Yeah, and it’s sad bro. I put about 900 hours into Elite: Dangerous, which I enjoyed a great deal, but it still left me longing for something with more depth. Back then I thought Star Citizen would be the next leap forward in my career as a space trucker who dabbles in bounty hunting and deep space exploration. I wanted to have games worthy of justifying a home cockpit setup, and now it seems like a lost cause.
I really hope someone picks up the torch. Even if it’s just Frontier making a generational leap with the Elite IP.
Elite:Dangerous is sad for its own reasons, too, and I have a similar count of hours logged. Glacial pace of development and a lack of strong game design / sense for balance. I’m still stunned by how much of a selling point the background simulation was, and how limited it actually is in practice (it did get some love over the years, but far too little too late IMO.)
I really wanted to like it, but it just never scratched the itch when I played it. I love stuff like freespace 2, but E:D just never did it for me. Which sucks, because the community search thing sounded really fun at the time.
It annoyingly needs a more complex HOTAS to properly play than most cheap entry-level ones have, while also not having ENOUGH complex need to justify me pulling my godamn keyboard over for
Literally the main reason I don’t play it even though slapping my quest 2 on and space VR flying is fucking fun
Good lord if that ain’t the truth.
It has every opportunity to be good, but I can’t even navigate the goddamn menus, let alone step into my ship.
Forget about using something other than a mouse and keyboard too, it just won’t work.
Like any of these games, you need to change the key bindings.
I have a set that I use in all space sim. What I am trying to say is that the control can be the same as any other space sim.
This type of game might not be your kind of stuff.
I remember how awesome Distant Worlds was, as a community event, and I wish I appreciated it more at the time. 65000 light years and back, I even bought a T-shirt and coin to commemorate the event lol o7
My big in game accomplishment was making it to SagA*, I spent some time in colonia and joined a discord of nerds that hung out there getting big exploration creds. I actually made the trek all the way back to the bubble after spending about a month in the galactic core. It was an epic adventure in my mind, but afterwards it was hard to be motivated for the engineering grind.
I haven’t played E:D so I can’t really make comparisons, but maybe X3/X4 can pique your interest?
I don’t think they can justify a home cockpit setup, they’re also kinda hard to get into (especially X3, you can’t get far without a guide), but hey, there’s a combined 1.5% chance that you haven’t heard of them and that you’ll enjoy at least one of them if you don’t care much about graphics. Or voice acting. Or UI/UX.
X3 is a fun game, with a very developed universe (you’ll see factions conduct invasion in real-time as you do your own thing) with a wide variety of gameplay. The universe of X3 honestly makes Star Citizen seems like a theme park for children.
That being said it is extremely difficult to get into them both because there are so many gameplay options and the UI/UX is subpar (prepare to be constantly fiddling with menu and looking up how to execute a given course of action).
