When comparing Town of Salem vs Elite: Dangerous, the Slant community recommends Town of Salem for most people. In the question“What are the best Massively Multiplayer games on Steam?” Town of Salem is ranked 2nd while Elite: Dangerous is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Town of Salem is:
The main aspect of the game is that you never know if anyone is lying to you at any particular time. This also goes for the player as well, as you can lie to anyone anytime. Which makes for quite the guessing game that asks of the player to use their deduction skills. When doing this with large groups and especially groups of friends this can make for a fun time trying to figure out who is doing what in the game.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Fun bluffing based gameplay
The main aspect of the game is that you never know if anyone is lying to you at any particular time. This also goes for the player as well, as you can lie to anyone anytime. Which makes for quite the guessing game that asks of the player to use their deduction skills. When doing this with large groups and especially groups of friends this can make for a fun time trying to figure out who is doing what in the game.
Pro The game keeps you playing, it's actually original
You can't find a game where you are this involved with other players anywhere else on the internet.
Pro Dedicated player base
Tons of people are playing Town of Salem and its different game modes, so you won't have a problem finding people to play with.
Pro Diverse gameplay
There are so many different game modes and roles to add.
Pro Built with future expansion in mind
When Elite Dangerous come out, development won't stop. To build a game with the huge scope of Elite Dangerous, not all of it can be done at once, so the developers have adopted an approach of incremental improvement. Various game play elements are being designed as a foundation for later features. For example, although planetary landings aren't going to be available until a later update, the engine has been designed to be able to support going from lightyears away to meters away.
Pro Exploration at every level of detail
Full exploration of the galaxy is planned, allowing you to be able to jump from star system to star system, and fly around within a solar system from planet to planet, eventually going all the way down to a planet's surface at a 1:1 scale in a later update. Planetary landings will require a lot of details to be developed and designed, but you can still see the level of detail shift in action when flying into a planet's rings, where getting close enough show the individual asteroids within, which you can then interact with through mining, or by having a battle among them.
Pro Very realistic representation of space & star systems
Elite Dangerous uses publicly available real world star maps that we have of the Milky Way consisting of 150,000 star systems. Although in the current beta, full access to the entire galaxy is limited, in the final game, you will be able to visit any of the 400 billion stars in our galaxy on a 1:1 scale. Stars that we do know of are properly mapped in place and are of the correct type given the information we have about them. Stars we haven't collected data on are procedurally generated which allows you to explore any of the 400 billion of them.
Star systems are intelligently simulated using the "Star Forge", a generator that simulates the creation of a star system forming from its nebular cloud to determine what celestial bodies appear and what orbits they have. This feature leads to many varied and unique star systems possibly with planets that can co-orbit around each other, or with binary star systems, and infinitely more possibilities.
Pro Great Oculus Rift integration
Elite Dangerous has very good integration with the Oculus Rift thanks to its cockpit view only gameplay philosophy. All ship UIs are part of displays that appear on each side of you that appear when you turn your head, so accessing the navigation or ship menus happens seamlessly just by looking in their direction. The game also uses the direction you are looking in for targeting, so your lock on target is whatever you're head is pointing at.
By sitting in the cockpit of a ship, you are given a stationary frame of reference that helps prevent motion sickness associated with movement in game when you aren't actually moving.
Cons
Con A lot of renegades
There are players that like going on their own and killing innocent people without any clue or strategy.
Con Gamethrowing
Sometimes, players act against their goals to win. For example, a member of the Mafia may end up purposefully revealing the whole Mafia. At that point the game is practically over. Luckily, you can report people who are gamethrowing within the game itself.
Con Uses Adobe Flash
Most browsers are starting to deprecate Flash as a plugin, (unless you have a browser like Google Chrome, which uses its own fork of Flash) you won't be able to play this game without having to purchase it on Steam.
Con High learning curve
It may be best to read up on this game and familiarize oneself to the rules and mechanics as well as common abbreviations. One particular aspect to learn about would be the 29 different roles found in the game, as you may be any one of them at the beginning of a game.
Con Really complicated to learn
Looking up faqs and trade routes from first hand users will be the norm for figuring out many aspects of Elite: Dangerous. On top of this notes will have to be taken, which is made more difficult by the fact the game does not support in game not taking. So a pad and paper is recommended to remember all of the minutia of the game.
Con Boring
It is more a simulation than a combat game.
Con Launcher issues
I bought the game on multiple stores and were never happy how the laucher and the account linking worked.
Con "Mile Wide and an Inch Deep"
The game has a serious problem with depth and requires the user to repeat the same few fun actions over and over again. The world is massive and beautiful but feels empty. The game gets stale quickly despite being visually stunning.