Elite: Dangerous

Dammit, the minute I try exploring a mystery alien base gets demystified back home. Tasteful vid montage here, with only the most tasteful of spoilers...



I won't be checking any more out until I can visit myself. Just gotta disentangle from the spiral arms first...

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That may not look very far from the blue dots of home, but trust me it is

My destination turned out to be just a red planet near a sun. But you know what, perched there miles from anywhere, it was alright by me





Exploring may be the most grind-ridden of Elite's pastimes, but it definitely has its moments

EDIT: Listening to this eerily beguiling stream of Beethoven's 9th stretched to 24 hours really gave the journey some flow too. It's like a song for space whales

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Made it back without succumbing to space madness. Only a little the worse for wear...





Actually the closest to Han Solo I've felt so far. Bounties on my back, three passengers who couldn't be scanned. (Sneaking back to the station actually proved pretty easy, but it's the thought that counts. I imagined they were stashed under the floorboards )

Now to gather up some samples from the derelict alien base, unlock the mad scientist & his corrosive-proof cargo racks, and go visit the 'live' alien site that's just been found

(And then build my super-fast science Courier just in time for the angry Thargoid response )

I bought it...

Now I'm wondering if the old Thrustmaster Terminator X Hot-ass will work on the PS4. It's already PS3 compatible, although I've no idea what you'd use it with on the console.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

Aww man, you have to go straight into mentor mode. Knock on their cockpit with the nose of your immediately acquired Cobra and shout 'WHEN I WAS YOUNG ALL OF THIS WAS STARS'

(You could actually genuinely try the Mentor setting in Multicrew if you got the full pack, and you're in the mood. Doubt anyone'll find that bit for the first few days tho...)

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Going by their FAQs only the new Thrustmaster is good to go: 'We support the Thrustmaster T-Flight HOTAS 4'

I've seen guys round the forum pretty convinced the workarounds will be found tho.

Yeah, the sticks look identical apart from the PS4 PCB. There's a driver that allows PS3 fight sticks to be used on PS4 fighting games but it has to be bundled with the game initially, no PC-style modding here. Darned Commies.

Wonder if something will eventually find its way into a patch?

Although, the Dualshock 4 looks to be a useful tool - You can bind hotkeys to the touchpad, use the same pad to navigate the map, and turn the motion sensitive controls into head-look. I'm off to give it a shot.

Yeah, support could trickle down, FDev have been pretty good on peripherals. Might depend on PS I guess. (Cunning hackage may still fill the void ). Yeah the control use looks neat though. Not sure I'd like the tilt-look, but def frees up sticks.

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Visited the 'dead' variant of the mystery site. Definitely the best planetary location to date . Some delightfully creepy noises at points...

Mainly non-spoilery shot



Gonna visit the 'live' location tomorrow, and delve into its belly...

Well, I'm already Cobra'd up - Early game is actually somewhat enjoyable compared to when the game launched and you're getting 70k missions straight away so grinding's not really a thing now. Dualshock 4 control is pretty sweet, with the touchpad in effect giving you two extra buttons in addition to 'mouse' look, which is better than I thought it would be.

Performance is ok, although the framerate chugs a bit. It's not a game which depends on great framerates to be playable but when you're used to buttery smooth 100fps/Ultra on PC it's a bit of a shock. There seem to be two graphics settings (but I have a Pro so it might be different for standard PS4s), Performance and Quality. Quality looks to have the same stutters as Performance but with noticeably nicer visuals.

All in all, it's a pretty decent port of the game but Frontier had to be Frontier, didn't they? You'd think the nickel & dime DLC would be a breeze to implement on a system which has a marketplace used to dealing with the likes of the Dead or Alive franchise? Nope.

We've got to buy 'Frontier points' and get sent to an outside website...

Hah . That business of them not duplicating cosmetics across is fairly standard-pants as well :/

I've got a feeling there's going to be a minor sh*tstorm when PS4 newbies realise how towering the gating is for the latest alien content. I found the grind manageable in the end, but it essentially took two weeks of gaming, and that's with high end ships (multi-purpose Conda for mission smashing, 40LY Asp for gadding about).

Not sure they'll find the current payoff super stellar either, although I'm fond of it . Dropped in on the 'live' site, and the atmospherics are solid, and the execution a big step up on their last 'puzzle'. It's still essentially a simple case of 'match the object with the object', but with much swisher presentation, and more fun to experiment with. Driving around gut-like internals adds to the claustrophobia too.

Couldn't actually complete the puzzle though, because we needed pretty much all of the rare alien items, most of which aren't available on site.

On the plus side it seems there are some fun easter eggs about. Saw a few neat behaviours myself, but here's what happens if you insert some tech from another alien culture into the machine...

*SOILERS ETC*



(I didn't mean to write soilers, but now I'm keeping it...)

There's some nice conspiracy bubbling over that what we'll eventually see with the alien emergence is both Thargoids and Guardians going at it. Which again could be a pretty cool combat scenario to slink about in

Gorramit but the new camera and it's focal depth tweakery really has cubed the screenshot generation...



Although as a Redditor sed: 'The hungry turtle cannot be unseen.'

Oh damnn. Some Redditors are becoming convinced that the live site is growing day by day, with those big 'arms' pushing further out of the ground. They've started taking high contrast shots like this...



At the very least, it sure does look like a Tharg capital ship. And if so, that means we're all driving into the control room, and hammering on the keys

(I am pretty impressed with the design work here. Even though the site had the classic Tharg silouette, when you're driving amongst it it all feels very natural mix of geography and wreckage. It didn't even occur to me that the landscape was mimicking the internal details that closely...)

Played a couple of hours on PS4 last night, and the amount of people online with me is pretty impressive. I don't think I've seen stations so full of real people.

The flip side of this is that it seems to tank the framerate to something which feels sub 20fps. Solo seems the way to go until this gets sorted out, but it's depriving me of some easy noob kills. Hey, I'm not above that.

You monster!

(You should be sending them to Hutton Orbital instead )

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EDIT: Gah, my bipolar relationship with ED continues...

Alien site shenanigans: Cool experience . (Particularly liked flying my SRV through giant wishbone / neuron formations while scrambling my way in, and spotting the little convincers that it's a living place. Plus, hey, glowing altars of bionic tech are cool )

Getting the final device to trigger the event: Grrrrr. Over an hour of orbital cruising experimentation around an ammonia world with no RNG drop. A combination of the very worst of ED. (Signal Source 'caves' at their crappiest, empty gameplay lacunas, RNG-based grind locking, zero interrogatable aspects or in-game hints leading to sheer guesswork and zero results. Meh )

Finally fricking got the alien pod thing I need, via following the arcane science of some forum-ites. Or possibly the RNG just rolled my way finally. Hard to know...

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The 'Canonn' science bods are doing their thang, truffling through previously incomplete mysteries, dotting alien scripts, crossing vast distances. They've found a trail of the sites, and with each one they find the complexes seem to be larger, more emerged...



I don't know how they found the trail, it involves maths, but apparently this:



+ this:



+ this:



= Eureka

Best guess on what's actually going on? Damn things are grown from the ground. And the longer these guys follow the trail, the closer they get to one that's bloomed

(In theory smaller ones may sound like this...)

Rampant Consumerism News:

Coloured jump jets now available. I've treated my Asp to tasteful pink...



And yes, FDev have also released a 'plain' name plate, for a price. No shame those guys, no shame...

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Also, I found this tale of Canadian Detective versus Genuine Ganker to be amusing

Damn these failed assassination attempts don't get any less intense...



38% hull again as I jumped, and that green bloop is my point defence desperately trying to ward off missiles hitting my drives...

It's not the rebuy that would have burned, it'd be losing my NPC crew and all her ranking. Greed will really make you stay on that target far too long though

I've gotta get some better shields...

I'm sciencing things

One of the Canonn guys found some of the Thargoid numbers replicated in the latest waypoint audios:



It's just a number system that's already been decoded (a base 8 system transcribed in binary triplets... which is kinda cute because the Thargs love octagonal things, and have three fingers...), but it's fun to have the symbols writ into the audio spectogram too. Replicated it myself and I was able to cull out a Thargoid counting to one

(Disclaimer: I know what binary is, and base 8. That's about it... )

To celebrate that I can now count up to 7 in Thargoid, I made a thing

These military flight suits are horrible. They are also free. That is all.

Damn, today on 'I've had this game for 2 years but I never knew...'



In 'realistic' view you can see the binary+ suns in real time, and figure out which approach will cook you. I'm totally not going to use it (getting a surprise bask basting is half the fun), but still, neat

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In other news, I have been slowly cobbling my high speed science vessel together. If the aliens emerge, I am ready for them

Elite in VR:



So hard to describe how all the pluses and minuses combine here, so I'm going bullet points...

Pros:

• Holy christ the scale. The DBX in the tutorial is ENORMOUS. It's an expanse of metal you can scud past for an age. Why this is so apparent now, given the fly-by takes the same time in 2D, I've no idea. It's really surreal. (I look back at pictures I took and they just don't convey the heights / widths / depths experienced at the time. Those hexagonal heat sinks on planets surfaces just are 50 feet high now. Things tower generally, hovering Goliaths hove mightily overhead, headlight glare and skimmer scans add extra voluminous vibes. It's striking stuff.)
  
  
• The little things: The sun glares on cockpit imperfections really make it feel like there's a curved bit of uber-glass just in front of you. Shadows now crawl in '3D' over the ship's interior. Tiny bits of space debris zip past in ways which real make the external vacuum feel like it has volume...
  
  
• The GalMap is just glorious. I accidentally turned on the PowerPlay filter at one point, and in a hallelujah chorus I was suddenly surrounded by huge scoops of candy-coloured galaxy expanse in all directions. Looked amazing
  

Cons:

• Distance view is just a muddle of pixels on my 970. You can get the general shape of things but no chance of spotting a ship type from its silhouette or whatever. It's pretty awful, mainly just mush. (I'm gonna have to toy with some down-sampling or 'supersampling', dialling other stuff down to get there).
  
  
• The ASW trickery kicks in every time I'm in a station, and sometimes on surfaces, turning everything into a juddery, melting Matrix world at its worst. Not ideal :/
  
  
• Much faff. Many crashes, much GalMap key remapping. Etc etc.
  

On Balance:

Amazing experience when it worked. Some big negatives to go with the big plusses though. Think the desire to constantly tinker with the graphics is going to always be there. (And the long-term itch to buy a 1080 once the price drops, to clean up those distance views :/)