Elite: Dangerous

[Nebu]

I'd be so much more interested if it were private server or single player.

I thought it was with the option for MMO play.

Am I wrong?

[Falconeer]

You are not wrong. This game can be played 100% offline or/and single player.

[apocrypha]

You are not wrong. This game can be played 100% offline or/and single player.

This. And more, you can play it online with *only* your friends and the NPCs, effectively private server.

[Sky]

Oh, in that case....

[apocrypha]

Newsletter #41 is out, and it's a good'un.

• Beta 2 release date 30th Sept
• Pilot combat ratings and system/faction reputations
• Another 100 ly radius to available map = 500 more systems
• New ship, Asp Explorer
• New ship modules - drives, sensors, shields, life support, etc
• New weapons (inc. mine launcher)
• Better ship visibility in supercruise
• System maps
• New station type (Ocellus) and Outposts
• SLI/Crossfire support

I'm still hoping for better (any) grouping mechanics, but no word on that.

Also, that wireframe Cobra skin is £10, which strikes me as far too much, and taking the piss somewhat.

[DraconianOne]

Also, that wireframe Cobra skin is £10, which strikes me as far too much, and taking the piss somewhat.

I concur. I would have bought it for a few quid but a tenner? I don't think so.

Still, will be interesting to see what "surprises" come out over the next few days.  May be worth logging in tomorrow to see if the event system works as promised given the Galnet stuff about Liquor embargos    And Beta 2 makes it seem more like a full game too - how long before the first one to get to Elite before release?

[apocrypha]

Witchspace Diaries ep.7 - Speed Parking. Mike & I decided to show everyone how awesome we are at flying. Yeah... 

Also, we've just recorded some footage of Mike flying a Cobra with the wireframe skin. It's not worth a tenner :(

[DraconianOne]

Just as an aside, you can now get the original BBC-B version of Elite for Beeb Emulator either via the Elite: Dangerous store or via Ian Bell's website.  Ian Bell is also making available a PC Version of Christian Pinder's Elite The New Kind. His website here.

[5150]

Also, that wireframe Cobra skin is £10, which strikes me as far too much, and taking the piss somewhat.

I concur. I would have bought it for a few quid but a tenner? I don't think so.

Still, will be interesting to see what "surprises" come out over the next few days.  May be worth logging in tomorrow to see if the event system works as promised given the Galnet stuff about Liquor embargos    And Beta 2 makes it seem more like a full game too - how long before the first one to get to Elite before release?

Just had a newsletter through that says 50% price drop

[DraconianOne]

Just had a newsletter through that says 50% price drop

That's a price drop on the in-game cost of a Cobra ship, not the price of the skin though.

[5150]

Just had a newsletter through that says 50% price drop

That's a price drop on the in-game cost of a Cobra ship, not the price of the skin though.

Ah sorry my bad, the newsletter had a pic of the cobra with the wireframe on it

[Yoru]

So I've been keeping a half-eye on this for a while now, and I heard it's basically in reasonably-complete open-ish beta. Then I checked the website and saw it was 60 GBP for beta, whereas the regular version is 40 GBP.

Is this one of those early-access deals where the game gets cheaper towards launch, or does the 40GBP version also come with access? Also, is the damn thing actually any good at the moment?

[Falconeer]

The thing is damn good but nowhere near to have all the promised things yet. While I love it to death, I think the more anyone can wait the better. Every phase of beta you manage to skip, the more stuff you'll get when you get in withouth the slightest hint of "burnout", and the more bugs you will dodge. Again, chances are this will be m GOTY 2015, but I still tell people to wait.

As far as prices go, the 60£ one gives you beta access and some bonus stuff. The 40£ is and will be the price at release, so if you get that it's the same as buying it on day 1. No beta, no bonus stuff.

[Yoru]

Good to know. I'll keep this on the sidelines for now. Civ:BE is coming out in a few weeks anyway.

[apocrypha]

Check in on it again next week, the next beta phase starts on Tuesday and will hopefully give a much better idea of what the final game (still definitely claimed to be releasing in 2014) will be like.

I agree completely with Falconeer though, it's really good at the moment but well worth holding out for actual release unless you have a burning itch that can't be scratched. That sounded wrong.

[apocrypha]

WSD episode 8 online. We had a look at the iBootis fleet and jabbered more about Beta 2. And I inadvertently annoy an Anaconda. 

[apocrypha]

Quick reminder, if you're playing this then don't forget to back up your control configs before the patch today.

You want to backup the files "Custom.binds" and "StartPreset.start" from the hidden folder at [C]:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\Options\Bindings\

[Falconeer]

New stuff from Beta 2 which launched yesterday.

NEW FEATURES/CONTENT

- Playable area expanded (a capsule 100ly long and 30ly wide @500 systems)
- Can scan celestial bodies
- Can sell explorer data
- Can buy body data
- Asp added
- Reputation affects mission availability
- Designer created content can be used in newsfeeds
- When an AI hyperspaces it informs the hyperdrive component where it's going, which stores this information in the wake object in the hyperspace cloud. If the player scans the cloud and then hyperspaces, the wake information is recorded
- Ocellus starport type added
- In system map added
- Scan data reveals objects in the in system map
- News feed support added to station services
- Outfitting system upgrade
- ECM systems added
- Cargo hatch disrupter devices added
- Mine launcher added
- Proximity mines added
- Added metal type asteroids
- Added ice type asteroids
- Various outpost types added
- Added repair wear and tear in repair modules menu
- Added SLI/X-Fire support
- Added backers' NPC names
- Ship wear and tear added
- AI pilots now have rankings
- Drives and shields now affected by ship's mass
- Single player scenarios adapted to tutorials
- Add docking tutorial
- Major update to how system contents are generated
- Extensive music system updates
- System economy/meta data dynaically generated for the non-authored systems

[DraconianOne]

No arguing that there's a few issues with Beta 2 - managed to log on last night and saw Apoc online but kept getting dropped by the server.  Still managed to bod around a bit and check out some new outposts and run a mission or two.

However, this video by Scott Manley has put a smile on my face. Background: apparently in an earlier video, he was complaining that the new system maps in the game didn't show correct data - he had looked at one real system and said that it should properly contain 3 exo planets but the map doesn't show them.  So someone said "why don't you go exploring?"

So he did.

Obvious results but I'm really liking this feature of the game. 

[apocrypha]

Heh, yeah, good video that :)

Unfortunately pretty much *nothing* is working at the moment. Approx 50% of people can't play at all due to login problems, disconnects, graphical glitches etc. If you do get in then it's very, very broken most of the time. Very frequent disconnects still going on, there's no Bulletin Board missions at all, the Commodities Markets are completely fubared with either no stock anywhere or repeated failures to buy items.

Changing the flight model to remove the Flight Assist Off advantages has turned the dogfighting into pointless jousting where the more agile ship always wins, which is a crying shame since it was very satisfying before to be able to use skill to beat the odds. Now the only thing that matters is which ship turns faster. If you're in a big ship vs a small ship just run away (if you can), there is no way you can land hits otherwise. At least that was the case this morning, not had any fights since then because it's too unstable.

Oh and the trading route information on the Galaxy Map is useless, it simply doesn't update in a useful time frame. And since they've disabled 3rd party data scraping tools trading is now a complete gamble.

On the positive side you can make decent money with combat now, just get a Viper and go farm NPC's for bounties.

[apocrypha]

Game is still fubared for me in all sorts of ways, but I did get a very high res (10240x5760) snap of a station and a binary star:

[Engels]

Between this and the 'window-dressing-ware' that is Star Citizen, what are space adventurers to do? Go back to being podded in Eve I guess.

[Nebu]

Between this and the 'window-dressing-ware' that is Star Citizen, what are space adventurers to do? Go back to being podded in Eve I guess.

Is Starpoint Gemini 2 any good?

[Engels]

I actually watched a clip or two on Starpoint Gemini, and although the graphics look cartoony, and the interface not particularly spectacular, it does look like most of its shit is together.

The review I watched was an early one, so its probably changed since then. Here's a newer one, that is clearly in the middle of a series of videos, but the benefit to this is that it goes right into the detailed mechanics involved in everyday playing, which I find far more useful in an evaluation of a game than some 'intro' video that's more of a showcase than a realistic presentation of what its like to play a game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGRArHomPQc

I seriously considered giving this a whirl but it also looked like a significant time investment and learning curve. I'm starting to think I'm too old for games that require learning an entire detailed gaming system, be it Arch Age or some space sim that has tons of fiddly bits. I'm getting old, I think.

[DraconianOne]

Only a couple of days into Beta 2 and they appear to have announced October 28th as the date of Beta 3. (via the ED Twitter feed so presumably legit)

[apocrypha]

4 patches in 2 days now. Most of my problems seem to be fixed. Very impressed with the speed of bug fixing going on here.

[apocrypha]

*WARNING* bloody great wall of text ahead, sorry.

Since the launch of Beta 2 and the subsequent four patches in 24 hours I've had a chance to play this some more, putting in something like 12-16 hours over the last week, so I thought I'd give some more detailed impressions of the state of the game at the moment.

I'm going to start by saying that I'm very concerned about the development and the game as a whole and that I have a growing feeling that it's going to end up being a niche product and a commercial failure unless major changes are made in the next 3 months.

Beta 2 brought some new systems and updated a lot of the existing game. Ships and ship outfitting are currently in a pretty good place. There's 9 ships available and there's a slew of options for outfitting them which have created a very flexible and somewhat deep meta-game. You can upgrade individual components, e.g. shields, drives, weapons, cargo bays etc., and several of the ships can be fitted for different roles quite successfully. The pinnacle of this idea seems to be the new ship, the Asp, which is incredibly versatile due to the way it's fitting slots are laid out. The only real downside to this at the moment is that there is no in-game information about what modules are available and most stations only sell a very limited subset of the total. This means that there is a lot of guesswork involved or reliance on out-of-game websites and player-gathered information. Also (and this is a recurring theme) the UI for ship fitting is terrible - clunky, slow, uninformative & unintuitive.

Combat is a mixed bag. Obviously ship choice and fitting play a major part in your combat effectiveness but your real life hardware is also, IMO, very important. Mouse control is better than many other similar games but I still think someone using a HOTAS and head tracking is going to be at a major advantage over someone without those tools. The combat is also very poorly balanced - this really isn't EVE-Online - with major discrepancies between weapon types. Currently there's no reason to play in Open multiplayer unless you're a pvp'er, and destroying unsuspecting players in weaker ships in 3-4 seconds is the de facto pvp combat exercise.

Combat vs the AI is also a mixed bag. It's quite satisfying in terms of dog fighting but the AI ships clearly don't follow any of the same restrictions to ship actions as players do, i.e. heat management, time to Frameshift (jump drive) out of combat, etc. The AI still has a nasty habit of suicide ramming you too, a tactic that always results in the instant destruction of your ship regardless of the size of the NPC vessel. They have also completely nerfed the "Flight Assist Off" flight control method in Beta 2, so the interesting semi-Newtonian physics that YouTubers like Isinona have shown off is completely impossible now.

Trading has also been greatly reduced in effectiveness now, with the markets being completely flat and profits by pure trading very slow to come by. The general (unconfirmed) consensus is that this was done to encourage backers to more fully test out combat, exploration and missions. And missions are now the only sensible way to make money without engaging in combat. You can pick up courier missions from stations that involve being given a quantity of goods which you have to deliver to a different station in a set time limit. This is profitable but tedious and can easily be gamed by abandoning missions then selling the cargo (that doesn't get taken away from you) on the Black Market or by finding a system with two stations in and repeatedly running easy courier missions between the two stations. The incidence of interdictions (being interrupted mid-Frameshift by possibly hostile NPCs) has dropped almost to zero since Beta 2.02 so there is no risk whatsoever in continually running these courier missions.

In addition to the poor profit rate of pure trading the interface, again, is utterly terrible. You cannot see commodity prices until you dock at a station. The only information you have is the Galaxy Map which can be configured (clumsily and laboriously) to show the supposed flow of trade goods between systems, and this interface is completely separated from the actual commodity market. It's also very often totally wrong and relying on it will leave you broke and with unsellable cargo very quickly. To compound the problem the devs have disabled all 3rd party data collection tools so only manually entered external databases are possible. The limitations of these are so great that they're also useless, so trading in this beta incarnation is really not part of the game any more.

Missions in general are, again, a very mixed bag. The aforementioned courier missions mostly work but can be easily gamed for mindless profit. There is no penalty for abandoning or failing missions so if the mission you want isn't available you can just accept every mission on the board and abandon them to force the game to generate new ones. There are "fetch & return" missions that ask you to go and find x tons of y commodity but due to the short time limits and the utter lack of useful trading information these are more or less impossible unless you already have the required commodity in your hold. There's even pirate fetch & return missions that want a specific commodity but it must be stolen so you have to find and scan an NPC ship carrying the cargo you want and then force it to drop it. I suspect that nobody does these missions.

Combat missions exist and these can be quite profitable but they suffer from a lack of information. You can be tasked with killing a certain named NPC but there is no indication of how to find them. After hunting on the forums (never a good thing to require players to do IMO) it turns out that you just have to repeatedly enter "Unidentified Signal Sources" while in Frameshift until you get lucky and find the correct NPC. There's also no indication of what kind of ship your target will be flying so you have to learn (again from the forums or simple trial and error) what size mission reward means which kind of target ship. E.g. 140k credit reward means an Anaconda. Bring a friend. Oh wait, you can't. There is no grouping system and no way to do missions, or anything for that matter, any way except solo. The only combat missions that are worth doing really are "Kill x civilians" ones. For these you have to fit a Kill Warrant Scanner (not explained in the mission details), go to a Nav Beacon (hard to find and not explained), scan NPCs until you find ones that have bounties and kill them. However after some time doing this System Authority ships will jump in and join the fight. These guys are flying assholes. They kill-steal all the time since only the shot that blows the ship up counts for bounties. They will "accidentally" shoot you all the time but if you accidentally hit them even once while they're trying to steal your kills they all instantly turn hostile and blow you to shit. Very frustrating.

Exploration is possible, you start with a basic scanner and can gather data on systems that you can then sell. However there's no documentation on how this works, it's currently incredibly buggy (doing detailed scans, for instance, reduces the value of your collected data) and it's very boring. Clearly this is a system that's in need of a massive amount of work since the current implementation is, at best, a minimally functional placeholder.

There's a reputation system that was introduced in Beta 2, that supposedly gives you better prices and mission rewards etc. with NPC factions. However it's completely opaque to the player. There is no indication of your standing with factions, nor is there even any information about what the factions are! After running courier missions in one system for a couple of hours I did seem to be getting higher rewards sometimes, which may have been due to reputations but I had no way of knowing for sure. Again, a system that feels pointless and unfinished. At least the reputation system doesn't have a terrible UI, because it has no UI at all.

What I haven't mentioned yet is the thing that you spend the vast majority of your time in-game doing: traveling. Your Frameshift Drive (FSD) is used to jump between systems providing you have enough range and enough fuel, and this is accomplished with an animated loading screen that looks like a hyperspace tunnel. It's not very engaging. Your travel in-system is also accomplished with your FSD but it's (suspected to be) an Alcubierre drive that compresses space around your ship. What this means in practice is that it's a bit like time acceleration but just means you move very fast (up to 200x light speed although you can glitch to much higher speeds, even though it's pointless to do so). You accelerate and decelerate quite slowly, it's easy to overshoot your target and the scenery whilst doing so is pretty much the same every time. The novelty of seeing planets and stars whip by wears off fast and it becomes a serious chore. It's a very unimaginative solution to the "real-sized solar systems in a multiplayer game" problem and I suspect it's going to kill most people's enjoyment very quickly. There's no auto-pilot, there's no route plotting, there's no interesting effects and every in-system journey takes several minutes, more in the larger systems. I found a system yesterday with the station 30,000 light seconds away from the jump-in point, which took me over 15 minutes to traverse. Not interesting.

I've complained a lot about the individual systems that currently make up the game but what about the larger framework? Is there an interesting story, interesting progression, a sense of purpose to it all? In short, no. In fact, in long, no. There's nothing. The only purpose to trading or combat is to make money to buy ships and components so that you can trade more, further and kill bigger things faster. There was an attempt at an in-game event at the end of the previous beta phase that involved a political, economic and military stand-off and eventual conflict between an independent, communist system and a large, capitalist Federation. However unless you frequented the out-of-game forums regularly you would have been completely unaware of this event. The fleets massing were all at planets far away from the starports. The trading and combat missions generated as part of this event looked exactly the same as all the other ones with equally uninformative description text. It was possibly the least interesting in-game event I've ever witnessed.

So why is this all like this? I believe there's two factors at work making E:D what it is. Firstly the game has always been openly stated to be "the game we (the devs) wanted to play". Given that the main creative force behind this is David Braben, who's career has rested on the original Elite from 1988, it simply feels like a recreating of that 30 year old game with a modern graphics engine. The problem there is that a lot more than the hardware has moved on in those three decades. Simply grinding ranks, credits and kills is the preserve of MMORPGs now, a genre deader than tank-tops. If E:D doesn't add an actual game on top of those 30 year old mechanics then there will be nothing here for anyone except the neckbeardiest of neckbeards.

Secondly the closed, paid beta method of development results in a testing population made up almost exclusively of fans. The large majority of backers up until now have been older players who are nostalgic for their youths and the countless hours spent chasing Elite status on a BBC Micro or ZX Spectrum. This results in a huge fanboi factor on forums. The official forum population repeatedly congratulate themselves on how special they are compared to other game forumites and how tolerant they are of developer mistakes, decisions, designs etc. What this really means is that poor design is rarely called out and those that do call it out are shouted down with cries of "It's beta!!!" and "This isn't the right game for you!". Unless the developers get their heads out of that collective arsehole they're going to release a steaming turd that all the testers have convinced them is made of gold.

I haven't even mentioned that fact that Beta 3 has already been dated for Oct 28th and release is still confirmed for 2014 and what kind of development hell that could mean given how many things are broken and the huge number of announced systems yet to be implemented at all, but I've already gone on for far, far too long so I'll stop there.

TL;DR: I strongly feel that Elite: Dangerous is NOT worth paying extra for beta access for right now, and that it's very likely not going to be the second coming of Space Jesus that everyone wants it to be. There's a lot going for it but it needs major, major work yet to become a good game.

[Ironwood]

Well, that fucked my morning.

[Nebu]

Sad but unsurprising. 

 

[Jeff Kelly]

Well the game is pretty much what I expected and - discounting all of the tweaks to push beta testers to test certain systems - also pretty much what I wanted from E:D so I'm not disappointed. It was always pitched as a spiritual successor to the original Elite and it is that. That it is nothing more than that might be disappointing to some but Braben never promised E:D to be more than it currently is. In fact if Frontier Developments closed shop tomorrow I won't be disappointed because I'm quite happy with how the game turned out, even in its still unfinished state.

I honestly don't even know how it could be more unless they'd run it like an MMO and constantly pushed out new content. Quite frankly I like Braben's approach to making and marketing the game. He didn't over promise, he delivered what he has promised so far and while that might not be at all what some people wanted and while that might mean that E:D will be a niche game for enthusiasts at least the people into Elite got the game Braben promised them and Frontier developments likely won't lose money over the endeavor.

Star Citizen backers on the other hand are the ones waiting for Space Jesus's second coming and will be bitterly disappointed. I don't think most E:D backers will though.

I wonder how the people waiting for no man's sky will feel though since it will pretty much have the same problem with being vast but probably not having the content to fill thze vastness in a meaningful way.

[apocrypha]

Well, here's a list of things that have been stated to be included in beta at some point. Full release is 3 months away, at most. I do not think all of the promises that have been made are going to be kept.

I honestly want to be wrong about this game. I'm invested in it. I spent £100 for premium beta access, I bought a HOTAS system and TrackIR for it. I co-host a YouTube channel dedicated to it! If it ends up being a game that only keeps a tiny niche pleased beyond a month then I'm going to be very, very disappointed.

I also think that failing to engage a larger market will damage even further the idea of crowd-funded development. I think Star Citizen is a very different kettle of fish and I don't feel comfortable making direct comparisons, having had no experience of SC myself.

There is a ray of hope that I can see at the moment, and that is that since Beta 2 the official forums have started to see a much larger number of posts from people giving critical feedback, as opposed to the sea of adulation that has been the mainstay for a long, long time now. I don't think it's necessarily too late for some of the worst design decision to be rectified, but I do think it's too late for that to happen *and* for that feature list I posted to be met.

[Pennilenko]

I just don't agree with you Apocrypha. I've got about 50 hours now into beta 2, and I love all of it. You are accurate with a couple of your issues, but I honestly  don't care about having to figure out game systems or mechanics for myself instead of being spoon fed everything.

Touching on the "nerfing" of assist off flight mechanics, the only thing they nerfed is being able to stay at max boosted speed indefinitely. You can still boost in any direction you can trust in and also rotate the ship traveling at any angle so pretty much nothing changed other than the permanent max boost speed.

Addressing your issue with the in game trading system, trading still can make a ton of money, which I have, you just have to explore some more first. Also when you are looking at the maps there is an option to get into the solar system level that will tell you exactly which market items they import and export. I haven't arrived with a hold full of loss inventory even once yet. Using the colored galaxy map over view to see trade routes is just a rough idea of what category of goods comes in and out of the system.

Normally, I agree with many of your opinions about games, but this time I really see a much different game than you appear to be seeing. I wonder if this is going to be one of those polarizing games, where either it is perfect for you or you hate it with no middle ground.

Edit: I just want to clarify, this is my first Elite game. I never played any other version at all, so no nostalgia glasses or anything here. I just wanted a space game where I sat in the cockpit of a space ship where it flies with twitch controls and I get to choose what ever I feel like doing when I fire it up.

[apocrypha]

Apologies for SirBrucing this but I want to address each issue separately rather than make another Wall'o'Text :)

I just don't agree with you Apocrypha. I've got about 50 hours now into beta 2, and I love all of it. You are accurate with a couple of your issues, but I honestly  don't care about having to figure out game systems or mechanics for myself instead of being spoon fed everything.

I really don't want to be spoonfed, not what I'm asking for, and I know a lot of the current mechanics are placeholders and WIP's, but there's so many things that really should have some in-game information supply. For me it's very much a case of "why does every game have to reinvent the wheel"? I find the interface design choices mostly bad, it's a bugbear of mine, UI design is an established discipline and they have ignored 40 years of work in interfaces. They require 4 button presses when 1 would do, they separate information that should be kept together, things are opaque for no other reason than bad design. IMO.

Touching on the "nerfing" of assist off flight mechanics, the only thing they nerfed is being able to stay at max boosted speed indefinitely. You can still boost in any direction you can trust in and also rotate the ship traveling at any angle so pretty much nothing changed other than the permanent max boost speed.

Are you sure you can boost in any direction? It really feels to me like you only boost forwards, FA on or off. I'll test more. The perma max boost speed isn't the issue, it's the slowdown to under 100m/s when going in any direction other than forwards that kills the combat maneuvering for me. I find it incredibly immersion breaking since there is no good physical reason that should be the case. I remember I-War clearly, the combat in that was fantastic, and the FA-off mode in E:D pre beta 2 was leaning in that direction. I've found the dog fighting far less interesting and fun since.

Addressing your issue with the in game trading system, trading still can make a ton of money, which I have, you just have to explore some more first. Also when you are looking at the maps there is an option to get into the solar system level that will tell you exactly which market items they import and export. I haven't arrived with a hold full of loss inventory even once yet. Using the colored galaxy map over view to see trade routes is just a rough idea of what category of goods comes in and out of the system.

Actually you can use the galaxy map to show specific goods within the categories. Expand the trade category and untick the ones you don't want to see. Needs an "untick/tick all" option, of course, not to mention a ton of other tweaks, but the data is there. It's just often wrong. Maybe it's correct in the original core systems, I don't know, I moved out to the far end of the "pill" as soon as I could and have been exploring the furthest 1/3rd of the available systems since then. And as I said, I am well aware that the trading has been reduced in efficiency specifically to test other aspects, not something I have a problem with. I have a problem with the poor information available to the trader. Try using the galaxy map trading info to reliably source goods for "Fetch & return" type missions. It's very unreliable.

Normally, I agree with many of your opinions about games, but this time I really see a much different game than you appear to be seeing. I wonder if this is going to be one of those polarizing games, where either it is perfect for you or you hate it with no middle ground.

No doubt, we all have our own opinions, I know many people don't agree with my views on several of these systems. However it feels to me that many of the design choices being made are reducing player choice greatly. This actually feels like a very limited game to me, despite the vast size of the galaxy that will be available. 400 billion systems are like 1000 channels on your cable TV if they're all the same.

There's definitely a lot of people that will find things they like about E:D - and I like lots of things about it, it's entirely possible to like something and still be critical of it - but I feel that some attempt to reduce the repetitious nature of most of the gameplay would end up creating a game that had a lot more longevity for a lot more people.

Edit: I just want to clarify, this is my first Elite game. I never played any other version at all, so no nostalgia glasses or anything here. I just wanted a space game where I sat in the cockpit of a space ship where it flies with twitch controls and I get to choose what ever I feel like doing when I fire it up.

I think the crux of my complaint is that we're soon going to find that we can't do whatever we feel like doing. We can grind bounties, we can grind missions or we can grind trading, with no actual game structuring it all. A sandbox is only any fun if you can actually build sand castles and E:D only lets you buy fancier buckets & spades.

[DraconianOne]

*WARNING* bloody great wall of text ahead, sorry.

Psycho! 

There's too much in your post to really address I'm afraid Apoc, so I'm mostly going to ignore it. I can't be arsed to go through point by point with a "Yes but..." - not because I can't but because it'll be tedious for everyone involved. But the tl;dr is that it is still in beta and the devs have already said that a lot of the systems are WIP including things like the station and outfitting interface.  It's not that I don't agree with you about some of it - that interface is truly terrible - but I find it difficult to complain about something that is, by Frontier's own admission, highly likely to change and evolve. Also I'm probably more optimistic and less invested than you might be (and no, I don't think they'll release this side of January but I find myself not really caring about that.) Similarly, I think complaining about trading right now is like pissing into the wind. You know what it can be like given how easy trading was in Beta1 so why not wait until it's pretty much final before whining? It'll be better for your blood pressure.

I'm also curious about what more you want out of the game? I get your concerns about it ending up being a similar grind to Elite '84 and lacking interesting progression - those same concerns are pretty much the reason I didn't sign up for the kickstarter because hey, it's Elite and that's what it is - but what is exactly you want to see? You say that you feel it needs more "game structuring" but that's not really very meaningful. So specifically, and at the risk of another wall of text, what systems would provide that structure for you?

Anyway, pessimism and critique aside, I went on a trip tonight. First stop, Rakapila:



That shot was taken from ~3LS away which is pretty much where your hyperspace exit brings you.  By comparison, ~3LS is the point where you perform an emergency stop near Aulin if you don't break or maneuver when you come out of hyperspace:



But if you travel 100LS away from Aulin, it looks like this:



However, if you were traveling to Arcturus, the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere and part of the Bootes constellation, this is what you'd see if you were 100LS away:



And if you didn't slow down coming out of hyperspace and kept heading towards the star, your FSD would stick it's heels in at about 73LS:



Makes you feel like you're in a Danny Boyle movie!

[DraconianOne]

Then I decided to go exploring. I had a scanner and I was going to find out how to use it!



Right, okay. That seems straightforward enough. Now, where to go? (I've spoilered the rest because a- lots of images and b- people may want to find some of these things for themselves. Fair warning etc.)


tl;dr - floating around, exploring an object that's in pitch black with nothing but your ship headlights is actually pretty cool. Also, I like the discovery mechanic for what it currently is.