Elite Dangerous

edit: id give this a yellow thumbs in the middle...not hated, not a thumbs down, and not a thumbs up...a thumbs meh..a thumbs middle finger to frontier. this game despite being 10+ years old, it seems to have an extremely harsh learning curve, and its merciless to noobs. the mechanics that are there, are awesome...but man, ease up on the roguelike features, THEY SUCK, the attitude this game shows to its player base man, the countelss bugs, and the mission failure penalties...Frontier's game failed me too, so give me back my money!!! -and then the bugs... supercruise quite often isnt working properly, and need to relog to make it engage, else will never finish charging. one would think 10+ years is enough for a game to mature. -- and then, i died on a planet, got shot down by soldiers at an outpost, when i delivered a courier job and looted a chest...then i got teleported 7 lightyears away to another solar system for some fuc.ked up reason, and now i cant go back to the starter system...the map and the route planning sucks, cant see anything, its not user friendly at all..... GOODBYE, PIECE OF SH.IT ---and then finally, my complaint below that was also my first review A Brutal, Time-Wasting Trap for New Players The Bait: I just started, was pretty hyped, finally after all these years i decided to give it a go, despite my hatred for mmos. Ingame all went decently well, like a mix between starfield and eve online. i finally mastered the controls, and set up my game settings to my liking, and did the tutorial, then bought the suggested spacesuit, then continued freeplaying the game and spent 4 hours grinding boring Data Courier missions to earn an extra 100k credits, only to get back the cash i spent on the 150k Maverick suit. NEXT: The Trap: The game offered an innocent-looking "Restore Power" beginner mission on a planet surface. It failed to warn me about the extreme difficulty spike or the hostile defenses.... the mission giver sent me a message when i was in my ship on my way there, "Oh, scavangers are going to arrive there soon, ill pay extra if you dispose of them" .The Instant Death: The moment I arrived, it was pitch black, couldnt see ♥♥♥♥....ship alarm rang, "UNDER ATTACK", and high-level enemies instantly shut down and shredded my ship in seconds, i managed to get away and landed my ship closeby at 3% health, IN PITCH DARKNESS... then disembarked, as soon as that happened, they gunned me down on foot. I took out 3 of them, but there were at least 10 or more,,, what a complete crapfest this is. Because I failed the mission, the game hit me with a massive 100,000 credit "mission failure fine" for losing the mission's power regulator item. (probably, it doesnt say why.... its just asking me to leave myself robbed blind to be able to respawn...asswipes) Instead of letting me respawn normally, the game locked my character into a bugged On-Foot "Prison Death Loop" at a Detention Center, holding my entire wallet hostage and forcing me to hand over all 4 hours of my hard-earned progress just to continue playing. Even trying to bypass the bug by loading into Horizons mode failed to clear the debt. this is not debt, this is theft,,,complete b.ull.sh!.t Verdict: Completely anti-player design. The game has an incredibly vertical, unforgiving learning curve, zero hand-holding, and actively respects your time right up until it violently wastes it. Avoid unless you enjoy losing hours of progress to hidden mechanics. ---the potential is there, the galaxy is gigantic, the harsh death penalties are r3tarded...im not proud of myself for giving in and purchasing this.....its too unfriendly with new players, my experience and first impressions with this game are frustrantingly RUINED...and i hate this fact. i wish the game respected me as a newcomer. ---even eve online was more new player friendly than this, at least there they warn you. this game feels like it was made by the government. corruption in every direction you look, and failure to give proper information to the public, altho never fails to steal your hard earned money. CONCLUSION: UNINSTALL... ASAP...this game does not respect the player at all. i tried to like this, i really did. 10 hours of my life, wasted, i didnt even have fun, maybe for 20 minutes, when the game was not trying to f.ck with me. i gave this game 10 hours, i didnt want to believe that it sucks.. but it does.... it has aspects that i like, the ships, the galaxy, the traveling mechanics...the planets and the ability to land and walk on them.... but this game wastes your time, doesnt respect you at all, and it punishes you for playing it. as i wrote above, this game tries to be too realistic, and it forgets that its a game meant to be fun in that process.....it feels like the f.cking goverment made this one, and its devs are the corrupt politicians thriving like leeches from the civilian populations suffering. Frontier, you shouldnt make your game this punishing to newcomers and FIX THE DAMN BUGS!!!! good news is, i have free space on my ssd again. and Thank God there are other similar games to this, so im not entirely sad that i have to let this one go.

7/13/2026: Still blue cobra errors every other mission complete. Still not in a stable playable state after 2 weeks UPDATE: You can now fly around but try and complete missions you get blue cobra error. Then can't sell commodities due to screen just going black. Then here's a new one the game BSOD cause it ♥♥♥♥♥ with the ram. What the hell is this update. The new operations update wasn't stress tested by volume of people. It renders the game unplayable crashing every 10 minutes in normal play. Operations has desync, crashing, and not giving rewards at times. I come from star citizen and at first elite dangerous was more stable playing hours without issue, now dealing with this it horrible. Maybe game companies can learn a thing or two from networking and cybersecurity personnel, STRESS TEST YOUR ♥♥♥♥ BEFORE PUTTING IT IN PROD. Not just a few hundred to thousand content creators I'm talking 50k to 100k players the normal population of this game. An open beta should have happened before live. This is what you get when you don't test things properly. A buggy, unplayable mess. I'll check back in a week. ALSO THE CARGO RACKS, I wanted to be able in my panther clipper haul maybe up to 2k from 1,168 with operations. no I get a whopping 40 more cargo space. For two and a quarter weeks of my time. SCREW THIS UPDATE waste of my time.

Here is my loot out of about 80% of operations i completed: [PH] SERVER ERROR: FAILED TO FETCH MISSION REWARDS -40 minutes of my time

Sadly, I cannot recommend this game. 400 hours played. Frontier still treats their "big" updates as betas. This is the best space flight sim available, but that is all it does well. If you choose exploration, you will see fantastic visuals of planets and stars at a distance, fantastic, if it were still 2009. Yes, the game was released in 2015. If you choose ship combat, you will get meh bounty interactions. This game is vast and empty. Planets are drab; Frontier says realistic, I say uninspired. Everything about the UI is over-the-top difficult and unexplained. God forbid you decide to attempt a co-op adventure. Be prepared to explain to your friends that they need to plan 2–4 hours of flight time to reach the location that will allow you to start your mission, so get your ships in position a day or two in advance. Awesome, you did all of that. Let's do the mission. Oh damn, we all flew 30 minutes only to find that we'd all forgotten our surface scanners. Well, the mission just became impossible on a time basis. That example is when things go moderately okay. Most of the time, it's a simple bug that destroys days of preparation. Steer clear of this game. It does not know what it is. Its newish money-making model of releasing exciting ships/vehicles for cash pre-purchase is a death knell. Lastly, the graphics engine is trash. Anti-aliasing is the noisiest mess I have ever seen, and there seems to be no intention on Frontier's part to set up a fix. Please don't put hundreds of dollars into this game like I did. If something changes, I will update. (But it's been 11 years since release.)

nothing works, game crashes on splash screen and reporting a crash is impossible. even the dmp looks encrypted so no crashlogs. no wonder i forgot i owned this piece of crap in 2021 and just now gave it another chance. at least NMS runs. wasted hours troubleshooting for nothing. not even steam so idk wth is going on.

After having it in my account for upwards of 10 years, i finally had the chance to full dive into it this year. HOBOII do we have some issues Frontier. Lets start with the good stuff: 1) Space combat is fun. like actually. the 6axis of movement and semi-newtonian physics sim is actually great. ships behave how you expect them to in space. 2) universe scale. all off the milky way (exept the horsehead nebula, but we will get to that) aaaand now with the bad stuff: HOLY MOTHER OF GRIND FEST: if you have like...life goals, don't play this game. Just the engineering grind alone is 70h for ONE SHIP. (source: Yamiks youtube/stream). I played EvE online for almost as long. i had capital ships at this poin. RN im still in medium class ships cause engineering is such a f0kin grind. PAY TO WIN BS: The new ships that are released as a timed exclusive to the ARX store is pure FOMO and Dark Pattern BS. They nullify half of the other ships utility cause FOK GAME BALANCE I GUESS. GROUND COMBAT SUCKS AZZ: These systems are the definition of *bare bones*. All skeleton, no meat. NPCs rush you with 0 self preservation, and they are OVER ARMORED/SHIELDED. This was not built around solo play, and it shows. Stealth in this game is a joke, if one dude spots you the whole encampment INSTANTLY KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE. and they DONT MISS. good luck CMDR, i guess. And now for the ugly: THEY OBVIOUSLY DONT PLAY THEIR GAME/TEST IT: An update went out sept 2nd for the new rino, and it introduced a BUNCH of new bugs into the game, most noticeable is the FSD cooldown timer on your hud is no longer accurate, but there are more, less noticeable bugs, like how if you die on a settlement and rspawn, sometimes you cant FSD or even use ESC to menu out. ALT-f4 doesnt close this game, so good ol TSKMNGR is your only hope for when it dont work. PVP P2W ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥: if you havent been here since the kickstarted days, good luck out there dude, the amount of sweat in open is enough to fill a gym locker room twice over. Whale Pandering: Litterally jiggling keys (new ships) and calling it new content, when they litterally copy pasta the stats and ship interiors and change a few magic numbers. Lack of actual LORE/Story/reason to give a f: Sure the thargoid thing was cool, but does anyone who wasn't actualy there KNOW HOW WE GOT HERE? the game doesnt tell you ♥♥♥♥, which leads me to THE GAME DON TELL YOU SHIIII: 3pt are your friend. like actually. you can't get sweet FA done without at least a tab of INARA open. Parts of the galaxy are still "story locked" after 12 years: So, about the Horsehead nebula....when fam? WHEN!? You can't story lock an area for over a decade, and not release ANY STORY. EVER. Unlock it if you arent going to give a damn about the Lore. All in all. If you like suffering, the endless grind, and opperate on pure hopium that they will make this game what they promised in the kickstarter 15 years ago , sure, go ahead and buy it. but even after star citizen and EvE fumbled the ball so hard, you still fail to capture that audience cause the game is actually just a slog to play and unfun for 90% of people. Personally, i think your money would be better spent on something like NMS...or a CBT torture device if you are actually into this game.

One of those games I wish I could give a mediocre rating. Flying around in your spaceship is really cool. Great sound design. But the game is literally a universe wide and an inch deep. Missions (at least in my 15 hours) consist of flying to this place, pick up something or kill something, then flying to another place and turn the mission in. That's the game. From what I can tell, the game is all grind to work towards goals that let you grind a little bit faster. There's no story, no feeling that I'm really doing anything to influence the universe. My biggest complaint is the UI is absolutely atrocious. Everything is behind multiple button clicks for zero reason. People say that you get used to it. It's hard to get used to having to do 8 button presses just to turn in a mission. And for a game with hundreds of keybind options, there is no search function. Absolutely mindboggling.

This game used to be one of my favorite games, then the devs kept nerfing payouts and focusing on aspects of the game that just weren't fun. This game had so much potential.

At first I adored this game, the freedom to travel around and to take part in whatever I wanted. Even went so far as to buy a HOTAS just for playing. But over time the shine wore off. The grinds became longer, like I was doing more for less. The most useful things in the game require a lot of grinding to get them in the first place, and in the case of the fleet carrier, even more grinding to keep it. It starts to feel less like a game you can have fun in and more like a second job to get to the fun parts. Most recently the game has been filled with bugs, I've came across several myself and it's just not fun anymore. Some of these bugs have caused me to have to get rid of my carrier and stopped progression in some aspects of the game completely.