Video Gamers Podcast - Elite: Dangerous - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

Gaming Commanders Paul, Michael and Josh are engaging their frame shift drive and blasting off into the universe of Elite: Dangerous. Highly requested after Michael dubbed it one of his favorite games of all times, we do a full deep dive into one of gaming’s most popular entries in the space genre. Does it live up to Michaels insane gaming hype or does it fall flat for Josh and Paul? Lets just say emotions run high and this is one episode you absolutely can’t miss! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad   Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody, it's your favorite host of the show, Josh. I just wanted to say thanks for supporting me, for tuning in to listen to me, and if you want even more of me, check out the benefits of supporting me over at MultiplayerSquad.com. Now, I know what you're thinking, Josh, what about the other two guys that are on this podcast? Well, there's a great answer for that, except that the show is starting right now. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are a group of three dads who love to game, so we get together and have conversations about our favorite hobby, and we release episodes on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. If you've not already done so,

please make sure to rate our podcast five stars and leave a written review. It only takes a couple seconds, and it really helps our show grow and get discovered by others. And if you like what we do and you want more content, you can help support the show on Patreon. Support starts at $5 a month, and you'll get access to The Squadcast, a separate feed of bonus episodes that release twice a month. Today is a bonus round of mon- I'm sorry, today is a deep dive Monday, and we will be spending our entire episode talking about Elite Dangerous. My name is Paul, and I'll be your host or commander of today's episode. I'm joined here by my co-pilot, who is elite rank in combat because we all know that he loves dogfighting. It's Josh. I can't believe you didn't call me Goose, man. That would be very timely given the new movie coming out. I want to see that movie by the way.

I do too. All right, let's go. Let's go right now. That's yeah. All right. See you guys. Stop. Oh boy.

And then I'm also joined here by the man who has 862 hours on record in elite dangerous. I know because I just checked steam a couple hours ago. Let's just give him honorary triple elite status for combat trading and exploration it's michael i believe i do have elite status in all three of those um i also have elite status uh the last time that you correctly introduced this podcast as a bonus round you guys remember what happened last week when we had a bonus round you remember what? There was a tournament? Nothing memorable. That was a good episode.

Was there a tournament? I won! I don't think so. I won it! I'm the boss! Now, because I'm such a professional, I did not break, but I believe the two of you were trying to get me to laugh during the introduction. We would never, Paul. We're never paul we're professionals never make indecent gestures towards you while you're doing

the introduction i do appreciate the attempts to sabotage the show even though it was not successful i mean i don't know it kind of was right. So before we hop into Elite Dangerous, we do have a little bit of housekeeping, which is always fun. Guys, we have another new Legendary supporter. This is becoming a pretty regular thing here on these Monday episodes. But we want to give a very big shout out to Glapsadier. He is a very long term listener of the show. He's been in our discord for forever and he bumped himself up to legendary so we did want to give him a shout out and say thank you

yes clap thank you i i'm gonna give clap his moment in the sun because i think he deserves it clap is an awesome member of the community as much as i love to troll clap uh we're glad you're around clap thank you for you for supporting the show. We really do appreciate it. Dude, these legendary shout outs, man. I love that they are becoming such a regular thing. So if you want to support the show, you can do that over at MultiplayerSquad.com.

If you want to have all the power to get us to play a game of your choosing, that is one of the perks that you get when you become legendary, among many, many others. But it's pretty fun to be able to say, I am going to make you guys play this game. It doesn't mean we're going to like it. We're still going to give it an honest deep dive, but it is one of the huge perks. But Glap, thank you. Thank you to all of our other legendary supporters, our epic tier supporters, our rare tier supporters. And even if you're not supporting the show, you're listening right now, and that's still supporting the show. Yeah, absolutely. And Glap, I think, was the first person to ever email me when we started

giving out our email address. He really is one of the ogs of the multiplayer gaming podcast so we're more than happy to give a shout out now he has not yet picked a deep dive game correct he has not correct all right so we're still waiting in suspense do you guys have any guesses for what he might pick it'll be something weird i wouldn't put it past him to pick fortnight even though i don't think he likes it either but i feel like somebody will it's so funny because people keep talking about making us play fortnight or some you know another game like that and and it's funny but then nobody ever does it's like dude bring it like i mean that's part of the fun is you get to pick the game so if you want to make us play the craziest game ever we will that's true and we also will play a game we've already played and give it a second look as well

because we have our top 71 now? I think 72? We currently have 71. After today, it will be 72. That's insane. And so we'll go revisit because I think Fortnite's on there. And as much as I'd rather, I don't know, hit myself in the

face with a frozen tuna fish or something like that uh then play fortnight i'll still play fortnight and i'll have a great time and i'll commit to at least 20 hours in it so let's do it whatever you guys want if you're legendary we uh we do what you say it's true and uh we have not yet done a deep dive on fortnight but if you want us to it's not going to happen unless you become legendary all right now j, I think you've got some reviews to read that people have left the show. I do always love reading these, man. Y'all out there know how I feel about these reviews.

It's awesome to read these. Okay, so this first one comes in from overseas, which is awesome, by the way. I love seeing our brethren over there across the pond, as we say. So this first one is titled Love the Podcast. It comes in from Maybe Vincent, and it says, very nice. Thumbs up. I'm 12. I live in England, and I listen to the podcast all the time. I just got an iPhone iPhone and the very first thing I did is send you a review. Yes. P.S. Pancakes rule.

Sorry, Paul. It was tight, but not really. That's all right. People are allowed to like pancakes more than waffles. It's a bad take, but it's one that you're all free to have. Oh, okay. And then this next one is titled long time listener finally reviewing now thank you by the way because that's

what we like to see and it comes in from saul good 1974 and it says i've listened from the beginning i've enjoyed listening to things mondays and Thursdays. The hosts seem to be genuine guys, except they claim to be old, and they've never once referenced any truly older games like any of the Wing Commander series or Microprose games. How many hours did you play that exploding banana monkey game in Cubase? Check this podcast out. There is personality discussion, laughs, and good fun to be had. Thank you for your

work guys sal on discord what are the odds i just mentioned wing commander in our very last recording and i did not see that review i mean that is hilarious i talked about dancing demon from the trs 80 days so right we talked about oregon trail that's from like 1971 the micropros games i it's like man i know that name i had to actually google like some of the games but they 80 days. So right. We talked about Oregon trail. That's from like 1971. I will say the Microprose games. It's like, man, I know that name. I had to actually Google like some of the games,

but they make all the old strategy games. And I have played quite a few of those back in the day as well. Um, but yeah, love our love, uh, the seasoned gamers, uh,

as we like to call them or just old. Like you guys call me all the time. Like ourselves. Yeah. I was going to say Saul good 1974. i'm guessing that's a birth year so that does make you a little older than all three of us but you're you're you're relatively close to josh right he's more on the he's more on the josh side than the paul and michael side oh man oh man all right well yeah thank you so much to saul good and maybe Vincent.

We love getting those reviews. Keep them coming in. We love reading them on the show. All right. I think it's time, guys. Let's deep dive Elite Dangerous. Let's get into it. All right.

I've got the Wikipedia description of Elite Dangerous right here, and here is what it reads. Elite Dangerous is a spaceflight simulation game developed and published by Frontier Developments. The player takes the role of a pilot, colloquially referred to as Commander, of a spaceship, and explores a realistic one-to-one scale open-world representation of the Milky Way Galaxy with the massively multiplayer gameplay being open-ended. All right, now, it's no surprise, Michael, this is one of your all-time favorite games, right? I mean, this is essentially why we're covering it. You drafted it with the very first pick for Best Space Game. Josh and I had to hit you with the news that we had never played it before. We had to vote it out. It did not win the tournament, but that did start laying some of the seeds here

for us to cover it on the show. Yeah, I hate this game because of how much I like this game because it has sucked so much of my time. Absolutely one of my all-time favorites. Very thrilled that we finally did this deep dive. I actually can't peel myself away from it lately. I've played it a little bit more over the last couple weeks. And I think I'm, as Josh said, I think I cracked down on it pretty good for a long time. And I think I may continue to do so

in between the games we have to play for our deep dives and so forth. Yeah. I went to go see what percentage of achievements you have gotten in Elite Dangerous, and there's no achievements in Steam. I was so sad because I was very curious to see how much you've actually done in this game. It's your second most played in your Steam library, and Josh and I are definitely the noobs here. We have not played nearly as much as you, Michael. So with you being the Elite Dangerous expert, how about I let you tell the people what this game is all about how would you describe it to someone who's never heard of elite dangerous okay so it's basically just an open universe or open galaxy like an open world complete sandbox like real

sandbox there's not really quests that you do you go get missions but you can get missions from almost any starport that you have um ultimately if i, if I were not to get too in the weeds on this, I'd say that you can pretty much do almost anything you want, whatever you want to do that's within the realm of this world or this galaxy, which is based, by the way, on the real Milky Way galaxy. So the Wikipedia description was correct. If you go to a different star system, it's a real star system. You can go to Andromeda.

You can go to all these places but basically it's the world is your oyster like you can do what you want if you want to go and just basically trade commodities and make money that way you can do that you can go and do combat um you can uh influence different political factions there's like nine different factions in the game and if you want to these factions actually depend on missions that you do so if you're like hey i want this faction to take over this system, and you do enough missions there for that faction and do things that make them more powerful,

you upset the balance of power. And it's entirely 100% player-driven. There's a little bit of aliens in it. The aliens are called Thargoids. You can go fight them if you want to, or you can just fight other players like a pirate. You can really do a lot of what you want to do, all whilst upgrading your ships, putting better weapons on them, engineering them later on if you want the weapons and

engines and stuff to be even better. But you can fine-tune any spaceship to fly pretty much however you want it to go. And that's pretty much it. It's basically whatever the heck you want to do whilst in kind of a flight simulator that's a full combat game yeah i think it's one of those games where there is so much to do you have to sink a lot of time into this game just to even scratch the surface josh i know this game was on your radar a lot more than mine i think you were very excited to pick this game up i was you were already aware of the fact that you could be a pirate so do you think that's an apt description does that kind of match the game that you could be a pirate. So do you think that's an apt description? Does that kind of match the game that you played? It does, in a way. I was very excited. I mentioned when Michael brought up this game in our Best Space Games episode. I said, I've had my eye on Elite

Dangerous for a very long time. I've looked at it repeatedly. I have seen some of the negative comments about it. I asked Michael about that. He says, yeah, there is some flying back and forth and stuff like that. And I said, well, maybe one day I'll pick it up. Well, then once Michael mentioned it, everybody went crazy about it. And they were like, you guys got to play it. And we said, okay, what a perfect excuse to dive in and start playing this game. I will say that I am coming at this game from a person that has played for about 15 hours. This game is massive. Michael, you have 862 hours and you got your buddy to hop in to try to teach us some of the ropes and he had like 4,000 hours?

Yeah, something like that. There's a lot. So this game is massive. I am approaching this game from the newbie perspective, because I can't put 4,000 hours into this game or 800 hours because we have other games to play. Right, exactly. So it's one of these things where my viewpoints are solely going to be from a person that has put in about 15 hours, which I get doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. And so Michael is much more versed than we are in this. I will say that I did some of the, what did you call it? The agriculture quests or the trade quests or whatever.

I ferried some stuff back and forth between a couple of space stations. I went out into the universe and located like a blown up ship that had a black box that was floating around that one of the factions really wanted to recover. Um, I did get into a few dog fights with some space pirates. I immediately got my butt kicked by apparently a ship I should not have engaged. Um, you know, and so I did get to fly to some different systems and kind of get a general idea of how the game kind of just goes, I guess. Yeah, I think the one thing that threw me off a little bit is I had not watched any video footage. I did not read anything about this game. All I knew

about Elite Dangerous are just the little bits and pieces I've heard from Michael or from people in Discord. And if you had a continuum from simulation on the left all the way to an arcade combat space game on the far right, like Star Wars Squadrons, this game is very, very far to the left. It's very much a simulation game. I think in my mind, I was expecting it to be a little bit more action-oriented as opposed to this game allows you to kind of just RP, being a person who's out in space with your own chip. You do whatever you want. You play in the sandbox. It's not necessarily action-focused. and that was the one thing that i think kind of took me a little bit by surprise that i didn't totally know now another thing i did not know about elite dangerous is that it's actually one entry in one of the longest running gaming series

of all time what do you guys know this is the fourth entry this goes all the way back to september 1984 with the very first game called elite i had no idea so we actually had talked about doing the we did the best standalone games a few weeks ago or a month ago or so and i was like oh elite dangerous and i'm like wait that's like the fourth entry never mind really i had i had zero clue so you're telling me there's games in the series, are they all space-oriented? Do they all follow the same premise? Dude, not only do they follow the same premise, I went and looked up footage of 1984 Elite, and at its core, it is exactly the same game. Obviously, today, it looks way better. It's far more detailed. It's gorgeous compared to 1984.

But at its core, you have the exact same mini map in the bottom middle. You've got your little computers to the left and right tracking your fuel and speed. And it has 360 degree. You fly around and run these missions with fighting or buying different goods that you then can sell in other systems. At its core, it is absolutely the same game, which really cracked me up. But yeah, the very first one came out when I was only six months old. That's when the series started. It's almost a 40-year-old gaming series. The second one is called Frontier Elite 2, which came out in 93.

The third one is called Frontier First Encounters. I don't know who named this gaming series. And then we get Elite Dangerous in 2014 after a couple of years of crowdfunding. So apparently this game had a lot of trouble getting a publisher to put the game out and so they ended up raising 1.6 million pounds which would be about 2.6 million dollars and the game itself actually ended up costing more than four times that wow yeah now were you guys aware of when elite dangerous was being developed or not, when did you first hear about it? I had heard about it, I think, sometime around when it released. I think I did hear about the Kickstarter. Maybe they had an early access or something like that. It's one of those things

where I have heard of this game for a long time. I just didn't know anything about it. And by the time it came out, I was playing other stuff. I do remember looking at it because historically, we talk about X-Wing versus TIE Fighter and that series. I love space games in general. I like space combat. I like the freedom of discovering planets and flying to space stations and stuff like that. So it seemed very much up my alley. I remember in the beginning looking up reviews, and at least in my mind, the overwhelming complaint that I saw was just, it takes forever to fly from point A to point B. And unless you like staring at your screen and watching stars fly by, there's not a lot going on. Now, I don't know how accurate that is. I've played it now.

So I mean, I do have some understanding. But I remember that being a little bit off-putting. And I was like, it seems like this game's a little boring to a lot of people. And so I think it just fell off my radar at that point. right before I got my new VR headset, I forget what it's called, the Valve Index, right? And I was like, I want to find something that looks beautiful in VR. And I was just going through, we have Slack channels at work. And I was going through and somebody was like, oh, talking about this game Elite Dangerous and how some new expansion was about to come out. And somebody's like, oh yeah, I play it in VR. And I was like, wait, a space game in VR?

And they're like, when did it come out in VR? They're like, years ago. Like, where have you been you been and i'm like i have to play this right now and so you can play it in vr or not vr which i do both and i picked it up instantly honestly probably less than two years ago so 864 hours or whatever in less than two years honestly most of that was over a year ago i put all that in a year um i only recently picked it back up so oh nice yeah and then josh and i just picked it up about two and a half three weeks ago something like that all right so we all launched the game for the very first time all right michael a couple years ago me and josh just a couple weeks i'm sorry michael a couple years ago me and josh a couple weeks ago and you hop into this game for the very first time

what do you remember as being your earliest impressions oh sweet heck what do i do i have no idea what to do like what do i do like there's so many buttons there's not really a tutorial and i it was it my first impression of this game was it's overwhelming and and it's it's exactly what paul said much more on the simulator side. If you've ever played the simulator, let's talk about Microsoft Flight Simulator X or whatever it's called now, where you're like, how do I even start this airplane? How do I even start the plane?

It's a lot like that. And that was it. I'm like, how do I get to the combat? I want to go fight stuff. And that was my initial reaction. Yeah, I did the tutorial they do it is nice because you get in the ship i remember thinking this game's it looks great i you know the graphics were very nice and the sound was good and so early impressions were like it seems

like a very well done like modern space game um it does teach you how to fly and how to target stuff and how to shoot things so initially i was was like, Ooh, okay, this game is going to be great. Like I get to dog fight and do all this and I've got lasers. And I remember thinking it was a little weird that I had to like deploy my lasers on these things called hard points. And I was like, dang, this game's getting like realistic here. And then I tried to like fly real fast with my lasers out and they were like, no, no, no, you can't do that. And I was like, Oh, I got to put them away.

And it was like, yeah, yeah. You got to put your lasers away before you can go fast. And I was like, okay, much power. Right. And then, so it was like, so then finally it turns me loose and it says, okay, you pass the training. Congratulations. You've got your permit. Go fly to the space station. And I went, okay, well, wait, how do I do that? Where's the space station at? And it's like, oh, we'll just pull up, open your galaxy map. And I'm like, wait, how do I do that? Where is the space station at? And it's like, oh, well, just pull up, open your galaxy map. And I'm like, okay, which of the buttons is that? Surely it's M, right?

Right. Yeah. No, it's not M, you know? And then it's like, okay, so I finally pull up in the map and there's 5,000 star systems. And then this is when the magic started to go away for me. Because my impression very quickly went from, oh, this is going to be a cool space combat game where I can fly around and check out planets and pirate people, to a massive frustration in control schemes and complications and things being overly engineered and complicated to the point where at one point I finally figured out where the space station was and I tried to fly to the space station and I overshot the space station by I

don't know how many light years I went oops, oops. I looked up, had a throttle down. Couldn't figure that out. Turned my ship around. Couldn't engage my warp drive because it told me my lasers were out. Which button puts my lasers away? And then it just became this like, ah, I just want to go to the freaking space station. You know what I mean? And then like literally i remember

just going like this game is stupid i can't do anything i i finally made it to the space station i docked i was so excited and then my ship just stops and a menu pops up and says okay well what do you want to do and i go i don't know can i get out and walk around and it's like oh no no you're stuck in your ship well then what do i do at this space station uh you can trade with somebody okay how do i do that we'll open up these five menus figure out which 18 buttons to press and then and then you can get a quest and i got a quest and it was like hey we want you to take this we want you to go get some grain and bring it back. And super easy. Eight hours later, I have not figured out where to find grain. I finally figured out.

I got another quest where it said, hey, we want you to take these materials and go drop them off at that space station that you started at. Now, I can do this. I am a grown man that is intelligent. I can do this. I flew back to the initial space station. I got there. I landed. I was so proud of myself.

And I went to the trading thing and I said, here is your fish. And then they went, you don't have any fish. And I said, the heck I do. I just picked it up at the other space station. They said, no, man, you don't have any fish. I spent another two hours figuring out why I didn't have fish. You know why? Because when they gave me the quest,

I had to accept the fish that they were going to put in the hold of my ship. And I didn't know that. So I didn't accept the fish. So I spent three hours flying back and forth for nothing. This was when Josh started DMing me in in discord and i had not yet played oh josh got in there first and josh he wasn't like mad or upset or anything he's like paul i've played this game for three hours and all i've done is go back and forth between these two places six times i'm doing something wrong certainly the game is not just this. And then that was when

we finally told Michael, I think you're going to have to give us some kind of tutorial because the game does hit you with a lot right away in the beginning. I definitely noticed when hopping in that the game was far more complicated than I realized. And they do hit you right off the bat before you get let loose in the open world. They run you through how many tutorials? Eight? Eight thousand. There's so many, so many tutorials that I was actually glad that they did that because it put me in the right mindset where I was,

okay, this is not squadrons where you just hop in and start pointing at stuff and clicking to fight. This is going to be more like No Man's Sky times 10 in regards to learning curve, and we're going to have to figure all of this out. This game, my early impression was this requires a lot of research outside of the game i continually had a google screen open on my second monitor and i was continually looking up either the buttons i needed to press or why am i landlocked and what does that mean or why can i not do a hyperspace jump and the the game itself did it was a little bit of, I can't think of the right phrase, but it did suck the air out of the balloon a little bit for me as well. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. All right. So Josh mentioned a little bit about the controls. We've already mentioned a little bit about it. I feel like we have to talk about the controls of Elite dangerous now first of all michael i know that you told me that you you play with a controller and mouse and keyboard right that's correct you almost have i love this this is this is the funniest thing i've heard in my life which go ahead and talk about do you use which one i said which third arm do you use well so you primarily play on the controller and then

you have a lot of keyboard commands. A lot of times it's easier just to use the keyboard for certain things. For instance, I still haven't figured out, after 864 hours, how to go... The Galaxy, obviously, is like a big... It's a big disk, essentially. It's flat, but there are still stars on top of stars and below stars, and I still haven't figured out how to go up and down on the Galaxy Map without using the mouse.

But it is easier sometimes when you're going to Super Cruise and Super Cruise Assist, and then if you want to do scanning, you want to use the B button on the keyboard, because I don't know what to do with it on the controller. It's a lot of, like Paul said, very simulator-esque, where there's a whole bunch of different buttons and commands. You can play with just a controller. But I do find it a lot easier to use a lot of keyboard commands as well, if you can remember which ones you're going to use.

Yeah. Now, Josh, did you try to use controller or did you go straight keyboard and mouse? I played with controller because I think I spent maybe five minutes with keyboard and mouse and then realized controller is going to be way better for this. You need the sticks on the controller. You need the throttle from the triggers or whatever. You know what I mean? The controllers just lend itself way better to this game, in my opinion. So I did go with controller. I will say that flying around feels great. I've got a lot to say about this game but the the flying it's responsive like what you know the yaw the roll all that stuff feels like a spaceship should feel in my mind thrusting physics right this is so incredible like you don't stop when you stop you're going

to continue going until you turn your ship around and tell it to go the other way like newton's law and so forth yeah yeah and it, so when you finally are able to get to a space station after like 40 hours of Googling tutorials and stuff, you have to fly through, they will autopilot you in, which I think is a really neat thing. But if you want, you can just fly in. Well, I don't know how to land. I don't know how to do anything. So I let them autopilot me in, but it's time for me to leave, to go not take my fish back to the first space station.

And you can autopilot out. And I'm like, but it tells me I have four minutes of a queue before I can leave the station due to traffic. And I'm thinking, well, this is, wow, they're really taking this thing to the next level simulation wise. Because if it was a real space station, I'm sure I can't just blast off and go whenever I want. So, okay. You need clearance. Right. Exactly.

Right. And so I'm like, okay. So I waited like two minutes and then I'm like, I don't see any ships leaving. Like, this is stupid. I'm going to go. And, and so I just throttled up and they were like, Hey, you're not supposed to do that. You're speeding. And I'm like, I'm out of here, man. And so, but the controls are

great because i remember like zooming through the little gate shield mail slot yeah the mail slot yeah i remember zooming through that and i was like oh yeah i did it man and then i started rolling because i was like yeah this is gonna look so cool and so the controls the game feels good my one complaint about the controllers or the controls and a controller is that nothing is intuitive. If I want to pull up my access panel that will pull up a map or the scan of the system, which is really just a weird list. There's nothing visual there, really. It's like left on the thumb stick or the thumb pad plus X. I got stuck because I didn't know how to put my lasers away,

I kept putting sensors out and lasers away, and I just wanted to fly and I didn't know what the heck was going on. And then, oh, I wanted to warp is what it was. And it says, well, you got to get up to speed before you can warp. And I said, okay, well, let me get up to speed. And it said, oh, well, you can't get up to speed while your lasers are out. And then like, well, how the heck do I do that do that guess what it's up on the thumb pad and why like everything is this weird combo of controls and i don't remember any of that stuff man yeah and

that's ultimately why i use a lot of mouse and keyboard mouse and keyboard as well is because all of those controls that you can use on the controller are like a single letter or number on the keyboard and so i'm like okay b does this c does this and so that's kind of how i do it because i'm like i don't i don't remember how to put my hard points out well i know now i believe it's hold down a and press up while whilst doing a little dance and spinning around your chair yeah um and then singing a song that matches the tone of the engines i think the engine harmonics i believe that's how you do it. But it's really complicated with a lot of the... Now, what they wanted to do, obviously, was make it so you could do everything from the

controller. But there's so many things on the ship that you have to run and manage. Let alone, have you guys even transferred power before? From engines to life support to... That was the easiest thing for me because I've played a lot of X-Wing and TIE Fighter and Star Wars Squadrons where it's like, hey, I've got to divert power to the lasers. I've got to divert power to the engines. That was a piece of cake for me because I had lots of experience doing that.

Pulling up a galaxy map, putting away my hard points, trying to warp. I remember screaming at my monitor at one point because I was like, I just want to go. And it kept saying, press up and Y. And I i press up and y and it would switch to scanners but then i and then it's like well you can't fly with your scanners out and then i'm like i'm pushing up and why it's like yeah so yeah and there's two different kinds of warps too because there's your super cruise which is like inside the system and there's the one where you go to a different system which is a whole different kind of warp and they're both very similar commands too yeah the only other game that i've seen like this is escape from tarkov in regards to controls it really does use your entire keyboard and that that's how i played i

did do mouse and keyboard because your friend michael said he plays with keyboard and mouse he thought that was easiest and I just stuck with it. But this game has separate buttons for your landing gear, your cargo scoop, your ship lights, activating your heat sinks. And these are all using buttons like Home. I've never pressed Home in a game ever in my life, but I have now because of Elite Dangerous. So it does require a hefty investment

just to learn the button scheme and i found myself continually the game would tell you put away your hard points and i'm like oh i i i i just tried six buttons and none of them worked i better go check the key bindings again because i just don't know yeah and so those it does require a pretty high learning curve and we are going to get more into that in just a minute but let's talk a little bit about the different kinds of missions that you can run all right so josh kind of mentioned you can fly around to various spaceports there are different factions they will give you different missions so it's not like a sandbox with no direction at all you know they do give you different missions. So it's not like a sandbox with no direction at all. They do give you missions. There are options like bounty hunting, assassinations,

carrying passengers, all kinds of stuff you can do. Were there any types of missions in particular that you guys found most interesting or least interesting so i i never do um there are certain missions i never do i don't ever do the data missions because i just i don't like them it's like go out and scan this and i'm like i don't want to scan that i want to go kill pirates or go move things most of the things that i do in the game i do like one of three things um because you can actually go and actually actually just go out and free explore and bring back data from what you've scanned and sell that stuff for money i like doing that um but again you've got to have a ship that you've made that was designed for d space but really what i like

to do is two things one i love doing the combat missions that's my favorite thing and so everything that i do in the game is to build a better combat ship and so how I make money in the game is by doing a lot of those, go pick up 600 of this ore from another space station and bring it back. And I do a lot of that stuff where it's like, okay, so get 600 palladium and you'll make 50 million off of this. And I look for a lot of that stuff.

But the thing is, is that the missions scale up as you go. So when you're a beginner and you don't have a lot of faction with a certain... Well, a lot of rapport. What am I looking for? Yeah, rapport. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

You don't have a lot of rapport with a certain faction. Reputation. Reputation. That's what I'm looking for. If you don't have a lot of reputation with a certain faction, then you can't get the good money missions on doing that. So you got to do the little ones over and over again. And then you get the big good ones and you can make lots of money and build better ships.

So most of it's like doing back and forth stuff, getting stuff, and then going out and upgrading my ship so I can kill pirates better or go kill Thargoids better. And that's most of the missions that I like to do. I stay away from the data ones because unless I really have to do it, I don't want to. Go scan this thing. Go land on a planet and scan this it's like it's a lot of time for not much reward you kind of feel like you're just being an executive assistant for that faction right they're just giving you're just being their gopher they're like just fly there and just fly right back those aren't the most interesting what about you josh um so i tried to do a variety of missions because i get that this is kind of like, play this game how you want.

And I told you guys from the beginning, like, I just want to be a space pirate. Like, I just, I want to be, I want to find other players and then like hold them at gunpoint and say, give me your cargo and then still blast them after they do, you know, or something like that. Right. So I, but I did want to try to experience as many different missions as I can. I definitely did a good bit of the, take something from the space station, deliver it to that space station. It is a good way to make money, but I found those to be very boring because I don't feel like I'm really accomplishing anything. That part almost reminded me of Sea of Thieves in the sense where it's like, what do I get for all this time?

Oh, well, you get some gold. Now, I know, and that's not to say that there's not massive progression in this game, because I know that there is, but I just found it to be very mundane. I did get excited when I did a couple of those, and then it unlocked some more mission types for me. I mentioned that I did try to do a bounding, and I went out and found the ship and then I attacked it and then they blew me to smithereens. And then I was like, apparently I'm either

way too weak for that guy or I did something wrong. And then I did another one, which is maybe this is what Michael was talking about. I had to go scan a black box. So I think maybe that was the data retrieval. Yeah, that's the data stuff. I don't like that one as much. So I, you know, but it paid good. And I was like, Ooh, okay. So I went out, I found this black box. I, again, I didn't know how to warp to it. I finally, I finally found it. I overshot it. I turned around. I tried to warp back. It told me, Hey, you're going to be 20 minutes away at your current speed. So I said, Oh, how do I engage my hyperdrive again? After 10 minutes of fumbling around and looking in the key bindings, I engaged my

hyper drive. I flew past it again. I turned around and it said, yeah, well, now you're 24 minutes away from this black box. And I went, okay. So I spent literally like 15 minutes just slow flying towards this thing so that I could finally get there because I didn't know how to come out of warp drive at the right time. I finally find this black box. I have no idea what to do with it. I don't know where my scanners are. I like, am I supposed to blow it up? Like, what am I supposed to do with this thing? So maybe I'm like, I'm not close enough to it. So I hit my thrusters. I crashed into the black box. It explodes. Mission over. And then I went, oh, man.

Okay, well, lesson learned. I go out. I pick up another black box mission. I finally know how to get to the black box because this is after your buddy kind of hopped in and taught us how to do this. And he taught me how to warp. You got to drop out of warp within seven seconds or you'll overshoot things. So I find this black box. I'm parked in front of it. I'm 30 meters away. I'm like, guys, I finally did it. And I'm

sitting there and nothing is happening. I Google how to use my scanners. I scan this thing. It's the black box. I don't know what to do with it. I two hours into a play session I'm staring at this black box I've googled to the ends of the earth I don't know what to do with this I finally find a reddit thread where some poor schlub like me is like what the heck do I do with this black box and they're like oh well you need an inventory scoop

or I don't know some kind of scoop you need a scoop on your ship and that's when the rage just slowly started to build inside of me. And I went, what is this game? Why would you give me a mission to get a black box and not tell me that my ship needs a scoop to pick up the black box? And that is when I started texting Paul.

Michael, I didn't want to text you because I wanted this to be a surprise. I started texting Paul and I said, Paul, I hate this game. This is the worst game I have ever played in my life. And Paul is just laughing and he's like, why?

And I said, I just stared at this black box for two hours trying to figure out what to do with it, only to realize that my ship doesn't have the stuff to get the stinking black box. Your ship should start with an inventory scoop. It does not. So I think yours, the side burner, doesn't have one? It does not. It does.

It comes with a scoop. No, I pushed every freaking button on my keyboard to try to scoop up that stupid black box and I never got it. So you know what I did? I shot that black box into oblivion and that was it. Well, the funniest thing too is later on, actually pretty early

on, you can get little limpet drones that will just go out and collect things for you. I found the thread on Reddit that told me to do that, but I was three hours deep into raging at this game at that point. I'm really curious what... I'm really curious where this is... I'm wondering where this game is going to land for both of you. I have an idea where it's going to land,

especially if you only got 15 hours. I'm not even sure if you make it out of the tutorial at that point. What about you, Paul? What kind of missions do you like? Dude, I tried to do a little bit of everything. The one thing that did really make me laugh is I could be remembering this wrong,

but I took a mining mission, I believe. And when I got there, there were like eight ships around me that were all fighting each other. And all of them would message me hey what you got in your cargo over there buddy and then they'd be like oh you got nothing you're not worth you're not you're not worth even worrying about and so then like none of them would engage with me which i thought was funny uh i tried to dabble in all of them a little bit

honestly the amount of time that you have to put into this game i found to be rather crippling since i knew i had such a limited amount of time you know josh has already made it very clear his thoughts on this game i was going to bring up one of one of his comments that he sent me do it here's do it do it he said josh josh rants about the black box mission all right and then he tells me that he's never wanted to refund a game so bad in his life but then he he knows he has to keep playing so so this is like josh's you know uh stages of grief when he comes to acceptance so i'm thinking i'm just gonna keep playing and hating every second of this game and absolutely blast it during the deep dive this is the most ridiculously stupid complex for no reason

game i've ever played i hate every aspect of it i don't know how anyone can enjoy this so that's where josh is coming from you know, I think so much more fun with friends. I got to say that. I got to say. So here's the thing. I think there are good things to say about Elite Dangerous, and we're going to cover some of that stuff. And I want Michael to tell us what fun you can have in the end game. I think most people really do like this game. For me, as a late 30s dad with multiple jobs and limited time, to me,

at what point do you learn this game? I'm checking Reddit threads like Josh, and someone said, hey, here's a list of 50 things you might not know about Elite Dangerous. And the very first one says, there's a little indicator to the top left of your compass that leads you into the spaceport where you're supposed to park. And there were 28 comments of people saying, I have 2,000 hours in this game, and I never knew that. And that kind of tells you the level of complexity in this game. So if you want to play something that is highly technical, high simulation, and you don't mind pouring a couple hundred hours just to learn the game, then this game will give you everything you could ever want. You can live inside Elite Dangerous. You're never going to run out of stuff to explore and go find. For me, though, even after a good 12 hours, I still felt like I had

no clue what I was doing. And I was like, if we weren't doing this for the show, I would have given up 10 hours before because I simply just found the learning curve too high of a price to get into. It might be the greatest game ever. I don't know that I want to pay the price of playing 400 hours to get to that point, if that makes sense. And that's the tough part about it is the learning curve is high. And I think the reason why the learning curve is so high is because it really is a simulator. Like in a lot of ways, it's very complex.

There are many things you can do. And the idea is to be able to do all these things in a realistic way without making it like X-Wing versus TIE Fighter, where it's like you can do one thing with your ship. You can fly and you can shoot. You know what I mean? And so I think that's a lot of it. The complexities get way farther. I think we're going to go into those. So I'll talk about that later on because I'm pretty sure if I say like engineering a spaceship, you guys probably have no idea what i'm talking about uh gathering ore to upgrade things uh fuel stuff like that like probably no idea because it's it's

funny when you say like 10 or 12 or 15 hours like i'm like is that even past the tutorial because the game is it's there are probably things 800 hours in that i still have not done in this game and i've done everything i think i And I've done everything, I think. I think I've done everything. Well, tell us a little bit about the fun that comes later once you know what you're doing in this game. When you're not fumbling like someone who's blind in the middle of an obstacle course. I mean, that's honestly how playing this game felt. So once you learn what's going on, what are the joys that can be found in late game content?

So one of the coolest things about it is once you understand what's going on, and you've... I love upgrading my ships. I love buying all the ships. I have different ships for different things. For instance, I think I have what's called an Alliance Challenger, which is my favorite fighting ship. It kind of looks like a helicopter thing with a bunch of... It walks like a dog or something like that, but it a bunch of... It walks like a dog or something like that, but it's got engines on it, like the feeder engines. I don't know where I'm going with this. But long story short, it's really nimble. It's really fun. Some people like to upgrade. They're really big ships that are really slow, but have lots of hard points on them.

Once you get past all that stuff, and you're doing things like that, one of my favorite things to do is pay attention to... there's news. Like if you look to the right panel, you can literally at any point push play and you'll hear galactic news. And it's always different. It's like they have someone that just produces a fake news channel for this game. And it talks about things that are happening in this real universe. Like you'll hear him talk about Zachary Hudson, the head of one of the alliances, one of the factions. And like there's things happening. Like when I stopped playing

about a year ago, there was this big summit that was happening next to Earth. I think it was happening in Alpha Centauri. And it was the first time ever that all seven of these factions in what's called the Bubble, which is basically like the known galaxy, got together and actually were trying to come up with a peace treaty. And then all of a sudden, there was a Thargoid attack. And the Thargoids are these aliens that live out in deep space. They've never attacked before. Everyone's like, oh my goodness, what are they doing in the bubble? They shouldn't be here.

What happened? And then you find out later on, it's a terrorist attack that happened. And they were trying to get us to go to war with the Thargoids so they could upset the... They were basically framing the Thargoids and trying to upset the balance of power in the bubble. Things like that, when you actually kind of understand the game and you know what you want to do with it. I do some mining. I've got a mining ship.

But it's really cool to go and immerse yourself in that universe and say, oh my goodness, I've got to go help. And there's these seven space stations that these terrorists attacked on attacked i spent three days literally outfitting a cruise ship guess because i have a cruise ship because there's there's cruise ship passenger missions um and if you pick up an illegal person who's like a smuggler or something like that or someone who's wanted by the law and you take it through a normal spaceport you can get arrested for transport of that person so if you know that they're they're a felon then you have you have to jam the systems of the space station. But anyways, sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. But I literally took a cruise ship and for three days rescued people off of these... It was real.

Rescued people off of these space stations, and then went back and kept listening to the news about what was happening with this giant summit and these terrorists and stuff. And then we went out and fought some Thargoids too. Like it's, there's so much in the universe that once you understand, and again, that's why like, that's just something I like to do, but other people will just go out and literally just go and attack other

players. Or like in, in, in Paul's instance where he was out and those pirates came by, I like to go out and pretend that I'm going to mine something. And then when a pirate comes up, he's like, Hey,

what you got? And I'm like, you're dead, you like to go out and pretend that I'm going to mine something. And then when a pirate comes up, he's like, hey, what you got? And I'm like, you're dead. And just attack space pirates. That's the thing is, what do I want to do today? What do I want to do today in the game? But I do love the lore because it's all player-based. So that terrorist attack wouldn't have happened if these other balances of power, the different factions, weren't in the right place at the right time because other players had done faction missions that helped them encroach on other territories where we needed a peace treaty in the first place. And it's kind of a cool thing. My buddy Jason, who is the one we refer to as the guy that kind of got us all started as far as helping us, he helped me remember some of the controls and helped Paul and Josh play the game. His MO is he's got, I don't know if they call it a guild,

but he's got a group of people he plays with and they just go kill Thargoids, which are scary, scary, big, giant alien things out there. And they have bounties for them. Like if you can prove that you killed a basilisk, then they'll give you a certain amount of credits. It's like, there's things like that. There's so much to do. That's what I love about the game. But the learning curve is very steep. It's a price to pay to get into it.

At the time, I had the time. I was living alone because my wife had already moved out to Phoenix, and I had tons of time. And I'm like, this is a great game for me to just dive into and waste time every single night just doing this. And then once you get past that learning curve, though, it's like, what do you want to do? Last comment. One of my favorite things to do is take my little Asp Explorer, which is basically a flying gas can that jumps like 76 light years a pop or whatever. And I took it one time almost to the end of the galaxy. It took me like a week to get there. And I charted like 174 new systems that nobody in the game had ever been to. And my name will always be there forever. So if you go to the system, it says first charted by Commander Dr. Johnson, which is me.

It's just kind of cool. So it's like that kind of stuff once you learn it. But some people, it's not their cup of tea. For me, still probably my favorite game ever. Yeah, when I hear all that, that sounds neat and that sounds fun. That's a little more of, I think, what I envisioned in my mind. I felt like the game was going to be more like Star Trek. Oh, I'm just flying my ship. Oh, we're getting a distress call. What's going on over there?

Oh, help, we're under attack by the Thargoids or whatever. And then I would go and try to rescue them. And that kind of stuff I never ran into in my playthrough. The missions were a little bit more mundane. It felt like I was a worker in space, kind of just doing things to make money. And it kind of sucked the fun out of it. And so I guess you just have to get to that point in the game when you're experiencing more of that lore and more of

that collective fun one thing i think there's i think there's a big point to that too because you want to start out in an area that's kind of basic so when you go to earth for the first time it's like the big reveal and that's where all these things start happening you know what i mean so i think again though are you willing to pay the price to get there and sorry i just totally talked into you you're saying one thing i think you're about to say something you liked i i was gonna say the other thing that threw me off is that you and i know you can do it in one of the expansions but in the base game you never leave your ship right so there are no away missions and i thought that would be built in i thought it would be kind of like Mass Effect 2 or something, you know, fly to this planet.

And now we're going to take a landing party and we're going to go, you know, carry out some mission. And you don't do that. And we did not play which of the expansions? Is it Odyssey where they do have first person shooting elements? Yeah. We did not buy that or pick it up because we knew the base game was already too much to try to learn it in just a couple weeks yeah you can actually get off your spaceship at each space station and instead of accepting the missions through the menu you can actually walk up to a person in the space station and they're like

hey come here come here come here i got a job for you hey you want to take this illegal cargo for me you're like no get out of here but then you walk up to someone else they're like hey i've got some exploration missions for you so if you really want to get really immersive and super nerdy you can role play the heck out of this game yeah now a couple random things that i thought would be fun to talk about you can get speeding tickets i got one of those i told you when i was leaving the space station, I was like, I'm out. And then I got fined. And they wouldn't let me back until I paid my fine. Yep. If you crash into other ships, you get in trouble.

They'll give you fines for this kind of stuff. You can get a bounty. Yeah, you can get bounties against you. That's part of what I found a little too realistic. I don't want speeding fines in a game when I'm traveling faster than the speed of light between galaxies. It seemed a little silly to have speeding fines when you're inside a port, but that is part of the game.

I think one of my favorite things that I've learned about this game are the fuel rats. And we have to bring up this group because in elite dangerous, if you run out of fuel and you're out in space, guess what? You can't do anything unless someone comes and gives you fuel. So there are a group of people who have put together where you can join their discord. They have a website,

they have all kinds of stats and stuff that they track, but you can make a request. tell them where they are they will come deliver fuel to you and help you get back on the road so to speak in order to keep playing now i looked up on their website they actually have stats on all this stuff in 2022 so this year even though the game is already eight years old they perform 50 rescues a day 50 a day those are people who completely run out of fuel on their own somewhere lost in the galaxy that means that they are still doing 20 000 rescues a year. I'm not surprised. Wow. Yep. And they have their own leaderboard where you can go see how many rescues all the individual fuel rats have done.

It is a group of 3,377 people. Do you want to take a guess how many people have been rescued by the number one person on the leaderboard? This person must not do anything else but be a fuel rat all the time so i don't even i don't even know if i could take a stab at it um of all time how many people has this guy rescued ever yeah his name is aletheia and how just take take a wild guess 12 2472 josh is remarkably close and he's still too low 13 225 dude this guy is an intergalactic tow truck driver that's all he is really well and the thing is when you're exploring out there you have something called a fuel scoop right and so you fly really close to a star you

open up the fuel scoop, and it replenishes your fuel. The problem is you can't scoop every kind of star. And if you're not careful while you're charting where you're going to go, if you're going to go in the middle of nowhere, you might find yourself in a spot where you're like, oh, shoot, this part of space has no red dwarfs or no white dwarfs or whatever you need. And you're like, I messed up and now i'm stuck i can't get back and that's it it's it's pretty wild i cannot believe that one person

has rescued that many people let alone them as an entire group doing 20 000 a year that's crazy they actually solicit donations on their website because their servers and their systems to alert one another cost over 100 pounds a month and so you can actually donate to them so they're also sinking money real life money into this oh yeah so that they can go into a game and just be a tow truck driver or to be triple a and deliver you some gas i i really can't believe that people are spending their time doing this but if that's how you enjoy it's like your gaming time it's like michael said you can do whatever you want in this game yep for better or worse yeah and that's one of the things too is i didn't even think about the different human factions not the games factions

like for instance um axi which is the guild or whatever you call it the fleet i think it's called a fleet um that my buddy cybus is in jason like if you attack one of them like they're known if you attack one of them you better not go near another axi spaceship ever again because it's like they've got their own probably website that tracks everything and you're killing sight to them forever from then on so like the fuel rats are this positive guild but there's also a bunch of other different guilds that like like you you need to know your way around the politics of this universe otherwise don't go just randomly kill someone and take their cargo it's not worth it because now you're gonna die every time you log in you know like yeah there's good and bad and like nice and

there's repercussions as well but i thought about being a feel rat at one point to be honest with you and then that's about when i stopped playing um because i moved back to with my family and realized i didn't have 12 hours a day to sink into this game yeah so for the interest of time i think we do need to move on a little bit i think uh we will talk a little bit about what we like and dislike overall when we do the the final segments here so that's a little bit about what we like and dislike overall when we do the, the final segments here. So that's a little bit about what we think, Josh,

you pulled a couple of community reviews for us to go through. I did indeed. This game is on steam. So I have pulled some steam reviews. Um, I always pull a couple of positive, a couple of negative. Uh,

it's interesting because anytime there is a game like this, a lot of the reviews are 18 pages long where people talk about different things that happen to them or why they hate this game now after 4 000 hours and it's just ridiculous so i was able to find a few shorter ones this first one is recommended this person has 31 hours on record it says first impressions i cannot stop freaking spinning getting more confident runs into an asteroid belt and almost sharts self finally got the hang of it oh go ahead oh no good you can finish it i thought that was the end no no finally got the hang of it wanted to leave the hangar at full speed and blast off into the distance to get some star wars

battlefront 2 space battle nostalgia but ended up slamming into the distance to get some Star Wars Battlefront II space battle nostalgia, but ended up slamming into the rim of the force field generator, then went into hyperspeed and almost crashed into the sun. Now my ship is almost destroyed and I have one minute until I run out of oxygen. 11 out of 10 would go through pilot training again. That is one thing. If you get too close to a sun, it'll start to overheat all your systems. And you also can't go into hyperspace if you're too close to another body. So a lot of times you can't do a straight shot somewhere. You got to go out of your way to get the right angle to then travel to another system.

Well, I love that. And I'll be real quick about this because mass plays a big part of it. That's why we say drop out of hyperspace when you're seven seconds away from something, because if you're near a gas giant, you're moving significantly slower than if you're in open space, because there's mass there. There's gravity. It's so beautiful. What a beautiful game.

Okay. This next one, not recommended. 627 hours on record. Oh my goodness. Did you write this one? I did not. So this one starts off with a too long, didn't read, but it's not that long. So too long, didn't read, not recommending for one reason. The most progress I've made in this game were some of the darkest and worst experiences of gaming in my life, where I sacrificed health

and a significant amount of personal time for slight gains in-game. The average person will literally hate everything about this game, but only know about 10 hours in after the refund limit while the addiction-prone person will get hooked. Considering I have 600 plus hours in the game, I can honestly say I got my money's worth. I've been to the center, I have the biggest ships, I have two fully engineered PVP ships, fully engineered Explorer, Miner, et cetera. So I've accomplished some stuff over that time. But, and a big but, only a very small fraction of those hours are really enjoyable. The rest were really just me having been crushed by boredom and the game's grind itself and just sitting in the ship looking at YouTube videos. Oh, ouch. Yeah.

So, I mean, this one was... The reason I picked this one is because it touches towards the... If you can break through what... I don't know what the learning curve is. 50 hours, 100 hours. I don't know. 300 hours. If you can break through that, it seems like you can really get sucked into this game.

Because I'm hearing things from Michael with Alien Wars and factions and all this stuff that sounds really neat. But I'm instantly just going like, yeah, I'll never experience that. And it's sad to me because if you have super cool things in a game like that, but you make them inaccessible, then you did everybody a disservice at that point. So, okay, this next one is recommended 307 hours on record. Still trying to figure out how to park my ship. Oh, that one made me laugh because that seemed about right. And then this last one is 2,594 hours on record.

It is not recommended. Incomprehensible UI. What? Sloppy controls. Granted, I'm a day one player, but very steep learning curve. Couldn't figure out interstellar navigation for the life of me. And the touchy controls made the dog fighting a chore save your money this isn't a jump in and play game it's not a jump in and play game yeah

uh the one thing i can say about the controls though is it really depends on your ship like different people like different ships different ships control different ways i don't know i'm just gonna keep defending this game forever that's quite quite all right. Okay, so that's what some of the Steam reviews are to give everybody an idea. And so this next part is we're going to guess the actual rating of this game. And I think, Paul, was it you or Michael that won last time? It was not me. Wait, did I win? I won.

It was Weird West. I think it was Michael. I put it was weird west and i think i bet i put one number i put one number under josh i think because i was like oh i wasn't gonna pick 73 and it was actually 72 but i think i said 76 because it was one below him and i all right from now on i'll just say that you won michael so you have to guess first so on the scale of zero to a hundred percent where do you think this ends up man see i don't know because i know that i know that a lot of people are like you guys where it's like i don't have time to get into this like i know it's a great game but you know are they the people actually reviewing the game or not um i do know

though that amongst a lot of season players this game does have a lot of bugs specifically when expansions come out it's it's plagued and odyssey is no exception so depending on what the recent reviews are odyssey like they still haven't gotten the ai down like literally you'll have um a person you're shooting at who's just shooting on a wall like that's not an exaggeration this this npc is shooting a wall and you're like uh you're dead you just go finish your missing um so i'm gonna say it's probably in the 60s honestly because there are people that love this game like me but i don't think there's a lot of them i'm gonna throw 68 out there all right okay um i'll go next

um i i i remember when this game came out i've talked about it before but i remember the overwhelming complaints that stick out in my mind were people just saying, this is like, it's boring. You're going to just fly from one thing to another and nothing happens. So if you like staring at your screen, you'll like that there's people that love it. I mean, Michael, it's in his top 10 games of all time. So I went with 78%. I thought there's probably going to be enough people out there that don't love it. I think if you do love it, you're really going to love this game. But I kind of went a little on the lower side, but I think there's going to be a lot of people out there that enjoy it. I think you're both probably too low.

My gut reaction was mid 80s and josh you said what i said 78 78 yeah i'll go i'll go 84 you know it's funny because now that i think about it the people that really like this game like me are probably the ones reviewing it and like really trying to bring that score up because people that love this game can't stop talking about it it's like a huge cult classic yeah it's like what was that it's like crossfit the only rule of crossfit is you can only talk about crossfit remember crossfit a few years ago it's like it's like that like the first rule is you can only talk about leap changers all right well you two are losers i am winner. The actual overall rating is 76%. That is all time.

I will say I didn't look at the exact number, but the recent reviews are mixed, which I think puts it in the 60s range. People are not happy about some of the recent expansions or where the game has gone. A lot of the negative reviews had to do with the developer of the game. People are supes mad at the people that made this game for whatever reason they're always mad at them yeah i mean i don't know

why apparently it's a beloved game to some and if you have a game that you love a lot and the developers don't do what you like then people get really mad at them so there's literally a guy on youtube and he's called obsidian ant and i think the guy's got like 10 000 hours in this game and his youtube channel exists only to complain about 000 hours in this game and his youtube channel exists only to complain about the developers of this game yet he plays it non-stop yeah wow that's funny yeah uh 76 is definitely on the lower side of all the games we've covered i'm a little surprised it's that low i thought josh and I were kind of outliers in not really enjoying this game much at all.

I figured it would be much higher, but I guess I'm not completely surprised. I think if this is your cup of tea, it's really your cup of tea. But for a lot of other people, they're not going to like it at all. All right. So Josh,

I get to bring us into the next segment. Oh yeah, you do. let's hit that music and you can lead us into it hey elite dangerous you want to waste all my time and make me hate you even more then let's keep playing oh boy michael i i really hate doing this segment to you because I know how much you love Elite Dangerous. I wish that I'd love this game. I love space games, but you know what? If I want a game that has exploration and crafting, I'm going to play No Man's Sky.

If I want action, I'm playing Mass Effect. If I want dogfighting, I'm playing Chorus. Elite Dangerous to me just does a lot of stuff very poorly. The learning curve is so high. Why would I put 300 hours not liking a game to get to the point where it's good when I can get an indie game for $3.99 and it's fun right off the bat? To me, when those are my options, I'm going to take the game that's fun right off the bat every time. This is make love, marry, or

murder to rate this game, and I'm going to murder Elite Dangerous, and it's not even in question that it's one of the others. I'm sorry, Michael. Don't quit the show. We still want to keep you. Let me just pile on this so that Michael can end this on a good note.

I enjoyed the murder too. That's the worst part. I legitimately don't know that I have hated a video game more in my entire life. This is legitimately no exaggeration. And Michael, I didn't want to ruin your fun ahead of time. So I mean, Paul has the texts from me to prove it. This game was absolutely infuriating for me to play. I had zero fun at any point during this game. I found it to be insanely frustrating. It was more convoluted than any game I have ever played in my life. Honestly, I don't know. I want to just keep trashing it, but for the sake of time, I don't understand this at all. I am a lifelong gamer. It is not difficult for me to learn how to play things and new systems and things like that, but there is something about elite dangerous that rubs me the wrong way.

And I despise this game with every fiber of my being, dude, I have never had a game waste more of my time. I, I legitimately, I don't rage at many video games and I hate this game. Like I hate it with everything. I want to murder it and then I want to bring it back to life and I want to

murder it again. And then I want to find its predecessors and I want to murder those. What is it? Elite? When did that game come out? 1984. I want to go back in time. I want to take the infinity gauntlet. I want to go back in time i want to take the infinity gauntlet i want to go

back in time and snap my fingers and erase elite from history because that's how much i hate this game josh i just sent you a copy paste of a discord message you sent me do you want to go read it oh oh yes did you you discorded it to me it's in in Discord. Yeah. Okay. In our channel? Okay. Hang on. Yep. Okay. Yeah. I said this to Paul. Everything is horrendous. Like my biggest joy comes from exiting to desktop.

Wow. Oh. I kept telling you guys, you just needed to play with me one day. I'd have shown you the ropes. Hang out. Let's kill some pirates. But it doesn't matter. just needed to play with me one day i'd have shown you the ropes hang out let's kill some pirates but your buddy your buddy bless his heart spent an hour and a half trying to show me the ropes and it only reinforced the fact that i hate this game and i will never spend the time to try to

learn it if you make a video game that's supposed to be entertainment and you make the barrier of entry a hundred hours i will never like your game i don't think it's a hundred hours here's what we're gonna do though one time just just hear me one time just one time i'll take out my corvette it's got fighters on it okay and i've got these fighters pretty decked out all of us just put the vr headsets on you can go with me we'll go out in the fighters you guys can each fly one of the fighters you don't have to learn anything you just point and shoot and you'll be like that was actually fun because it is fun the funnest thing is as soon as this recording is over i am uninstalling elite dangerous as quickly as i possibly can all right all right it's incredible too all right

michael to bring us home buddy and this on a positive note for all the people, for all the people screaming at me and Josh saying that we're wrong. Yes. You got to talk to the Michael. They're saying, Michael, come save this episode. Cause there are many people that agree with you on this. So I don't know if I can save it.

I mean, the whole thing is like, it's true. There is, there is a, there is a bit of a barrier to entry, but it's, it's,

it, I don't think that it's as long as you guys are making it necessarily. The whole thing, I think, is a lot of it. A lot of people start playing this game with a friend who helps them out along the way. I think you might have a different take if you'd have taken my advice

and just let me help you get a better ship off the start and let me show you what to do, how to get the pirates, kill the pirates. Or not. Either way, it's not for pirates, kill the pirates or not. Either way, it's not for everyone. And I totally get that. And I would never expect everyone to like every game ever. It's one of those though that I just... I think that the freedom that I have in this game and the control that I have is just... It's just addictive to me. The fact that like,

what do I want to do today? I can do anything I want want to do i can go name a planet if i want to you know i can go save some people i can listen to the news um i can go answer a distress call if i'm in an area where there's a distressed distress call happening because that actually does happen too you can you can actually do that but it's just so many different things you can do and i think if you're someone who maybe likes mmos and you put a lot of time into an mo you know like you're not going to get to level 80 in World of Warcraft by playing for two hours. You've got to put time into it. You've got to learn how to use the gem systems, how to enchant your weapons. You've got to do all that stuff.

It's a lot more in the vein of that. It's not a game you can pick up and play for 15 hours and even scratch the surface, to be honest with you. But you play World of Warcraft for 15 hours, what are you, level 8? I mean, nowadays, it's a lot different. But back in the day, or EverQuest, back in the day, Josh, it's a lot more in the veins of an EverQuest where you really do have to commit to it, put a lot of time into it. And I don't see the barrier to entry as being a negative at all. I see it as being a positive because of the fact that if you're like,

hey, I want to play this game. I want to experience all the stuff I can do. I like the fact that it's complicated and you've got to learn how to do all this cool stuff before you can do it because there's a lot of stuff to do. And that's my biggest thing. I absolutely marry this game. I can tell you, I know where I'm at that part. I know exactly where I put on the leaderboard as well. Coming back to it after having left it for, I think, 8 or 9 months I hadn tell you, I know where I'm at on that part. I know exactly where I put it on the leaderboard as well. Coming back to it after having left it for, I think, eight or nine months, I hadn't played, I cannot wait to log in again. In fact, we're playing V Rising right now, and I'm like, I am excited to play V Rising, but man, what I really want to be doing right now

is playing Elite Dangerous, 100%. And that's not a lie. Not for everybody, I know that. But I think I kind of explained a few things. And I saw your guys' heads nodding a little bit. You relate to it. EverQuest. It took a long time.

It was hard. You had to spend time on it. EverQuest was fun right away, though. I thought Elite was fun right away, too. But you can do whatever the heck you want to do. And the fact that it's real star systems, and it takes the time to get the physics in the game, the fact that you're close to a gas giant that took a lot of that was that's smart that they they

they put mass in the game you know like that's cool and those are just things that i enjoy about it that's why i marry it i love this game yeah i know you do and i've honestly been really dreading this episode because there's nothing i hate more than like fanning out the flames when someone really loves something i love jumping on the bandwagon if we all can't get my flames okay good because i i really have been worried about this episode and michael really really does look and sound so bummed out i i am so sad but we have one last i've only i'm only bummed that not one time like i was like guys just come it doesn't i i can guarantee you dude that it would the ship has nothing to do with our thoughts on the game it has a lot to do it has so much and i'll be

honest i i would there is a reason that i never took you up on that, because I wanted to play this game as a new person to the game. I wanted that experience of somebody new, you know what I mean? And to give that outlook on it, there is a gajillion people at Level E Dangerous, and that's the beauty of this show, is that we often do not agree on games. I mean, I still to this day think Paul is absolutely ridiculous for not thinking Outer Wilds is an absolutely incredible game, you know what I mean, I still, to this day, think Paul is absolutely ridiculous for not thinking outer wilds is an absolutely incredible game. You know what I mean? And he thinks the same thing about me for hating stardew Valley. And I get it.

Stardew Valley is one of the most popular, well-reviewed games in existence. And I hate that game. So did you guys ever, even ever, ever upgrade your ship? Like, yeah,

I bought a new, I, yeah, I did. I bought a new, the Vi i bought a new the viper or eagle or something like that you know i still hated it this ship didn't matter well that one sucks too but you know yeah yeah i i i never did all right paul i i was so done are you ready to make michael sadder yeah let's let's do it let's let's uh I feel like the music's not going to fit the mood right now,

but let's go to the leaderboard, see where this game stacks up. All right. So for anyone who has not heard a deep dive before, Josh, you want to tell them how the leaderboard works? So after you've heard everything we have to say about this game, we love to put ourselves in awkward situations. And boy, this is going to be one of them

because we have to, as a group, come to a consensus on where this game will rank on our overall leaderboard. We have 71 games that we have done a deep dive on. And now it's time to figure out where Elite Dangerous is going to rank on that leaderboard. So do you want me to start this off?

I want to hear what you want. I want to hear you. I want to start. All right. In all fairness to Michael. Okay. Because as much as I have trolled this game and expressed my despise of this game, I know that this game has a lot to offer to people. And I know it's one of Michael's favorite games.

And I love Michael to death. That being said, I would rather play Battlefield 2042 for 20 hours a day than to ever have to jump into Elite Dangerous ever again. That is literally the extent of my despising this game. I cannot think of a game I hate more, legitimately. And I don't know why, but it's because this game frustrated me. It's because it didn't explain a single darn thing to me. It wasted 15 hours of my extended life.

You know what I mean? And I hate it. I would rather play Battlefield 2042 every single day of my extended life. You know what I mean? And I hate it. I would rather play Battlefield 2042 every single day of my life than to ever have to play Elite Dangerous again. So for me, it ranks 72. I'm sorry, Michael. I love you.

You're still one of my best friends. I'm sorry. Well, I wasn't listening. I apologize. Michael just went into a coma. Oh, he's like, I'm in my happy place. I'm in my happy place. I'm in my happy place. Well, hopefully my score can bring it off the bottom.

I don't know, because do I just get overridden? Or does my score even matter at this point? It's a three-man consensus. It's all give and take. Because I'm looking at the list here, and it's absolutely number one for me on this list. Oh, boy. This is so good, Michael. Like 100%.

I'm like, Red Dead Redemption 2. I love that game. That's currently number one. And honestly, I just... What? I think it's because I can go into... I would rather play Elite. Michael, I do have a question for you.

When is the last time that you suffered extreme disappointment? I'm just curious. No reason whatsoever, but just curious. I'm experiencing it right now a little bit. Oh, sorry. But you guys can help me out because you can help me move my castle later and be rising all right all right so michael has it number one josh has it dead last at the bottom paul and i'm and i'm not just saying that to bring it up like legitimately this is absolutely one of my favorite games in the in the world you mentioned that this game was one of my favorite games in the world. I love this game. I know that this game was one of your favorite games of all time,

well before we ever even thought about doing a deep dive. So this is you being completely honest. I don't think I want to go back now. I don't think I rated it high enough in my top 10 episode, like legitimately. Now that I've taken some time away and I've come back to it, I'm like, oh man, why did I stop playing this game? Oh boy.

All right. When I look at these 72 um i'm definitely closer to john than i am to michael really uh when i'm looking at the bottom 10 games i'm like boy fall guys i'd rather play that minecraft dungeons left for dead 2 sea of thieves i'd rather play all of those i think for me it's it's the forest the i felt about the same playing the forest as i did elite dangerous where i was like i get why people like this it is not my thing i don't want to spend any more time in this world it's not what i'm looking for I would rate it 66 out of 72, which tells me when we combine all three of our opinions,

it's going to have to be in the bottom half, but we do have to honor how much Michael likes it. I don't even know what to do on a compromise like this because it's such vastly different opinions. Yeah. Look at Star wars squadrons we have that at 48 oh that's way better than elite dangerous i i agree but michael totally disagrees so i don't i don't even know what to do with this this is the first time i feel completely at a loss

i had to rank this game and i just get to sit here and watch you guys figure it out. No, I mean, I really do want to respect your take, Michael. I, man. Josh, you really hated some of these games. You hated 12 Minutes and Civ VI. I feel like it wouldn't. I love those games compared to elite no let's say hypothetically let's say hypothetically you were like okay i put in the 50 hours i understand the game like did you get did you guys even dog fight at all did you fight i did

i fought that one boundary yeah like could you see your guys like like if you were like hey let's say that i understood everything about this game would i then maybe at least enjoy the game a little bit going out and doing these things and fighting do the dog fighting going exploring or not at all not at all because it seems like most of the stuff you hate about the game is the learning i felt like the i felt like the the the stock the trading is literally just a never-ending series of fetch quests it like i felt like the black box retrieval, which, you know, that was another fetch quest.

Shoot the black box. I felt like the... I got really excited when I went to go out on my bounty and try to kill this guy, but then the game tells me nothing about that that ship's way out of my league. Even though it was a beginner mission,

that guy obliterated me, you know? And so the dogfighting didn't have anything to do with like my skill level. It was just that that ship was decked out and mine wasn't. So there wasn't even a challenge there. I just, this is not my kind of game, man. I honestly, it's, I, I mean, maybe if I understood it, I like, I hear these great things that you talk about. And part of me goes like, Ooh, yeah, I want that. But I don't know that I would ever get that. Yeah. And I think when Josh and I are railing on the learning curve, it's because we had no fun in the parts that we did play. And we're kind of just taking it on

trust that it must get better because all of you can't have mental illness. There's got to be something fun later in this game and so i think we're just kind of defaulting back to learning curve all right so if i average out our scores 166 and 73 that works or 72 that works out to be 46 which is exactly where we have tiny tina's wonderlands and i think we just need to decide whether it's one above or one below. Because none of us are going to be happy with this rating. This is the one that we're all going to hate. We can just put it at the bottom, and you guys win.

Just put it at the bottom. That's what we want to put it. Put it at the bottom. We're not putting it that low. Let's take a game that's close. Star Wars Squadrons. I would rather play Star Wars Squadrons than this. They're not even close. And that still puts it in the 40s for Michael.

I actually really hated Squadrons, too, to be fair. I did not like either game. I did, too. All right. Let's put it one below Squadrons. I mean, if Michael's just going to concede, then I say put it at 72. But he does, you do legitimately get a say

in where this goes, Michael. Well, and wherever we put it, it's fun because we can argue about it later on when we do our revisits. It's true. And every time you guys can knock it down. I was going to say this. This is the new Halo Reach.

Right? Where, yeah, where early on we would always just, would always just pick on Todd for really loving Halo Reach. All right, so let's put it one below Squadrons. You guys want to do 49? Sure. Michael. Michael's just done. I thought you said like 429.

We put it in the range of like number four to number nine. Oh, 429. No, no. You might need to check those ears buddy I'm happy with it I'm fine with it 49 consensus we just do the math on it and put it there I think that's a fair way to do it yeah I think

that's just what we have to do and we're all just gonna hate the rating yeah okay all right any any closing thoughts Michael I would implore anyone that plays this game and enjoys it to definitely try it in VR because in VR it is at a different level

especially like the dog fighting like because if you buy different ships that have bigger canopies and on the controls if you have a HOTAS I heard that's like the way to do it and also you know some of the controls are easier in vr as well because you don't have to try and figure out how to look at different screens you just move your

head and look that way so it does remove a lot of the of the difficult part of controlling your ship uh that's my final thought for those i'm speaking to people that actually like this game yeah um not josh and paul they don't care uh but but like seriously like try it in vr it will bring it to a different level and it's beautiful in VR. The game is beautiful, though, right? It's a good-looking game. Yes. And the sounds are great.

You feel like you're actually arriving at an actual space station. There's a lot of realism to it. The scale is good. Yeah. All right. Not to start picking on the game again, but when you move up and down, it sounds like bubbles. It's like...

Yeah, your ship's farting. There's gas in space. I understand the physics. Okay, you've got to shoot something behind you to go forward. But even those sounds, I don't know. It didn't sound to me the way in my head a starship would sound, which, of course, there's no sound in space anyway, so who cares? That's because you're flying a crappy sidewinder.

Actually, each ship does have different sounds, by the way. when you hit the boost button on a dolphin it actually sounds like a dolphin it's hilarious it's like yeah so it's just different ships have different sounds and i think the idea is the sidewinder is so bad they made it have awful sounds i i will i do want to say one good thing about elite dangerous before we end the episode for michael and for people out there that think hey maybe josh and paul are crazy. The game's only $7.50 on Steam. It's on sale right now. Yeah, it's on sale. It's $7.50.

This game's been out for a while. Normally $30. You can pick it up dirt cheap. And so if you have interest, you cannot spend a lot of money to decide whether Michael is right or Paul and I are right. I'll say something nice about it, too.

It uninstalls so fast, guys. Wow. It comes off that hard drive before you even know it. Get out of here. Close the door on this episode, guys. We're going. All right. Yeah, I think we're done for this one.

And we're going to put Michael on Suicide Watch. And our next deep dive will be on V Rising. And Michael can maybe get some revenge because maybe Josh and I really like it. I hate this Gilmore. You'll have to come back and listen to that episode. So we'll have our next episode on Thursday. We will have a quick take on Saturday. And then we'll be back with a bonus round on Monday.

And then two weeks from today is when that deep dive will happen for v rising that way we have plenty of time to jump into that one as well and come check us out on socials at multiplayer pod michael primarily runs the helm there so come let him know that josh and i are wrong and you can build his self-esteem back up and then come join us in discord there's a link in the episode description we would love to have you guys join us there and i think we're done right that's it i think we're yeah we're good to go yeah thanks so much to everyone for listening thank you to all our patreon supporters and we will see you guys on thursday for this week in gaming sorry i'm gonna go play play some Elite Dangerous and do cool things. Sorry, Michael.

Still love you. Alright, bye everybody. See ya. Cheers all.