What byshop said. It's a slow burning game that requires patience. It's a game I think I'll always pick up and play to relax and to get my space flight fix.

Loving the old-school RPG resurgence. I've sunk my teeth into Wasteland 2 and am loving it. Will play this after. Graphics ain't everything that's for sure.

I liked the ending and can't understand what the melodrama's all about really (I did only watch the ext. ending and had all the DLC). It's like Avatar; a lot of people were quick to point out the supposedly unoriginal story. I ended up seeing it in the cinema in 3D, not having a clue what it would be about, no hype invested, and it was one of the best cinema experiences of my life. I had minor withdrawal symptoms after leaving sad to say it, it immersed me into the world emotionally and to me that bypassed its flaws. Same with Mass Effect.

Unreal's one of the best single player shooters I've ever played and I get the feeling most people saw it as just a graphics benchmark which is a little sad. I think it offered something Quake II lacked - a sense of place. I had great fun playing through it 2 years ago.

Pros:

• Every fight's a challenge without being bullet-spongy; hitting and dodging your opponent's the challenge which I really enjoyed.
• Amazing soundtrack.
• Lengthy.
• Epic, colourful and varied grand-scale level design.
• A dark, brooding, exotic, alien, mysterious, lonely vibe. It's otherworldliness and your role as an interloper in the middle of a conflict made the game very fun to explore. It had that in-the-moment immersion of Dark Souls.

Cons:

• Dated graphics.
• Archaic storytelling.
• No more worthy sequels!

A new RTS is always a good thing, I'm just not a fan of the goo faction. Too tacky and doesn't seem fun to fight.

I've been playing bite sized chunks of Elite since its official release and am still earning cash as a trader, but want to eventually get a taste of combat, then ultimately explore the galaxy.

• The gameplay does take getting used to. Everything seems to be reasonably easy to learn but hard to master; combat has hidden layers of depth but it's easy enough to grasp the basics. You're best off spending 30 minutes practising the combat tutorials, give the game manual a read through and visit the Elite beginner forums.
• The Kb/M is fine but if you do get into the game I'd definitely get a joystick. It's a lot more satisfying, immersive and accurate in combat.
• I personally don't think that Elite's a game I could drop 100's of hours in like I did with WoW in its current form. It's admittedly quite bare bones; there's no real sense of engagement with the factions and there's only a small variety of missions - none as of yet for exploration, which is odd. But 30 hours into it, I'm still enjoying it and I've only really been trading.
• You don't lose any progress by not logging, but you don't gain anything like WoW's bonus xp by not logging in. You must always keep spare money by to pay for insurance if you die though, otherwise you could lose your ship and start from scratch. But that's easily rectified by keeping money by.

• Being stuck with people who don't stop talking.
• People who are quick to blame others.
• People who talk over you mid sentence and speak so fast as though they think you're about to do the same to them. Typical people who love to talk but never listen.
• People who have no manners i.e. no eye contact, half-assed mumbling, won't acknowledge you unless you make the first move.
• People who walk slow and stop every so often.
• Wow, I could go on all night, it always comes down to people :)

Loving the game so far. Just upgraded to a Cobra from a Hauler. I've geared the ship towards trading but I want to try combat. Finding good trade routes has been difficult. You can earn more the further your journey is but jumping like 5-10 systems a run's a pain up the ass. I'm struggling to make sense of the stats on some of the equipment too. Can't make head or tail as to what the FSD stats mean and I'm not sure if it's one of those things where it's worth even spending much on a low-mid range ship. Oh well. I'm using this old stick which seems to work well:

Elite's amazing. I would have never enjoyed it a few years ago but I see it's one of those games where you put a bit of focus into and I see it reaps the rewards. I consider myself a hardcore gamer but Elite just seems like a fucking way of life, like a secondary virtual career excuse my French. I can already see it's a game where the patient succeed and the instant-gratification AAA folk grow weary fast.

@rabakill: Yeah you're right they're absolutely terrible, what were they thinking making these abominations? You may as well quit gaming (and posting on Gamespot) right? The golden days are gone and there's obviously nothing left to enjoy.