You get to do your own thing at your own pace in a massive shared galaxy, it's peak.

TLDR: Elite: Dangerous is a really great game and better now than it ever has been, absolutely worth coming back to or starting fresh if you've never played before. I say this despite originally being a little disappointed with it not living up to the Elite legacy.

I have fairly mixed feelings about Elite: Dangerous. The original Elite games were foundational to, not just my childhood as a computing enthusiast and my adult life as a computing professional, but to the computing world, the internet and global culture.

The third game in the Elite series, Frontier: First Encounters, is one of the most amazing gaming experiences ever crafted and still well worth playing today. For its time and the technological restrictions of the time, it is possibly the greatest piece of programming in existence.

In many ways, then, especially at launch, Elite: Dangerous failed to live up to its legacy.

But it was still a good game, and now I would even say it's a great game.

There is an amazing breadth of things to do and the dedication to community, story-driven events and changes in the persistent, shared universe, is amazing.

My criticisms largely revolve around the immersion of the game and the unfortunate hollowness of some aspects of gameplay which, ultimately, reduce immersion by breaking suspension of disbelief.

One of the things that made Elite and Frontier: First Encounters in particular so engaging and different, were the significantly more realistic mechanics, Newtonian flight physics for example. Also, the depth of the trading mechanic and supply and demand and everything else were incredibly revolutionary back in the early 90's.

One would have hoped, then, that Elite: Dangerous, which we waited 20 years for, might be similarly revolutionary, but instead (and for various reasons) Frontier Developments played it safe. They went with traditional, unrealistic space-sim mechanics, the trading system was not much more 'real' or more advanced than it was in Frontier: First Encounters. One of the first things I noticed when playing Elite: Dangerous, at launch, was that trading ships weren't 'real' and nor were pirates or any of the other ships, they were just randomly generated.

I had hoped, or rather expected, that they would be real, they would have real cargo that really got bought by real stations and really affected economies and if you destroyed enough trading ships it would really affect the real economy or if you really destroyed all of a pirate faction's ships they would take time to replenish and pirate activity would diminish in the meantime, but this was not the case.

I had also hoped, with odyssey, that at least they would build on the physical immersion significantly; have a greater variety of station interiors, let us see and shape and walk around the insides of our ships and develop them as a sort of 'player housing' - I understand their justification that ship interiors would be a lot of work, but it would also have a massive payoff because you'd only have to do each ship once and then all your thousands and thousands of players could enjoy them for the vast majority of time they are in the game and it would just remove that ever present reminder that you are in a fantasy land when you walk up to a blue shiny circle and teleport into a ship's bridge.

Another minor gripe is combat mechanics, there are some great indie games that simulate realistic space combat without fake 'damage numbers' and 'armour numbers' but instead actual simulated heat transference and tolerances and ballistic deflection from armour (or lack thereof), I would have been so happy for Frontier Developments to have at least attempted some form of non-immersion breaking semi-realistic damage model.

Anyway, despite all of that complaining, Elite: Dangerous is a great game with great features, some of which took a lot of work and are sadly abandoned, despite being a lot of fun (CQC for example), and great co-op mechanics and an incredible community with active maintenance and development and constant story updates etc. etc. and there has never been a better time to play the game than now, when players can even settle their own star systems!

🚀 Elite Dangerous — Space Truckin’ with Existential Dread ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Bought this game to become a heroic space pilot. Ended up delivering space onions across the galaxy for 300 credits and accidentally boosting into a space station, turning my ship into scrap metal faster than you can say “request docking permission.”

This isn’t a game — it’s a second job in space. But somehow, it’s the most beautiful, soul-crushing, absolutely addicting second job you’ll ever love.

✅ Spent 3 hours figuring out how to land
✅ Got stranded 15,000 light years from Earth with no fuel and nothing but space jazz to keep me company
✅ Got ganked by pirates while transporting mugs
✅ Joined a space faction I still don’t understand
✅ Learned to fly like a pro, then exploded trying to high-five a planet

This galaxy is huge. Like, mind-meltingly huge. You will feel awe, confusion, pride, and rage — sometimes all at once — usually while trying to park.

Pro tip: bring a fuel scoop. Or make peace with dying in the black.

10/10, would drift through the void and question my life choices again.