I'd be rating this a five if they continued it on consoles, or if Odyssey was better (from all I gather).

Elite: Dangerous is the pinnacle of space simulators. Few other games do scale well, but here you'll get a nearly perfect construction of the galaxy.

While tasks ultimately boil down to getting engineering materials or money, you'll never run out of goals to reach--whether you set them yourself or whether it's the natural progression of shipbuilding. That's just about the best thing I can say about a live service game.

I sincerely hope they put this back on consoles.

I just don't get it. I love space. I love truck sims. I love cozy couch games where I can mine some stuff, sell some stuff, repeat. Everyone tells me that Elite Dangerous is essentially Truck Sim in space. So why do I hate it?

The first, and biggest indictment, is how god damn ugly the game is. For a game where you spend most of your time just staring at it, Elite Dangerous is flat out aesthetically brutal. The color palette in 90% of scenarios is black, brown and orange. With this awful garish orangey-red cockpit UI. You spend the whole time staring at the blackness of space with a slightly orange wash from nearby stars. Then you get the orangey-red UI overlay that is hard on the eyes and depressing looking. There are no vibrant colors or interesting gradients or nice variance. No Man's Sky does a great job of changing up the colorations in each system and each planet. It's all brighter. Elite Dangerous is just pure brutalism.

And I suppose with my understanding of astronomy, Elite Dangerous is fairly accurate. That is what things look like out there. But it doesn't mean it's what I want to stare at. Where are the cool looking nebulas? Or interesting ship models instead of lots of utilitarian looking discs. Or like...anything? Most of the asteroids, regardless of composition, look like big brown space potatoes. And you have to be like 10 inches away from them to mine them, so you see fuck all outside of this burning bobbing space potato.

It's just tiresome. The rest of the time you point your ship in a direction and push the supercruise button and watch it Star Wars lightspeed jump for a few minutes. There's just not much that engages you. In truck sim you have to drive. Even if you're turning on cruise most of the time you still have to turn the wheel. There are still trees and billboards and other cars all on the road. You have to stop for gas. You have to sometimes get off the highway to navigate a set of small town roads with your giant trailer. In Elite Dangerous you just aim in a direction. Hit the supercruise button. And off you are. Once you come out of hyperspace you point yourself at a space station and click a button. It flies you to it. Then you dock. Then you're done. Repeat.

All the while the scenery all around you looks identical. You have very few meaningful inputs and everything around you looks the same. It's almost an idle game somehow. The minimal active play isn't great. Dogfighting feels mediocre compared to other games like Star Wars Squadrons. And as fun as it is, the nature of dogfighting makes things risky. If you want to play more pacifist and mine some asteroids, that gameplay is tedious. It's enough steps to not feel fun but it's also not difficult enough to actually feel like engaged gameplay. It's somewhere in between. Mining asteroids in No Man's Sky isn't exactly fun, but it's braindead easy. Shoot something a few times and then it autocollects. The mundane can be fun, like changing tires or oil in Car Mechanic Simulator, when there are several engaged steps and processes and types of items. But in Elite Dangerous you have to swap weapon sets, equip your mining lasers, dig into a boulder for several minutes, then put away your mining lasers, lower your cargo scoop and then fidgetly drive over the floating minerals to get them into your craft. It's arduous.

Then you have some courier or trade missions. Where you have to fly from point a to b or buy something from point a to take to point b. And there's just no gameplay to that. It's not like what you carry affects how you drive, like it does in truck sim. It's not like where you take it changes how you play, like driving through small towns. You just point, click, go, collect your fee. There's not even management components that feel engaging like in X4 or in Truck Sim. You don't hire other pilots or command fleets.

I just don't get it. It seems like a game I should love on the tin. But playing it just sucks.

I feel like I did myself a bit of a disservice to the game being played normally since I first played it in VR, especially in regard to learning how to actually play the game. Even after figuring everything out, I still feel a bit confused on how it exactly works, and am not sure in what direction to carry on with the game. I imagine I'll go back to it at some point (hell, I have a HOTAS to use with this game, so why not use it), but for now it'll sit off to the side until I get a yearning to enter it again.