Remember a decade ago when I was absolutely head-over-heals in love with this game? Oh, what game you ask? Well I guess it's now simply Elite Dangerous though I'm such a dinosaur, I last remembered it as Elite: Dangerous with the colon. When did the developer Frontier change it? IDK, even Wikipedia seems to have ignored that.
I was such a fan of this game, I even made a few videos which you can check out in my YouTube channel games playlist. And around the time of that last video, after I'd made millions of star credits, or whatever the game money is, doing various tasks like bounty hunting, passenger ferrying, fetch quests, asteroid mining, and probably my favorite, exploration, I got to the point where I was, man, space is really fucking big, like it hadn't dawned on me until just then. Then in this post where I get my Oculus Rift, I slap that baby on and it literally feels like I'm in the cockpit of my ASP, whipping 'round those oh so gnarly looking asteroids and looping through those ringworlds going "yeehaw!" And of course, like I even boast in my video titles, it was all so much even better with a big old tall glass of bubbly IPA or two, or three, or four, well, you get the picture.
I'd been back at least once over the past 10 years. I'm sure of it. But unfortunately as I figured I'd dive back in today and reinstall it, I did so neglecting to check out the date of my last play in my Steam games library, and now I can't tell you from just memory alone when that last playthrough was. But I'm pretty sure it was more than a couple years at least. And, I'm also pretty sure that it was a real brief visit. I think like today's visit so far which is been not even an hour in, I got really, really frustrated by forgetting all the controls of how to do the simplest things.
How to fly? Got to remap all the key bindings because the default ones are shit when using keyboard and mouse like I do. All right, took a few YouTube How-To videos, and wiki instructions, and an hour or so, and finally got that down. How to land? Oh brother.
This game is essentially multiplayer in that yes, other players could be present, but where I am is some tiny spaceport out in the pipsqueak middle of nowhere so of course no other human players were around and that's a very good thing since me trying to land on my wide open landing pad was totally embarrassing. No lie, it must have taken me a good 15 minutes of trial and error, banging up my ship's paint job a bit and causing me to scream at my monitor in frustration.
Jump drive. It took me a while but I finally figured out how to navigate while I'm in this middle of the way fast speed. Navigation systems, communication systems, weapon systems, landing gear, scanning, galaxy map, system map, the list goes on and on. I'm beyond a noob.
A noob is excited to learn new things. I'm pissed because I learned all these things 11 years ago! And I've since forgotten them all! And all for what? All to just simply buzz around the emptiness of an almost desolate, black, cold, dead, lifeless, meaningless, nothingness. What's the point? What's it all about? What's to hold my interest?
Just because I've become a fresh space cadet this past month all over again, does becoming an Elite Dangerous space cadet, I mean Commander, all over again, mean it'll get any more interesting? Or am I doomed to just learn this all over again, to whiz aimlessly by the loneliness of an aloof and desolate space, without even my buddy glass of brewski by my side?
