Elite: Dangerous (for PC) Elite: Dangerous is a fascinating exploration of space that will endlessly appeal to some players and thoroughly bore others.

Elite: Dangerous (for PC)

  • Pros

    Massive, open galaxy. Offers complete freedom in how you play. Remarkable sense of space and scope.

  • Cons

    Requires tons of patience. Steep, uneven learning curve.

  • Bottom Line


I didn't really appreciate the vastness of space until I tried to travel anywhere in Elite: Dangerous ($39.99 GPB, or approximately $60 USD). This PC game by Frontier Developments is a crowdfunded follow-up to the classic Elite series of space sims. It's a game that gives you a ship, a handful of equipment, and a full tank of fuel, then sets you out on your own in the vast cosmos. It's huge, slow, deliberate, and open, and it will reward players with the patience stay with it.

Do Whatever You Want
The concept isn't much different from the original Elite, related in 1984. It's the thirty-fourth century. You're the pilot and captain of a ship. You can fly through space. You need money. Get to work. There's no epic story told where you're the main character and the universe is at stake. You're just a guy trying to make his way in space. Once you leave stardock for the first time, your actions, goals, and destinations are entirely up to you. And the galaxy has 400 billion star systems (the vast majority of which are procedurally generated, and yet to be explored) to see while you do it.

That isn't to say the galaxy is empty or static, though. Elite: Dangerous is a persistently online game that automatically lets you encounter other players online if you're in the same part of space; you can optionally play solo without the player interaction, but that mode still needs an Internet connection. Politics and economics are the lifeblood of the galaxy, and every cargo run, government crackdown, and pirate raid influences the price of goods in a given system. Larger, overarching events take place in the background, letting players work en masse to back different factions in certain systems, running missions for them in the hopes of overthrowing the ruling government or protecting the status quo.

Careful Controls
Like most space sims, Elite: Dangerous is ideally played with a flightstick. However, they're increasingly rare these days, and the game is perfectly playable on a gamepad, which is how I played it. The default settings covered nearly everything I needed, though I had to turn to my keyboard for a few more-specific ship functions, such as lowering my landing gear or extending my cargo scoop. The dual analog sticks of my controller gave me yaw, pitch, and roll controls, plus helpful up-and-down thrust maneuvering, along with easy access to targeting, throttle, weapons configurations, and system power-balance levels.

Everything in the game is slow, careful, and deliberate. Jumping between stars requires charting a course to your destination and making a series of warp jumps that will take your ship several minutes to go any significant distance. Even when you get to your target star system, you have to navigate to your destination at slower-than-interstellar speeds, throttling up and down to get within a million meters of it at less than a million meters per second before you can drop out of sublight speeds and dock, mine, or attack. After that, docking takes a few minutes, as you fly into starbases and land carefully on a landing pad. Mining requires careful shooting of asteroids and then even more careful scooping up the minerals by aligning your ship at a specific angle and very slowly flying into them. Even combat is as much a game of cat and mouse as it is dogfighting, with jumps, chases, and jockeying for position.

Elite: Dangerous

If you're hoping for frantic space opera action, look elsewhere. There certainly is combat in Elite: Dangerous, but it's a relatively small part of a much bigger-picture. You can make your way as a pirate or mercenary, fitting your ship with tons of weapons and going after targets. You can also avoid battle entirely and outfit your ship to be a deep-space exploration vessel with advanced sensors, selling information about your discoveries. Or you can get a mining laser and an onboard refinery and mine asteroids all day, scooping up and processing ore into usable material. You can also simply travel from star to star, buying and selling commodities to make a profit. You might get attacked by the very pirates you would otherwise be chasing. It's usually better to evade them than fight them if your ship can't handle it.

Some Minor Direction
You very much make your own fun in Elite: Dangerous, but there are plenty of ways to do it. You won't ever find your hand held as you make your way through space, but most starbases have bulletin boards with missions you can undertake, and there are three major space factions and several minor ones you can ingratiate yourself with in various ways.

Elite: Dangerous isn't technically an MMO game, but it does have several persistent online elements that require a constant Internet connection. You can play online and encounter other players in the vastness of space or play on your own, but you need to be connected regardless, as mentioned. This lets the game keep a persistent and complex system of economics, politics, and cartography throughout the galaxy. Prices go up and down depending on the cargo runs players make. Political factions gain influence and can even get control over certain systems if enough players do missions for them. It keeps the galaxy active and consistent, so players can work together as they wish and share useful information. It's not the deep, cooperative experience EVE offers, with massive economic factions waging war with each other, but it gives the sense of a living, active galaxy.

Lost in Space
I initially spent many hours drifting aimlessly through space, trying to find my way. I tried skirmishing against pirates, making cargo runs, and mining asteroids. Eventually, I loaded my ship up with a fuel scoop and advanced sensors and pointed myself in the direction of "away." A few hours of jumping to new systems, scanning everything of note in them, sitting in the corona of the sun for a few minutes to refill my fuel, and jumping further off got me fractionally closer to the galactic core. I started to take damage from flying too close to stars, so I made my way back to known space and sold my sensor data. I killed hours encountering no one and seeing very little except scan readings as I flew by unknown celestial bodies, and I was satisfied by this. It might be the most engaging boring experience I've ever had.

For the Patient
Elite: Dangerous is a game for the patient and the strange, but for them it's a fantastic game. It's a massive, open sandbox that lets you realize just how tiny you are in the galaxy, while still giving you plenty of things to do. It's not fast-paced, exciting, or even very personal outside of the story you craft for yourself, but it's so incredibly vast and intriguing that at least some of you will find yourselves jumping back into your cockpit just to scan another star or mine another asteroid, just because they are there.

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