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.

Lets gloss over the buggy launcher which forces you to have a useless 'frontier' account and leaves processes hanging so that steam thinks the game is running even after you close it... lets also not talk about predatory micro-transactions and nickles and diming the player for ships and skins.

A delivery mission (playing with a controller):
- While docked, access station services, enter mission menu
- Accept the mission, back out of that to the mission menu root
- Manually navigate to the other submenu to load the mission cargo on your ship
- Manually move the slider all the way, move down and select accept
- Back out of that menu, and out again to station root, select auto-undock
- Wait 40s for the auto-pilot to get you out of the station
- Out are out of the station, but can't jump because you are too close to the station
- Throttle up and boost to get out of mass lock
- Open the map, select the target system (you can't pick the planet or station yet)
- Exit the map
- Manually point the ship toward the system you just selected
- You can't jump, 'target is obscured'.
- Waste 45s using supercruise in janky manual mode to go around the planet blocking you.
- Once that's clear, Initiate jump, wait 15 seconds to drive to charge
- Wait 10 second for jump itself
- Exit jump, open the map/mission list, select the station
- Exit the map
- Manually point the ship toward the station you just selected
- Engage supercruise
- Open the mission list, manually activate supercruise assist (to the station you just selected and manually aligned with!!!)
- Wait 55s to get there, acceleration, deceleration, yawn
- Exit supercruise 8.5km away from station, you can't request landing farther than 7.5km
- Throttle up to close that stupid 1.0km gap
- Open coms menu, contact section, pick the station, request landing
- Autoland won't kick it because you are moving
- Throttle down, every damn time
- Autoland kicks in, wait 75s for it to actually land you inside the station
- Open the mission menu, go to the deliver item subsection
- Manually move the slider all the way, move down and select accept
- Select mission to complete, manually move up to select the only reward available (default was cancel/back)
- Receive reward, one more click to confirm and get out

It is PURE DRUDGERY... so much of that stuff should be streamlined and automatic. As off-putting and sad as Starfield's fast travel was, it was still better than this. Just go play Everspace 2 or anything else really. This and X4 deserve to disapear. Terrible products, user hostile, crap all over your time investment, small nuggets of fun wrapped in hours of chores.

All right I'm throwing together a quick, somewhat low effort review, because I'm tired of Steam asking me if I recommend it, and I can't just say yes/no without writing a review. For better or for worse, Elite Dangerous is probably my favourite game, right up there with Battletoads and Mario 3.

I've been playing Elite for a long time now, and I have more hours in Elite Dangerous than is tracked on Steam alone (probably near 2000 hours, which is much more than any other game I have). There are a ton of different things to do, and most of them involve some sort of grind. A lot of people complain that the 1:1 galaxy doesn't mean much when most of it is empty, but space _is_ vast and empty.

There are bugs. Annoying bugs. Multi-crew in a single ship does not play anything like the Odyssey trailer hyped it up to be. In fact, there is a pretty good likelihood that when you jump to another star system with a friend in your passenger seat, he will be disconnected. This is sad, but my friends and I play anyway. We just learn the workarounds. I'm not apologizing for the game; I just really like the lore in this series and... Something about the gameplay. I don't know what. I don't normally like overly-grindy games, but I can't get enough of this one.

I would recommend to any prospective new players though: Don't play for "the meta." Play this game to do what you enjoy, even if you aren't making the most credits per hour. Go out into the black and make your own stories. Just try not to expect the Odyssey part of the game to be the next Battlefield game.

Elite Dangerous. How do you define a game like this? It's prolific. The idea of mapping the galaxy on a 1:1 scale is insane, yet these heroes did that.

Over the years, ED had become the very best in Space Sim. There is no other that has taken the time to create as accurately and passionately as the developers at Frontier.

So where to begin. The learning curve I guess. It's not nearly as bad as people say it is. If you can put the square cube into the over sized circular hole, you are golden. If not, there is a square hole for you to fit into. The real challenge in learning the game isn't in it's mechanics, but more so into what you desire to see from the galaxy. And yourself, as it's story teller.

Elite Dangerous is the best in it's class. Should you try it? Yes. Should you feel overwhelmed? Yes. Does the void intrigue you? Yes.

Welcome aboard, CMDR.

I genuinely enjoy the ship combat and mining in this game (core mining at least.) but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ end game content being locked behind engineering is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I hate wasting hours traveling around doing stupid ♥♥♥♥ for engineers. The grind for it is boring and reptetive. Even with them modifying the grind I still don't want to do it. I shall continue coming back every year and uninstalling when people give me a 5 page essay on why I should do engineering. I don't want to waste the time or effort for it.

Don't get fooled by the negative reviews, this game is amazing with a great community but with a steep learning curve and relies on external tools/websites and the community a bit too much.
You can be whatever you want to be - mercenary, explorer, trader, miner, pirate, bounty hunter, support, contractor, you name it - and most new or casual players are overwhelmed by the degree of freedom and often don't like to make own decisions, so if you prefer a game with a narrow scope this game is not for you.
The worst part imho was the grind for upgrade materials, but they recently improved the grindy part a lot to make the more sophisticated tech upgrades available to the casual players.
Yeah, the Odyssey DLC which brought on foot aspects to the game was underwhelming if you expect a game in the game. It still is a space sim focused on "flying" space craft and/or travelling the galaxy. If you expect a 1st person shooter in astro suits, this game is not for you as well. The on foot missions however can be fun and so can the on foot combat, the AI is somewhat underwhelming, too predictable, too easy if you get the first couple of upgrades, i really don't understand how ppl complain about difficulty - and I'm no shooter expert by any means. And on foot does not neccesarily mean combat ... If you play as an explorer, I absolutely love the ability to leave your ship and walk around on landlable planets.

o7

I have read the reviews before buying the game and want to share my experience after some hours of gameplay. I don't really agree on the criticism that ed is too grindy, I have played other games where progress was much slower. Instead I would rephrase the problem from grindy to repetitive. Why? Grindy for me means that I have to play the same type of gameplay for hours/days/weeks to progress towards a goal, BUT with the difference that I like what I'm doing.

1. I have grinded in many games many hours and I have no problem in doing so, because during grinding, I'm playing an activity that I enjoy and that I feel is relaxing. Contrary to this is repetitive: In ED I need to repeat the same task over and over but its not fun, it doesnt give you the "grindy" feeling, you dont want more of it, it just feels boring and you want to be done soon. This sometimes happens with grinding too after you spent way too much time doing it, but I hope you can understand my point.
2. Repetitive play has no goal and no progress. Some argue that this is a simulation and you can set your own goals. Thats fine, but most people would set their goal in the beginning in earning credits to buy bigger ships. The problem here is that this is only fake progress, because with a bigger ship you only scale the repetition up but you dont finish the "task".

With 45hrs in, I have spent around 5h to understand the basics, 15h to just explore my first system, some settlements, planets, then my first jump to another system, the galactic map and so on. the other 25hrs I have spent doing missions to earn some starting cash, then did some trading. After finding a decent trading route, I just basically went back and forth buying and selling and without too much effort in played time I would say I could buy the most expensive ship (200m?!) in around a week or two, playing maybe an hour or so per day. I dont consider this really "grindy", if reaching that was the goal. But because of the explanation I made above, I dont really think I'll go for it.

Instead I may try other professions like mining and then exploring, and I would really like to see our solar system!
I could really see this being amazing with VR too. What I dont understand is that people say this is a simulation. It feels too easy for it. Your ship has Auto-docking, Auto-landing, Auto-Speed, Auto this and that. There are no buttons or switches in the cockpit, every cockpit looks pretty much the same (I tried 4 ships). I turned off almost every little helper but for example the pre-flight launch checklist (I was really excited) is not much more than pressing 5 buttons and then turning itself off automatically for your next launch.
There are some really cool voice comms when approaching a port but for some reason I wish there was more of it. Also that would be my final resumee of the game: I like the idea but wish there was more to it!

i love space games and if u love to chill in space fly close to plantes do a lil money runs to upgrade it an amazing place to fly in our system and orbit around a planted looking ionto the stars at u watch the day and night cycle it really night once u find a nice spot in place to watch a planted ordit for a cycles and lison to the raidio get out of ur chair get some food or have some relaxing space musie or raido to fly with.

my brother and I play together on his carrier we go around mining collecting bounties with me and his other friend its such a great game just don't get killed learned it the hard way.