going to the core and back. This allowed me to kit out my Asp ship with modules I could barely dream of purchasing before. After a short period investigating other new elements of the game, I was swiftly reminded that I am bad at space combat, and too lazy to trade, mine, or do pretty much anything else worth doing in the Bubble (for the uninitated: the relatively small region of the galaxy that has space stations and inhabited planets). A brief interaction with another player, which lead very quickly to the utter destruction of my ship, cemented my determination to once again get far away from so-called 'civilised' space (don't worry, I had more than enough cash to buy back my Asp).
Travelling to the centre of the galaxy got my player name on a prestigious thread in the Elite: Dangerous forums: the Sagittarius A* Visitors List. Another thread had always caught my eye, however: the 65,000 LY from Sol Club, set up by the Elite community after players first successfully made their way to the most distant accessible star from Earth, located all the way on the other side of the Milky Way. The first person there christened it Beagle Point. In a move that, to me, sums up a great deal about ED and its passionate community, Frontier officially renamed the system Beagle Point - no longer just another random string of letters and numbers, like all the other stars in deep space.
So I decided to go to Beagle Point - but the quickest route would be via the centre, which felt too similar to my previous grand trek. Instead, I hit upon an even more ridiculous target: a circular trip around the entire galaxy, stopping off of course at Beagle Point. After faultlessly recalling the formula to calculate the circumference of a circle - no googling required, no siree - I realised this could add up to as much as 160,000 LY. That's over three times further than the trip to Sag A and back. Hoo boy.
Flash forward five months, and I'm a mere 18,000 LY from the fabled Beagle Point! The below screenshot shows the route I've taken so far, plus a couple of landmarks yet to come. The blue arrow near the top is my current location. The cluster of blue tags at the bottom are the Bubble, home of solid ground and arseholes with space lasers. Then, arcing upwards and to the right, is each noteworthy place I've been on the way. At first, remote nebulae served as medium-distance goals on the way to my ultimate destination; but at this point, in the very deepest depths of space, I don't even have vast clouds of interstellar gas for company. Instead, I am simply picking places to go that will hopefully not lead to a dead end, and noting the path I took for posterity. At the top of the image is Beagle Point, tantalisingly almost within reach.
After that momentous pit stop, it will then be up to me to tackle a region most members of the 65,000 LY Club experience on their outward, as well as return journey. Between the galactic arm Beagle Point sits upon, and another arm closer to the centre, is an expanse of emptiness with fewer jump options than almost any other region of the galaxy. The community has affectionately named this place the Abyss, and at some point in the near future I will have to navigate it, doing my utmost not to run out of fuel and lose everything I have scanned in the last half a year.
Beyond that, the next venue is a more cheery one: another player-named system closer to the centre: Colonia (middle-left in the above image). Last time I heard, this system was home to the only space station in the game that travels to other systems. Also, its fictional owner is literally a robot barman who has made a name for himself already in the earlier Elite games. Jacques' Bar sounds like a good place to put my feet up, my landing gear down, and sell a buttload of exploration data without fear being blasted to pieces on the last leg of my trip.
Perhaps you noticed that the detour to Colonia will cut off a sizable portion of the second semicircle of my ambitious journey. If you have a problem with that, well... s-shut up! That was my plan all along, to... um... make my route (sort of) look like a D? ...For Dangerous?
More Than A Game
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| Ringed planets? Cool. Ringed Ammonia Worlds? Awesome. |
This has ended up running quite long, which I guess makes up slightly for the two-year blogging hiatus. But I still have some thoughts about what this crazy, intimidating for most, labyrinthine for all, game has become for me. To my knowledge, I've never played one game for this long, and the way I have chosen to play sets it aside from most of my other gaming experience.
The more I play, the more assiduously I repeat the same task: scanning. I wrote an entire post about scanning, so no need to go into a lot of detail, but let's just say that the way I play ED is the definition of repetition. I scan stars, and I scan planets that look interesting to me. Sometimes the game reveals to me that the planet I just scanned is valuable, which I find gratifying. 99.9% of what I scan has never been scanned by another player, which means that one day, when I sell the data, I will be credited with the discovery of that planet/star - provided that I get back without running out of fuel or blowing up. That remains a strong motivation, but when describing this process, I always imagine it to sound, to someone unfamiliar with the game, like a dull grind. Hopefully this isn't Stockholm Syndrome, but it doesn't feel that way to me.
Part of the reason it doesn't become tedious is definitely down to what I introduce to the experience from the outside: music, podcasts, TV, movies, and Youtube. More and more, playing ED involves having a tablet propped up in front of me. In recent weeks, what's spurred me into launching the game was as much another episode of Deep Space Nine as the possibility of discovering a new terraformable world. And that's just the current side-piece of entertainment. Without ED, when would I have gotten around to watching Attack on Titan? Or Avatar: The Last Airbender? Or a never-ending trainwreck of video game-based movies?
Multitasking while playing games has never held much appeal to me - in fact, hearing anecdotes about the practice always seemed self-defeating to me. Why play a video game if you don't think it deserves your full attention? I have a different perspective now, at least regarding a game I know inside out. I give it as much attention as I need to, while still getting the aforementioned gratification from interacting with it. In a bizarre way, it's kind of like tweaking the graphical settings on a demanding PC game: over hundreds of hours, I've identified first the type of gameplay I enjoy the most, and then dialled in that experience to make every individual action in the game feel like second nature. It's reached the point where I often jump to a star, scan that star, open the system map, decide whether to scan any planets, do a spot of refueling and jump to the next star... and I honestly couldn't tell you if I was looking at the monitor while performing all those tasks, or if I was entirely absorbed in a fun episode of Star Trek.
None of which is to suggest I've lost patience with Elite, or that the only thing that keeps me coming back is an unrelated TV show - I could be watching that stuff on a bigger screen if I wanted to. The game still hooks me in, in specific ways. Realistically after close to 450 hours, the chances of finding something I've never seen before in the game is tiny... but it's not zero. Over a year ago I stumbled upon a water world with a second liquid-covered body orbiting it as a moon. I was ecstatic! The possibility of other such exceedingly unlikely discoveries helps maintain my interest.
I'll conclude with the other element of ED that always tempts me back for more. It's very simple, but it is one of the biggest fascinations I have with this space sim. I adore zooming all the way out on that galaxy map, and looking at where I am in the Milky Way, and where I've been. Which ultimately brings it all back to my fascination with space itself, and the quite incomprehensible vastness of the universe. Playing Elite: Dangerous allows me to gawk at that vastness from a perspective that is personal, and meaningful to me.
But enough of this introspection - I need to see what dilemma Commander Sisko has got himself into this time! Next stop, Beagle Point.
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