| OneTime said: Has anyone played Elite Dangerous? How does it compare to NMS? |
It compares as much as Mario Kart compares to Gran Turismo.
Elite Dangerous starts with about 10 pages of settings to go through, then you need to figure out how to launch the ship without crashing it into the space station on the way out. You make money by doing delivery of mercenary jobs or you can simply trade goods between stations when you find a good route. Money to upgrade your ship and get better ships for better speed/manoeverability/jump range/cargo space/weapons/shields. Here's a tool with all the ships and how you can outfit them https://coriolis.io/
The game uses a realistic rendition of the galaxy with procedurally generated star systems to fill out the rest. 400 billion stars to visit. You start out in 'the bubble' which is about 200 ly across of inhabited space where you can trade and do missions. Outside of that is all there to be explored if you wish. https://www.edsm.net/ is another user created tool mapping the galaxy.
The star systems all behave realistically in real time. However black holes aren't actually dangerous (they do have gravitational lensing effects) and neutron stars can't be rendered properly for obvious reasons that they're only 1 pixel big. You can only land on airless planets yet those are very detailed and unique, while the same for everyone.
Oh and it's proper multiplayer. You can meet up with people, choose to play in private groups or go solitary, however the universe is still shared. If you make changes to one system, they will affect everyone else as well. (Not that you can make any big changes on your own, it's mostly influencing factions)
I like both games, yet Elite Dangerous kept me addicted for over 9 months. NMS started to get stale after a month. In ED you actually have a sense of getting somewhere and the galaxy is a far different place in the center than on the outer edges and it has all different nebula to visit. NMS gets very samey after a while. ED has about 10GB of screenshots sitting on my hdd. The galaxy is a beautiful place. However ED can also be incredibly boring, I watched a ton of Netflix while doing trade runs to get the exploration ship I wanted. Then there are some places it literally takes an hour to fly to with nothing going on.
