Do what you want!
Immersive story.
FUCK YOU.
Do stuff!
Follow missions!
FUCK YOU.
Elite Dangerous is terrible for the beginner. Absolutely fucking disastrous. Missions you think that are set up to help you progress can be fucking impossible if you so happen to chose the wrong way of the 15 different ways of doing it. I've just lost about 90 minutes of work trying to complete a missing that was supposed to help me improve my ranking with the Federation. It doesn't tell you how to get the "Personal weapons", just that you have 2 hours to do it. So I tried a bunch of things. I even Googled for it. I flew to all sorts of places and looked for the black market, which only seemed to want to sell my stuff. I tried lawless outposts but they were still in federation space. I tried an anarchy system and I died, losing cargo along the way. When I eventually got to the destination to buy the shit I was supposed to buy, I didn't have enough cash because the mission didn't tell me that I needed 13k. FUCK YOU.
I hate games that do this to the beginner. I'm not trying to do something complex. I'm simply following the bounties as they are laid out in front of me.
Comments
I had a problem where I took a cargo mission which on the mission board said I could do but due to the jump drive having a weight limit I found with the cargo I couldn't actually jump anywhere there was no way to complete the mission. It was very counter intuative with the mission board stating that I could take the mission when it was clear there was no way I could complete it with the ship and tech I had
I've seen similar complaints from many Kickstarted/crowd-funded games. I think that as there is a vocal group of players is involved in the development, and the developers tend to be in contact with them, by the time the game is playable there is an assumption that 'everyone already knows this'.
I also think developers are too keen to rely on community run wikis to be their instruction manual, though these can be extremely variable in quality.
All good comments, agreed. Having slept on it, I am keen to get back in.
Games of this complexity should have some basic bloody assistance. Some examples: when it is urgently telling you to do X, put the bound key next to it. Allow you to request docking from the nav menu rather than only on contacts menu. Allow you to go from the commodities menu to the galaxy map so you can easily see what's what. That sort of UX is paramount.
I don't mind games being hard or having some sort of learning curve some of the best games are like that Kerbals space program for instance you can spend hours trying to get things to work and fail in that case the community have helped and also it's still in beta so not yet a finished game. With elite which supposedly is finished all the tutorials focus on quite basic aspects of the game the how to pilot the ship and the rest of it how to make money how to trade or what have you is just unexplained. What is fine for something still in development seems poor for a finished product.
yeah, it's a fair point. Kerbal is a lot easier these days as the campaign leads your through a bit more.
I've played a load more this evening...
Your cockpit breaks and you start running out of oxygen
But you're not dead. If you're lucky enough, you can fly it to a nearby port and get inside before the time runs out. I managed it with 5 seconds on the clock.
There's no obvious upgrade path in terms of ships
The sidewinder is a good little all-rounder and you can upgrade it. The best thing to upgrade is the Frame Shift Drive (jump drive) because it gives you more options for trade.
I now have 70k in the bank and feel like being a bit more varied. I want to try combat but the stock ship is pants. I don't want to plough all my money into a fighter and then not be able to fit a fuel scoop for long range missions. So, I want the next level of all-rounder, which appears to be a Viper III, which is 300k. For me to save up that much, I'd have to trade in the Sidewinder forever or get a larger vessel that does cargo. But I want to fight soon, not in another week. It's not obvious where to go next.
(sorry, I mean Cobra III, not a viper)