When comparing Project CARS vs Elite: Dangerous, the Slant community recommends Elite: Dangerous for most people. In the question“What are the best Simulation games on Steam?” Elite: Dangerous is ranked 21st while Project CARS is ranked 26th. The most important reason people chose Elite: Dangerous is:
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.
Specs
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Pros
Pro No VR sickness
Since the player and the character are stationary with the vehicle creating a frame of reference, much of the issues with motion sickness are avoided.
Pro Accessible to non sim players
While Project Cars is a hardcore racing sim, it still stays accessible for unfamiliar players through easy to understand design.
Pro Simple VR setup
The game auto-detects Oculus Rift, making setup a breeze.
Pro Finely tuned AI
Users can set what kind of AI they will be racing against each race, allowing you to make the game easier or harder if you wish.
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 Horrible optimization for AMD
For those that use and AMD CPU or GPU the performance is way below optimal with AMD performance at about half of what Nvidia and Intel chips are seeing.
Con Menus don't work on Occulus
Users are unable to control the menu in Occulus as the menus do not show, some workarounds are to close one eye to see if you can see a menu or use a tool to broadcast the Occulus image to ones monitor. Either way this can be a frustrating experience and needs to be worked out.
Con Buggy gameplay
Even though the game is fully released and out of early access it is still filled with bugs and balancing issues. From strange physics to graphics that flicker, the game has the appearance of a rushed product that was not ready for release.
Con AI can vary wildly
Even though the player can preset the AI before a race, the AI can still behave in strange manners, some drivers being really aggressive while others too passive. It is a strange mix that can make for some uneven racing.
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.