Elite Dangerous or X4: Foundations

Vern1961 · 27 Dec 2018 at 08:27

The biggest problem with ED (IMHO) remains the rebuy scheme if you total your ship and the lack of a hard dock save out in the boonies. If you bite the big one two jumps from home after weeks out in the black, all your progress is gone. I haven't bought X4 yet (a tad pricey) but at least Egosoft games normally allow you to quicksave as you go.

NeoWave · 27 Dec 2018 at 08:30

To answer some of the above (I hope):
X4 allows you to progress from lonely ship commander to owner of a corporate empire with bases & the works. It looks more like a business sim in places than a space sim with a lot of action taking place via menus. It is single player with a pseudo-MP mode being added which will enable NPCs from different players' games to meet but not actual players.

Elite Dangerous is much more immersive & more about the commander and their ship. It suffers from grind in some areas but a lot of this problem has been removed with a reworking of the engineering, exploration & mining systems to remove the games addiction to RNG. It is MP & has landing on non-atmospheric planets unlike X4. The base game & Horizons seasons pass gets you Elite Dangerous Seasons 1 - 3, ie Base Game, Horizons & Beyond. Season 4, 'New Era' will be the next paid for expansion.

In a nutshell, get X4 if you want a game that will take you on a journey from small fry to big fish in an isolated world. Get Elite Dangerous if you want to fly a space ship, pretend to be Captain Picard to a growing degree & maybe find other people to do it with. X4 is a largely complete game, Elite Dangerous isn't remotely complete and is aiming to be where Star Citizen is heading but is arguably a functioning product & completely playable product whilst Star Citizen is still very much a tech demo.

Hope that helps

CaptainRAVE · 27 Dec 2018 at 20:50

You can’t really compare the two. ED is a spaceship simulator, X4 is an economy simulator with some first person elements. Both difficult to get into, I personally found X4 easier to get into. X4 I find easy going, Elite stresses me out! Both are being actively developed with DLC and free content as seems to be the new model.

SPG · 28 Dec 2018 at 08:28

Vern1961 said:
The biggest problem with ED (IMHO) remains the rebuy scheme if you total your ship and the lack of a hard dock save out in the boonies. If you bite the big one two jumps from home after weeks out in the black, all your progress is gone. I haven't bought X4 yet (a tad pricey) but at least Egosoft games normally allow you to quicksave as you go.

Why is a problem ? Its a consequence of the player not paying attention nothing more but your own fault especially if you fly without being able to cover the rebuy.

mortals · 28 Dec 2018 at 11:38

Completely different style of game, one is fly your own ship + multiplayer and other is fly a ship while trying to micromanage a fleet of ships doing trading, fighting & everything else.

At the moment, out of the two I would pick Elite Dangerous.

I personally bought X4 which made me want to play Elite again (bought in 2015). I like both games for their different styles but have found myself playing Elite more & even bought the Horizons Season Pass.

X4 seems like a game for the future, it's quite expensive at the moment in comparison to Elite and the UI/UX is terrible.

Elite Dangerous still has the problem of getting boring from grind but there are lots of things to do, the new exploration tools are fun & the new mining looks interesting.

Elite still doesn't feel like an MMO in comparison to something like EVE Online.
If they could add MMO aspects it could be amazing but I guess it has been out for 4 years already & they haven't moved into player interaction or trading or alliances/corps, if anything you get punished for co-op of multicrew etc.