Elite Dangerous Funny Docking Crashes Video
Gaming & Culture —
A few weeks in deep space with the Elite: Dangerous premium beta
We fought, we traded, we braved witch space—and we're excited about what's to come.
Get out of my sky
The worst bit about Elite: Dangerous isn't the bugs—after all, this is a prerelease beta and bugs are expected—but rather the other players. In fact, I'd pay real money to be able to play the trading/NPC combat version of the premium beta alone.
Although the release version of Elite: Dangerous will have a reputation system in place to ensure that players who engage in uncivilized behavior are dealt with, the current beta is really more about stress-testing the game's server and instancing infrastructure and tuning the gross mechanics (all of which are still evolving). The economy (and all the players' ships and in-game bank account balances) have already been reset several times, with more resets guaranteed to come as the game iterates through its various beta stages. On one hand, this means that nothing you do right now really matters. On the other hand, this means that at this stage in the game's development, nothing you do really matters.
Enlarge / Two Cobras, a Sidewinder, and two Anacondas (including mine)—it's a busy day at Azeban City!
Many players take this to extremes. It only takes a few hours of grinding away at combat to get enough money to upgrade to an Eagle fighter, and the vast majority of players I encountered in the game's instanced PvE combat areas (i.e., areas where players are supposed to be firing at computer-generated bad guys for credits) were all gleefully shooting each other, without a lot in the way of consequences (this is "allowable" in the game's setting because sometimes the instances allow you to pick a faction, and players on opposing factions are fair game). Worse, the in-game bounty system awards money for destroying pirates or other bad guys to the ship that fires the killing shot, so you might drop into a combat zone and start whittling away the shields of a hostile NPC, only to have a far better equipped player zip in front of you and claim the kill and the credits with a quick missile or railgun blast. Right after that, they'll more often than not flip around and blow you up just out of spite.
Enlarge / Outfitting a Cobra Mk. III with better equipment—getting an "iron ass," in the game's parlance.
Part of the reason behind this kind of psychotic behavior is that there are currently only two meaningful ways to interact with other players: you can blink your ship's lights at them, and you can murder them. Coupled with the free-for-all nature of the beta, this leads to a very unfriendly atmosphere around most of the starter system's instance zones. It's painful to grind for hours to save up for some new equipment, only to have it taken from you in seconds by someone else with a bigger gun.
Some people enjoy high-conflict games, though. The difficulty of E:D's PVE and PVP combat is heavily variable, but it's definitely north of "casual" right now. It's currently impossible for anyone not willing to devote many hours of game time to even have a chance of flying around in anything but the starter Sidewinder. PVP is utterly unregulated, and there's no concept of matchmaking or fairness, so nothing is stopping upgraded players who enjoy "griefing" from wading into instances labeled as "low intensity" and annihilating other players by the dozen (though calling it "griefing" is borderline—as many posts on the official forum note, PVP is part of the game, and if you're in basically any public space, you can expect to get shot at). Posts in the official forum complaining that new players are having a hard time are rabidly shouted down by others who enjoy the current high degree of difficulty (including this peach of a commenter, whose sole contribution to every thread appears to be some variation on "if you don't like the game like it is, you suck and you get better or stop playing.").
Fortunately, you can generally avoid being shot at if you'd prefer not to fight—even the semi-random pirate encounters that yank you out of in-system frameshift drive travel can be avoided by flying away really fast. Even in your starter Sidewinder, you can outrun just about anything that can hurt you. Everything except the bugs, that is.
Enlarge / Docking an Anaconda requires slow and careful maneuvering—here, I pause my own docking run to watch another of the enormous freighters line up on its pad.
In space, no one can hear you crash
The whole purpose of opening the game in a semi-private beta is to ferret out problems. If you're expecting a product as ambitious as Elite: Dangerous to not be chock-full of bugs at this point in its development cycle, then you've never used software before. The game at this moment is perfectly playable and is in far better shape than some other betas in which I've participated. However, if you're thinking of dropping the $150 it costs to jump into playing at this early stage, you do need to be aware of what you're getting into.
Many of the most common bugs being encountered at this stage are enough to wipe out hours of progress (though, again, that "progress" will be reset several times more by the developers themselves before the game hits general release next year). Ships safely docked at space stations can suddenly find themselves occupying the same dock as another ship—a situation which is almost inevitably fatal to both, unless one of them can scramble through the launch procedure in time. Space stations can themselves disappear while you're docked, causing your ship to instantly explode.
Enlarge / At least until some bugs are squashed, a "safe" docking bay can be one of the most dangerous areas in the beta.
Crashes to the desktop aren't uncommon, and you'll likely hit one at least once every two to three hours. Sometimes you can restart and resume in the same system you were in when you crashed; other times, your save is corrupted, and you start over with 1,000 credits and a Sidewinder. Alt-tabbing to the desktop breaks the game (though that particular bug might be squashed by the time this story runs). Buying and selling equipment for your ship via the "Starport Services" menu can be glitchy. As often as not, using the in-game star map results in a crash to the desktop.
"We want to make the game as good as we can," noted Braben. "We are working hard to fix issues people are having, but that is the nature of pre-release games—there are always some issues that catch some people or their machines, but the key thing is we now have 10,000 more players playing the game, and the majority are having a great time."
Braben is likely right—I'm having fun, anyway!—but those 10,000 players he mentions are both accelerating the pace of bug testing and also exposing gaps in the game's ability to support larger playercounts. Elite: Dangerous is a series of instantiated shared spaces; when you're in a station, you're in the same instance as a dozen or so other players whose ships you can see, but there are many other instances of that station with many other players. When you drop out of in-system frameshift travel to dock with a station, you are joined to an instance; sometimes this happens in seconds, and sometimes longer. Sometimes it takes much longer—I've stared at the wiggly "dropping out of frameshift" animation for as long as six minutes before alt-tabbing to purposefully crash the game and try my system approach again.
Enlarge / Zipping past the local star. Head tracking makes the game incredibly immersive.
Going to hell and back for an iron ass
But it doesn't matter. Even the crashes and the restarts and the griefers can't get in the way of an absolutely amazing gaming experience. In the late 1980s when I encountered Elite for the first time, I read and re-read the game's pack-in novella The Dark Wheel until the flimsy pages were dog-eared and the staples fell out. Even though the game I was playing on my PC was nothing more than blocky CGA shapes, I imagined myself as Alex Ryder, trading my way through a galaxy overflowing with danger and mystery. The graphics didn't matter—my mind filled in the gaps.
Even though it's still early and only a shadow of what it aims to be at completion, I can already see that Elite: Dangerous is exactly what I was imagining almost 30 years ago. If Braben and his team can stay the course and bring the game to release with the overall vision intact, it's going to be a hell of a game. "We really appreciate the help the backers are continuing to give us, to make this the best game it can be," Braben told Ars. "This is a joint effort—that is the nature of the alpha and now beta process."
Video: a quick docking run wherein I manage to follow another Anaconda into Chango Dock. This video shows off how well head tracking via a TrackIR fits with the piloting experience.
The first stage of the Premium Beta is almost over. According to the latest newsletter from Frontier, "Premium Beta 2" will be released next week on June 24. This update will bring three new star systems, a new ship type (the Zorgon Peterson Hauler, which can carry four times the cargo of the Sidewinder but which has only a single weapon mount), a new type of space station to dock with, and a boatload of bug fixes.
Folks interested in pinning on their wings can still buy in to the premium beta for £100 ($150 in the US), and the price of entry will decrease with subsequent betas. Elite: Dangerous is slated for release some time around the end of 2014 on Windows. A Mac version is slated for release about three months later. No console versions are planned.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/06/a-few-weeks-in-deep-space-with-the-elite-dangerous-premium-beta/3/
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