Available through Feb 25, 2025
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As someone who has played ED for a few hundred hours, if you’ve never played this, don’t go in thinking it’s going to be No Man’s Sky or something. This is a game with lore and factions, but it’s ultimately a game of the sort that is what you make of it. It’s the Flight Sim of space, and Frontier has a legit astrophysicist on their payroll that has helped with things like planet generation.
When you feel like you’ve got the hang of things but don’t know what else to do, find a community to join. Lots of communities have their own ongoing projects, like the Fuel Rats or the various hunts for Raxxla. Good luck out there, Commanders!
Fuel Rats
can’t be overstated. when you run out of fuel for the first time (and you will), don’t wait for death silently, call fuel rats. the operation they run is unparalleled to anything i have seen anywhere in gaming world.
Yeah completely right about is what you make of it. For me it was space euro truck simulator. Ofc I then ended up doing smuggling. I then ended up with a bounty on my head for attacking an npc that was collecting slaves from a ship wreck, basically my smuggling competition. Turns out an escape pod floating in space is automatically labelled as a slave by the game, and the npc was trying to rescue a stranded shipwreck survivor. I essentially attacked the Red Cross of space and ended up getting my ass handed to me by bounty hunters… Fun times!
And I’m currently exploring, making my way to the far side of the galaxy. I once dropped out of hyperspace and went to go eat dinner, forgetting that you are still moving, though it’s not always easy to tell. Came back to find my ship slowly drifting into the nearby star as individual systems fried, one by one.
Thankfully, I brought an autorepair. The life support went, and I had to fix the FSD just enough and reboot it while cooking in my space suit. I managed to escape the star’s gravity and corona, and I managed to get everything fixed enough to make it to a planet, collect some resources, and make some more repair drones to fix the rest (except the autorepair, which will sit at 34% for the rest of the journey).
And it’s stories like yours and mine that just make the game feel so unique. None of that fun and excitement was scripted, it just kind of happened by chance, and I think that’s partly why the game has stuck around for 12 years.
I think that’s partly why the game has stuck around for 12 years.
In a way, longer than that. This game is a modern (and much more elaborate) version of Elite from 1984, directed by one of the original developers.
If we’re just talking about this incarnation, though, it will be 10 years old in a couple weeks. :)
I wrote up a short description of it a couple weeks ago:
https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/15850080
tl;dr: the galaxy offers a lot to do, but nothing pushes you toward any one particular activity. Choose your own space adventure. :)
How is it free when you need prime first
I’m not a big fan of Amazon, either, but let’s face it: A lot of people are already subscribed to Prime, and would like to know that this game is free to them if they claim it in time.
Similarly, a lot of people already live in certain regions of the world, and sometimes games are made free to them, but not to people who live elsewhere.
My thousands of hours of Elite can vouch that this is still THE best space sim out there. You can try NMS, X, Star Citizen, Everspace but there’s nothing that can quite touch it.
If you do get it, remember a few things: it doesn’t have a learning curve, it has a learning cliff. You’ll learn a lot in the first hours. Also, join a community. There’s reddit, or the various discords, or join a squad on inara.cz or even directly in-game. But the community surrounding this game is one of the nicest and most supportive i’ve ever seen. Oh, and if you’re into salt and drama, there’s the Frontier elite forums. Fly safe
I have a couple hundred hours in this game, and still have no what I’m doing. Flying a ship, and having the sound all the way up on my stereo system is amazing though.
I own the game but can’t play it because I can’t complete the tutorial as I am to dumb to complete the landing. Why are landing computers not standard on those ships? No, we let the pilots destroy huge parts of our station when they try to hit the tiny landing pad in the right angle and speed, its for sure better and cheaper that way then loading a program in the autopilot that will perform the landing safe and fast…
For what it’s worth, docking becomes easy with practice (as long as you don’t disable Flight Assist). Good thing, because although the docking computer is pretty good with small ships, it’s drunk half the time with the largest ones.
I think the free starter ship comes equipped with a docking computer. Have you tried entering the game without completing the docking tutorial?
Flinging yourself safely through the mail slot and then landing without flight assistance is fun as hell though
I never found a option to start the game without completing the tutorial, but to be honest I last tried it maybe 3 years ago or so. Since then the PS4 Disk collects dust.
Simming the space is a pretty integral part of the space sim. I for one really enjoy those parts of the game
Yes, but some guidance system that prevents huge damage from a ship hitting your space port or your space station with gigantic amounts of kinetic energy sounds like a great and very logical idea and one should assume that it is mandatory.
But maybe that is what they mean with Dangerous in Elite Dangerous 😜
I had / have the same issue.
Hilarious to me that I bought the game at launch. Never made it out of the tutorial and now it’s free.
Absolute banger of a game
Don’t forget to sub to !elitedangerous@lemmy.world
This game is impressive not only in scale, but also in its community-built tools. The developers made it easy to get observed data out of the game, and players made tools to automatically send that data to a public database, along with star maps, item finders, route plotters, market watchers, ship build planners, etc.
You don’t need these to play, but you might find some of them useful if you end up playing a lot.
Fun game, but engineering and the land missions killed it for me. Didn’t try it after the latest updates, maybe it got better.
Anyone knows if these games will still be accessible if one cancels prime?
Should be - most of the game pages have
Games with Prime are free to collect and can be kept forever.
on them.
Oh!!! I did not see that. Thank you.
I don’t know for sure, but in the several years during which Prime has been offering gratis games and people have been giving away their leftovers, I’ve never seen any reports of them being revoked.
Thank you. I’m asking because it is now publicly stated everywhere that we are leading a license to the games WE BUY, and these are gratis, so I wasn’t sure.
Might have to check that out. It’s been on my Steam wishlist for a while.
Absolutely stunning to play on a projection screen…
