When comparing Star Citizen vs Elite: Dangerous, the Slant community recommends Elite: Dangerous for most people. In the question“What are the best open world space games?” Elite: Dangerous is ranked 1st while Star Citizen is ranked 2nd. 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 Ability to command persistent ships and stations
Players will be able to command multi-person ships with other users who will be able to command their own stations on said ships.
Pro Over $73 million in funding
A game with the huge scope of Star Citizen will cost a lot of money to develop, and through multiple campaigns, Star Citizen has raised a huge amount of money to make that happen. More money means more developers, and designers which can lead to a ton of features.
Pro Includes a singleplayer mode, called "Squadron 42"
Squadron 42 is a single player campaign that takes place in the in game universe that allows players to play offline.
Pro Vast, detailed sci-fi world
A long term goal is to have over 400 different star systems in game, most of which will have many planets within them.
Pro Dynamic economy system
The economy of the game and the actions to keep it moving are constantly going on in the background but allows for players to step in and out of it at their leisure in order to take part.
Pro A true PC game
It's been stated that the game will take full advantage of PC's capabilities and will not be held back by a need to accommodate a console port.
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 Commercial launch is at an undetermined date
The commercial launch, initially slated for 2016, is now at an undetermined date in the future.
Con Online shop
They sell premium ships for cash rendering early backers ships obsolete before the game has been released and creating a pay to win mechanic.
Con Incomplete; might never come out
The alpha is playable but very buggy; it supposedly represents less than 10% of the finished game, which was supposed to be released several years ago (as of 2020) and has no release date in sight. Despite a frankly staggering amount of funding, the developers never hit their deadlines and it's becoming ever more doubtful that the game will ever be released in anything resembling a finished state.
Con Maybe too big to be real
The game want to be the biggest Space game ever. I want everything and maybe Will not be able to deliever.
Con Long waiting
The game Will be released in 4 or 5 years.
Con Requires a powerful computer
To be able to run the game you need an expensive pc with high end materials.
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.