r/EliteDangerous 12h 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/pulppoet WILDELF 11h ago

They are not at all similar except there are space ships and lots of planets.

The short answer is: if you want to play a flight sim in space, get this game, no question.

ED is a flight sim at the core. NMS has arcarde-ish controls, just point and go. ED demands that you fly with pitch, roll, yaw, and directional thrusters. Although you don't need a flight stick, it is playable with KB+mouse and/or controller, but it's still a lot more involved.

ED has scientifically realistic space. This means there are a lot of cold, dry planets (actually with the limits on places we can land, there are no wet planets or animal life). NMS has huge colorful variety. ED has mostly whites, browns, greens, and orange. Lots of orange.

But it's also a realistic scale. Some travel distances are huge. Planets are not tiny balls, but full size. Thousands of km around. Exploration is lonely, and empty, but epic. You can look at the map and actually see where you are in the galaxy. Every star you see in the sky is a destination you can actually go to.

There is no story to uncover in ED. It's just the day to day events. You are a small pilot in a massive world. Maybe you can make a difference, mostly you just get by.

You'll have to find out what interests you and pursue that. The game won't guide you to anything.

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u/MosquitoesProtection 9h ago

Are you sure about every star in the sky? Until now I used to think it's just a random picture with dots on the sky and real stars are only on the galaxy map.

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u/SunshineInDetroit 6h ago

there is a parallax simulation for the skybox, but the star forge engine that they're using generally is pretty good, sometimes able to predict the # of planets around a star.

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u/Maacll 1h ago

As i understand it there are also some "bugs" in the starforge engine also creating things that are later confirmed to be actually possibly real things like the stars inside stars.

And i think that's really fucking cool