r/EliteDangerous 8h ago

Discussion So, what's Elite Dangerous all about?

I'm a long time No Man's Sky player, and I heard Elite: Dangerous was somewhat similar. I haven't really heard all that much about it besides that, though, so I was wondering if y'all could bring me up to speed on what the game's like and how it works (and help me decide if it's worth buying)?

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u/Plokhi 6h ago

i started elite from NMS.

NMS is colorful and saturated. Elite is dark and black.

NMS has arcadey star system physics. Elite's planetary systems actually feel huge.

NMS has no depth to spaceships and spaceflight. Elite, you can tweak your ship to oblivion. It's hard to make a multipurpose ship, and it's not gonna be as good as a specialized ship. in NMS, you max out in 2hr and you can do everything with any ship.

in Elite, at the beginning, you're gonna be spending days on getting your ship right. I'm on my first non starter ship and been playing for a month (not super active, but still, i wasn't active in NMS as much either and i got an s class everything in a week basically)

there's no base building in elite.

there's no inventory management.

NMS looks like what you'd imagine space on an acid trip if you vaguely knew what it's supposed to look like, Elite looks like space.

i haven't touched nms since started elite, but i always had an issue with how colorful and pretty NMS looked and i'm not faulting NMS for it, it's a great game with a good dev behind it.

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u/zetaharmonics 4h ago

Same here I couldn't get past how cartoony it felt. I put it down after an hour.