I've just started playing Elite Dangerous after it was given away for free on the Epic Store (yeah, yeah; but I played the original all the way to Elite so how could I resist?) and you know what it has?
- Flying across the Galaxy in spaceships
- Combat, trading, mining, exploration (like it is actually a money-making, credit-receiving profession for once!), piracy, bounty hunting etc.
- Faction building (including with motherships that can even be partially public and make money from non-faction members!) which also includes influencing and "taking over" systems
- A single persistent galaxy (with the biggest "map" of any game ever made (excluding one or two infinite auto-generated games) made up of approximately every star and black hole in the real-life Milky Way galaxy and (mostly made up) planets for most of them - though they have used real data to generate everything that they could... I have yet to visit but our Solar System is replicated exactly!)
- It supports VR (and HOTAS etc.) - name it and it is supported (though a couple need community created software to work to their fullest)
- It is available on XBox, PS and PC (Steam, Epic or standalone) - Switch is unlikely though due to lack of appropriate interfaces (VR, HOTAS, Keyboard+Mouse etc.) and the screen size in portable mode would be inappropriate to say the least!
- You can play in the same galaxy map either without seeing another player at all (Solo), or in a private session (with only people you invite) or in open world with other people (though it is worth adding that these all happen in the same galaxy and progress and stuff transfers across them all and you can switch between them session to session). You can also join random players or friends in temporary "wings"/squadrons for one session or do the same more permanently through factions.
- Then they added planetary landing to everything (though landing on a sun has kinda predictable effects - you burn, well before you get anywhere close) and the ability to transport a land rover with you that lets you drive around whole planets (there is a even a group of people who specialise in this, though they prefer low-grav worlds where it is easier to jump canyons and other obstacles - the largest world so far accomplished is about a tenth the distance around the Earth in a rover that drives at a maximum of 35km/h (about 20mph) - and of course with no roads)
- Then they added being able to join your friends and fly ships together though you can play entirely solo if you so wish...
- And they have just added First Person so you can walk (fight etc.) around outposts, space ports and planetary bases as well as walk around on all the aforementioned planets you can land on and drive around a rover on. This includes adding an FPS element into the mix as well as missions, quests etc. You never need go off planet...
- This game was released in 2014 and bugs in it are minor at this point though players have still only "_seen_" 0.042% of the map and the community mapping project has only scanned, categorised and gathered details on 0.015%of the systems (this means spending more than a few seconds in the system to just jump through it).
Now... are there any details of Star Citizen that this doesn't cover?
P.S. If you play Elite Dangerous and do any exploration at all it would be great if you could join
EDSM.net and sumbit your Journals so that they can collect your system data to provide confirmations and keep habitation data up to date :) - feel free to ask me if you need any help getting set up - it's (apparently) usually pretty easy even if I had a couple of issues (mostly terminology since I'm so new to this version of the game!) and if you're an exploration type played you will LOVE this game - you even get credited with discovering and mapping (separately) stars, planets and moons first in game for all to see, maybe your system will also host a colony some day - there have already been hundreds of new colonies created in once barren systems!
P.P.S. Yes, I know I am clearly a recently converted fan-boy but then again, this game I can actually play and actually use the ships I own in game (and didn't have to pay real money for them) so at least I'm a step above the Star Citizens fan-boys who keep keep funding it and this game might actually help real life astronomy too!