[dotnet00]

I think that of the two, Elite Dangerous is the only one that scratches a similar itch, especially in terms of the spaceship mechanics. But it too has suffered from severe mismanagement (pursuing features that got advertising hype over those that made the game fun, abandoning features and leaving them in a broken state, taking forever to fix bugs but being quick on exploits, poor communication and of course the general brokenness of the way they designed their multiplayer in the first place).

I suppose Elite's one saving grace is that it doesn't claim to be in alpha.

[JTbane]

My biggest problem with Elite: Dangerous is the Engineering mechanic, which basically gives you strictly better ship components in exchange for very long and boring MMO-style grinds.

If you want to be seriously competitive in PvP, it's required to do Engineering.

[mrguyorama]

Everything about Elite: Dangerous is a huge grind. You basically cannot play it casually, even in the completely offline and singleplayer session.

[arielweisberg]

Elite is kind of tragic in that there are serious steps backwards in performance, VR, and visuals that they just don’t fix things.

A lot of great gameplay mechanics have been added over the years, but it hasn’t all been forward progress.

No Man’s Sky is the total opposite and I really want to come back to that at some point and get lost in it the way Elite was in VR.

Truly transported you elsewhere and gave you presence in an empty uncaring galaxy that made the tedium and grind still feel like something.

[dotnet00]

I think Elite's devs bit off way more than they realized they were willing to chew, especially with Odyssey, thus dropping consoles and VR.

On the other hand, over the years they've left so many things broken/unfinished or just in general avoided certain things, makes me wonder if maybe the foundation itself was unstable. Eg powerplay being ignored even when it wasn't working right, many years between the addition of new ships and the lack of creativity in terms of the ship's capabilities, similarly with SRVs, weapons bugs, completely failing to capitalize on the excellent PvP mechanics they have, the relative standstill of the Thargoid plot until people largely lost interest, the stagnation/disconnect of Colonia from everything else etc.

[mattmanser]

Yeah, I gave up on it ages ago. The only fun thing was docking/undocking.

It's funny, we've seen games released by the previous generations leading lights in game design and they're all disappointing so far. Relying on boring grinds, poor difficulty curves, etc.. Julian Gollop, David Braben, Chris Roberts, Peter Molyneux, etc.

It's like they can't adopt the new ideas from the next generation to make their games fun. Quite eye opening on how old age or perhaps success, not sure which, can make your thinking rigid.

Elite Dangerous is one of the worst. It's simply not fun. So pointlessly grindy for what is predominantly a single player game. I was so excited for the first 5-10 hours, and then so disappointed as it was obvious that every mechanic was just another massive progress bar that barely moved after hours of play.

No Man's Sky was much better, 40-50 hours fun play before the procedural nature of it became too obvious for me to enjoy it anymore. I played it 2-3 years after launch though, after all the updates. I'd probably play it again over a holiday weekend if I ever get the MS game pass again.

[dingnuts]

>Elite Dangerous is one of the worst. It's simply not fun. So pointlessly grindy for what is predominantly a single player game. I was so excited for the first 5-10 hours, and then so disappointed as it was obvious that every mechanic was just another massive progress bar that barely moved after hours of play.

Speak for yourself, I had a lot of fun for hundreds of hours and revisited the game multiple times over the years. I did space trucking and mining and combat at various times, and enjoyed never paying a monthly fee for an MMO.

Elite Dangerous was announced at the same time as Star Citizen, for comparison, and it's so old now that the main reason I don't play it anymore is because I did everything I could do in single player and the concept has finally lost its allure.

I have a friend who played thousands of hours because he was more social than I and wound up in a large player guild.

I love(d) Elite so much that I bought a VR headset and a joystick solely for it, and I don't regret these purchases.

[mattmanser]

I'm sure it's fun for a small minority of players. The kind that like truck simulators. Takes all sorts. Other than that, it has incredibly shallow game elements. With long grinds of those shallow game elements to get new ships.

Lots of E:D's own player base acknowledge this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/qk6kqs/why_...