Elite: Let's Get Dangerous

Now for something completely different:

This little picture is something I made after starting a long-range expedition in Elite: Dangerous.

The game can be as beautiful as EVE Online, even though in other parts the games are as different as night and day. While EVE takes a more holistic approach to space gaming, Elite is a true simulation of space travel. You and your joystick control your ship directly and the map is a painstaking simulation of the 400+ billion star systems found in our Milkyway.

When I'm not playing EVE, I like to continue my lonely journey through the emptyness of space, taking pictures along the way.

Elite: Dangerous is a nice game, even though it is kind of barebones at the moment. On the other hand, if you hate people you can just play in Solo-mode and never get annoyed by someone ever again.

As an explorer, I normally could ignore this and play in the normal "Open"-mode, but 400 billion stars are a lot and outside of the small human-settled space you generally see no-one either way. Sadly, in Open-mode the function to make HighRes-shots is blocked, so a picture like the one above would suffer quite a bit.

Theoretically, it should not bother me as much, since I have to resize and compress my HighRes-shots anyway before uploading them to the mighty internet to share. But I feel like having at least some genuine HighRes-shots on my HDD and anyway, I like to downsize the pics myself, thank you very much.

If you want to try it out for yourself, here's a link to the shop. (You can also get the original 1984 Elite for zero money, if you want.)

Don't worry, by the way: Trading and shooting is also possible, you aren't forced to go out and see the universe!