It was always a dream of mine to play a modern version of Frontier: Elite, so I jumped on the Kickstarter bandwagon when it finally seemed to be happening. A few days ago I made time to dive into the 'finished' game. Unfortunatly I did not find any of the magic that made the old game great.
First of all, performance. I've never seem a game perform this bad. It's probably due to a bug, the game won't recognize my NVidia GT 740M and defaults to Intel HD Graphics 4600. I've tried the work arounds on support sites, yet none seem to work. At least there are many people with this problem so it should be looked into hopefully.
Yet even with the Intel HD graphics, with everything set to low, it shouldn't perform this bad. The frame rate fluctuates wildly from over 30 (fluid, I don't have an fps counter to get exact numbers) to terrible judder, stalls, and brief slowdown to single digit fps. Sure my hdd is slow, but I also have a 2.4ghz quad core I7-4700MQ and 16GB of ram. Everytime I increase or lower speed, or go into a space station, the game turns into garbage. It must be a streaming issue, sitting still in a space station gets me steady fps, although only around 20fps with everything on low.
Anyway I can live with all that, it's still playable, just take it a bit slower on approach. However the devs had the brilliant idea to overlay all the space port menus over the background, which means that navigating all menus is also restricted to the low fps. Laggy menus are not acceptable, especially not in this game where you spend so much time with the commodities markets, ship upgrades, bulletin boards etc.
Performance out of the way, would this game be any good if it ran well? Short answer not really.
The first thing you see when you start the game is an optional tutorial, certainly useful in a complex game like this. However it starts with combat, the thing I'm least excited about to see return in an Elite game. Oh well, flying around the asteroids was good enough to start setting up the controls. Ugh there are so many. It took well over an hour to get to sort of an agreement between me the game and my ds4+mouse+keyboard, while doing the launch, docking and travel tutorials. I don't understand why I can't use the mouse to operate things in ship, while using the ds4 to fly. You have to go into ui mode first, then use the d-pad (which you have to configure first) You can only use the mouse to look around after enable headlook mode with another button. The mouse cursor only becomes active in the startport menus.
The flight model. Normal mode of operation is you go forward or backward as long as you apply 'gas' and stops when you release the 'gas'. The ship also automatically will correct to go where you are pointing. Nothing to do with space flight, also nothing new for space 'sims'. You can turn off the auto correction ('z' by default), in which case the ship will keep drifting the way it was going. HOWEVER you still can't go faster!! There seems to be some exteremely low speed limit. This is not Kerbal space program flying.
So how do you get anywhere. Since time compression is no option, thanks to the always online mmo nature, you now have frame shift drive. You can enter frame shift drive a little bit away from a space station and that simply gives you a way to keep accelerating. I went up to a couple 100x light speed before getting bored. Even at 1000x lightspeed it would still take you over a day to get to alpha centauri and I doubt you can actually exit a system that way anyway. For inter system travel you have the old hyperspace jump, which works as expected.
Frame shift drive is functional for interplanetary travel. Yet it lacks all feeling of space travel. You can turn corners exactkly the same, no matter what your speed is. You can't turn off directional correction as in slow travel mode. You simply stop when you get too close to something or press the emergency brake. Acceleration is based on how close you are to objects. Oh well, just point at where you want to go, set it to auto speed, press exit frame shift drive when it tells you too and it will magically drop you right in front of the target. Boring.
What can you do. I wanted to explore first, land on a planet. Forget about that for now, planetary landings are planned for an expansion. You can't get close to planets at all. Frame shift drive simply stops in front of a planet, slow travel seems to stop at an invisible bounding box limit. I had the ship pointing straight down at a planet and let it go for an hour, never got closer. Just a message about boundary limit or something. For now, planets are only background pictures.
Next I decided to go visit Earth. Erm, forget about that too. You need a special permit to enter that system, says only the super rich can go there in the map screen. Guess it would be too crowded in an mmo. Oh well, can't land anyway.
Thus it seems there is nothing left but to trade or take on a bulletin board mission. Bullitin board missions seem dangerous, might involve space combat, so I'll try trading first. However your starter ship only has 4 cargo slots, ugh. Plus you can't see what commodities are worth somewhere else, only some general trade route lines on the map. I can check online what a bag of peanuts costs in New Zealand. There really is no trade prices communication in this future of instant travel? Seems it will take a long time to save up for a better ship or any upgrades.
The problem is, after 5 hours, I'm just not excited at all to keep playing. Performance issues aside, all the magic of the old one is simply not there.
In Frontier Elite I started on the planet, playing with the time compression, watching the moons, other planets and the sun(s) swirl by, and day turning into night and back. Then launched looking backwards at the shrinking planet (can't figure out how to look backwards in Elite dangerous), turned off auto correction and got myself into an elliptical orbit to become part of the star system, swirling around in accelerated time.
Next I worked my way to earth through Bernard's star, landed in muggy San Francisco, to decide to go visit the greener pastures of Mars. Along the way I picked up threads of some intergalactic story while quicly trading my way up to a bigger ship.
Ofcourse the old one was far from perfect. Combat was annoying, yet a quick save before travel would be enough to avoid the random combat. Simply reload. With the new one being always online that's not an option. I don't want to think about what happens when my cargo ship full of expensive cargo gets blown up in a random encounter. That alone turns me off from playing.
TLDR: In essence always online ruins the game for me. No saves, no time compression, boring flight model instead, long grind ahead. Game is far from finished and runs like crap.
