It's gonna be a long introduction into my text.
I am the type of gamer that play different genres of games, with different themes, spanning from fantasy/medieval to modern, post apocalyptic to hyperfuturistic. I have unexplainable passion and curiosity about space, having read a lot of different things about space, planets, galaxies, and so on. I enjoy different media works about space, with the Star Wars franchise (and its spin-off) and the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey being my most favorite. I like Star Wars about how it's more focused as a space opera/fantasy than being some heavy sci-fi work. The galaxies are vast, crowded but empty, the ships and stations are dusty and rustic, they look rough, but have a charm in them. I love 2001: A Space Odyssey about how close it gets to reality in space traveling, the ships, the fear of machination, the fear of an unknown entity that might have the power to control us humans, and it transmit the true feelings of how is space: vast, empty, but still mysterious and fearful.
For some reasons I never knew about Elite: Dangerous, or the whole game series, until last year's July. I always wanted to play a space game, having known about such games like Kerbal's Space Program, or No Man's Sky. KSP doesn't look attractive enough to me, and NMS is a bit too sci-fi for my taste. Don't get me wrong, they are both very great game which you should give a try at some point, I have recently gotten into NMS again and am loving it, it's a very well made game with passionate and responsible developers. They had the worst release flop possible in gaming history, yet they've made the best comeback ever.
Now, back to Elite, I asked a friend about which game should I get during Steam Summer Sale, he sent me a list of different genres of game, Elite was one of it. Of course it's gonna be Elite! It's a space game! I said, bought it and installed it. The Odyssey/on foot intro-tutorial felt like Mass Effect (which is a good thing), I kept on with the tutorial, having no idea what is the game about, yes, it's about space, but what are you supposed to do? "You can do anything, be anything", my friend said. Tutorial is done, I found myself at the concourse of a surface station, I never knew where I was until recently, I was able to find the station and dock on it and get to the bar again, because I remembered the station's name, somehow the game never spawned me inside a new pilot system, which is why I could go back to it. Everything looked so good, I love how the station looked, outside the big window I could see the other part of the buildings.
As there was nothing to discover in the station, I got on pilot training half an hour later, the inside of the Sidewinder looked so good, so detailed, it's dusty, full of equiments and cables, of course, it's a budget ship loaned to every pilot, thanks to our Pilots Federation. Finished the tutorial, as I set my throttle to 0 to engage auto docking, the Blue Danube Waltz started playing on my ship's sound system. I found myself smiling as I'm looking at the mail slot getting closer to closer, listening to the song, as I knew it was a direct reference to my favorite movie.
After my first night of joining my friend to shoot some pirates in order to get myself a better ship, I kept coming back and back every day to continue what I left the other night, either finishing a mission I was doing the other day, new weapons, new activities. On the second night I found myself flying in a new Cobra Mk III trying to shoot some pirates, mining some minerals, or participating in a war (I barely killed anyone in the conflict zone), two weeks later I found myself hauling some commodities to get some credits, not counting sitting on my friend's ship's turret control to shoot Titan Indra's core on my second week, the other week I found myself flying around Guardian's Ruins doing Ram Tah's mission (credits, of course). Today, 1000 hours later, I am still flying around engineering a new ship, while polishing my flying skills in combat, beside doing regular power play activities, while getting excited for this weekend's short expedition organized by an allied squadron. The fun just never ends! And we're at the best time, new ships still incoming, and new types of activities.
As if there wasn't enough fun, I found myself getting into a squadron, there we do things together, get credits together, fight the Thargoids together, expand our supported faction, share our experience, and most of all help out new cmdrs.
The community is great, after a long time I'm able to see a game with such great community, when players instead of different preferences and factions, get to work together against the Thargoid, I never got the chance to participate in Distant World 1 & 2, but looking forward to its third edition.
It's a never-ending fun to me, as long as the servers are up :)
It's one of the few games I love, great community, good art direction, complicated but addictive mechanics and gameplay. It portraits greatly the vision of a future when humans have dominated a small portion of our galaxy, it paints a accurate picture of a space opera: vast and empty, but you'll never be alone.
