Elite vs Elite: Dangerous

I’ve always been a fan of space trading simulators - and in fact any game that lets you fly a spaceship. Wing Commander was revolutionary to me, especially as the on-screen joystick could move if your Amiga was powerful enough! But even before that, back on the ye olde BBC, there was something I’d only heard about - Elite.

I never got to play the original game, and actually avoided playing any remake or sequel to it, for many years. I didn’t want to sully how amazing the original was supposed to be. I played other space games and other space trading simulators, but by the time I decided I might play one of the other versions, I found I couldn’t be bothered. So when the Kickstarter for Elite: Dangerous came about, I backed without even reading the whole spiel. I got about three paragraphs down before finding the cheapest tier which guaranteed me a copy (so not Alpha or Beta access), backed and started waiting.

The Alpha and Beta stages came and went, finally giving a release date of 16th December 2014 - my 31st birthday and just after Elite’s 30th birthday. I was overjoyed when I was given Gamma access, days before release. I installed and logged in - and promptly failed at the tutorials quite messily. I steadily got better before going into Solo: the game mode which has only NPC ships. Not long after graduating myself into Open (the multiplayer game mode), the internets enjoyment of the game had ebbed and come to an almost-stop. Suddenly all these posts and reviews were coming in that were bad-mouthing the game. The description “It's inches deep but miles wide” was bandied about.

Well, whilst waiting for my copy of Elite: Dangerous, the original Elite along with a BBC Micro emulator went up on Frontier Development’s store for free. I decided not to play it until now, as rather than play the original I would soon be playing the latest edition. But as Elite: Dangerous is ‘boring’, ‘empty’ and has ‘nothing to do after a couple of hours’, then surely the same complaints couldn’t be levelled at the original 30-year old game.

So I booted it up - and had no idea what I was doing. After managing to exit my game and start a new one about four times, I finally undocked and launched into space. And again had no idea what I was doing. I wasn’t expecting a tutorial, as very few games before the ‘90s did that, the instruction manual was for that. Yet even reading the instruction manual didn’t enlighten me, because it’s 61 pages long and ain’t nobody got time for that.

Elite: Dangerous presents a chance to play Elite as if it was created on modern systems. It does that spectacularly. You dock, load up on supplies and fly off to another system to trade. Or you can be a no-good pirate (or a good pirate!), stealing and selling. Bounty hunt, mine, become a vigilante! The galaxy is open to you - quite literally. You can go from one spiral arm to the other, taking in the sights.

The amount of people I’ve seen who compare Elite: Dangerous to EVE Online is quite staggering. It’s not trying to be EVE, it’s trying to be Elite. What’s more, this is Elite if you could hook up two BBC Micro’s and play with a friend - many friends. Elite: Dangerous is what you make of it. Just like Elite was - but with a tutorial.