Three times in the last two days I have booted up Elite and quit playing it within 10 minutes because I just kept wondering "Why is this even worth it?". The first time, I went to 4 different systems looking for High Grade Emissions so I could farm more military alloys so that I could trade them for military supercapacitors so I could check off one more engineering grind before moving on to try to find Datamined Wake Exceptions and then Selenium and all of this so I can go engineer parts for a ship so that I can actually go do what I want to do, which is explore. I have spent at this point countless hours JUST DOING BUSYWORK SO THAT I CAN GO HAVE FUN DOING WHAT I WANT TO DO….which I have yet to actually really be able to do, so far!
The randomness of high grade emissions sources and not giving the right materials, having to drive the stupid SRV around collecting even more materials, all this grindy shit just to have fun. It's not worth it anymore, I fucking hate engineering. It was garbage when it came out and it's still garbage now. It took me over 100 hours just to unlock the main engineers, let alone do anything cool with their services. Engineering my jumpaconda took about 150 hours in total and I'm still not done.
Frontier is up with Activision and EA when it comes to how little they care about their players, how little they respect their players and their time, and how little effort they actually put into this game. I've been playing it since 2014 and it barely feels any different than it did when I started.
Sure there's more ships now and you can walk around a bunch of empty planets with not much to do, but there really still is no DEPTH to this game. There's no damn point to most of what there is to do. Space is boring, there's no threats except for the occasional glitch where you jump into a multi-star system through one of the stars, or the occasional unexpected neutron star cone. Where's the danger? Where's the cool shit to go look at and see? Oooh, space crystals..big whoop.
Mile wide and inch deep still. Not to mention, where's the community engagement? Frontier has devalued the story so much that Sag Eye stopped updating entirely, there IS no story outside of what few sentences some intern shit out on GalNet this week.
I was really looking forward to Odyssey too. It got me back into this game after a 3 year hiatus (I quit again when Salome was killed by CMDR Harry Potter, that and the whole initial return of the Thargoids was so much fun but THEY DON'T DO ANYTHING LIKE THAT ANYMORE.) but it was such a wet fart of an expansion that it was one of the few times I've ever felt actually ripped off. I've spent about 15 minutes total on my space legs because there's absolutely fuck-all worth doing on foot.
I think I'm done with this game unless the devs make major course corrections and honestly I don't think they will because they are targeting super grognards who played these games in the 80s and who have howling conniption fits at the mere thought of making it more accessible to people who don't have 3000 hours to spend just familiarizing themselves with the game.
