Elite: Dangerous

[RemingtonRyder]

I've been playing it on Xbox since New Year. A bit buggy still, alas, but quite playable. Obviously since I'm a silver scrub I only play solo, but that suits me just fine.

It started out quite slow because there is a learning curve, but now that I've got quite a few hours in, it's become more enjoyable. For example, I used to rely on the docking computer early on, now I prefer to do it manually. I also used to get interdicted quite a bit by pirates but now I'm pretty skilled at evading.

It's quite an open-ended game. It's a little bit grindy on trade missions but you can if you prefer just load up your cargo hold and do your own trading on your own terms.

It's a bit of a time sink. The travelling back and forward can take a little while. I don't mind so much, since I can fix a cup of tea and some toast while I'm waiting for the ship to warp to a station, but I can see why other players might get impatient.

Missions can be multipart and have a timer in real-life hours, which means that if you want to wrap up for the day you need to stop accepting missions and finish your outstanding jobs. On the other hand the timers are quite generous most of the time, so you can go away and do something else and finish up your Elite stuff later.

You can customise the loadout of the stock ships. In fact, I recommend doing so as the default equipment can be a bit rubbish. What you have to consider carefully though is that the more expensive the loadout, the greater the cost to rebuy the ship if it blows up. Fortunately, insurance covers 95% of this cost (insurance is free) so as long as you have plenty of credits losing a ship doesn't have to be a huge setback.

It does lead me to carefully consider what cargo I'm going to buy though, since cargo is obviously lost if my ship is destroyed.

Anyway, that's what I've been up to lately.