Stay very far away from this expansion, if you can call it that. For a DLC costing $40 and as long as this has supposedly been in development, this has a very concerning lack of content and all of it is very basic at that. The best place to start is with that "Armstrong" moment frontier claimed we would have when stepping out of our ships for the first time. Yeah, sorry, but loading into a black loading screen and then teleporting onto the surface doesn't make for a very memorable experience. Next look at combat, the part a lot of people were looking forward to. There are a lot of problems with this too. The first and worst problem is how basic the combat is. You get your standard kinetic and energy weapons with energy being more effective against shields and kinetic being more effective against no shields. All conflict mode matches play out exactly the same with two teams trying to capture and control points to drain the enemy team of what Ill refer to as tickets. Nothing changes and with how average the AI is, Its not hard to win these matches. One may think as well that as conflict zones get harder, maybe enemies will start using some vehicles like SRVs. Sorry, wont see any of those either, just the vultures used to drop in enemy troops. Ill use this to bring me to my next problem with the conflict zones. Vehicle balance. This is something special. Grab a ship with some dumbfire missals and enough materials to synthesis more and you are pretty much untouchable in the planetary conflict zones. I personally haven't taken a SRV into one of the conflict zones but from what Ive seen they are almost just as powerful. There are more problems with the conflict zones as well but now Ill move on.

Next is the implementation of planetary "life" into the game. I put this in quotes because it just barely passes as adding something resembling life. All life added to planets are just flora and that is just as basic as everything else in the game. All of it spawns in very defined and preset places. Nothing about it looks like how natural life should behave. It almost looks like borders have been put up around the different area where it spawns on planets and doesn't go any further, a lot like how the barnacle forest look now. You find a patch of life on a planets and once you hit the edge, these is nothing else, not even just a few plants that are separate from the main cluster. There is also the ability to gather data on those plants and sell it back at stations but the little mini game that goes along with it is completely unrelated to the process of collecting samples. All together another feature that feels base level and even rushed to make sure it was ready for launch.

The last problem Ill discus with this dlc is the station interiors. This one confuses me the most. Stations in Elite are massive. that cant be understated. So with how much time there was to work on this expansion did we end up with a small room trying to fit all the different services in it. If you look out the window of the station interior you can see you are in one of the buildings in front of a landing pad, and even then they couldnt use all the space in one of those. Maybe I was wishing for too much but I expected to, lets say Im visiting a tourist station, go out the ring and at least see a bit of the scenery you can see from your ship when entering the station, but no. Every station is just a copy and paste of each other with nothing unique about any of them.

Im ending this here but if you want my honest opinion on this expansion, then it is to stay very far away from this product. FDev obviously dont care enough about this game to put any real effort into it and it feels like this is just a paid version of what the fleet carriers turned out to be. If they truly cared about this expansion, then more time would have been put into flushing out these basic features and even adding more content. They are trying to sell you what in other games would cost no more than $10 for four times that price. Capitalizing on the idea of finally being able to leave your ship after the game's release six years ago, only to charge you the price of a who other game and give base level features like this is not a sign that the developers truly care about this game or the community surrounding it. Unless this goes on sale for less than half its original price, do not buy this and do not give support to a developer who has stopped caring about their game.

Stay very far away from this expansion, if you can call it that. For a DLC costing $40 and as long as this has supposedly been in development, this has a very concerning lack of content and all of it is very basic at that. The best place to start is with that "Armstrong" moment frontier claimed we would have when stepping out of our ships for the first time. Yeah, sorry, but loading into a black loading screen and then teleporting onto the surface doesn't make for a very memorable experience. Next look at combat, the part a lot of people were looking forward to. There are a lot of problems with this too. The first and worst problem is how basic the combat is. You get your standard kinetic and energy weapons with energy being more effective against shields and kinetic being more effective against no shields. All conflict mode matches play out exactly the same with two teams trying to capture and control points to drain the enemy team of what Ill refer to as tickets. Nothing changes and with how average the AI is, Its not hard to win these matches. One may think as well that as conflict zones get harder, maybe enemies will start using some vehicles like SRVs. Sorry, wont see any of those either, just the vultures used to drop in enemy troops. Ill use this to bring me to my next problem with the conflict zones. Vehicle balance. This is something special. Grab a ship with some dumbfire missals and enough materials to synthesis more and you are pretty much untouchable in the planetary conflict zones. I personally haven't taken a SRV into one of the conflict zones but from what Ive seen they are almost just as powerful. There are more problems with the conflict zones as well but now Ill move on. Next is the implementation of planetary "life" into the game. I put this in quotes because it just barely passes as adding something resembling life. All life added to planets are just flora and that is just as basic as everything else in the game. All of it spawns in very defined and preset places. Nothing about it looks like how natural life should behave. It almost looks like borders have been put up around the different area where it spawns on planets and doesn't go any further, a lot like how the barnacle forest look now. You find a patch of life on a planets and once you hit the edge, these is nothing else, not even just a few plants that are separate from the main cluster. There is also the ability to gather data on those plants and sell it back at stations but the little mini game that goes along with it is completely unrelated to the process of collecting samples. All together another feature that feels base level and even rushed to make sure it was ready for launch. The last problem Ill discus with this dlc is the station interiors. This one confuses me the most. Stations in Elite are massive. that cant be understated. So with how much time there was to work on this expansion did we end up with a small room trying to fit all the different services in it. If you look out the window of the station interior you can see you are in one of the buildings in front of a landing pad, and even then they couldnt use all the space in one of those. Maybe I was wishing for too much but I expected to, lets say Im visiting a tourist station, go out the ring and at least see a bit of the scenery you can see from your ship when entering the station, but no. Every station is just a copy and paste of each other with nothing unique about any of them. Im ending this here but if you want my honest opinion on this expansion, then it is to stay very far away from this product. FDev obviously dont care enough about this game to put any real effort into it and it feels like this is just a paid version of what the fleet carriers turned out to be. If they truly cared about this expansion, then more time would have been put into flushing out these basic features and even adding more content. They are trying to sell you what in other games would cost no more than $10 for four times that price. Capitalizing on the idea of finally being able to leave your ship after the game's release six years ago, only to charge you the price of a who other game and give base level features like this is not a sign that the developers truly care about this game or the community surrounding it. Unless this goes on sale for less than half its original price, do not buy this and do not give support to a developer who has stopped caring about their game.