After playing for 259 hours, I can say that the game is too frustrating for several reasons. While the gameplay and usability have improved, after purchasing the Odyssey expansion, I noticed a significant issue with learnability. The game does not provide enough structured learning paths to progressively understand and master its features. This makes it difficult to fully grasp and utilize the mechanics, especially for someone who plays to relax after work. Overall, this lack of guidance detracts from the experience and makes the game less enjoyable.

I liked it for awhile but just seeing this made me furious!

Frontier SW, if I pay for the damn game, let me fking paint my ship the way I want and don't charge me extra for it!

Don't do cancerous micro-transactions just for a function that should be basic!
f*ckers

This is what I despise most in games today! I buy the damn game and they still have micro-transactions in it! SMFH

This used to be an iconic SF game franchise. As a kid, I experienced the original ELITE on my first computer in the 80s, that can only be described as a milestone in video game design. I also played ELITE II: Frontier (as it should have been named) in the 90s, which was not as impressive, but still a considerable upgrade from part I. When ELITE: Dangerous came out, I was full of hopes and expectations of what would come from that in the new era of the 2010s. I knew from the start that it would take years to fully develop this game to manifest the vision that the creators apparently had, and I was more than willing to get on board and undertake that journey with them. In the beginning of the game's life cycle, there were some hick-ups, like an unplayable tutorial and an extremely bland mission system, but those things got incrementally better over time. At least we had an actual game to enjoy and not just trailers and promises like in the case of Star Citizen.

However, that stereotypical "at least this is not SC" lost its effect after some years. The unavoidably shallow nature of this vast open world universe meant that the game concept quickly lost its appeal. It was always easy to play this game for a few weeks and earn enough credits to buy the largest ships available, so you could - well, earn even more credits with them to watch numbers go up even higher, I guess. Grinding credits, grinding Elite ranks, grinding for optimized equipment - that seemed to be the whole experience, and all of those factors are effectively capped (in the case of credits by the lack of things to do with more money after a certain point), so the potential for continuous progression is severely limited.

One expansion and update after another added content that seemed to address this problem and introduced new parts of the game: Planet surfaces for exploration (procedurally generated and mostly empty), "settlements" with a few NPCs, ship and station interiors, invading aliens, multiplayer faction wars. All of that sounded excellent on paper, but the execution of every single one of these aspects was as lackluster as that of the other ones before. It almost felt like management made a list of tasks to perform in game development, and some underpaid and undermotivated developer interns did just enough work on them to earn their paychecks and call it a day. I did not see any passion or noteworthy creativity in any of these new layers. They just ticked boxes and gave the results to marketing, who could draw players in with some buzzwords that misrepresented what the player engagement with them actually looked like (e.g. the whole Powerplay system that managed to make galactic warfare and intrigue the most boring thing in a space sim that ever existed). The real issues in the game's core (like the severely unbalanced and notoriously toxic PvP since the introduction of the engineering grind) were never properly addressed, the dev just added more and more things to distract from them.

ELITE: Dangerous has now become a collection of disconnected mini-games (separated by "hyperdrive tunnel" themed loading screens) that are all more or less trivial and repetitive, linked merely by a series of uninspired statistic screens you can look at. There is the dog-fight mini-game you can jump (or be drawn) into from hyperspace, there is the mining mini-game in asteroid fields, there is the planetary scan mini-game, the UPS mini-game (where you actually have to run up to braindead and generic NPCs standing around between some huts to hand-deliver packages) and always the classical "Euro Truck Simulator in space" mini-game, where you buy wares from a spreadsheat, travel to another station, sell wares on a different spreadsheet, rinse and repeat. Over and over. Year after year. This is not one whole, complex game or the "Second Life" hardcore FD fanboys want it to be; it is a funfair with a series of little booths where they offer you some cheap entertainment to earn tokens with. In the end, you go home with some tokens that don't mean anything.

The activities in those mini-game booths are not even fun, really. Especially the Odyssey expansion, with the implementation of NPCs in space stations and surface settlements, was so undercooked, buggy and overall disappointing that I would have felt ashamed to demand as much money for it as they did. The worst thing about it is that even though the Odyssey content is several years old by now, they have not improved a thing, despite all the due criticism of the new and seemingly shiny features they advertised it with. I tested that content specifically a few weeks back, and it left a bad and bitter taste in my mouth. This is not a finished game, this is an abandoned beta version of a game that was sold with the promise to be finished "soon". Well, this "soon" will never arrive, because the dev team has moved on to the next features that will turn out just as low-quality as the last one.

My patience wore thinner and thinner over the years. I saw YouTubers who used to champion this game like TheYamiks and ObsidianAnt turn their backs (giving good reasons for that too). I saw the formerly idealistic and dedicated organisers of the Galactic Mapping Project give up on the devs. I saw EDDB being shut down, that once was an indispensable third-party toolbox for commanders all over the world. The recent attempts at monetization, where you pay considerable amounts of real money or crazy amounts of your limited lifetime with grinding for some cosmetic junk that was designed and implemented without any talent or care for consistency, can only be called desperate. It is a sad case of whale-milking, and I feel for everyone who fell for that and spent his hard-earned currency on ridiculous stuff like goofy bobbleheads or different colours for your ship exterior. (Yes, AngryJoe, you can literally pay many dollars for BLUE in this game...)

No nostalgia for this legacy title can prevent me from admitting: E:D has run its course. It is lost. There are still some players left, but those will get bored soon as well. It will not get any better, it has started becoming worse years ago. Do not buy this. Do not support the lazy, greedy and incompetent company FD is today (that celebrates the 40 year anniversary of the franchise as if they had contributed anything to honour it, when in reality, they are in the process of destroying their own brand with inapt management decisions). Do not spend your money or your lifetime treading their money mill like obedient little hamsters. You, the player, deserve better than this. It is time to leave this failed project behind us and look for something else that can take its place.

EDIT (Dec 12th, 2024): I have now been banned from the community forum for pointing out - verbatim! - that this game has been "mismanaged and poorly maintained" (which it is, in fact), because a moderator deemed this to be "disrespectful". I have to conclude that this team is so desperate to hide every kind of criticism against the game and its makers that they actively suppress harmless and legitimate sceptical remarks like this under dubious pretenses, in order to mitigate the deserved negativity against FDev and to keep sales up as long as they can. Well, if those are the methods they stoop to, instead of actually improving their performance, I can feel justified in my assessment that this game is doomed, because without critical feedback, it is next to impossible that anything will change for the better in the future. Buying into this would be a severe mistake. Hands off of this game and everything else this dev produces!

it's... complicated. It feels like a singleplayer game masquerading as an MMO. All forms of communication are basically delegated to third-party apps, but it makes the universe feel like a dead one to me. Joined a max capacity squadron to see if it would liven up the place but it did not: with a limit of 500 players per squadron and the promise of a squadron chat, it seems like nobody wants to use the chatting features in-game. Instead, there are all these clans presenting themselves as roleplay entities, but I do not subscribe to their roleplay. I do not share the vision. I feel crushingly alone in a galaxy that pretends to be full of people

The user experience of this game is utterly abysmal. Here's a list of some evidence of just how bad the user experience is:

* There are 100s of keybinds, and you have to scroll through ALL OF THEM, because the devs categorized them in ways that only make sense to them. Just add a search, people, come on. This is amateur crap.
* If you don't have a photographic memory, you'll literally spend 90% of your time looking up how to do things. Even when you ask the community, you'll get half-answers and sentences that start with the word 'Just' -- ('Just land at a station and pay the fine!' -- Nah, there's more to it than that).
* You can land at a station with a fine and be locked out of important services, with literally no way to pay the fine _at that station_ (probably because you didn't land at the _right kind_ of station).
* Trying to plan a route for your evacuation mission before you take off from a settlement? Hope you aren't using default keybinds, because your hyper jump destination is behind the planet you're currently on, and you literally won't be able to super cruise OR jump at all until you can find a clear line of sight to your jump destination! Meanwhile, Thargoids are killing you, and you can't stop the game to look up how to fix the problem. You're probably going to die, and then you're also going to incur fines for not being able to deliver your passengers. By the way, hope you know what type of station to land at so you can pay the fines!
-- * While you're at it, don't bother trying to clear your jump destination so you can supercruise off of the planet -- you literally can't. No keybind exists, despite the community asking this question repeatedly. (Note: The answer is 'set a separate keybind for supercruise and hyperjump - don't use the defaults. Good luck finding those, tho! (They're under Options -> Controls -> Ship Controls -> Miscellaneous - but that will probably change, and you'll never be able to find it.)
* Hope you've got more than one monitor -- if you want to make any meaningful progress in this game, you're going to need to rely upon 3rd party websites that are only updated by the good will of its members, because the devs sure as hell don't want to help you figure out how to play the game.)
* You want to fight Thargoids and participate in some large-scale PvE? Plan on spending 2 hours kitting a ship out to be able to do the bare minimum, and end up dying repeatedly anyways because you don't have Caustic heat sinks, or because there's literally nothing telling you how to use the Thargoid Pulse Neutralizer.
--* Oh, and also, you're probably going to spend a significant amount of time just floating around in space, because the Thargoid interceptors will EMP your ship and you'll literally be dead in the water for 30 seconds while your systems reboot (it might actually be less than this, but it is an _egregious_ amount of time you spend disabled)
* By the way, you're going to need ECMs, but nothing in the game is going to tell you where you can find them. By the way, the official Fan wiki is useless, as well - it'll list _maybe_ 8 locations, likely 100s of lightyears away. If you were smart and used inara.cz, though, you can probably find one in the next system over.

This is before you even get to the number of game breaking bugs in this game that require you to log out and back in, or absolutely stupid, imbalanced mechanics that require nothing more than trial and error to solve for. Unless you spend 1000 hours on this game, you _will_ spend 75%+ of your overall game time _just figuring out how to play the game_. And god help you if you quit playing the game and come back more than a few months later -- you're in for another 100 hours of learning how to play the game.

This is just awful. What an absolutely miserable experience. The game CAN and WILL be fun, and you WILL eventually figure your way around all of these god-awful eccentricities, but I would never ever ever recommend this game to anyone. I genuinely don't think that it's worth the effort, by-and-large. The devs clearly have never heard of the words 'User Experience,' and it shows. They don't care.

[edit] The first comment on this review is 'git gud scrub' -- I could not ask for a better representation of what I'm talking about in this review. Thanks!

Elite Dangerous is a difficult game to recommend, primarily because it only achieves the bare minimum for what you can call a "game"...

Lemme put the cards on the table here: Elite dangerous is very much a game I WANT to like, but even after 10 years it feels more like a glorified tech demo. Everything in this game looks, sounds and handles beautifully and realistically. there is no game out there that so realistically simulates just how vast and empty space is, and how spaceships could look and handle 1300 years in the future.

The customization of ships in this game is incredibly deep, and it rarely feels like any weapon or module for your ship is a direct upgrade, since even different tiered modules of the same type have different use cases. A tiered modules are usually the most powerful, but also expensive. B tier is the most sturdy, but also have the highest weight. C tier is the most bang for your buck. And D tier is the inverse of B: lighter weight, but more fragile. same thing with weapons: fixed weapons need to be aimed by the pilot, but have the highest base damage. Gimballed and turret weapons have lower damage but can shoot in a wider cone. the game is full of these trade-offs.

There are various activities in the game that you can outfit your ship for, like hauling cargo, mining, bounty hunting, piracy, exploration, xeno-hunting etc. and you're never locked into or required to do any of them (unless you wish to hunt for certain ranks or side-grades for your modules and weapons).

But here comes the stinger: what are all these systems and activities used for? Well they are used to earn credits that can be used on buying new ships, modules and weapons. Sounds fair enough, right? Yes, but that is pretty much the only thing you can use credits on. the "Game" is just one long ass grind, to get enough credits to upgrade your ship so it can become slightly better at the thing you were already doing! That's it, that's the entire game-play loop. Once you have the biggest ship and the best modules and weapons, there is basically nothing to work towards any more.

There is only really two things to do in this end-game: the first thing is to grind for an additional 100 hours to get your hands on a carrier, that also needs its modules bought separately and has maintenance/upkeep that needs to be paid for. Requiring you to log in once a day and grind credits for a few hours. And if you want to move it, it requires 500 tons of a specific commodity that can either be bought or mined, in both cases requiring you to find where it can be bought/mined first.

The second thing is Xeno-hunting. Unlike human NPC's (and other players in some cases), the aliens in this game are a real threat, that will tear even your biggest ship apart in less time than it takes for you to say "Oh ♥♥♥♥!". So these bastards require that you have a specially designed ship with specialized weapons, and for you to have fully mastered maneuvering your ship, if you want to even stand a chance at defeating them. (They are hands down the best part about the game tbh, mainly cause unlike every other activity being rather mind-numbing, fighting the aliens is a genuine challenge).

Do I recommend Elite Dangerous? Depends on if you find the act of combat or exploration exiting/rewarding (even after have done it 1000 times before) rather than it just being the means to get to "the end".

So, first off, this game is beautiful. Finding things that are new to me was really relaxing (I did an explorer type build). The controls are a huge learning curve, but once you get used to all the possible actions it feels very immersive. It's like you're really piloting a spacecraft. So why not recommend it to friends after 400 hrs? Because I just had my ship blown up by the alien antagonists in a cut scene. Why does that infuriate me to point of uninstalling and writing this? Because when your ship blows up you lose everything that ship had. That means multiple highly upgraded engine parts. That means all the minerals I gathered. That means the 2 MONTHS OF REAL TIME I SPENT GATHERING ASTROLOGICAL DATA. Lost. In a cut scene. Screw this game.

EDIT: If my hours played make this review ring hollow to you, By all means go ahead and play the game, It doesn't bother me and I genuinely hope you have fun! this review is my opinion and I don't regret much of my time in elite, But when i look at my time spent in Elite and steam asks me "Would I recommend this game to other players?" The honest answer is no, At least not without a little bit of additional context.

It makes me sad that so many people seem to be taking my review as an attack on their favourite game. I changed and elite didn't, Not really, And after 800 hours I decided I wanted to share my experience.

For those of you still playing, 07 and fly safe CMDR

ORIGINAL:
There's a fun experience to be had in Elite dangerous for sure, The vastness of space and the thrill of flying around it is... captivating. Feeling fully in control of this ship as you experience the freedom of going around the galaxy, Exploring these systems, It's like exploring your home town in your own car for the first time, but in space! you can shoot things, trade things, or fly off into the black to scan things all of which are valid ways to experience this game and to really appreciate the lustre the experience provides.

Then, of course, you get used to it.

Once the magic fades and you're left with the reality of the game, you can still have a fun time for sure. Trading, shooting and exploring gets you credits that let you buy bigger and better ships - which in turn get you more and more credits. Eventually you'll hit a point where you ask yourself, Why? Why am I getting a bigger trade ship? At the end there will be the biggest trade ship, And once I get that what do I do with it?

Credits become meaningless after a point, you cant invest them into making a home, a base or A business. it is always you, In your ship, Drowning in money you can't meaningfully spend. along the way you're extremely likely to encounter what I call "Frontier moments", Design decisions that make you say "Why would you do it like that?" From everything to do with engineering to the more recent stuff to do with colonisation.

Speaking of colonisation, Up to now I've been very vague, because I've played this game for 800 hours, On and off since it initially released, and specifics escape me, it's mostly Vibes. But I've been doing the colonisation recently.

At first glance, Colonisation is a surprisingly salient system by frontier standards, Some bugs for sure (It is a beta, not that that excuses things) but the cost of entry and the incentive to participate is fine, not great, Not terrible. An entry price of 25 million is downright sane after the cost of fleet carriers, And the fact that you don't own the system is genuinely fine if that's how they want to do it. Hauling the required cargo pays pretty highly above market average, So you're always going to profit from a haul - more so if you make sure to use a third party tool to ensure you get the best price.

The whole time i did this, In the back of my mind i was wondering "Where's the frontier moment?" and it turns out that it was discovered on reddit, Hidden as part of a vague line in the codex: The economy of stations is determined and influenced by the planetary installations on the body they orbit. You can build a coriolis or an orbis in orbit of a gas giant, In the same system as any number of other installations, But they can't send ships over to deliver cargo? The system can't be affected by distant installation? Your colony station is doomed to perpetually produce nothing but hydrogen fuel and biowaste (poop)- This is especially bad because YOU DON'T GET TO DECIDE WHERE THAT FIRST STATION IS, A friend got unlucky and his is around A water world, Which means it literally cannot be influenced.

People have been building their system, Functionally acting as unpaid interns for frontier to expand and design these systems, Labouring under that assumption that they work in a way that would make logical sense with the information we are provided in the UI, Only to then realise "Oh wait, I've messed up this whole system!". Terrible documentation, And frankly consistent poor design decisions really take the wind out of my sails.

oh and I looked around in a system i used to call home, They don't abide by this rule. So why is it suddenly so restrictive on US?

I really hope frontier can pull it back up, Elite is a beloved old fling of mine, That I now see in a terrible state and I want nothing more than to help them, But I can't. I don't have that power. Only Frontier can really put their boots in and bring elite back from the brink, But given the playerbase and frontiers history over a number of other games, I wouldn't bet on it.

The only thing dangerous about this game is the FDevs development choices.

Too grindy. Make ship interiors.