Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Aelisha]

The actions I take are in character. So a large part is 'head role play' but the crux of it is action and conversation in game, that matches my character and the world I see through him.

It's far more 'four buddies sharing a narrative' than the sweeping channel rp of eve, but it has it's place in the role play arsenal. Add to that the constant community goals (all story based) and every actions impact on a changing political landscape (no matter how small), you've pretty much got a living world to work with.

Plenty of meta game tools support this - reddit groups, slack, FDEV forums or even conversations like these. It is personal, almost intimate, in scope and focuses far more on the 'day in the life of' than your character's participation in the grand scale events of EvE, WoW and so on.

It's role play by a different measure and tone, but it certainly is role play.

Case in point:

The Anansi Syndicate (my group) is pushing an agenda in the Bhado system, destabilising existing power there. This is a mosquito bite on the face of human politics and is noticed by few but us.

Mere light years away a community goal of public importance, broadcast throughout the community, is gathering pilots (role player or otherwise) for an in universe, canonical and thematic task (ship goods, kill pirates and so on) that will have a lasting effect in fiction and in the background simulation.

Between these two extremes are the daily conflicts and actions of pilots in the universe. Everything has an impact on background sim. Hand in a bounty? Security improves incrementally. Kill a trader? A corporation might go bust if that carries on. These are fertile ground for little seeds of imagination that can be easily shared with others on the forums, or in space if they happen to be in the area.

RP is alive and well in Elite .

[Lyn Farel]

Ah so yeah, you play a lot and regularly with four buddies, do ops and go on space adventures together? I can see it better with that in mind, yes..

[Aelisha]

More of a rotation with a dozen or so, but yeah, 4 at a time in wing and shared stories on TS/forums after.

Though I do enjoy reading some of the stuff put out there by solo pilots too - lone space cow boys can be pretty engaging characters from afar.

[Louella Dougans]

today i tried out the horizons landing thing. zomg, it's complicated.

There's also a bunch of new missions added. Didn't try many, but it looks like they're very diverse. There's missions to do all sorts of things. Like, instead of take cargo to station X, now there's missions where you've to take cargo and wait for your contact, and you've to expect interference. Interesting stuff.

[Mizhara]

Is there a storyline to follow?

[Elmund Egivand]

Bought the game, registered and did tutorial and good gracious me is this game hard to control with a mouse and keyboard. My FPS muscle memory caused me to spin uncontrollably, I'm not too sure how to go sideways (am I supposed to S and D for that?), etc.

Is this game any more intuitive with a HOTAS?

[Mizhara]

Been doing all the training with KBnM and it seems to work fine once you're used to it. Z and C are the default "strafe" buttons, Q and E rolls, R and F ascends/descends and W and S accelerates/decelerates you. The most important part here is rolling, I find, because turning sideways is helluvalot slower than changing your pitch up or down. Some slight yaw left or right (A and D) is just for fine-tuning a turn.

Bear in mind, this is with a massive 98 minutes of game behind me.

With KBnM I also found it more useful to set my acceleration/deceleration to 10% increments rather than holding and releasing the button. Given my FPS background, this lets me get to the exact speed I want pretty near instantly (since the ship lags behind no matter which scheme you use) without me having to pay much attention to where the throttle lands on the scale. Four quick W taps sets speed to 40% and I'm done, instead of trying to time how long I need to keep W pressed.

Docking and undocking was remarkably simple and the only thing I need to start getting into muscle-memory there is to retract landing gear when undocking.

Diving through the options menu, there does seem to be a lot more depth to the controls than what the tutorial vids show, but I can't be arsed going there until I have some form of understanding of the game itself. (Also, tutorial vids on youtube. Really? At the arse end of 2015, we can't have an interactive tutorial telling you these things, or at the very least an in-game video stream thingy?)

While I remember Elite was never really big on handholding, I am a bit nonplussed by the complete lack of any story hook at the beginning. "Start game". Okay. I'm now in a ship. In space. Hello? Anyone or anything out there? No? Okay...

...

Right. You know what? Fargo Season Two beckons. Save and Exit to Desktop.

[Elmund Egivand]

Well, screw it. I probably should just get a HOTAS.

[Morwen Lagann]

Is this game any more intuitive with a HOTAS?

Yes. To the point that after playing with a HOTAS you will wonder how you ever managed without it, regardless of how skilled you are/were with kb/m.

[Mizhara]

So... storyline? Yay or nay?

[Aelisha]

Just woke up.

There is an undercurrent storyline, follow the news and pick at threads and you can see it(community goals tie in with it sometimes). But there is no explicit storyline as far as missions/space activity goes on a day to day basis.

Essentially - there's a story, but its being told via galnet (cockpit news) and community goals. Most recently, a new Emperor of Achenar was crowned, Emperor Lavigny Duval (wife to be of Hengist). She has retained the title Emperor as a nod to the former patrilineal method of crowning Emperors, while acknowledging that although she stands for traditional values, a female Emperor has been a long time coming.

Previous to this, the President of the Federation was killed in a hyper-drive mishap, leading to the installation of Zachary Hudson, a military minded pro-corporate politician, to the post of POTF.

There are a handful of key personalities that shape the power dynamic of the human cluster day to day: http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Key_people

But as previously mentioned, in game news is the best bet for the large story arcs, and are manually put in by community and dev effort.

Small arcs appear on an automated, system basis, based on if corps are going bust or pirates getting murdered to the point security can be increased in system. This ranges from simple traffic reports in system to smaller scale community goals (usually triggered by player activity that fdev notices and centres a mini-arc around - Imperial-Independent wars have been a prominent example).

tl;dr - no explicit story, but trawling through news articles shows that there's definitely story there.

PS: Have a video with a soundtrack you might remember and visuals to die for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu4LtVagEb4&feature=youtu.be

[Mizhara]

I can definitely work with that. I suppose that ties in with that Powerplay system.

That video though. a) I want that ship. I don't know anything about its performance, but I want it. Badly. b) God damn, that soundtrack. Stuffed me right into the nostalgia cannon and launched me back to when that series was good, which was the entire series except the last twenty minutes.

Allright, guess it's time to try and make something of myself in that universe.

[Aelisha]

Powerplay, as far as mechanics go, is pretty grindy and awful, but the fiction and personalities around it are pretty great. So I tend to sit on the outside looking in and playing with the minor faction back ground simulation stuff.

Glad to hear you'll be knocking about! Get in touch if you ever need help - still dealing with Mad Catz RMA process atm, but I think I can just about handle KBM...

[Mizhara]

Yeah I think I'll spend most of my time solo to start with, at least until I have a bit of a handle on the game. Did my first mission, jumped a few systems out and went randomly looking for three flashies to fulfill the quota and return. Combat is definitely slower and thus quite a bit more... impactful in this game than most space games. Might just be my noobship with its mounted flashlights, of course. Sorry, lasers. Killed a few "mostly harmless" guys, after discovering there's such a thing as "signal sources" which apparently mean random ships, returned to the start and got myself about two hundred k, 37k from the mission and 170k total in bounties, which has now been turned into a multicannon, a cannon, better armor and thrusters. Oh, and a fuel scoop. Emptied the main fuel tank on my way back, it seems. Being able to refill after a jump seems useful.

So, first impressions after about two hours...

I like it. Slow and thoughtful, lots of travel and enjoying the setting etc which is the stuff I always loved about X and a few other space games. Somewhat interesting flight model, but I miss an inertia mode where I can cut thrusters and coast while I turn the ship around, but for all I know that is actually in there somewhere, iuno. It is nice and pretty, very immersive and the UI is surprisingly well designed. Trimmed down to its necessities and very simple to maneuver in. That's an incredible feat for a space game that still tries to be immersive and "real", I think.

If shipsizes go far enough up as I progress, this might actually be my new X.

[Mizhara]

Hah! Reading more about the setting and lore, I find it kind of hilarious that I instantly get drawn to focus my efforts against the Empire and it's slaver ways.