And I played them side by side for a VERY LONG time. For almost 5 years, I was a devout CMDR in Elite. I was active in the community, I wrote stories on inara.cz and I built dream ships in Coriolis. Then, out of the blue, Frontier Developments announced that they would no longer give support to console gamers and that no future DLC would be added except to PC. So after 5 years of paying them for every scrap of content to include paint jobs, ship kits, and decorative boubles for my cockpits; after spending $50 of my hard-earned money so many years ago to purchase a physical copy of the game, I was told to either buy a Steam Deck/PC, or kiss off because (supposedly) the FPS aspect that was added in the Odyssey expansion was too much for consoles to handle.

Meanwhile, here’s Hello Games not only constantly expanding the game by leaps and bounds (totally for free) and not only have they never stated that NMS is too much for consoles to handle, they’ve done the impossible and added the Switch to their list of platforms! And with every expansion or update, there’s always something that HG has in the background to try to improve stability for non-PC fan base. Proving without a doubt that the Elite dev team and their claims are full of sh*t.

Thank you Hello Games for actually CARING about the people who spent money on your product and fastly refusing to leave us blowing in the wind as you move forward. Thank you for doing all of this hard work for FREE (even though I have no idea through what sorcery you’re supporting yourself). And thank you for putting other developers to absolute shame by showing them how you’re supposed to treat people who invest both their time and their faith in your product. I’m proud that after I hung up my CMDRr’s hat, I was able to pick up the cloak of a traveler…

Well, I finally went and did it. I’m among the 0.7% of NMS players on Steam who journeyed to the center of Euclid in Permadeath mode.

Since I did all of last year’s Expeditions when they came out, I decided to make my own expedition-like experience – earning the “To Live Forever” achievement. The first hour or so was worrying. There were some close calls here and there. But my main impression of the Permadeath mode was annoyance:

• I kept hitting the inventory limitations even after setting up a base and freighter.
• Trying to mine guaranteed a Sentinel spawning nearby and getting big mad at my audacity.
• Pirates showing up and offering to free up inventory slots by taking my stuff every other time I went into space.

My chosen method was to go up the main story/quest line. It’s been a long time and the changes Hello Games made to it since the days of yore were interesting to see. I also took the opportunity to make some different choices this time around. It turns out that everybody is remarkably chill with letting Artemis die.

In the end, I reset the simulation and I found myself on an extreme radioactive planet in another galaxy with a bunch of broken gear. I struggled for a moment, but since I was planning on deleting my Permadeath save anyway, I calmly waited and let it self-wipe.

Going back to my legacy save and seeing the vast expanses of inventory space was like booting up a whole different game.