Originally, We experienced Elite: Dangerous with a mixture of fascination, boredom and naked fear. In the meantime, We have completely fallen for the game.
I wish I could describe in a comprehensible way what Elite: Dangerous does to me. For decades, video games have always been my escape from reality, everyday life and myself. In games I can be who or what I want, do unimaginable things that would never be possible in real life. They are my “happy place” when I want to retreat because the world around me is too noisy and too depressing.
And my refuge of choice for weeks now has been that half-baked, frustrating, unimaginably cumbersome Elite: Dangerous, of all things. In the beginning I was completely helpless and overwhelmed, didn’t understand anything, could hardly get out of the space station without autopilot. In the meantime, I lead a kind of virtual life there.
I have my everyday life in the game, have chosen a job, know my way around my corner of the galaxy and control my ship, the MARDUK, completely blind. That’s a good thing, too, otherwise I’d be pretty much screwed in VR.
I fly completely manually, take off and land the thing by hand, I don’t trust any docking computers. I love this ship, I feel comfortable in it and would sleep in it if I could. It’s probably the ugliest pot in the whole game, but that only makes my virtual home more appealing to me.
Table of Contents
Penzhorn’s Moving Castle
The MARDUK is a Type 10 Defender. This is a heavy freighter converted to a mobile weapons platform, with all the storage space gone for armour and weapon mounts. The thing is huge, clunky, uncool to the max. The community derisively calls it a meme ship.
You can get ships in its price range that have much better handling, much fancier designs and more uses than the Type 10, but that’s exactly why I like this ship so much – it’s largely ignored, not taken all that seriously and occasionally underrated.
Through engineering upgrades, I have increased the value of my ship to almost half a billion credits. In case you only understand what I’m saying now: It’s been beefed up, but there’s still some room for improvement. When you sit in the cockpit of this monstrosity, especially in VR, you feel like you’re flying a coach. Or a small family home.
Navigation errors when approaching a space station cost lives. Never yours, don’t worry. I use it to play group bounty missions solo, easily flattening packs of 40 pirates and amassing crazy amounts of in-game currency.
I’ve also given one or two other players a beating when they’ve sensed easy prey and dragged me out of the supercruise. Flight Assist off, rotation around your own axis, while ten heavy Gatling Guns create a spectacular inferno. Flight assist on, booster, collision course. A thousand tons of mass crash unchecked into the small, manoeuvrable ship of the attacker, whose hull strength is already impaired by the endless impacts of my rotation guns. When he then lets out one last hail of insults before his ship finally bursts, it feels indescribably good.
My little delivery service
While I prefer fighting, Elite: Dangerous is much more than simply banging around in space. To get access to the really interesting upgrades, you pretty much have to do everything anyway: Go exploring, play taxi and courier, farm asteroids for resources and so on.
To increase my rank as a trader, I buy a Hauler. It’s a handy little cargo ship that I use to ferry stuff all over the galaxy. I have configured the ship for the greatest possible radius of action and loading capacity.
Of course, I can’t take on pirates like this, because they are better armed and more heavily armoured than I am and want my valuable cargo. Instead of going on the hunt, I have to hide here, stay alert, hope for the space cops in an emergency. They actually help if the sector in question is secured and you have a reasonably good reputation.
Later I have to mine and process 500 tonnes of ore. I equip a small ship with a mining laser and a refinery module and get to work, but I’m interrupted non-stop by pesky pirates, robbed and at worst blown up.
How fortunate that I have collected huge amounts of credits as a bounty hunter and have built up a very good reputation as a courier with the Empire, one of the three factions in the game. I buy an imperial cutter, a 200-metre-long monster ship, equip it with guns and henceforth mine my ore chunks in this vehicle. Pirates who now knock on my door and ask for a donation are disintegrated fully automatically. It’s completely over the top and definitely unnecessary, but I’m just happy that it works anyway.
Basically I know nothing
After several hours, days, weeks in this game, I know to some extent how to fly, fight, mine minerals and trade. I no longer feel like a non-swimmer just dumped out over the Atlantic with a tap on the shoulder. And yet I have barely scratched the surface of this game.
One of the contacts I’m supposed to seek out is in the Colonia system, some 22,000 light years from Earth. I have no idea how to travel such distances in the game. According to the internet, they use some kind of neutron stars. People tell stories about how this trip took them several weeks. Weeks! From Earth to Cologne!
There are hostile aliens in the game, the Thargoids. They have ruins on remote planets, full of hidden puzzles and coded messages. The community works together to elicit the aliens’ secrets. You can engage in some really heavy space battles with them.
There are special community events with rewards, a PvP arena and so-called power play, in which you work for one of the factions in the game to get very special weapons and modules for your ship. Most of this I only know from Reddit threads, descriptions and videos.
It will take many more hours before I will be really familiar with this and other content. So far I just know the basics. I know the basics, but I haven’t really seen anything yet. Wow! The game is not for people with little time.
Unaware but happy
Sometimes I just fly through space collecting data from far away systems because it pays well. Often nothing happens at all in the game for long stretches. Silence. Darkness. My ship serves as a mobile home, offering protection and security.
This may sound completely crazy, but I love the MARDUK. I am one with it, it is an extension of my body, does what I want it to do without me having to think about it or focus on it. As I look around in it in VR, it couldn’t possibly seem more real. Now when I close my eyes, I see the bridge, the instruments, the whole interior like a place I visit regularly, that exists in real life. This is my domain, this is where I am at home.
Often I am just drifting through space for several light years. Chasing some pirate, playing taxi, courier or explorer. For half an eternity I see only my instruments, hear only my ship. Space is not as colourful as in the movies. Photos from space are usually heavily coloured. In fact, I see mostly a lot of black.
This gnaws at your mind over time, makes you paranoid. Do I have enough fuel left? How far is it to the next inhabited system? Have any Thargoids been sighted here? In no other game have I ever felt so alone, so lost. It gets more and more oppressive until you finally reach your destination, fly past inhabited planets, radio an orbital space station and ask for permission to land.
Life in the void
There is always plenty of traffic outside the stations. Quite a few more couriers, explorers, hopeful pirates and pirate hunters launch and land their ships, go about their jobs. The glass ring around the space station is a huge greenhouse, green and blooming. Inside, trucks drive up and down, transporting cargo, keeping the place running.
I am assigned landing platform 17. Advertising projections present ships, engines and weapons systems. Life, civilisation, in the middle of nowhere, after unimaginably long distances of total darkness.
A speech by Gene Roddenberry can be heard on Radio Sidewinder, the community radio station for the game. He talks about how he believes in humanity, that we as a species still have a lot to learn and need to overcome our infancy. But that we can achieve great things once we grow up.
I like Radio Sidewinder. In addition to futuristic music, it also plays interesting quotes from Star Trek every now and then, there are commercials and news items that all revolve completely around the game universe. It contributes an important part to the immersion, makes the world more tangible and real.
Sometimes I leave the channel on for a while when I go to bed because I want to stay in that world for a bit. I refuel the MARDUK, have the cannons loaded with new ammunition. Because for all the relief about the space station, about all the life around me, the journey must continue soon. Then I’ll have only my ship again, my only constant, the only security. My home.
