Combat and Controls

The ship interiors are a lot bigger than you may think.

For veterans of the space-sim genre, Elite Dangerous’ various control schemes will feel immediately familiar. But there are a lot of people who have never played a space-sim before, and Elite Dangerous’ learning curve is very steep indeed. Even when enabling “flight assist” on your ship, which automatically governs the thrusters so that the ship to compensate for inertia, you will still have to become accustomed to moving along multiple axes (pitch, yaw, roll, vertical and reverse thrust). Using a keyboard and mouse, the default control scheme rolls your ship left or right according to mouse movement, rather than turning the ship left or right; making the controls a particular hurdle for gamers accustomed to looking or turning with the mouse, and strafing with the keyboard.

In fact, if you really want to strafe in Elite Dangerous you need to disable the aforementioned flight assist. Without flight assist your behaves in a completely Newtonian way: If you start spinning your ship one way, it will not stop spinning until you engage your thrusters to spin the ship in the opposite direction (called “counter thrusting). I won’t lie, flying without flight assist is incredibly challenging, and I tend to switch back and forth as the situation demands. Once you come to grips with the unintuitive flight model, however, you can, say, rocket towards an opponent before using your lateral thrusters to rotate your ship and keep your weapons trained on them — i.e. strafing your target. Pretty neat, and very effective.

The universe is full of wonders.