Wow, I can't believe that NeverKnowsBest made a video that's only the length of a single average feature film. I was starting to believe that he'd never return to short form content.
If you ever play Elite again try going way "above" or "below" the galactic plane and just watch the stars slowly disappear with every jump until the only one you can see is the one you jumped in from, it's a bit eerie
I tried this once. At some point there stops being any star in front of you, and you can just fly forward at 2000 times the speed of light into the abyss knowing full well you will never arrive anywhere. It is actually a very powerful moment.
I remember first time with tribbles, hadn't seen star trek or such before. Darn, it was "worth it to buy the damn BBC micro computer" (yeah it was on C=64 later) :D Many a night played, many lectures sleep deprived...
A few things you may have not noticed about Elite Dangerous. 1. You can visit the Capital systems of several in-game faction (Sol, Achenar, Sirius and others) when you gain enough faction standing with them. 2. The skybox is real. Once I was at Barnard's star (20 LY from Earth), and noticed a set of stars that looked like the Orion Belt; then looked a bit better and noticed that was indeed the Orion constellation. If you fly to that region, you'll see how stars look like from that position, and everything in around 2-3K ly from Earth is NOT (completely) generated; most of the stuff comes from real astronomical data. 3. Because of how hyperspace jump works, doubling jump range more than halves travel time. Even relatively basic ships you could certainly afford in the video may have increased your travel distance by about 3 times. 4. Neutron star and white dwarf jets overcharge the hyperdrive, giving you about 3 times you jump range for one jump. There are a few notable "neutron star highways", that further help cutting down travel time around the galaxy. 5. With all the upgrades and following a neutron-star route, you can have jump ranges of 200-300ly. Still, getting to Sagittarius* takes easily a couple of days.
one thing that's really cool about the skybox is how it changes as you travel. I was in a thick nebulaic zone and the skybox was incredibly dark, there were probably 1000-2000 stars visible which is a fraction of what you expect from earth's sky. Then I jumped into the centre of the area where loads of star formation was happening and the sky was practically blinding. There were gigantic blue bright stars flooding my vision from every direction. A few more jumps and it was behind me, looking back I could see this patch of bright blue stars in an otherwise black sky. One of the cooler experiences in ED. I never experienced it myself but some people glitched to outside the milky way to see it side on and honestly, even a second hand, recorded experience inside a *video* game of the milky way from the outside was deeply moving in a way that's hard to explain.
I found that Elite didn't support my playstyle very well. You had to do hours of mining in order to do the fun activities(Unless mining is your thing) such as combat, hauling and exploration. A group of Elite youtubers once asked FDev how much money you should be making(after the mining focused update where some players were making trillions), and they couldn't give an answer.
@@the11382 That simply isn't true, I did maybe an hour of mining and that was purely to get access to a late game npc. You can mine, trade, haul or explore to get to more expensive stuff. By now all activities more or less give equal rewards where you can do whatever you like best and make enough money to sustain your playstyle.
@@the11382 You're really not required to chase a meta money making method to get to properly play the game. You get money from everything you do, so just do what seems fun to you and the credits will follow. By the time you have the cash to buy and outfit a proper mining ship, you could use that money for an exploration or bounty hunting focused ship instead. Maybe you'll earn a bit less but who cares, at least you're not staring at an asteroid for hours.
Neutron star hopping is something you can get used to but it's both extremely risky in comparison to just hopping in between main sequence stars and quite frankly extremely spooky lol. It's the absolute best way of traveling long range but cozy exploration really becomes a radical sport at times.
Elite Dangerous is seriously special. For all it’s problems, no game has ever done “space” the justice this game does. I have a hard time playing now a days, but those first 200 hours were immaculate
Nothing more spacey than finding a plant or two 3000 light years away from nearest permanently settled area. Glad they made conflict zones and RESs so you can practise true flying.
I know what to expect. He never cuts to a loud sound effect and never starts to yell. So I use these videos as background noise to sleep. The low murmur is soothing.
The story of a spaceship commander who winged and cheated his way into his position because he was so excited for space exploration, got some initial lucky success, only to get lost in the middle of nowhere with no fuel and shooting himself out of hopelessness is very cool, and I think says a lot about what space exploration actually is compared to what it is made to seem like by media.
@@GreatBlueWorldhaha yeah the prospect of someone being able to fake it into the position of commandeering a spaceship in the real world is unrealistic, but I'm pretty sure he's alluding to what the grim reality of independent space exploration would be in the setting most of these games present, where space travel is widely accessible
Space Exploration is to us what was sea exploration for our old ancestors. Lot's of old stories about people getting stranded in the ocean. @4thgreenburg. A skilled conman can pretend himself everywhere he wants, if the there is some slight chance of opportunity. There were fake surgeons which worked for 30 years for example. There were also a bunch of fake fighter plane piolots and commanders during WW1 and 2.
1:19:42 This isn't entirely true. You can visit the Sol system and it's decently well detailed, but you need a Federation superpower rank of Petty Officer to get the permit to go there. I wouldn't expect you to learn that though because you can only really find that out on the wiki lol.
I was done with ED, but had that TIR + HOTAS space sim itch. Looking for something to do, I bought one of the newer ships and did the Sol Permit grind on a weekend. Imagine my disappointment when I couldn't even land on Lunar. Landing there, with the Earth rising/setting in the background, is one of the most obvious 'tourist attractions' imaginable. Instead we can visit Voyager, because apparently ED doesn't have enough flying in straight lines already. What a bad joke.
I personally prefer a game series like Mass Effect, that doesn't let you explore the universe but is very good at making you feel like said universe exists. Space exploration is just too hard to do because of the scale necessary
There's a reason Mass Effect 2 resonates so much with so many despite having arguably the least to do with the main story, it does the best job at making the galaxy feel lived in and expansive. Walking into Omega's Afterlife is absolutely as epic today as it was in 2010. "C'mon, let me in!"
I like games that respect my time. Mass Effect did that well. Here is our story. It has a beginning. A middle. And an end. You go on a journey and enjoy it. Then go away. These randomly generated worlds don't give me the feeling that my time I'd respected.
I want something more like Kerbel space. It's neither story nor exploration, but it feels kind of an accomplishment. No doubt tho Mass effect 1-3 is overall the best space experience.
My experience of flying to the other side of the galaxy and back over two weeks of arduous effort is a happy memory, including the time I flew dangerously close to a black hole, and seeing my ship's paint all streaked and pitted from countless jumps. Also, Elite Dangerous does the space mining thing amazingly well. And dogfighting in VR is just next level.
The actual Elite isn't bad either, but the porblem with the game is the clunky UI, that isn't just worst than X4 ui, but X4 at least has the excuse that it is an space empire building / ship combat sim.
@@efxnews4776 Interesting as when I played ED when first released, I felt the UI was pretty sublime, nicely integrated into the world and functional. I wonder if over time and the additional content simply stretched it too far. Its also odd that with the original release I never had any of the problems in this video, but I guess that was due to it being a far simpler game overall and an almost exact copy of the 1984 game.
@@efxnews4776 I also had more fun in X4 than in Elite. Being mulltiplayer and its limits on changing the world made Elite Dangerous a pretty boring game.
Big +, the old Elite games are SO underrated these days. People see the oldschool graphics and assume the game will just be Asteroids. Kind of a shame that most of these showcase style videos only tend to rehash the 3 or 4 most mainstream contemporary space games. I think the oldschool games and their clones (Oolite, Pioneer) provide better, more 'realistic' single player experiences than pay-to-win MMO titles like ED or Star Citizen. Wish more people knew about/covered these open source hidden gems.
@@noisecrime they re-did the whole ui and galaxy map, it's pretty great but there's just too much stuff I think. it's just overwhelming when you're new but it becomes second nature in a bit. kinda like paradox games.
My favorite space exploration game ever is Starsector. I can probably write an entire assay in the comment section about it but for the sake of brevity I'll condense it into one sentence: Starsector combines danger, opportunities and wanderlust with a robust sandbox to create a nearly perfect space exploration gameplay. Every new playthrough is like 14 year old you booted up Skyrim for the first time, but without bugs.
Starsector is NOT like Skyrim at all. When you decide to rob some merchant fleet, it will have an impact on the economy and planet stability, which you can then exploit further if desired. Skyrim has nothing like that. As for exploration, I don't find it that engaging anymore. After a few playthroughs you just know what's out there and become very efficient with exploration. It becomes less of a question of what you'll find, but where. But with Sustained Burn and time acceleration, it's at least not as tedious as other games. In just 30-45 minutes you can explore a decent chunk of the sector, depending on your fleet and it's easily combined with missions that take you outside the core worlds. Anyways, I'll always recommend Starsector to fans of the genre. What it lacks in fancy immersive 3D graphics, it makes up for with depth and it's very well polished. Mods only enhance the experience, rather than fixing it. Easily one of my top 5 games ever for sure and I've played a lot of games.
@@fonesrphunny7242 the modding community around starsector is fantastic, and the devs are still developing it. Technically it's still in beta but even with mods I've rarely encountered bugs and the game is absolutely playable.
Obviously this is a very different type of game with a different target audience, but Spore (for all it's many faults and shortcomings) is another interesting space game worth mentioning. A lot of things in Spore are aplicable to the discuassion of space exploration games. Mainly the size of the game world and how the player is able to traverse it (the galaxy is large but not unmanageable), and how that world is populated. Spore is really a fascinating game when you start thinking about all the things it was trying to juggle. A universe populated by player created content (lifeforms, vehicles, buildings, etc) is an almost shockingly obvious solution to the samey feeling that plagues many space games. It's nice to imagine how such a content creation system could be expanded in a modern game targeted at a more mature audience.
19:03 THANK YOU for mentioning Space Engineers! Many critics that look at the space genre will talk about the nichest of games completely missing this giant in the space sandbox genre. The developers are fully independent with their CEO owning 100% of the company making Space Engineers which is to this day so successful it's funding their other companies including AI development. It's been my main game since 2014 and just recently I've been flying around the moon on one of the EU servers where I've discovered a wreck of a base. I looked around inside the old underground ruin made by a long-gone player faction with a couple people still inside their cryo chambers. I found a long tunnel leading under the base which was likely how the attacker reached the reactor to disable the base defenses. It was among the best exploration moments I've had in any space game.
The whole marketing vibe of Starfield was that it was gonna be focused on exploration and like, the wonders of space. Naively I was genuinely hoping to see some stuff we'd never seen in a space game before like tidally locked moons, exoplanets where it rained glass and iron and great glittering clouds of alcohol unfurling into the vast reaches of infinity. But all that stuffs really hard to code so Bethesda didn't bother. Shame!
I was also hoping we'd see some commentary on human space exploration. Off the top of my head I could imagine the usa and russia still trying to outperform each other with space exploration willy measuring contests hundreds of years into the future, china and saudi arabia turning entire planets into factories while building unsustainable orbital cities, billionaires getting themselves blown up etc etc. Ah well.
@@Garbageman28 nah Bethesda is lazy, so they just decide to destroy Earth over bs just to avoid to make a single Earth city in the game, it would be so simple to Bethesda to make a landing pad in a city like NY... To be fair in videogames the vision of a futuristic Earth in a space opera setting, was better done so far by Mass Effect 3, we got to see Montreal at the begining of the game in the peak of humanity at least for some brief minutes and we saw London completely wreaked at the end of the game.
I'm glad they at least implemented the different gravities including zero G in some fights in space even if the latter is annoying. I read somewhere that earlier versions had more survival type elements where your fuel didn't instantly refill after a jump and such, but those got scrapped for the benefit of accessibility. That fills me with hope that someone will mod those aspects back in.
Bethesda has shown us what they can do, what their engine can do, so Starfield was 90% predictable. Todd and the marketing team kept everything vague, so they could profit from people's expectations, as usual. If Ubisoft has their formula for open world games, Bethesda has theirs with RPGs and it's underwhelming every time.
I think space exploration works best when its just one of game design elements. A Mass Effect with a better space exploration system would be the ideal implementation.
Yes. Basically, this goes back to original Elite. As an oldie ,I remember even back then, most people said "it sounds a great idea, but everywhere is much the same and ultimately boring", While a few seem to get totally hooked on this shallow repetition. It's very attractive to a niche. And it's the same today with this kind of space game.
Mass Effect actually has other species, cultures, values and societies built in to the game, I think that's what's missing from these games is there is no other inhabitants except humans, there is no intelligent life, no procedurally generated aliens with their own procedurally generated culture's, history and factions. This leaves the games feeling empty, there's only so many flora, fungi and bacterium you can find in the galaxy before you start to wonder where all the intelligent species are
@@MasterIceyy I disagree. Sapient alien life can definitely be interesting, but that doesn't mean games without it aren't. Absense of sapient aliens can be used as an easy way to make a game feel more real and grounded. I actually disliked how almost every alien race in Mass Effect looked, acted, and talked, exactly like humans. It felt cheap and unrealistic.
Minecraft is still exciting to explore because the seeds can spit out very cool formations sometimes and it's usually the more surreal/unlikely formations we enjoy so I wonder why these space games just didn't crank up the "weirdness" of their generation.
I'd like more weirdness too but then you'd also get a lot more jank which would be used by people making bug compilation like Crowbcat. They probably don't want the bad press. Minecraft pull it of because everything is a cube of the same size.
minecraft actually more and more trying to limit the weirdness esp on bedrock. If you look on how people find weird seeds like chasm seeds, it is revealed that those weird stuffs got patched :(
Another honorable mention that I really enjoy: Empyrion Galactic Survival. It's kind of like Space Engineer's jankier cousin SE is a lot more technical and realistic, with thrust vectoring and all that, ESG is a lot more gameplay oriented, with more simplified spaceflight and actual enemies and missions to play
But now we've reversed it and stopped going into space, meanwhile focussing all our effort on simulations. The fastest speed travelled by a human increased exponentially from around 1750 to 1970. In 1970, the fastest human speed was achieved. On the Apollo flight. Since then, it hasn't increased, it's stopped for the first time in 250 years. The fastest airplane flight was Concord, also in the early 1970's. Also, not beaten since then.
Elite Dangerous is still the best "space sim". It captures the vastness of space, the oppressive feel of the void just outside the canopy, while still having pleasant space trucking and at least some on foot gameplay. It's the closest to the sim dream so far. Also, you have a night vision mode, but the game doesn't tell you 🤡
@@Beanskiiii I did space trucking in VR for a while, and figured out how to set up overlays in VR such that I could see what I needed to fly by instrument and scoop stars while watching Twitch streams on my HUD. That was Peak Elite for me.
one of my favorite and most disappointing game genres! love these documentaries. I will say though that the X series has way more influence on the genre then the time it was given in this video.
I think the irony with Star Citizen is that the things it keeps getting criticized for are what make it resemble space exploration more than any other game. An impossibly massive and never-ending project, shooting for the stars, getting there step by step and when zoomed out it seems like it didn't actually get anywhere yet, but when you zoom in it is filled with amazing stuff.
The problem with SC is that everybody thinks its a MMO, even tho the company primarily develops an engine and a singleplayer game. Most of the money went into the later two, so it always seems as if SC just doesnt get anywhere or at least not as fast as one would expect it to, given the time and money, because the priority is something akin to a black hole, as we know very little about the singleplayer game. Most people probably dont even know that it exists.
@@j.d.4697 the main focus has been on the single player campaign: Squadron 42, but I think they are getting close to finished so they are starting to focus more on the persistent universe
@@caseyk.479 The problem is that I was around in 2012, and that wasn't what people were being pitched and what people were hyped for. Much like No Man's Sky, which I'll leave up to the reader to interpret since while I think a NMS comparison is positive, my opinion on Star Citizen is decidedly negative.
To be fair to No Man's Sky being too convenient to the player, there's a host of sliders these days you can set to max difficulty. This changes the experience from the base 'normal' setting (which is completely devoid of any kind of jeopardy) and, for me, is a much more satisfying experience.
They should stop making updates for nms and start working on No Mans Sky 2. Take all the lessons and ideas from the first one and make a more cohesive fleshed out game. Base defenses, turrets, orbital shipyards for ship building, capital ship building, a much much wider range of enemies and gas giants you can't land on you just die.
@@MSpotatoesYeah, NMS is, imo, a masterpiece now after all the updates, but it has run its course. They should now work on a sequel that aims to surpass the original, taking all the lessons learnt and not just reimplementing them, but improving them (On a side note, the idea of gas giant planets you can't land on is really cool, since there's already 99% ocean planets (with small patches of land sparsely spread out)
@@MSpotatoes There needs to be a purpose to adding all of that. Great, you can build turrets that defend your base but then what? You can look at it. To me, that's not the type of game I enjoy. It's just empty of meaning. > gas giants you can't land on you just die Why is that an important feature? You can't do anything with them, they are just there. Is the idea to just look at them and go "Yup, can't land there". Why should I pay money for that?
You can actually visit the Sol system in Elite, you just need to get a permit. You can do this by reaching Petty Officer rank in the Federal Navy, which is done by doing missions for factions aligned with the Federation.
@@croozerdog I agree with you. Just do activities that interest you and in time you have all the permits, mats and credits with no grind. I hate that everyone wants to rush for stuff then complain there's no content and what's there means very little.
I haven't played Elite Dangerous but it sounds like the extreme space version of My Summer Car. It may be difficult and confusing at times but the stories it generates are absolutely legendary.
@@Dumb-Comment They're different games. With so much nuance involved, a simplistic X is better than Y glosses over so much that is very relevant. Some aspects of ED are quite brilliantly realised, others I have no time for at all (such as the absurdly communistic nature of the various economies, which prevents organic out-of-the-norm gameplay from even being possible). Ironically in the context of the video, exploration is the one aspect of the game that was developed the least after initial launch, because Fdev adhered too much to the more vocal crowd who just wanted pew-pew in space, an issue which defined its eventual on-foot mechanic aswell. In the end, ED became very wide but rather shallow, though like the video says, if some aspect of what it does is the sort of gameplay one is looking for, then it'll be spot on.
Problem is that Morrowind feels more otherworldly location than Starfield. They should have stuck to fewer planets, and made more weird places, races and flora and fauna
I said this myself after 20 hours into starfield, before I quit because the game was bad (imo). I think that if Starfield honed it the fuck in, and did maybe 50 planets and put more time into making each one of those 50 very distinct, the game would have benefitted.
the reality is that the bethesda RPG formula doesn't lend itself to large-scale proc-gen like this. Honestly it makes me sad, knowing that TESVI is going to actually just be The Elder Mid
@@aegisofficial3819 yeah, exactly. Under 50. Personally I think maybe under 20 is what they could really make as distinct. Anyways the strength of recent Bethesda games (Morrowind onwards) has been unique handcrafted locations, so it would make more sense to make unique planets with interesting things to find there. That would make exploration feel more interesting.
@@tj-co9go I'm literally doing a skyrim playthrough right now (This time, heavily modded, last time was closer to vanilla) and the game is still pretty good. I miss morrowind. I need Skywind to release so bad.
Outer Wilds was my kind of space exploration. I know you need to be in a certain kind of mood for that game, but i'm sure a lot of people tried it, walked around a little, didn't even take off from Timber Hearth and said "yeah this game's not for me".
I had 0 knowledge of what the game was like. Like didn't even know it was a space game. Started playing, thought "man this thing is laggy, and the controls are wonky, and the pathway is linear". Kept playing for some reason. It is now my favourite game. The intro is kind of weak, but the realization that it's simulating a solar system down to tidal forces makes it worth it once you really start going.
@@KyriosHeptagrammatonI couldn't figure out the purpose of the game or what you were supposed to be doing. I'll have to go back and at least give it another shot. I went to a few planets and kept getting pulled all over the place because I sucked at flying the ship.
@@deviantarsenal it's mostly about solving mysteries and acquiring knowledge. In the beginning you can explore wherever to get a vague idea of what's going on, then start following up on whatever question or plot thread grabs your attention. It'll take you to different locations with cool puzzles and also tie into other plot threads. Once you have all the answers you'll know what to do.
A small mistake at around 7:10 You mention Starflight, Space Rogue then Star Control. But the footage of the later is actually from an excellent port of Starflight to the Genesis/Megadrive home consoles!
Thanks for always making such comprehensive and high-quality videos. It’s obvious you put a lot of research and work into these. We all appreciate it. 👍
It's a shame you didn't mention X4: Foundations. Exploration in that game is wonderful, and the sectors of the game are full of incredible stuff to see, and it's chokefull of lore everywhere. Though in general you play X4 not for exploration, but for the incredible sandbox.
I completely agree with you! It is really a shame the X series are overlooked time and time again. Honestly - Turning a blind eye to a space game series that is running for 24 years already (the first game X-beyond The Frontier was released in 1999) is not a very nice thing to do...
@@jclosed2516I think a lot of that is because X4 is just not going to be a game for everyone, including those in the enthusiast camp of space sims. Being that it is more of a tycoon/empire building econ sim, a lot of the core parts of the game is left lacking that might be up to other people's tastes. There is a real lack of activities that feel good to do outside of, empire building. Then by the time you get to a point that empire is built you spend even more time in menus and not flying space ships. So if you want to just sandbox as a bounty hunter, finding any content at all to that is going to be incredibly prohibitive out of the box and without aid of mods. Dog fighting as well leaves a whole lot to be desired and the generally learning curve and confusing menu/submenu design of the UI can be extremely prohibitive to new players. Then, you have to have your crew at certain levels and skills in order to unlock very basic stuff, like advanced autotrading which is a must the further in the game you get.
He did mention it very briefly. Though, as much as I love the X series and X4 (currently doing a second playthrough), 'exploration' isn't a big focus of the game. It's less about simulating space travel, and more about simulating the activities of the factions within that space.
X does exploration in it's own way, but it's there, even if somewhat temporary, as at some point the universe transitions from unknown to something that almost feels like home 😁
Wasn't the exploration in X3 pretty good though? Finding ships and stuff, still looking for a game where I can scavenge or board abandoned ships more often (fairly rare in most games). Starsector is pretty good in that regard @@Pruvmerong
Oh man, hearing Distant Worlds from the Mass Effect series always puts me in a happy place. Nice to hear it being used in an adjacent context, considering the topic. 😅 Great video as always, keep it up, Never.
To break one for Star Citizen: you can for the price of a full game ($60 mark) get access to an already pretty large and visually impressive gameworld and many things to try out. Easily spend 30 hours of entertaining discovery there. Its not polished or nearly finished, but you can play it, and can do it without spending hundreds for fancy ships. (many can be rented ingame with ingame money to try out). So its more than just a bag of promises, but actually something playable already. Just dont overspend on ships like a mindless whale.
Elite is the most punishing game for commanders who fail to see the little button called "night vision" located on the same screen with "self destruct"; which is a visual aid for landing on the dark side of the planets/moons. I hate to admit, without a flight stick and even an analog throttle control (HOTAS - Hands on Throttle and Stick), Elite can be extremely daunting - yet there is still much more depth than you've explored. Do not lose hope, Commander o7.
In No Man's Sky, they have redone the entire universe! The newest update, "Worlds Part 1" they have made more fauna, minerals, and flora, as well as more enemies. The vile brood isn't as big of a bad as sentinels, but they are nice to fight. They also have redone some UI, and made Walkers have boss bars. Not only that but the Space Stations have been redone too after this video! They have more variations. The buildings are still repetitive, but they have done a great job revamping!
Learning how to play Elite is the best part of the game. Once you know how to play it's just a big grind. Miscalculating your power draw and equipping the wrong reactor, leading to critical systems like oxygen getting shut down when you deploy your weapons, jettisoning your whole cargo trying to save power by disabling the hatch ( which opens it, it's a maglock system, doesn't work without juice ), destroying a valuable asteroid because you setup too many explosive charges, getting your ship stuck in the letterbox because it's way bigger than you thought, getting too close to a star and overheating, etc.
Nice video, the narration alone gave glimpse how fast space really is. Crazy to think every person on earth could own his own galaxy and space is way way way wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy bigger.
@@nbkhnzzrSure, but Outer Wilds does still have its own style of space exploration. The way it compresses everything to make a way smaller, yet more compact experience is an interesting way to solve the problem of many other space exploration games, that being all the empty space with nothing to do. It's also a fairly realistic simulation in many ways, even if all the effects like gravity, quantum mechanics, star growth, etc. are on a very macroscopic scale. Like how you can fly to the sun station by matching its speed, and if you go to the center of a planet you become weightless.
@@basicbirch I consider the finding stuff in empty space to be exploration. In comparison, Outer Wilds practically shows you the entire solar system right in front of you. You just have to figure out how to use it to progress.
There is nothing quite like playing Elite in VR. I used to spend several hours daily just fully immersed in its universe. The gameplay loops may be shallow, but the feeling, the scale, the simulation of Milky Way is something to behold. Too bad the game seems to be mostly forgotten by the devs.
Here's my solution for making space explorations games: 1. Chose 10-20 "biomes" to base your planets on a la Outer Wilds 2. Make 5-10 variants of each biome. So 50-200 ish hand crafted very small planets. 3. Claim your game has 2-3 times that number. 4. Whenever a player visits a planet load up a randomly chosen one of your hand crafted planets which match the biome. Throw in a few shuffled around/ randomized features to keep the illusion stronger. 5. The players will never visit all 50-200 of your planets. You only need to load and save a handful of the pre-generated ones. This is similar to the "quantum Ogre" idea in D&D. So instead of needing to make 2-3 times as many planets and have them all feel samey, the players will see that there is 200 planets out there, but only visit 40 or so, and never be the wiser.
Fun fact: this is almost exactly how planet generation works in no man's sky. Each biome has lists of ground covering, plants, terrain roughness, water presence, etc. So they only had to make 8 or 9 biomes to populate every planet in the universe
I’ve played Elite Dangerous for a while and agree with almost everything you just said. Had a good laugh too. It was fascinating and even addictive to explore and simply f around. But oh my goodness, the learning curve is immense and poorly presented at first. I especially agree that a good campaign would’ve helped tremendously. Just imagine, missions navigating through political struggles between factions to really understand the state of humanity in that future universe. Imagine missions with a real goal to help, or to challenge and defeat. Imagine being a copilot tasked with basic commands in the first missions to help you with the many concepts of flying and the MANY dangers of space lol. To get into tricky situations while reducing the age old lame die and start again. Imagine not having to spoil the only suspense/otherworldly aspect of the game provides with the Thargoids… I don’t know by suggesting weird things happening here and there, delivered by good characters that could be amazed, worried or daring. I don’t know, Elite is such a perfect shell for something much more grandiose, other than the scale of the galaxy you’re partaking in. Thank you for this video!
Every Halloween, Frontier drop in a little surprise that almost resembles a Fallout76-like quest. And every year I think “why isn’t there more of this??”
even though I've played a collective 200+ hours of Elite it still just never quite took hold, I agree with the sentiments about commitment to realism, it's painfully obvious how many critical systems were missing, and lucky for FDev the community was willing to fill that gap, I remember for at least the 1st year or 2 of the game there was no way in the game to log waypoints or points of interest or something. wasn't until years later they finally added Super Cruise Assist which took away some of the tedium because just keeping my hand steady on a flightstick doing absolutely nothing but managing my throttle and heading isn't really that exciting. even then SC Assist fell way short of an actual autopilot, and a large number of the community were vehemently opposed to adding anything to the game that broke their version of what they considered "immersion" which never really added up for me since that version of immersion forces me to believe that 1000 years in the future all the spacecraft will have less advanced flight avionics than 1980s era passenger jets. There are some really cool and immersive experiences to be had in that game, but also a great deal of frustration that results for only listening to a certain subset of the community.
@@matthamende6359 My thoughts exactly. My first time landing a ship, followed by a crash; I was like, really? A spaceship that can’t park itself? I was just too stubborn to quit and of course learned how it works. Ultimately though, when the auto-pilot module was installed on my ship, I never looked back and never missed landing by myself on stations. I do appreciate the concept of disabling it when you have to fly-in rogue style when required…
This was a great video. My favorite of the bunch is still ED but the others all have their places in the space genre and do deserve some praise for what they accomplish. Space for me is space mining in ED. Hoping in my Type-9, heading off to an asteroid belt looking for minerals is always relaxing, especially with a podcast or music in the background. And fun comes from the pirates constantly trying to harass me and steal my stuff, so I jump out in my little Condor fighter, blow em up, and get on with my mining. It isn't always the most profitable and I've had close calls, but for me at least, it is relaxing, and I always love seeing a big asteroid crack open. I haven't played in awhile though, other games take up my time and I really want a HOTAS to really immerse myself, but I look forward to diving back in when I get back too it.
Wish Space Rangers (1 and 2) had gotten a mention. They are still my favorite space games with great world that lives on its own, a wild variety of gameplay styles (especially in 2) and amazing exploration not just through flying around, but through text quests and planet surveying.
Space Rangers wasnt really exploration tho. Text quests are just that, text quest where you solve puzzles, do math, play some tabletop games, be in jail, run a business or something among those lines. And planet surveying is just putting probes on the map and then leaving and then coming back some time later to see what kind of loot you got. And all of the sectors are already explored and inhabited. Its more of a space sim imo. And in this video NKB seem to focus more on exploring space.
@@anuaronaibay8628 but it could at least be mentioned in the history of space games, cause that seemed to include simply games that were about space. And I feel like SR's living world is one of the best representations of what space "should be". Not a place that simply waits for the player to come push it forward, but a place that completely exists on its own and could not really care about the player's actions, unless they directly influence said world.
@@megamcee Maybe. The video is called "An in-depth look at Space Exploration in video games", so it looks like he mostly focused on games that are either primarily or partially about space exploration, and not space games in general. Or maybe he just never heard of it =b its not a popular game after all. Yeah, that part of SR was always amazing. It was an actual living universe. But I think its not what "Space should be", but instead mostly like a "Living world should be" on a whole. A game that just lives on its own without any player input could be really cool anywhere, not just space. And like NKB said in this video, space is big but in SR it feels very crowded. I think SR is an amazing game, but I dont think its a "space game" necessarily.
Great video with great games. I am old enough I've played almost all of them back in their time. Now I give an another memorable title to this list which made a deep mark in me: Independence war 2 - Edge of chaos (published in 2001) with its athmosphere, newtonian phisics, interesting story.
I can't place exactly why, but Starfield just didn't feel like it had the same heart as Elder Scrolls games or even Fallout to a lesser degree. It just felt so sterile and... by the numbers.
Because they were trying to avoid offending anyone, and in result, couldn't be bothered to add anything creative or villainous, lest someone get offended. So it's everything all at the same time and nothing. Zero tension, because someone might get offended. Zero actual bad guys; because someone might get offended. But then they extended that to the gameplay mechanics as well, so the game is more sterile and less mechanically inclined than Halo from 2001.
The writing is bland but it has nothing to do with "trying not to offend anyone". You can write compelling fiction without sociopath villains. @@billywashere6965
@@billywashere6965 Now, I am no bethesda sycophant or anything, but there being zero actual bad guys is not entirely true. One of two 'antagonists' you face in the main story can absolutely be that bad guy if you think about their beliefs for a little more than a few minutes. The spacers and ecliptic mercenaries are also evil by definition with Crimson Fleet having some crumbs of gray morality here and there. The issue is that Bethesda is just not capable of giving depth and interest to most of those kinds of factions anymore on account of their poor quality writing team. Barely of the lore surrounding the two main faction's rivalry make all that much sense, either.
@@theo1170 excatlly. it was the same problem in Fallout 4. even the main "badguy" of the game. in Institute wasn't really all that bad. when you win the game by completing their questline, the commonwealth doesn't really change at all. other than a few characters going "oh no! the institute won!"
I never was a huge Sci-Fi fan in my teen and early adult years. Now, after getting a basic knowledge of astrophysics because I got hooked on documentaries, it's becoming my favorite genre of all time.
To this day, finding the correct spot and manually landing on a space station in Elite: Dangerous felt like one of the hardest things I ever did in a video game. Even with the added tutorials they have now, it's a rough game to get into and as you have said the youtube solution not ideal to say the least. Honorable mention goes out to "Space Engine", despite not being a "game", but it's on Steam so can't really argue, right? Great video and I'm glad you took a broad approach for this topic.
It takes some getting used to but its not that bad once you get the hang of it. You just need to hang around in the queue, slowly approach and enter the mailslot, find your docking number, approach slowly and deploy landing gear, then when you get close enough your dashboard changes to give you a proper indication of your relative position to the landing pad, then just use the 3d controls (q, e, w, a, r and f) to orient and lower yourself, also note that you need to be in the right direction (I was confused on this for quite a while lol). Ok having written all that it is a lot more complicated than I was thinking lmao
I played a lot of Elite. I was once ranked no1 trader during one of the first large conflicts. I was so proud seeing my name in the ingame news bulletin. We used python scripts to determine the most profitable trading routes before other people found them
I don't remember my starting hours of Elite Dangerous but I know it was a learning curve and I spent a long time just customizing the controls to my preference. I don't play it as much as I used to, but I still find myself returning every once in a while. Star Citizen, No Man's Sky and the other space sim games just never clicked with me as well as Elite Dangerous. Its certainly not for everyone and the Odyssey dlc was a big letdown, but the core elements of flying and exploring in space is done so well. No other game had me spending several days just to make a pilgrimage to SagA* and continue the voyage to Beagle Point, hours of scamming lifeless planets with the rare occasional Earth-like then flying to the next system to do it all over again, again and again hundreds of times. Some might find it boring and monotonous but I find it relaxing, just me in the black. Also I know Raxxla is out there, it will be found in time.
Exactly this. And also that you feel you’re exploring a real life place rather than some fictional game world. Ever wondered what the night sky would look like at the dense centre of the Milky Way, or from inside a nebula, or from way above/below the galactic plane? Elite gives you that.
as someone who's made it to sag A*, its a massive journey you can only practically do by hitchhiking on a carrier or taking the neutron highway even with a highly specialised ship with maximised jump range its a several day endeavour. kinda worth it for the view though
Empyrion Galactic Survival felt like a nice balance between simple and real. Infinity Battlescape handles the weight of it all pretty well. I like having to manually fly/warp between battlefields during downtime Starbase felt incredible but was very tedious, and Elite Dangerous of course is peak for realism, imo
This channel quickly evolved from great game reviews to Ahoy level quality documentary style works of art. Amazing stuff, love every single project you make, Never.
I gonna say it, what players want isn't Skyrim in Space is a mixture of a lot of genres, folks want the procedural generaltion of NMS, the exploration and flight mechanics of Elite, the realism of Star Citizen, advanced gameplay with 4x elements of X-series, the lore and world building of Mass Effect with ground gampeplay and graphics of Cyberpunk 2077 If someone manages to pull all of this at once, this would be the perfect space game. Notices that i didn't even mentioned Starfield so far? Because Starfield is the exact opposite of my perfect game. It doesn't have ANY of the elements that make a great space game, the ONLY great thing about Starfield is the ship crafting, and even then, other games did better than Starfield, again, if it's about RPG and stories, then Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic did much better than Starfield. No wonder why folks are comparing Cyberpunk 2077 with Starfield, the lack of Space sim on it, combined with story and gameplay outdated of Bethesda that what folks actually want is Cyberpunk 2077 in space rather than Skyrim in space. No Man's Sky is arcady, it is a game sim, made to be arcady, somewhat of a introduction to space sim games for kids. You can notice this on how you interact with the world. The main antagonists of the game are just some space police protectiong certain worlds, that ONCE you comply with them, they aren't so much a danger to the player, there the pirates who are the sentients you never meet in person and only fight them on their ships (Hello game should add humanoid ground combat ASAP for this game) and theres the TRUE danger of the game with is the parasitic horrors that could be completely avoid by players (don't touch wispering eggs, don't get close those giant organic structures, in the end yeah despite having very powerful guns incredibly powerful vehicles (even a mech that doubles down as a companion) you don't have real challenges besides ocasionally defy the sentinels, desacrate whipering eggs, or wait for pirates to attack. Yes, NMS is a great space sim, but is also a space sim for kids (i'm not saying you are immature for playing this game, but NMS is trully a family friendly space sim, wich i think is awesome, if you have kids, you should play togheter). Ah yes the most realistic space sim ever made Elite Dangerous, also the most BORING one... One thing to say about ED, is that with a few twicks here and there such as ship interiors, companions a more robust procerually generated system and better integration of comunities in the game such as the fuel rats, this game has not only the potential to become the BEST space game ever made but also the most USEFUL videogame ever made. One great thing that ED could do is literally integrate real scientific discoveries in the game, with real science, this could attract investments from governments and institutions, such as add exoplanet discoveries in the game (make expedtions to such planets just like NMS). ALSO, ED should learn some things with NMS, the crafting system there complements the game in many ways, you need a place to rest, to call home, to store the things you find... damn i barely knows how to make food in NMS, and yet sometimes i cook, and manage to make space chocolate. YOU NEED this sort of STUFF in a game this VAST as ED, in ED you don't need to actually make space chocolate, but maybe analize in depth the life you found let's just say in your base? But critically speaking what ED is missing is precisly, ship interiors, if you have this feature this game would become way better. I want to love ED, but it is just one step above of Space Engine...
Many space games fail to be entertaining games first instead of space themed reality simulations. People like the IDEA of unlimited planet exploration with no regard of how that would play or be meaningful. I think the best way to make a space game is to design an ocean and sailboat game first until it is fun and then transport those mechanics into the space theme. Too many space games lose themselves in the unlimited freedom and ambition.
This ^ if a game managed to get a balance between elite dangerous, star citizen, and no man's sky, it'd be probably the best game of all time. We'll see how star citizen actually plays on release 😅
Starfield is not an space exploration / sim game, it's an RPG that happenned to be in space. they're not trying to compete with Space sims. it just people kept comparing Starfield to the other space sims. Starfield is like Fallout 4, but without the road, therefore you're in action more often. Here the thing, people always said that Starfield should be like No Man's sky, or Star Citize, or other space sims, but if you're not a sim guy, it's Extremely Boring. True Sim is very boring. you'll feel like the reward loop is just broken, everything is way too repetitive i played No Man's Sky, and i was nowhere as fun as Starfield, and i want to get my hands on Star Citizen if they're available Starfield did a lot of things right, - they had a great spaceship crafting that you can roam around with amazing interior - they had a good Multi Planet Outpost system - weapon, Spacesuit & other crafting is just very good, even when compared to other game like Farcry 6 - Their Level Design is one of the Highest Tier in the Industry and they nailed it with Starfield. - Role playing & Faction, you can be whatever you want, align to any faction you want. - The graphics in this game is Amazing, if you compared it side by side to Fallout 4, Starfield really not hold back any punch in Graphics. - Ship Capture, god this is a very addicting system, Boarding enemy starship, and have a combat inside it, then steal the ship? Count me in. - their Stats system is never old, Bethesda Mastered this, and they didn't disappoint. it just most people who trash talk on this game never play it. and Most people who played it had criticism, but they didn't hate the game. all of them spent 200+ Hours despite all the criticism that they said. because this game is far from Flop, it can be easily be fixed by a couple of update. in gamepass, Starfield is still at top 5 or 7th , and it's one of the Most played game, if i remember correctly they peaked at number 3 for almost 3-5 Months, and climbing Gamepass Rank is crazy hard which is an indication that the game is good, although people won't admit it. Most people think that Reddit and Twitter is the real world, if people on Reddit or Twitter trash talked it, it must be bad. but the reality, people Who Played starfield will soften their stance toward the game, because there are still a lot of Jawdropping moment in the game. as an RPG, Starfield is better than other new RPGs for $70 game, you definitely get way more value out of your money
@@efxnews4776 it's like GTA, you can steal & ride car, but it's not considered a True Car Sim like Grand Turismo or Assetto Corsa the requirement of Sim is Higher also, it was out of their scope of the game, and can easily makes their game delayed indefinitely because of the Complexity required.
I was waiting for this, great video. A combination of these game best parts would be awesome, with cdpr handling the story. One can dream. FYI, in Elite you can enable night vision on every ship, and also on suits when engineered (upgraded). Good luck finding the keybind. Also in Elite, travel to the center of the galaxy and beyond is time consuming but feasible when you have a top of the line ship that has more than 10x the starting ship jump range. You can also use neutron stars jets to supercharge your drive and boost jump distance condiderably (there is an option in galaxy map to automatically set the route using them). You can go to Sol system, but to obtain permit you have to rank up Federation rep. As for narrative, it is present but it is very slow and thin, and proper questlines were scrapped early on. There are rumors of a certain... place... anyone still has to find.
One of the last and also most exciting things I did while I played Elite Dangerous was flying a fleet carrier (which can pretty much jump across the entire inhabited world in one step) from morning to evening all the way to the top of the galaxy, more than 5000ly up so you could see the galactic disk in all its glory. Also Elite Dangerous (pre-Odyssey) had probably the best VR support out of all full-release games. But yeah, no one game could possibly satisfy all the itches of space exploration. Currently I'm in more of a "space homebuilding" phase, so I'm having more fun building ships in Starfield but also wishing Bethesda had implemented the full settlement system from FO4.
I really don't like how some youtubers that don't follow Star Citizen always focus just on the bad and fail to recognize all the huge technological stuff they've accomplished, for this game to even exist as it does today is a miracle
I always cautious of space exploration in fiction, since, at least in a character adventure stories it's usually written as islands. Like a planet = a city and a bit around. Because think about - if we call open world games bloated with copy-paste content, and that's like a small part of one planet. In stategy genre again i would prefer ground since space is again kinda just objects and nothing in between. You can have some meteor-fields and such but it's much more limited in that sense then on-ground strategy. Space shooters i guess could be cool, but again having shooting on the planet gives you more ideas of enviroments and obstacles. Unless you randomly generate it like No Man''s Sky i don't really see much point of doing it in a gameplay sense. But there's also an aestetic argument, if space exploration appeals to your taste there's nothing anyone can do. I remember playing alot of Space Rangers as a kid tho. And Outer Wilds is great, but it's space is comically shrinked, i don't think that appeal to people this an aestetic of serious space adventure.
NMS also is comically shrinked it is a great game the exploration feels fantastic as the view but frankly isn't even CLOSE to what real space exploration really is like, in this regards props to NMS., they got it right, way too much right, space is vast and empity, and ED is boring as you can get.
In development NMS had multiplayer, but near release they had to cut it and a sticker was placed over the multiplayer label showing how late in development it was cut. They planned to readd it in an update after they fixed the fatal related bugs.
Elite Dangerous is not an easy game to get into, but once you learn all the basics and can navigate, the whole galaxy opens up. It took me many failed attempts but eventually I flew to Sagittarius and back, and saw some of the most amazing things I have ever seen in any game.
This is an awesome summary. I expected to disagree with a lot of things because I noticed that people have such diverse opinions on these games, but I ended up nodding through the whole video. Great job!
I personally want a space exploration that basically stays in our solar system, where everything can be hand crafted instead of procedurally generated. This way something can be taken from each of the space games mentioned. Our own system is large enough and would be a ton of fun. human factions at war for territorial control and maybe even an out side alien invasion.
Elite has a substantial learning curve. The key binds menu is not intuitive. If you really get into Elite, you are probably going to get a HOTAS. The key binds menu makes a lot more sense because of the variety of different HOTAS out there. Once you get a control scheme that works for you, it's really something special. Nothing else comes close.
In the original version of Elite, you had to grind for hundreds of hours to get a new ship. And it was super tense because if you died you would lose several days of progress. And if you weren't careful to save enough cash to cover insurance, you would lose EVerYTHING. And you could die very easily. Coming in a bit too hot when landing in a space station? Dead... Accidentally pressing boost while leaving the station? Dead Forgetting that you have illegal contraband? Get destoryed by station turrets.. Dead When you were close to enough money for your upgrade, it was really fucking stressful. I wonder what became of this game. I stopped after the first expansion. I bet they nerfed ship costs and boost earnings by a lot Elite is a lot like a flight sim. It's not a pick up and go game. Learning how to control each vehicle is part of the game. Each ship controls totally differently
I don't think they nerfed any costs but there are definitely easy ways to make money. I played around 1-2 years ago and I remember the best way to make money as a new player was to tag ships for combat in a high res zone and let the authorities take out the pirates which would give you the bounty reward, you could make a few million this way in a couple hours. Getting the higher end ships (and god forbid fleet carriers) is still a big grind especially since you need a hell of a lot of reputation with the 2 big factions to even have the option to buy the corvette / cutter and then engineering is a whole thing in of itself, but its undeniable its gotten easier. There were some systems you could go to where you could pick up 20 missions to kill like 50 pirates, then when you kill 50 you could get hundreds of millions, especially if you did it with 3 other people to quadruple everyone's profits. I think that might have been nerfed but you can still get good money by mining in omicron capricorni b for platinum and stuff like that. its been a while since I played but I definitely had fun with it
@@technoboop1890Yeah when I played it wasn't possible to make that much money. The most expensive ship was the Anaconda, and it was almost impossible to get
Had BEAT FOR BEAT the same experience with Elite: Dangerous. I feel your pain. I'm desperate to love it but it makes it so hard at every single point. Anyway, incredible vid man. Loved this.
Actually you can visit sol in elite dangerous, you need to do a certain questline if I believe, it’s pretty cool actually you can visit the voyager probes
"MUSHRUM" - rock and stone brother, rock and stone. edit: this video really gets the heart of my personal experiences with all three of these games. I think it also helps me square why I've been so unsatisfied with a lot of mainstream criticism of starfield. So many people are talking about what it's missing based on expectations and comparisons to other space games without acknowledging that space games as a whole are an exercise in compromises. Starfield surely makes some missteps, and has a lot of missed opportunities that are easy to spot, but the sheer scope of the game as it is already dwarfs most other games, and at a certain point, you have to stop hoping for more, and start tempering your expectations around what is reasonable or likely. I really enjoyed starfield, and I think part of that was because I had played, loved, and been disappointed by ambitions space games in the past like elite, or NMS, or x3/x4. I knew that it wouldn't live up to my imagination of space, and so I tried to approach it more on its own terms as a followup to bethesda's other RPGs.
Fantastic video! Watched it to the near end and wanted to comment. Imagine in the distant future, people in space playing video games about living on Earth. Humbling thought.
I’ve played Elite Dangerous on and off for several years and NKB’s attempt to reach the center of the galaxy reminds me of a similar experience. One day I got bored of my usual money making strategy of bounty hunting and decided to take a different kind of job - scan a planet and bring the data back for a significant payout, way higher than what I’d normally make through my usual combat missions, so I took it, not really thinking about how far away the planet might be. I bought myself a mid tier ship outfitted for exploration and started planning my route. To my surprise, I realized the job was taking me within a few jumps of Saggitarius A, a good 500-600something jumps there and back. Normally I’d have just cancelled the mission, but for some reason I decided to give it a shot. I spent every night for the better part of a month jumping from system to system for about 2-3 hours at a time in order to make it there and back by the mission’s deadline, stopping only to scoop fuel from stars along the way or check out the occasional point of interest I’d stumble across. On the way back I nearly lost my ship when I got stuck in a White Dwarf’s gravity field. When I made it back home I made enough money to buy one of the largest ships in the game. I wouldn’t say that all the time I spent jumping to and from the center of the galaxy was “fun”, but I can definitely say that no other game has ever managed to make me feel the enormity of it’s setting in the same way Elite Dangerous does.
The original multiplayer or rather co-op concept in No Mans Sky is absolutely brilliant, and has created an entirely new way to interact with a game. Instead of actually seeing others and running around with others, you collectively worked to achieve a goal. Being able to visit others bases and share in the resources they are collecting, yet never having to deal with others one-on-one is brilliant. An enormous amount of people refuse to play multiplayer games to preserve the pace of the game at exactly the pace they desire and to prevent interacting with the unavoidable jerks and this concept is a huge breath of fresh air for them. It is now amazing to see, and to build a base yourself. where the results of what has been learned and accomplished can be shared/passed on with the newer players. Brilliant!
For Elite, if your new to Space Sims, YEAH it's harsh. If your not then some things are known from other games, like tapping off your fuel so you don't run out but just like in real life some people don't watch their gauge and end up on the side of the road out of gas. ;) But in general even if you know Space Sims you know they are often complicated so looking up a UI Guide is often key to success. Don't need any making money, combat, loadout, and etc guides that go over content. Just a video on like what all the menus on your ship do, how to hail people, land, and etc. It's a bit like picking up MS Flight Sim and being mad you don't know how to fly a jet liner. It's the type of game your getting into and most experienced in space sim know this, but someone new to genre might be expecting a simple combat sim like No Man's Sky.
Idk how long youve been there but i just noticed you hit 250k subs. Ive been with you since late 2019 and if i think you were around 80k at the time. Its well deserved my man. Keep it up
Small little nitpick from a person that sank real time months into the game (Visited both Beagle Point and Sag A*, triple elite etc. etc.): You can visit Sol, you just have to grind reputation with the federation, who hold control over that part of the bubble.
![Yailin La Mas Viral, @kreizyk.official - Dale 2 (Remix) [Video Oficial]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/JaYHBzgqz94/mqdefault.jpg)
Wow, I can't believe that NeverKnowsBest made a video that's only the length of a single average feature film. I was starting to believe that he'd never return to short form content.
Is this one of them tiktoks those teenagers keep talking about?
Tim rogers is the only one that can outshine him
This video is longer then the current starfail any% speedrun world record. Not joking. Its around 45 minutes. Can't remember how long exactly
And he was really quick with that!
He only made 2 vids that are almost 6hrs long. The rest are movie lengths.
If you ever play Elite again try going way "above" or "below" the galactic plane and just watch the stars slowly disappear with every jump until the only one you can see is the one you jumped in from, it's a bit eerie
I tried this once. At some point there stops being any star in front of you, and you can just fly forward at 2000 times the speed of light into the abyss knowing full well you will never arrive anywhere. It is actually a very powerful moment.
Or you can hunt for Raxxla...
I remember first time with tribbles, hadn't seen star trek or such before. Darn, it was "worth it to buy the damn BBC micro computer" (yeah it was on C=64 later) :D Many a night played, many lectures sleep deprived...
@@KaiJasonAnd they told us space was the last frontier...
Also, more prosaically, in the SRV ground vehicle, just turn "drive assist" off - you'll have much better time.
A few things you may have not noticed about Elite Dangerous.
1. You can visit the Capital systems of several in-game faction (Sol, Achenar, Sirius and others) when you gain enough faction standing with them.
2. The skybox is real. Once I was at Barnard's star (20 LY from Earth), and noticed a set of stars that looked like the Orion Belt; then looked a bit better and noticed that was indeed the Orion constellation. If you fly to that region, you'll see how stars look like from that position, and everything in around 2-3K ly from Earth is NOT (completely) generated; most of the stuff comes from real astronomical data.
3. Because of how hyperspace jump works, doubling jump range more than halves travel time. Even relatively basic ships you could certainly afford in the video may have increased your travel distance by about 3 times.
4. Neutron star and white dwarf jets overcharge the hyperdrive, giving you about 3 times you jump range for one jump. There are a few notable "neutron star highways", that further help cutting down travel time around the galaxy.
5. With all the upgrades and following a neutron-star route, you can have jump ranges of 200-300ly.
Still, getting to Sagittarius* takes easily a couple of days.
one thing that's really cool about the skybox is how it changes as you travel. I was in a thick nebulaic zone and the skybox was incredibly dark, there were probably 1000-2000 stars visible which is a fraction of what you expect from earth's sky. Then I jumped into the centre of the area where loads of star formation was happening and the sky was practically blinding. There were gigantic blue bright stars flooding my vision from every direction. A few more jumps and it was behind me, looking back I could see this patch of bright blue stars in an otherwise black sky. One of the cooler experiences in ED.
I never experienced it myself but some people glitched to outside the milky way to see it side on and honestly, even a second hand, recorded experience inside a *video* game of the milky way from the outside was deeply moving in a way that's hard to explain.
I found that Elite didn't support my playstyle very well. You had to do hours of mining in order to do the fun activities(Unless mining is your thing) such as combat, hauling and exploration. A group of Elite youtubers once asked FDev how much money you should be making(after the mining focused update where some players were making trillions), and they couldn't give an answer.
@@the11382 That simply isn't true, I did maybe an hour of mining and that was purely to get access to a late game npc. You can mine, trade, haul or explore to get to more expensive stuff. By now all activities more or less give equal rewards where you can do whatever you like best and make enough money to sustain your playstyle.
@@the11382 You're really not required to chase a meta money making method to get to properly play the game. You get money from everything you do, so just do what seems fun to you and the credits will follow. By the time you have the cash to buy and outfit a proper mining ship, you could use that money for an exploration or bounty hunting focused ship instead. Maybe you'll earn a bit less but who cares, at least you're not staring at an asteroid for hours.
Neutron star hopping is something you can get used to but it's both extremely risky in comparison to just hopping in between main sequence stars and quite frankly extremely spooky lol. It's the absolute best way of traveling long range but cozy exploration really becomes a radical sport at times.
Elite Dangerous is seriously special. For all it’s problems, no game has ever done “space” the justice this game does. I have a hard time playing now a days, but those first 200 hours were immaculate
Same here. o7
Elite dangerous is so close and its infuriating
I loved that game but I just can’t believe they discontinued console support. Such a shame
Those first few hundred hours, pure magic. The following thousands, pure hell. All joking aside i just came back to it and I'm loving it again.
Nothing more spacey than finding a plant or two 3000 light years away from nearest permanently settled area. Glad they made conflict zones and RESs so you can practise true flying.
The voice of Neverknowsbest is the sound of a cosy, crisp evening. Wind lashing at the window as I rest my weary head in the dark and listen.
lol
@@rawallon I bet you're gen z aren't you?
*snaps fingers* I dig it
Sounds like the most relaxing time ive ever had
I know what to expect. He never cuts to a loud sound effect and never starts to yell. So I use these videos as background noise to sleep. The low murmur is soothing.
The story of a spaceship commander who winged and cheated his way into his position because he was so excited for space exploration, got some initial lucky success, only to get lost in the middle of nowhere with no fuel and shooting himself out of hopelessness is very cool, and I think says a lot about what space exploration actually is compared to what it is made to seem like by media.
He just wanted to explore space, he wasn't ready for what awaited him. This winter in cinemas.
lmaoooo
@@GreatBlueWorldhaha yeah the prospect of someone being able to fake it into the position of commandeering a spaceship in the real world is unrealistic, but I'm pretty sure he's alluding to what the grim reality of independent space exploration would be in the setting most of these games present, where space travel is widely accessible
Space Exploration is to us what was sea exploration for our old ancestors. Lot's of old stories about people getting stranded in the ocean.
@4thgreenburg. A skilled conman can pretend himself everywhere he wants, if the there is some slight chance of opportunity. There were fake surgeons which worked for 30 years for example. There were also a bunch of fake fighter plane piolots and commanders during WW1 and 2.
lol, I thought you were talking about Cris Roberts!😂
1:19:42 This isn't entirely true. You can visit the Sol system and it's decently well detailed, but you need a Federation superpower rank of Petty Officer to get the permit to go there. I wouldn't expect you to learn that though because you can only really find that out on the wiki lol.
Can confirm. It's true.
Getting to visit the Sol system was one of the most exciting things I did in ED.
It gets better. Due to the current event the permit requirement has been removed. Anyone can visit it.
I was done with ED, but had that TIR + HOTAS space sim itch. Looking for something to do, I bought one of the newer ships and did the Sol Permit grind on a weekend.
Imagine my disappointment when I couldn't even land on Lunar. Landing there, with the Earth rising/setting in the background, is one of the most obvious 'tourist attractions' imaginable. Instead we can visit Voyager, because apparently ED doesn't have enough flying in straight lines already. What a bad joke.
The description does say you can visit with a permit and who gives out the permit but it doesn't really say how
Nerrrrrd lmao
I personally prefer a game series like Mass Effect, that doesn't let you explore the universe but is very good at making you feel like said universe exists.
Space exploration is just too hard to do because of the scale necessary
There's a reason Mass Effect 2 resonates so much with so many despite having arguably the least to do with the main story, it does the best job at making the galaxy feel lived in and expansive. Walking into Omega's Afterlife is absolutely as epic today as it was in 2010.
"C'mon, let me in!"
Halo.
I like games that respect my time. Mass Effect did that well.
Here is our story. It has a beginning. A middle. And an end. You go on a journey and enjoy it. Then go away.
These randomly generated worlds don't give me the feeling that my time I'd respected.
The problem with big scale is lack of focus. A coherent and interesting story can not utilize thousands of planets.
I want something more like Kerbel space. It's neither story nor exploration, but it feels kind of an accomplishment. No doubt tho Mass effect 1-3 is overall the best space experience.
My experience of flying to the other side of the galaxy and back over two weeks of arduous effort is a happy memory, including the time I flew dangerously close to a black hole, and seeing my ship's paint all streaked and pitted from countless jumps. Also, Elite Dangerous does the space mining thing amazingly well. And dogfighting in VR is just next level.
I went to Beagle Point too. Going there and back and seeing Sag A was unbeatable
When I sit and think about the original Elite, it blows my mind that they got so close to the ideal so early
The actual Elite isn't bad either, but the porblem with the game is the clunky UI, that isn't just worst than X4 ui, but X4 at least has the excuse that it is an space empire building / ship combat sim.
@@efxnews4776 Interesting as when I played ED when first released, I felt the UI was pretty sublime, nicely integrated into the world and functional. I wonder if over time and the additional content simply stretched it too far. Its also odd that with the original release I never had any of the problems in this video, but I guess that was due to it being a far simpler game overall and an almost exact copy of the 1984 game.
@@efxnews4776 I also had more fun in X4 than in Elite. Being mulltiplayer and its limits on changing the world made Elite Dangerous a pretty boring game.
Big +, the old Elite games are SO underrated these days. People see the oldschool graphics and assume the game will just be Asteroids. Kind of a shame that most of these showcase style videos only tend to rehash the 3 or 4 most mainstream contemporary space games. I think the oldschool games and their clones (Oolite, Pioneer) provide better, more 'realistic' single player experiences than pay-to-win MMO titles like ED or Star Citizen. Wish more people knew about/covered these open source hidden gems.
@@noisecrime they re-did the whole ui and galaxy map, it's pretty great but there's just too much stuff I think. it's just overwhelming when you're new but it becomes second nature in a bit. kinda like paradox games.
The section on Elite Dangerous was absolutely awesome and hilarious; keep up the good work 👍
My favorite space exploration game ever is Starsector. I can probably write an entire assay in the comment section about it but for the sake of brevity I'll condense it into one sentence:
Starsector combines danger, opportunities and wanderlust with a robust sandbox to create a nearly perfect space exploration gameplay.
Every new playthrough is like 14 year old you booted up Skyrim for the first time, but without bugs.
Starsector is NOT like Skyrim at all.
When you decide to rob some merchant fleet, it will have an impact on the economy and planet stability, which you can then exploit further if desired. Skyrim has nothing like that.
As for exploration, I don't find it that engaging anymore. After a few playthroughs you just know what's out there and become very efficient with exploration. It becomes less of a question of what you'll find, but where. But with Sustained Burn and time acceleration, it's at least not as tedious as other games. In just 30-45 minutes you can explore a decent chunk of the sector, depending on your fleet and it's easily combined with missions that take you outside the core worlds.
Anyways, I'll always recommend Starsector to fans of the genre. What it lacks in fancy immersive 3D graphics, it makes up for with depth and it's very well polished. Mods only enhance the experience, rather than fixing it. Easily one of my top 5 games ever for sure and I've played a lot of games.
Man, you are boring af@@fonesrphunny7242
@@fonesrphunny7242 the modding community around starsector is fantastic, and the devs are still developing it. Technically it's still in beta but even with mods I've rarely encountered bugs and the game is absolutely playable.
The mods are so good!
@@fonesrphunny7242 See, that's when it is time to sell all the best blueprints to the pirates, and maybe a few nanoforges for good measure!
Obviously this is a very different type of game with a different target audience, but Spore (for all it's many faults and shortcomings) is another interesting space game worth mentioning. A lot of things in Spore are aplicable to the discuassion of space exploration games. Mainly the size of the game world and how the player is able to traverse it (the galaxy is large but not unmanageable), and how that world is populated. Spore is really a fascinating game when you start thinking about all the things it was trying to juggle.
A universe populated by player created content (lifeforms, vehicles, buildings, etc) is an almost shockingly obvious solution to the samey feeling that plagues many space games. It's nice to imagine how such a content creation system could be expanded in a modern game targeted at a more mature audience.
The GOAT of video game essayists gifts us another one. Truly appreciate you man.
19:03 THANK YOU for mentioning Space Engineers! Many critics that look at the space genre will talk about the nichest of games completely missing this giant in the space sandbox genre. The developers are fully independent with their CEO owning 100% of the company making Space Engineers which is to this day so successful it's funding their other companies including AI development. It's been my main game since 2014 and just recently I've been flying around the moon on one of the EU servers where I've discovered a wreck of a base. I looked around inside the old underground ruin made by a long-gone player faction with a couple people still inside their cryo chambers. I found a long tunnel leading under the base which was likely how the attacker reached the reactor to disable the base defenses. It was among the best exploration moments I've had in any space game.
The whole marketing vibe of Starfield was that it was gonna be focused on exploration and like, the wonders of space. Naively I was genuinely hoping to see some stuff we'd never seen in a space game before like tidally locked moons, exoplanets where it rained glass and iron and great glittering clouds of alcohol unfurling into the vast reaches of infinity. But all that stuffs really hard to code so Bethesda didn't bother. Shame!
I was also hoping we'd see some commentary on human space exploration. Off the top of my head I could imagine the usa and russia still trying to outperform each other with space exploration willy measuring contests hundreds of years into the future, china and saudi arabia turning entire planets into factories while building unsustainable orbital cities, billionaires getting themselves blown up etc etc. Ah well.
Yeah I was hoping there was some really strange stuff. With the weird stuff on earth imagine the crazy stuff in SPACE~
@@Garbageman28 nah Bethesda is lazy, so they just decide to destroy Earth over bs just to avoid to make a single Earth city in the game, it would be so simple to Bethesda to make a landing pad in a city like NY...
To be fair in videogames the vision of a futuristic Earth in a space opera setting, was better done so far by Mass Effect 3, we got to see Montreal at the begining of the game in the peak of humanity at least for some brief minutes and we saw London completely wreaked at the end of the game.
I'm glad they at least implemented the different gravities including zero G in some fights in space even if the latter is annoying. I read somewhere that earlier versions had more survival type elements where your fuel didn't instantly refill after a jump and such, but those got scrapped for the benefit of accessibility. That fills me with hope that someone will mod those aspects back in.
Bethesda has shown us what they can do, what their engine can do, so Starfield was 90% predictable.
Todd and the marketing team kept everything vague, so they could profit from people's expectations, as usual.
If Ubisoft has their formula for open world games, Bethesda has theirs with RPGs and it's underwhelming every time.
I think space exploration works best when its just one of game design elements. A Mass Effect with a better space exploration system would be the ideal implementation.
Yes. Basically, this goes back to original Elite. As an oldie ,I remember even back then, most people said "it sounds a great idea, but everywhere is much the same and ultimately boring", While a few seem to get totally hooked on this shallow repetition. It's very attractive to a niche. And it's the same today with this kind of space game.
Hopefully with a better plot than Bioware's now tired and cliche 'chosen one/starchild saves the world and everyone suck their cock' story.
I think soace exploration works best when it's interesting
Mass Effect actually has other species, cultures, values and societies built in to the game, I think that's what's missing from these games is there is no other inhabitants except humans, there is no intelligent life, no procedurally generated aliens with their own procedurally generated culture's, history and factions.
This leaves the games feeling empty, there's only so many flora, fungi and bacterium you can find in the galaxy before you start to wonder where all the intelligent species are
@@MasterIceyy I disagree. Sapient alien life can definitely be interesting, but that doesn't mean games without it aren't. Absense of sapient aliens can be used as an easy way to make a game feel more real and grounded. I actually disliked how almost every alien race in Mass Effect looked, acted, and talked, exactly like humans. It felt cheap and unrealistic.
Minecraft is still exciting to explore because the seeds can spit out very cool formations sometimes and it's usually the more surreal/unlikely formations we enjoy so I wonder why these space games just didn't crank up the "weirdness" of their generation.
I'd like more weirdness too but then you'd also get a lot more jank which would be used by people making bug compilation like Crowbcat. They probably don't want the bad press.
Minecraft pull it of because everything is a cube of the same size.
minecraft actually more and more trying to limit the weirdness esp on bedrock. If you look on how people find weird seeds like chasm seeds, it is revealed that those weird stuffs got patched :(
Shrimple. Same reason why microbes are more wacky than large organisms. Complexity scales with size.
As a member of the Freespace 2 modding community, I'm really glad to see it mentioned in this video. Great essay!
Another honorable mention that I really enjoy: Empyrion Galactic Survival. It's kind of like Space Engineer's jankier cousin
SE is a lot more technical and realistic, with thrust vectoring and all that, ESG is a lot more gameplay oriented, with more simplified spaceflight and actual enemies and missions to play
Wow i never really thought about that before. We physically went to outer space before creating simulations (video games) of being in space.
That's pretty wild to think about.
But now we've reversed it and stopped going into space, meanwhile focussing all our effort on simulations.
The fastest speed travelled by a human increased exponentially from around 1750 to 1970. In 1970, the fastest human speed was achieved. On the Apollo flight. Since then, it hasn't increased, it's stopped for the first time in 250 years. The fastest airplane flight was Concord, also in the early 1970's. Also, not beaten since then.
@@OrangeNashcommercial flight… because there is much faster than the concorde mac2
Elite Dangerous is still the best "space sim". It captures the vastness of space, the oppressive feel of the void just outside the canopy, while still having pleasant space trucking and at least some on foot gameplay. It's the closest to the sim dream so far.
Also, you have a night vision mode, but the game doesn't tell you 🤡
>the game doesn't tell you
ED in a nutshell.
Playing it with a VR headset is peak
@@KnjazNazrath Just look at your UI in your ship. It's say 'Night Vision Mode'. Need your hand held for everything?
@@Beanskiiii I did space trucking in VR for a while, and figured out how to set up overlays in VR such that I could see what I needed to fly by instrument and scoop stars while watching Twitch streams on my HUD. That was Peak Elite for me.
one of my favorite and most disappointing game genres! love these documentaries. I will say though that the X series has way more influence on the genre then the time it was given in this video.
by far thats for sure
The X series I would say has marked my life in such a way that it has been in my username for 14 years
I think the irony with Star Citizen is that the things it keeps getting criticized for are what make it resemble space exploration more than any other game.
An impossibly massive and never-ending project, shooting for the stars, getting there step by step and when zoomed out it seems like it didn't actually get anywhere yet, but when you zoom in it is filled with amazing stuff.
Playing Star Citizen as I watch this
The problem with SC is that everybody thinks its a MMO, even tho the company primarily develops an engine and a singleplayer game. Most of the money went into the later two, so it always seems as if SC just doesnt get anywhere or at least not as fast as one would expect it to, given the time and money, because the priority is something akin to a black hole, as we know very little about the singleplayer game. Most people probably dont even know that it exists.
@@SETHthegodofchaos
It's being built as an MMO.
Some of the tech they spent years on is exclusively MMO tech.
@@j.d.4697 the main focus has been on the single player campaign: Squadron 42, but I think they are getting close to finished so they are starting to focus more on the persistent universe
@@caseyk.479 The problem is that I was around in 2012, and that wasn't what people were being pitched and what people were hyped for. Much like No Man's Sky, which I'll leave up to the reader to interpret since while I think a NMS comparison is positive, my opinion on Star Citizen is decidedly negative.
To be fair to No Man's Sky being too convenient to the player, there's a host of sliders these days you can set to max difficulty. This changes the experience from the base 'normal' setting (which is completely devoid of any kind of jeopardy) and, for me, is a much more satisfying experience.
It is still to limited, also i find the lack of humanoid combat off putting. Like we have pirates, so why don't we have gorund combat with pirates?
They should stop making updates for nms and start working on No Mans Sky 2. Take all the lessons and ideas from the first one and make a more cohesive fleshed out game. Base defenses, turrets, orbital shipyards for ship building, capital ship building, a much much wider range of enemies and gas giants you can't land on you just die.
@@MSpotatoes Agreed. I'd love this.
@@MSpotatoesYeah, NMS is, imo, a masterpiece now after all the updates, but it has run its course. They should now work on a sequel that aims to surpass the original, taking all the lessons learnt and not just reimplementing them, but improving them
(On a side note, the idea of gas giant planets you can't land on is really cool, since there's already 99% ocean planets (with small patches of land sparsely spread out)
@@MSpotatoes There needs to be a purpose to adding all of that. Great, you can build turrets that defend your base but then what? You can look at it. To me, that's not the type of game I enjoy. It's just empty of meaning.
> gas giants you can't land on you just die
Why is that an important feature? You can't do anything with them, they are just there. Is the idea to just look at them and go "Yup, can't land there". Why should I pay money for that?
You can actually visit the Sol system in Elite, you just need to get a permit. You can do this by reaching Petty Officer rank in the Federal Navy, which is done by doing missions for factions aligned with the Federation.
The Solar System in Elite Dangerous actually is visitable, but you do need to grind Federation rank
True, but it doesn’t take that long in practice.
or just play the game and get the rank naturally, always wanting to grind and reach stuff within 24 hours is why everyone burns out from the game
@@croozerdog I agree with you. Just do activities that interest you and in time you have all the permits, mats and credits with no grind. I hate that everyone wants to rush for stuff then complain there's no content and what's there means very little.
I haven't played Elite Dangerous but it sounds like the extreme space version of My Summer Car. It may be difficult and confusing at times but the stories it generates are absolutely legendary.
EVE is still better
@@Dumb-Comment They're different games. With so much nuance involved, a simplistic X is better than Y glosses over so much that is very relevant. Some aspects of ED are quite brilliantly realised, others I have no time for at all (such as the absurdly communistic nature of the various economies, which prevents organic out-of-the-norm gameplay from even being possible). Ironically in the context of the video, exploration is the one aspect of the game that was developed the least after initial launch, because Fdev adhered too much to the more vocal crowd who just wanted pew-pew in space, an issue which defined its eventual on-foot mechanic aswell. In the end, ED became very wide but rather shallow, though like the video says, if some aspect of what it does is the sort of gameplay one is looking for, then it'll be spot on.
I recommend the video about Elite Dangerous by UpIsNotJump, it has a good general overview while also highlighting some of its weaknesses.
A 90 minutes video on my favourite genre by my favourite developer as I'm working on my own space sim, nice
Problem is that Morrowind feels more otherworldly location than Starfield. They should have stuck to fewer planets, and made more weird places, races and flora and fauna
I said this myself after 20 hours into starfield, before I quit because the game was bad (imo). I think that if Starfield honed it the fuck in, and did maybe 50 planets and put more time into making each one of those 50 very distinct, the game would have benefitted.
the reality is that the bethesda RPG formula doesn't lend itself to large-scale proc-gen like this. Honestly it makes me sad, knowing that TESVI is going to actually just be The Elder Mid
@@aegisofficial3819 yeah, exactly. Under 50. Personally I think maybe under 20 is what they could really make as distinct. Anyways the strength of recent Bethesda games (Morrowind onwards) has been unique handcrafted locations, so it would make more sense to make unique planets with interesting things to find there. That would make exploration feel more interesting.
@@tj-co9go I'm literally doing a skyrim playthrough right now (This time, heavily modded, last time was closer to vanilla) and the game is still pretty good.
I miss morrowind. I need Skywind to release so bad.
@@tj-co9go Funny thing is, I'm pretty sure Morrowind onwards also use procedural generation, they just used it better.
Outer Wilds was my kind of space exploration. I know you need to be in a certain kind of mood for that game, but i'm sure a lot of people tried it, walked around a little, didn't even take off from Timber Hearth and said "yeah this game's not for me".
I had 0 knowledge of what the game was like. Like didn't even know it was a space game. Started playing, thought "man this thing is laggy, and the controls are wonky, and the pathway is linear". Kept playing for some reason.
It is now my favourite game. The intro is kind of weak, but the realization that it's simulating a solar system down to tidal forces makes it worth it once you really start going.
@@KyriosHeptagrammatonI couldn't figure out the purpose of the game or what you were supposed to be doing. I'll have to go back and at least give it another shot. I went to a few planets and kept getting pulled all over the place because I sucked at flying the ship.
@@deviantarsenal it's mostly about solving mysteries and acquiring knowledge. In the beginning you can explore wherever to get a vague idea of what's going on, then start following up on whatever question or plot thread grabs your attention. It'll take you to different locations with cool puzzles and also tie into other plot threads. Once you have all the answers you'll know what to do.
@@deviantarsenal I think if you play for at least 22 minutes in a row you'll probably start having questions you want to answer.
The greatest game that we cannot talk about
A small mistake at around 7:10 You mention Starflight, Space Rogue then Star Control. But the footage of the later is actually from an excellent port of Starflight to the Genesis/Megadrive home consoles!
Thanks for always making such comprehensive and high-quality videos. It’s obvious you put a lot of research and work into these. We all appreciate it. 👍
It's a shame you didn't mention X4: Foundations. Exploration in that game is wonderful, and the sectors of the game are full of incredible stuff to see, and it's chokefull of lore everywhere. Though in general you play X4 not for exploration, but for the incredible sandbox.
I completely agree with you! It is really a shame the X series are overlooked time and time again. Honestly - Turning a blind eye to a space game series that is running for 24 years already (the first game X-beyond The Frontier was released in 1999) is not a very nice thing to do...
@@jclosed2516I think a lot of that is because X4 is just not going to be a game for everyone, including those in the enthusiast camp of space sims. Being that it is more of a tycoon/empire building econ sim, a lot of the core parts of the game is left lacking that might be up to other people's tastes. There is a real lack of activities that feel good to do outside of, empire building. Then by the time you get to a point that empire is built you spend even more time in menus and not flying space ships. So if you want to just sandbox as a bounty hunter, finding any content at all to that is going to be incredibly prohibitive out of the box and without aid of mods. Dog fighting as well leaves a whole lot to be desired and the generally learning curve and confusing menu/submenu design of the UI can be extremely prohibitive to new players. Then, you have to have your crew at certain levels and skills in order to unlock very basic stuff, like advanced autotrading which is a must the further in the game you get.
He did mention it very briefly. Though, as much as I love the X series and X4 (currently doing a second playthrough), 'exploration' isn't a big focus of the game. It's less about simulating space travel, and more about simulating the activities of the factions within that space.
X does exploration in it's own way, but it's there, even if somewhat temporary, as at some point the universe transitions from unknown to something that almost feels like home 😁
Wasn't the exploration in X3 pretty good though? Finding ships and stuff, still looking for a game where I can scavenge or board abandoned ships more often (fairly rare in most games). Starsector is pretty good in that regard @@Pruvmerong
Oh man, hearing Distant Worlds from the Mass Effect series always puts me in a happy place. Nice to hear it being used in an adjacent context, considering the topic. 😅
Great video as always, keep it up, Never.
The blade runner cut in was amazing lol :) Congrats for putting it in. Really make my day :)))
Incredible amount of videos recently, don't forget to take breaks once in a while!
Stop it we need more videos
Pls don’t listen this guy
To break one for Star Citizen: you can for the price of a full game ($60 mark) get access to an already pretty large and visually impressive gameworld and many things to try out. Easily spend 30 hours of entertaining discovery there. Its not polished or nearly finished, but you can play it, and can do it without spending hundreds for fancy ships. (many can be rented ingame with ingame money to try out). So its more than just a bag of promises, but actually something playable already. Just dont overspend on ships like a mindless whale.
Elite is the most punishing game for commanders who fail to see the little button called "night vision" located on the same screen with "self destruct"; which is a visual aid for landing on the dark side of the planets/moons. I hate to admit, without a flight stick and even an analog throttle control (HOTAS - Hands on Throttle and Stick), Elite can be extremely daunting - yet there is still much more depth than you've explored. Do not lose hope, Commander o7.
o7
The X series is based.
Very glad it got a very early mention. It deserves it.
In No Man's Sky, they have redone the entire universe! The newest update, "Worlds Part 1" they have made more fauna, minerals, and flora, as well as more enemies. The vile brood isn't as big of a bad as sentinels, but they are nice to fight. They also have redone some UI, and made Walkers have boss bars. Not only that but the Space Stations have been redone too after this video! They have more variations. The buildings are still repetitive, but they have done a great job revamping!
Learning how to play Elite is the best part of the game. Once you know how to play it's just a big grind.
Miscalculating your power draw and equipping the wrong reactor, leading to critical systems like oxygen getting shut down when you deploy your weapons, jettisoning your whole cargo trying to save power by disabling the hatch ( which opens it, it's a maglock system, doesn't work without juice ), destroying a valuable asteroid because you setup too many explosive charges, getting your ship stuck in the letterbox because it's way bigger than you thought, getting too close to a star and overheating, etc.
Nice video, the narration alone gave glimpse how fast space really is. Crazy to think every person on earth could own his own galaxy and space is way way way wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy bigger.
If Neverknowsbest doesn’t mention outerwilds I’m gonna flip.
I love the outer wilds, but I consider that more of a puzzle game than anything
@@nbkhnzzrSure, but Outer Wilds does still have its own style of space exploration. The way it compresses everything to make a way smaller, yet more compact experience is an interesting way to solve the problem of many other space exploration games, that being all the empty space with nothing to do. It's also a fairly realistic simulation in many ways, even if all the effects like gravity, quantum mechanics, star growth, etc. are on a very macroscopic scale. Like how you can fly to the sun station by matching its speed, and if you go to the center of a planet you become weightless.
@@basicbirch I consider the finding stuff in empty space to be exploration. In comparison, Outer Wilds practically shows you the entire solar system right in front of you. You just have to figure out how to use it to progress.
19:18
@@nbkhnzzr Outerwilds is a horror game
There is nothing quite like playing Elite in VR. I used to spend several hours daily just fully immersed in its universe. The gameplay loops may be shallow, but the feeling, the scale, the simulation of Milky Way is something to behold. Too bad the game seems to be mostly forgotten by the devs.
Here's my solution for making space explorations games:
1. Chose 10-20 "biomes" to base your planets on a la Outer Wilds
2. Make 5-10 variants of each biome. So 50-200 ish hand crafted very small planets.
3. Claim your game has 2-3 times that number.
4. Whenever a player visits a planet load up a randomly chosen one of your hand crafted planets which match the biome. Throw in a few shuffled around/ randomized features to keep the illusion stronger.
5. The players will never visit all 50-200 of your planets. You only need to load and save a handful of the pre-generated ones. This is similar to the "quantum Ogre" idea in D&D.
So instead of needing to make 2-3 times as many planets and have them all feel samey, the players will see that there is 200 planets out there, but only visit 40 or so, and never be the wiser.
Fun fact: this is almost exactly how planet generation works in no man's sky. Each biome has lists of ground covering, plants, terrain roughness, water presence, etc. So they only had to make 8 or 9 biomes to populate every planet in the universe
@@tacoterrorizer1862 But No Man's Sky has no quantum ogre. With my system you get "tricked" into going to hand made planets that are swapped in.
I’ve played Elite Dangerous for a while and agree with almost everything you just said. Had a good laugh too. It was fascinating and even addictive to explore and simply f around. But oh my goodness, the learning curve is immense and poorly presented at first. I especially agree that a good campaign would’ve helped tremendously.
Just imagine, missions navigating through political struggles between factions to really understand the state of humanity in that future universe. Imagine missions with a real goal to help, or to challenge and defeat.
Imagine being a copilot tasked with basic commands in the first missions to help you with the many concepts of flying and the MANY dangers of space lol. To get into tricky situations while reducing the age old lame die and start again.
Imagine not having to spoil the only suspense/otherworldly aspect of the game provides with the Thargoids… I don’t know by suggesting weird things happening here and there, delivered by good characters that could be amazed, worried or daring.
I don’t know, Elite is such a perfect shell for something much more grandiose, other than the scale of the galaxy you’re partaking in.
Thank you for this video!
Every Halloween, Frontier drop in a little surprise that almost resembles a Fallout76-like quest. And every year I think “why isn’t there more of this??”
even though I've played a collective 200+ hours of Elite it still just never quite took hold, I agree with the sentiments about commitment to realism, it's painfully obvious how many critical systems were missing, and lucky for FDev the community was willing to fill that gap, I remember for at least the 1st year or 2 of the game there was no way in the game to log waypoints or points of interest or something. wasn't until years later they finally added Super Cruise Assist which took away some of the tedium because just keeping my hand steady on a flightstick doing absolutely nothing but managing my throttle and heading isn't really that exciting.
even then SC Assist fell way short of an actual autopilot, and a large number of the community were vehemently opposed to adding anything to the game that broke their version of what they considered "immersion" which never really added up for me since that version of immersion forces me to believe that 1000 years in the future all the spacecraft will have less advanced flight avionics than 1980s era passenger jets.
There are some really cool and immersive experiences to be had in that game, but also a great deal of frustration that results for only listening to a certain subset of the community.
@@matthamende6359 My thoughts exactly. My first time landing a ship, followed by a crash; I was like, really? A spaceship that can’t park itself? I was just too stubborn to quit and of course learned how it works. Ultimately though, when the auto-pilot module was installed on my ship, I never looked back and never missed landing by myself on stations. I do appreciate the concept of disabling it when you have to fly-in rogue style when required…
Among the best and well thought of documentation on YT ! Just excellent. Thank you, I enjoyed every minute!!
This was a great video. My favorite of the bunch is still ED but the others all have their places in the space genre and do deserve some praise for what they accomplish. Space for me is space mining in ED. Hoping in my Type-9, heading off to an asteroid belt looking for minerals is always relaxing, especially with a podcast or music in the background. And fun comes from the pirates constantly trying to harass me and steal my stuff, so I jump out in my little Condor fighter, blow em up, and get on with my mining. It isn't always the most profitable and I've had close calls, but for me at least, it is relaxing, and I always love seeing a big asteroid crack open. I haven't played in awhile though, other games take up my time and I really want a HOTAS to really immerse myself, but I look forward to diving back in when I get back too it.
As someone who’s played ED since 2014 it’s always nice to see new players learning the game
Wish Space Rangers (1 and 2) had gotten a mention. They are still my favorite space games with great world that lives on its own, a wild variety of gameplay styles (especially in 2) and amazing exploration not just through flying around, but through text quests and planet surveying.
Space Rangers wasnt really exploration tho. Text quests are just that, text quest where you solve puzzles, do math, play some tabletop games, be in jail, run a business or something among those lines. And planet surveying is just putting probes on the map and then leaving and then coming back some time later to see what kind of loot you got. And all of the sectors are already explored and inhabited. Its more of a space sim imo. And in this video NKB seem to focus more on exploring space.
@@anuaronaibay8628 but it could at least be mentioned in the history of space games, cause that seemed to include simply games that were about space.
And I feel like SR's living world is one of the best representations of what space "should be". Not a place that simply waits for the player to come push it forward, but a place that completely exists on its own and could not really care about the player's actions, unless they directly influence said world.
@@megamcee Maybe. The video is called "An in-depth look at Space Exploration in video games", so it looks like he mostly focused on games that are either primarily or partially about space exploration, and not space games in general. Or maybe he just never heard of it =b its not a popular game after all.
Yeah, that part of SR was always amazing. It was an actual living universe. But I think its not what "Space should be", but instead mostly like a "Living world should be" on a whole. A game that just lives on its own without any player input could be really cool anywhere, not just space. And like NKB said in this video, space is big but in SR it feels very crowded. I think SR is an amazing game, but I dont think its a "space game" necessarily.
@@anuaronaibay8628Yeah this video also lacked the good ol X4 series of Space Sims
Great video with great games. I am old enough I've played almost all of them back in their time. Now I give an another memorable title to this list which made a deep mark in me: Independence war 2 - Edge of chaos (published in 2001) with its athmosphere, newtonian phisics, interesting story.
I can't place exactly why, but Starfield just didn't feel like it had the same heart as Elder Scrolls games or even Fallout to a lesser degree. It just felt so sterile and... by the numbers.
Because they were trying to avoid offending anyone, and in result, couldn't be bothered to add anything creative or villainous, lest someone get offended. So it's everything all at the same time and nothing. Zero tension, because someone might get offended. Zero actual bad guys; because someone might get offended. But then they extended that to the gameplay mechanics as well, so the game is more sterile and less mechanically inclined than Halo from 2001.
The writing is bland but it has nothing to do with "trying not to offend anyone". You can write compelling fiction without sociopath villains. @@billywashere6965
@@billywashere6965 Now, I am no bethesda sycophant or anything, but there being zero actual bad guys is not entirely true. One of two 'antagonists' you face in the main story can absolutely be that bad guy if you think about their beliefs for a little more than a few minutes. The spacers and ecliptic mercenaries are also evil by definition with Crimson Fleet having some crumbs of gray morality here and there. The issue is that Bethesda is just not capable of giving depth and interest to most of those kinds of factions anymore on account of their poor quality writing team. Barely of the lore surrounding the two main faction's rivalry make all that much sense, either.
Fair enough.@@theo1170
@@theo1170 excatlly. it was the same problem in Fallout 4. even the main "badguy" of the game. in Institute wasn't really all that bad. when you win the game by completing their questline, the commonwealth doesn't really change at all. other than a few characters going "oh no! the institute won!"
I never was a huge Sci-Fi fan in my teen and early adult years. Now, after getting a basic knowledge of astrophysics because I got hooked on documentaries, it's becoming my favorite genre of all time.
Dude the fuel rats thing is SO RAD! What a bunch of legends
To this day, finding the correct spot and manually landing on a space station in Elite: Dangerous felt like one of the hardest things I ever did in a video game. Even with the added tutorials they have now, it's a rough game to get into and as you have said the youtube solution not ideal to say the least.
Honorable mention goes out to "Space Engine", despite not being a "game", but it's on Steam so can't really argue, right?
Great video and I'm glad you took a broad approach for this topic.
It takes some getting used to but its not that bad once you get the hang of it. You just need to hang around in the queue, slowly approach and enter the mailslot, find your docking number, approach slowly and deploy landing gear, then when you get close enough your dashboard changes to give you a proper indication of your relative position to the landing pad, then just use the 3d controls (q, e, w, a, r and f) to orient and lower yourself, also note that you need to be in the right direction (I was confused on this for quite a while lol). Ok having written all that it is a lot more complicated than I was thinking lmao
I played a lot of Elite. I was once ranked no1 trader during one of the first large conflicts. I was so proud seeing my name in the ingame news bulletin. We used python scripts to determine the most profitable trading routes before other people found them
I don't remember my starting hours of Elite Dangerous but I know it was a learning curve and I spent a long time just customizing the controls to my preference. I don't play it as much as I used to, but I still find myself returning every once in a while. Star Citizen, No Man's Sky and the other space sim games just never clicked with me as well as Elite Dangerous. Its certainly not for everyone and the Odyssey dlc was a big letdown, but the core elements of flying and exploring in space is done so well. No other game had me spending several days just to make a pilgrimage to SagA* and continue the voyage to Beagle Point, hours of scamming lifeless planets with the rare occasional Earth-like then flying to the next system to do it all over again, again and again hundreds of times. Some might find it boring and monotonous but I find it relaxing, just me in the black. Also I know Raxxla is out there, it will be found in time.
Exactly this. And also that you feel you’re exploring a real life place rather than some fictional game world.
Ever wondered what the night sky would look like at the dense centre of the Milky Way, or from inside a nebula, or from way above/below the galactic plane? Elite gives you that.
as someone who's made it to sag A*, its a massive journey you can only practically do by hitchhiking on a carrier or taking the neutron highway
even with a highly specialised ship with maximised jump range its a several day endeavour. kinda worth it for the view though
You should be happy you havent found aliens in Elite. Trust me.
In Elite Dangerous you can easily gather materials and mining minerals using collector limpets.
Wonderful video! Love that you are still producing these absolute bangers!
Empyrion Galactic Survival felt like a nice balance between simple and real. Infinity Battlescape handles the weight of it all pretty well. I like having to manually fly/warp between battlefields during downtime
Starbase felt incredible but was very tedious, and Elite Dangerous of course is peak for realism, imo
This channel quickly evolved from great game reviews to Ahoy level quality documentary style works of art. Amazing stuff, love every single project you make, Never.
I gonna say it, what players want isn't Skyrim in Space is a mixture of a lot of genres, folks want the procedural generaltion of NMS, the exploration and flight mechanics of Elite, the realism of Star Citizen, advanced gameplay with 4x elements of X-series, the lore and world building of Mass Effect with ground gampeplay and graphics of Cyberpunk 2077
If someone manages to pull all of this at once, this would be the perfect space game.
Notices that i didn't even mentioned Starfield so far? Because Starfield is the exact opposite of my perfect game.
It doesn't have ANY of the elements that make a great space game, the ONLY great thing about Starfield is the ship crafting, and even then, other games did better than Starfield, again, if it's about RPG and stories, then Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic did much better than Starfield.
No wonder why folks are comparing Cyberpunk 2077 with Starfield, the lack of Space sim on it, combined with story and gameplay outdated of Bethesda that what folks actually want is Cyberpunk 2077 in space rather than Skyrim in space.
No Man's Sky is arcady, it is a game sim, made to be arcady, somewhat of a introduction to space sim games for kids.
You can notice this on how you interact with the world. The main antagonists of the game are just some space police protectiong certain worlds, that ONCE you comply with them, they aren't so much a danger to the player, there the pirates who are the sentients you never meet in person and only fight them on their ships (Hello game should add humanoid ground combat ASAP for this game) and theres the TRUE danger of the game with is the parasitic horrors that could be completely avoid by players (don't touch wispering eggs, don't get close those giant organic structures, in the end yeah despite having very powerful guns incredibly powerful vehicles (even a mech that doubles down as a companion) you don't have real challenges besides ocasionally defy the sentinels, desacrate whipering eggs, or wait for pirates to attack.
Yes, NMS is a great space sim, but is also a space sim for kids (i'm not saying you are immature for playing this game, but NMS is trully a family friendly space sim, wich i think is awesome, if you have kids, you should play togheter).
Ah yes the most realistic space sim ever made Elite Dangerous, also the most BORING one...
One thing to say about ED, is that with a few twicks here and there such as ship interiors, companions a more robust procerually generated system and better integration of comunities in the game such as the fuel rats, this game has not only the potential to become the BEST space game ever made but also the most USEFUL videogame ever made.
One great thing that ED could do is literally integrate real scientific discoveries in the game, with real science, this could attract investments from governments and institutions, such as add exoplanet discoveries in the game (make expedtions to such planets just like NMS).
ALSO, ED should learn some things with NMS, the crafting system there complements the game in many ways, you need a place to rest, to call home, to store the things you find... damn i barely knows how to make food in NMS, and yet sometimes i cook, and manage to make space chocolate.
YOU NEED this sort of STUFF in a game this VAST as ED, in ED you don't need to actually make space chocolate, but maybe analize in depth the life you found let's just say in your base?
But critically speaking what ED is missing is precisly, ship interiors, if you have this feature this game would become way better.
I want to love ED, but it is just one step above of Space Engine...
Many space games fail to be entertaining games first instead of space themed reality simulations. People like the IDEA of unlimited planet exploration with no regard of how that would play or be meaningful. I think the best way to make a space game is to design an ocean and sailboat game first until it is fun and then transport those mechanics into the space theme. Too many space games lose themselves in the unlimited freedom and ambition.
This ^ if a game managed to get a balance between elite dangerous, star citizen, and no man's sky, it'd be probably the best game of all time. We'll see how star citizen actually plays on release 😅
Starfield is not an space exploration / sim game, it's an RPG that happenned to be in space.
they're not trying to compete with Space sims. it just people kept comparing Starfield to the other space sims.
Starfield is like Fallout 4, but without the road, therefore you're in action more often.
Here the thing, people always said that Starfield should be like No Man's sky, or Star Citize, or other space sims,
but if you're not a sim guy, it's Extremely Boring. True Sim is very boring.
you'll feel like the reward loop is just broken, everything is way too repetitive
i played No Man's Sky, and i was nowhere as fun as Starfield,
and i want to get my hands on Star Citizen if they're available
Starfield did a lot of things right,
- they had a great spaceship crafting that you can roam around with amazing interior
- they had a good Multi Planet Outpost system
- weapon, Spacesuit & other crafting is just very good, even when compared to other game like Farcry 6
- Their Level Design is one of the Highest Tier in the Industry and they nailed it with Starfield.
- Role playing & Faction, you can be whatever you want, align to any faction you want.
- The graphics in this game is Amazing, if you compared it side by side to Fallout 4, Starfield really not hold back any punch in Graphics.
- Ship Capture, god this is a very addicting system, Boarding enemy starship, and have a combat inside it, then steal the ship? Count me in.
- their Stats system is never old, Bethesda Mastered this, and they didn't disappoint.
it just most people who trash talk on this game never play it.
and Most people who played it had criticism, but they didn't hate the game.
all of them spent 200+ Hours despite all the criticism that they said.
because this game is far from Flop, it can be easily be fixed by a couple of update.
in gamepass, Starfield is still at top 5 or 7th , and it's one of the Most played game,
if i remember correctly they peaked at number 3 for almost 3-5 Months,
and climbing Gamepass Rank is crazy hard
which is an indication that the game is good, although people won't admit it.
Most people think that Reddit and Twitter is the real world, if people on Reddit or Twitter trash talked it,
it must be bad.
but the reality, people Who Played starfield will soften their stance toward the game,
because there are still a lot of Jawdropping moment in the game.
as an RPG, Starfield is better than other new RPGs
for $70 game, you definitely get way more value out of your money
@@jensenraylight8011 sorry, but if has flyable space ships, IT IS A SPACE SIM.
@@efxnews4776 it's like GTA, you can steal & ride car, but it's not considered a True Car Sim like Grand Turismo or Assetto Corsa
the requirement of Sim is Higher
also, it was out of their scope of the game, and can easily makes their game delayed indefinitely because of the Complexity required.
Oh my! Such an amazing content, I wish you all the best for your next videos and more and more followers! Cheers from Marrakech!
I was waiting for this, great video. A combination of these game best parts would be awesome, with cdpr handling the story. One can dream.
FYI, in Elite you can enable night vision on every ship, and also on suits when engineered (upgraded). Good luck finding the keybind.
Also in Elite, travel to the center of the galaxy and beyond is time consuming but feasible when you have a top of the line ship that has more than 10x the starting ship jump range.
You can also use neutron stars jets to supercharge your drive and boost jump distance condiderably (there is an option in galaxy map to automatically set the route using them).
You can go to Sol system, but to obtain permit you have to rank up Federation rep.
As for narrative, it is present but it is very slow and thin, and proper questlines were scrapped early on. There are rumors of a certain... place... anyone still has to find.
One of the last and also most exciting things I did while I played Elite Dangerous was flying a fleet carrier (which can pretty much jump across the entire inhabited world in one step) from morning to evening all the way to the top of the galaxy, more than 5000ly up so you could see the galactic disk in all its glory. Also Elite Dangerous (pre-Odyssey) had probably the best VR support out of all full-release games.
But yeah, no one game could possibly satisfy all the itches of space exploration. Currently I'm in more of a "space homebuilding" phase, so I'm having more fun building ships in Starfield but also wishing Bethesda had implemented the full settlement system from FO4.
I really don't like how some youtubers that don't follow Star Citizen always focus just on the bad and fail to recognize all the huge technological stuff they've accomplished, for this game to even exist as it does today is a miracle
Thanks for being a person on the internet who fianally gave some constructive criticism to modern No Man's Sky.
hope you're doing good. keep on keeping on!
Great video. Playing No Man's Sky on psvr2 is the most immersive space experience i found. Your Blade Runner tribute says it all. Thank you. 😊
Why are your final thoughts always so touching? Thank you for this.
I always cautious of space exploration in fiction, since, at least in a character adventure stories it's usually written as islands. Like a planet = a city and a bit around. Because think about - if we call open world games bloated with copy-paste content, and that's like a small part of one planet. In stategy genre again i would prefer ground since space is again kinda just objects and nothing in between. You can have some meteor-fields and such but it's much more limited in that sense then on-ground strategy. Space shooters i guess could be cool, but again having shooting on the planet gives you more ideas of enviroments and obstacles.
Unless you randomly generate it like No Man''s Sky i don't really see much point of doing it in a gameplay sense. But there's also an aestetic argument, if space exploration appeals to your taste there's nothing anyone can do. I remember playing alot of Space Rangers as a kid tho. And Outer Wilds is great, but it's space is comically shrinked, i don't think that appeal to people this an aestetic of serious space adventure.
NMS also is comically shrinked it is a great game the exploration feels fantastic as the view but frankly isn't even CLOSE to what real space exploration really is like, in this regards props to NMS., they got it right, way too much right, space is vast and empity, and ED is boring as you can get.
Space is very much akin to the ocean. Very vast area of nothing. The islands and other things you can find residing there are the important part.
couldnt hope for a better video to put on before going to sleep after what was a terrible terrible week, i appreciate you Never
Just watched most of your videos and i have to say i adore your calm voice and your deep analysis, i hope your videos never stop coming.
In development NMS had multiplayer, but near release they had to cut it and a sticker was placed over the multiplayer label showing how late in development it was cut. They planned to readd it in an update after they fixed the fatal related bugs.
I thought I was the only one who only used "Never Knows Best." I love that quote.
Elite Dangerous is not an easy game to get into, but once you learn all the basics and can navigate, the whole galaxy opens up. It took me many failed attempts but eventually I flew to Sagittarius and back, and saw some of the most amazing things I have ever seen in any game.
This is an awesome summary. I expected to disagree with a lot of things because I noticed that people have such diverse opinions on these games, but I ended up nodding through the whole video. Great job!
The single best dive into these games, what makes them different, and what they are. Thank you.
I keep just plowing through all of your videos whenever I get a free moment. It's the accent to be honest. You are easy to fall asleep to
I personally want a space exploration that basically stays in our solar system, where everything can be hand crafted instead of procedurally generated. This way something can be taken from each of the space games mentioned. Our own system is large enough and would be a ton of fun. human factions at war for territorial control and maybe even an out side alien invasion.
NeverknowsBest banger again. In the heat of battle he don't miss, In the heat of controversy he don't miss.
Finding out about Fuel Rats just made my day.
Elite has a substantial learning curve. The key binds menu is not intuitive. If you really get into Elite, you are probably going to get a HOTAS. The key binds menu makes a lot more sense because of the variety of different HOTAS out there. Once you get a control scheme that works for you, it's really something special. Nothing else comes close.
In the original version of Elite, you had to grind for hundreds of hours to get a new ship. And it was super tense because if you died you would lose several days of progress. And if you weren't careful to save enough cash to cover insurance, you would lose EVerYTHING.
And you could die very easily. Coming in a bit too hot when landing in a space station? Dead...
Accidentally pressing boost while leaving the station? Dead
Forgetting that you have illegal contraband? Get destoryed by station turrets.. Dead
When you were close to enough money for your upgrade, it was really fucking stressful.
I wonder what became of this game. I stopped after the first expansion. I bet they nerfed ship costs and boost earnings by a lot
Elite is a lot like a flight sim. It's not a pick up and go game. Learning how to control each vehicle is part of the game. Each ship controls totally differently
I don't think they nerfed any costs but there are definitely easy ways to make money. I played around 1-2 years ago and I remember the best way to make money as a new player was to tag ships for combat in a high res zone and let the authorities take out the pirates which would give you the bounty reward, you could make a few million this way in a couple hours. Getting the higher end ships (and god forbid fleet carriers) is still a big grind especially since you need a hell of a lot of reputation with the 2 big factions to even have the option to buy the corvette / cutter and then engineering is a whole thing in of itself, but its undeniable its gotten easier. There were some systems you could go to where you could pick up 20 missions to kill like 50 pirates, then when you kill 50 you could get hundreds of millions, especially if you did it with 3 other people to quadruple everyone's profits. I think that might have been nerfed but you can still get good money by mining in omicron capricorni b for platinum and stuff like that. its been a while since I played but I definitely had fun with it
@@technoboop1890Yeah when I played it wasn't possible to make that much money. The most expensive ship was the Anaconda, and it was almost impossible to get
Had BEAT FOR BEAT the same experience with Elite: Dangerous. I feel your pain. I'm desperate to love it but it makes it so hard at every single point. Anyway, incredible vid man. Loved this.
Actually you can visit sol in elite dangerous, you need to do a certain questline if I believe, it’s pretty cool actually you can visit the voyager probes
However infrequent the videos may be, I'm always happy to see you upload
"MUSHRUM" - rock and stone brother, rock and stone.
edit: this video really gets the heart of my personal experiences with all three of these games. I think it also helps me square why I've been so unsatisfied with a lot of mainstream criticism of starfield. So many people are talking about what it's missing based on expectations and comparisons to other space games without acknowledging that space games as a whole are an exercise in compromises. Starfield surely makes some missteps, and has a lot of missed opportunities that are easy to spot, but the sheer scope of the game as it is already dwarfs most other games, and at a certain point, you have to stop hoping for more, and start tempering your expectations around what is reasonable or likely. I really enjoyed starfield, and I think part of that was because I had played, loved, and been disappointed by ambitions space games in the past like elite, or NMS, or x3/x4. I knew that it wouldn't live up to my imagination of space, and so I tried to approach it more on its own terms as a followup to bethesda's other RPGs.
Fantastic video! Watched it to the near end and wanted to comment. Imagine in the distant future, people in space playing video games about living on Earth. Humbling thought.
I’ve played Elite Dangerous on and off for several years and NKB’s attempt to reach the center of the galaxy reminds me of a similar experience.
One day I got bored of my usual money making strategy of bounty hunting and decided to take a different kind of job - scan a planet and bring the data back for a significant payout, way higher than what I’d normally make through my usual combat missions, so I took it, not really thinking about how far away the planet might be. I bought myself a mid tier ship outfitted for exploration and started planning my route. To my surprise, I realized the job was taking me within a few jumps of Saggitarius A, a good 500-600something jumps there and back. Normally I’d have just cancelled the mission, but for some reason I decided to give it a shot.
I spent every night for the better part of a month jumping from system to system for about 2-3 hours at a time in order to make it there and back by the mission’s deadline, stopping only to scoop fuel from stars along the way or check out the occasional point of interest I’d stumble across. On the way back I nearly lost my ship when I got stuck in a White Dwarf’s gravity field. When I made it back home I made enough money to buy one of the largest ships in the game.
I wouldn’t say that all the time I spent jumping to and from the center of the galaxy was “fun”, but I can definitely say that no other game has ever managed to make me feel the enormity of it’s setting in the same way Elite Dangerous does.
"Humanity and Game Developers both" NeverKnowsBest letting us in on the Alien Game Dev conspiracy
The original multiplayer or rather co-op concept in No Mans Sky is absolutely brilliant, and has created an entirely new way to interact with a game. Instead of actually seeing others and running around with others, you collectively worked to achieve a goal. Being able to visit others bases and share in the resources they are collecting, yet never having to deal with others one-on-one is brilliant. An enormous amount of people refuse to play multiplayer games to preserve the pace of the game at exactly the pace they desire and to prevent interacting with the unavoidable jerks and this concept is a huge breath of fresh air for them. It is now amazing to see, and to build a base yourself. where the results of what has been learned and accomplished can be shared/passed on with the newer players. Brilliant!
For Elite, if your new to Space Sims, YEAH it's harsh. If your not then some things are known from other games, like tapping off your fuel so you don't run out but just like in real life some people don't watch their gauge and end up on the side of the road out of gas. ;)
But in general even if you know Space Sims you know they are often complicated so looking up a UI Guide is often key to success. Don't need any making money, combat, loadout, and etc guides that go over content. Just a video on like what all the menus on your ship do, how to hail people, land, and etc. It's a bit like picking up MS Flight Sim and being mad you don't know how to fly a jet liner. It's the type of game your getting into and most experienced in space sim know this, but someone new to genre might be expecting a simple combat sim like No Man's Sky.
Idk how long youve been there but i just noticed you hit 250k subs. Ive been with you since late 2019 and if i think you were around 80k at the time. Its well deserved my man. Keep it up
Small little nitpick from a person that sank real time months into the game (Visited both Beagle Point and Sag A*, triple elite etc. etc.): You can visit Sol, you just have to grind reputation with the federation, who hold control over that part of the bubble.
that was a whole lot of yapping lmao
This video is infuriating. Just someone struggling with modern games.
I think this was the kindest review of sea of stars I've seen all month