I was into the beta approximately two weeks early from their July 29th release. It had been a while since I was in the cockpit of anything and even longer since I was doing so in space. There are some things you can’t forget easily. How to navigate an asteroid field is not one of them.
That being said I had a blast and I firmly cemented my desire for a joystick that arrived a week later: CH Products Combatstick
It’s more joystick than I’ve ever owned and I like it enough it could easily be the last joystick I ever own. Flying soon turned into an occasion of adjusting keybinds to accommodate quality control layout but I was able to turn my “I don’t know what I’m doing” into “Once more into the Breach!”
I can’t stress how excited I am for Elite: Dangerous, the potential and the quality of design. At present you can slip into full online play, limited group play or solo play with ease. The only difference being how many live humans you encounter in your travels. While EVE was a tactical game of space empires, Elite is showing to be a game of space piloting. I only hit the side of the station 4 or 5 times during my first day of full beta. Since then I’ve had a lot of close scrapes as I perfect my rapid departure technique and lost two ships to unpleasant collisions.
Elite has baked in a fair amount of forgiveness. If you lose your initial ship you have two options: a) The same ship again for a fee including all installed components or b) the newbie/Free ship all over again. For your first few days/hours this “Free Sidewinder” is easier replaced than repaired. I rather pride myself on keeping a ship operating as long as possible but even I gave in to Insurance fraud when repairs were too expensive.
You’ll likely hear more about this as time passes and updates release with more content for digestion. I’m not doing much else these days aside from prepping for the next D&D launch later this week.
If you choose to play look me up under CMDR Johann Vorga, I’ll be cruising the spaceways looking for wanted villains and loose cargo in need of a home.