Punctuation marks allowing, Elite: Dangerous: Horizons: Engineers: Beta is in full swing. Is it the Lord Saviour many have been holding their breath for? A bunch of crazy folk paid their own money to test drive it and tell us.Back to our Lord Saviour, if there’s anything biblical about the wannabe game-rejuvenating update, it’s the proportion of crap it goes about selling us as gameplay. So much for all the suspense. With Engineers, Elite: Dangerous descends ever deeper down Grind Devil’s sulphuric larynx.
Oh yeah, before we have a look at our brand new yay-progress-bars, hear ye that the game’s notoriously terrible AI has been apparently tweaked to take the leap from imbecilic AFKers bouncing hopelessly between asteroids to one-shotting executioners of anything that moves. It is yet to be seen if they now obey the game’s (lack of) rules or happily continue to give any logic the middle finger, but my bet is quite firmly on the latter.
Now. Elite – Dangerous – Horizons – Engineers’ much-advertised party piece is to be crafting. I have made it, hopefully abundantly, clear where I stand on crafting in video games and this load of bollocks has just become the case in point.
In this particularly delusional implementation of a crafting and loot system, you’ll have to be crafting in order to progress into higher-tier swag. Yeah. It’s not just you, it does indeed mean that in order to fill the flashy new progress bar, you’ve no choice but to repeatedly craft random gear that you’ll never need or want, with randomly-spread components the game can’t be bothered to even hint at whereabouts of, and with a bunch of raging, ransacking, cheating psychopaths randomly on and off your tail. Does this sound like fun to you? Great! Off you go, pay Frontier their dues for your testing and hop right aboard the White Knight Train!
As for me, well, I’m done with this. At this point I’ve only infinitely negative motivation to even try and revisit my once-favourite Elite when the Engineers grind fest hits the shelves at a bright random time. I already am in one-too-many vicious circle of same-shit-different-day. It’s called a day job.
