Elite Dangerous, does it have too steep a learning curve?

Posted by admin on November 10th, 2014

I backed Elite Dangerous on Kickstarter what seems like a long time ago and I’ve finally had a chance to play it properly even though I had access to the early single player release. The game is at a Beta 3 level now and from my initial look it seems pretty polished which bodes well for the full release.

The thing is that you need to put some time aside to really get into it. Regardless of whether you are playing with mouse or joystick the list of controls is a mile long with many choices about how you want to manage the inputs. There are tutorials now as well which are quite light on teaching but do expose the basics of the game.

The first tutorial teaches you about docking, it only takes about five minutes but the first time I played it through it took half an hour, most of that time was spent flicking back to the controls menu to see what buttons do what. In the end I made a video to help other people through the tutorial, you can see it here:

That seems like a lot of effort but then I thought back to the original Elite game. Now that was a nightmare to get used to. I played a lot of it and I was always rubbish at combat, remember those ‘needles’ on the radar and docking. Oh blimey docking in the original Elite what a video gaming hell that was (at least for me). Once I had a docking computer I would make sure I had my saved game backed up because there was no way I was playing the game ever again without one.

In comparison Elite Dangerous is actually pretty accessible. It’s a complex game there’s no doubt about that. There are a myriad of controls and settings which I think is only appropriate because you’re flying a space ship, you just need to take some time, get the hang of the controls and then you should be good to go. I’m not sure I’d call it a ‘sim’ but it definitely has the learning curve of one.

I’ve bought a joystick to play Elite Dangerous and it is superior to the mouse input. I just need to find some more time to sink into it and then I’m going to venture out into the unknown, at least until I get shot down.

Good luck Commanders.