Elite Dangerous vs Star Citizen: The Space Game I Want Is Somewhere Between Them

I've played Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen for years, and despite the obvious comparisons, I've never really seen one as a replacement for the other.

On paper, they're remarkably similar. Both give you a spaceship and a large sandbox, then let you decide what to do with it. You can trade, mine, bounty hunt, fight, explore and spend unreasonable amounts of money upgrading ships because apparently financial responsibility doesn't improve when the currency is fictional.

In practice, they approach the space-game fantasy very differently.

Elite Dangerous built a galaxy and asked us to find our place in it. Star Citizen is building a smaller, more detailed universe and trying to make us feel like we physically exist inside it.

After years with both, there are things I desperately wish each would steal from the other.

Elite Still Owns the Sense of Scale

Nothing Star Citizen currently does compares to opening Elite's galaxy map and understanding that you're looking at a recreation of the Milky Way.

Not a collection of destinations pretending to be a galaxy. An absurd number of star systems stretching across an enormous simulated space.

That changes how exploration feels.

You can leave inhabited space and keep going. Eventually the stations disappear, other players become rare and you're jumping through systems thousands of light-years from where you started.

There's a genuine sense of isolation to it. A distant nebula isn't just a skybox. You can point your ship toward it and start travelling.

I've always loved that about Elite. Space feels enormous because it actually is.

The downside is fairly obvious after enough time with the game: procedural scale can become repetitive. There may be billions of systems, but that doesn't mean there are billions of interesting things to find.

Elite can give you an incredible reason to travel 20,000 light-years while occasionally struggling to give you much to do when you arrive.

Star Citizen Goes in the Opposite Direction

Star Citizen can't compete on scale, so it concentrates detail into a much smaller area.

Cities have transit systems. Stations have interiors. Cargo physically occupies space. Ships have rooms, doors, elevators, beds, components and storage. You can land somewhere, walk out of your ship and continue playing without switching to an entirely separate representation of the world.

I currently base myself in Nyx and mostly fly a Drake Corsair, which suits the kind of exploration-focused, slightly questionable lifestyle I want from a space game.

The important part isn't the specific location or ship, though. It's how physical everything feels.

Star Citizen is obsessed with removing abstraction. Sometimes this is incredible. Other times I'm standing in an elevator wondering whether perhaps a little abstraction was actually fine.

That tension exists throughout the entire game.

Odyssey Changed the Elite Comparison

One criticism that used to be easy to make about Elite was that you essentially were your ship.

Odyssey changed that significantly.

You can leave your ship, walk across planetary surfaces, visit settlements and stations, take missions on foot, fight, salvage materials and experience the scale of your ship from the ground. It made Elite feel much more like a place rather than exclusively a cockpit.

I think Odyssey is sometimes undersold when the two games are compared.

Standing underneath an Anaconda or walking across the surface of a planet adds a sense of scale Elite previously struggled to communicate from inside the cockpit. There's something very different about seeing your ship sitting on the horizon and having to physically return to it.

But the transition between ship and person still feels more compartmentalized than it does in Star Citizen.

You don't walk through your ship to reach the exit. You don't move naturally between its rooms because those interiors don't exist as playable spaces. Boarding is handled through a transition.

That's not necessarily bad design. In fact, sometimes I prefer it.

Elite gets me from wanting to do something to doing it considerably faster.

Star Citizen is much more interested in everything that happens between those two points.

Star Citizen Has a Time Problem

This is probably my biggest criticism of Star Citizen as an actual game.

Everything takes time.

Preparing equipment takes time. Retrieving ships takes time. Loading takes time. Meeting friends takes time. Travelling takes time. Recovering from dying takes time.

Individually, these systems make sense. Together, they can turn a casual gaming session into logistics management.

Elite respects my time more consistently. I can log in, decide what I'm doing and get started relatively quickly. It abstracts the boring parts because sometimes the boring parts are, in fact, boring.

Star Citizen occasionally seems philosophically opposed to admitting this.

I understand the argument for immersion. I like immersion. It's one of the reasons I play.

But there's a point where simulation stops creating meaningful decisions and starts creating errands.

Finding that line is going to be increasingly important as Star Citizen adds engineering, maintenance, physical inventories and more complicated ship systems.

I want to live aboard a spaceship.

I don't necessarily want to spend Saturday afternoon doing chores on one.

Elite's Problem Is Almost the Reverse

Elite can sometimes become too efficient.

A lot of its universe is experienced through interfaces. Cargo becomes numbers. Repairs become menus. Missions become panels. Materials become inventory counts.

The systems work, but over time the abstraction can make the universe feel more mechanical than physical.

This is particularly noticeable after spending time in Star Citizen, where moving cargo means someone physically moving cargo.

That can be tedious, but it can also create unexpected situations.

A simple delivery can become interesting because something happens during the process. Another player arrives. The ship gets attacked. Someone makes a mistake. Equipment gets lost. Plans change.

Star Citizen creates stories through friction.

Elite removes friction so you can get back to the larger activity.

Neither philosophy is inherently better. I just wish there were a comfortable middle ground.

Exploration Is Where Elite Still Wins

This is probably the easiest category for me.

Elite has exploration.

Star Citizen currently has places to explore.

Those aren't the same thing.

Elite lets me choose a distant region of the galaxy and build an entire session, or several weeks of sessions, around getting there. Distance itself becomes part of the experience. Fuel matters. Route planning matters. Ship range matters. Returning with exploration data matters.

There's a wonderful simplicity to it.

Pick somewhere absurdly far away.

Go.

Star Citizen has some incredible environments, and its handcrafted locations are considerably richer up close. But I want exploration to become an actual profession rather than an excuse to fly somewhere beautiful.

This is also the gameplay I'm most excited to see develop.

Scanning should matter. Information should have value. There should be unknown signals, resources, derelicts, anomalies and locations worth finding. Exploration ships should have meaningful advantages beyond looking like they're designed for exploration.

I want to leave populated space because there might genuinely be something out there.

Elite already understands that motivation.

Star Citizen Could Do Stealth Better

Where I think Star Citizen has enormous potential is stealth both for ships and on foot.

Space games tend to treat stealth strangely because there's nowhere obvious to hide. But Star Citizen already has many of the systems required to make it interesting: emissions, power management, components, radar, physical environments and multicrew ships.

I don't want a stealth mode that effectively makes a ship/player invisible; I want decisions.

Turn off systems and reduce your signature. Use terrain. Hide among asteroids. Detect someone before they detect you. Decide whether shields are worth the additional emissions. Decide whether engaging is worth revealing your position.

A successful stealth encounter shouldn't necessarily end with someone exploding. Sometimes the interesting outcome should be avoiding the fight entirely.

Elite already plays with heat and signature management, particularly through silent running, so the basic concept isn't new. But Star Citizen's more detailed ship systems could potentially make it much deeper.

That's exactly the kind of slower, more deliberate gameplay I'd like to see.

Combat Depends on What I Want That Night

Elite's ship combat remains excellent.

The flight model feels deliberate, different ships have distinct characteristics and learning to fly properly matters. There is a satisfying progression from barely understanding why you're spinning to confidently managing positioning, power and weapons.

Engineering complicates that.

Building highly optimized ships can be satisfying, but Elite has historically buried some of that satisfaction underneath material collection and repetitive progression systems. At times, preparing the ship I wanted became considerably less fun than actually flying it.

Star Citizen's combat is messier.

When it works, I like the physical damage and the direction it's moving with components and engineering. There's potential for combat to become something beyond reducing another ship's health until it explodes.

There's also a broader connection between space and FPS combat. You can fight in space, land, continue on foot, board locations and move between vehicles and characters inside the same sandbox.

That creates possibilities Elite doesn't really attempt in the same way.

But “when it works” continues doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Elite Is Better at Being a Finished Product

There's no clever way around this: Elite Dangerous is substantially more reliable.

Star Citizen is still under active development and behaves like it.

I've had sessions where everything works and the game is genuinely astonishing. I've also had sessions where missions break, servers struggle, AI stops functioning, ships behave strangely or some tiny interaction prevents the evening from going anywhere.

That unpredictability is exhausting.

The longer you play, the more you develop a strange sixth sense for it. You start recognizing when the server feels wrong. You learn workarounds. You avoid certain elevators. You know when it's probably safer not to touch something.

This is useful knowledge in exactly zero other areas of my life.

Elite has bugs, obviously, and Odyssey had a particularly rough launch. But today I generally trust Elite to let me accomplish what I logged in to do.

I still don't always have that confidence with Star Citizen.

Multiplayer Is Where Star Citizen Pulls Me Back

I run a small crew rather than a massive organization, and that's where Star Citizen has become much more compelling for me.

Multicrew feels natural because everyone physically occupies the same ship.

Someone flies. Someone uses a turret. Someone handles cargo. As engineering develops, there are more reasons for people to actually move around and manage the ship.

More importantly, you're sharing the same physical situation.

Elite supports cooperative play, wings and multicrew, but I've never developed quite the same attachment to playing aboard another person's ship.

EVE Online is actually the game I think both could learn from here.

EVE figured out decades ago that the most interesting thing in a multiplayer universe is often the players themselves. Organizations, economies, territory and conflict give people reasons to create their own stories instead of waiting for developers to provide them.

I don't want either game to become EVE, but I'd love more of that philosophy.

Give groups reasons to care about locations. Make resources strategically important. Let reputation matter. Create systems that encourage cooperation, competition and occasionally extremely petty space politics.

Developers can never produce content faster than players can consume it.

Players can produce drama indefinitely.

No Man's Sky Is the Other Useful Comparison

No Man's Sky sits somewhere else entirely.

Its procedural universe provides enormous scale, but it approaches exploration with a much more colourful, accessible and game-like philosophy. It isn't particularly interested in simulating every switch on your spaceship.

And that's fine.

Its greatest achievement might simply be how much it has grown since launch. Hello Games kept adding systems, expeditions, vehicles, base building, ships and increasingly bizarre things to discover.

It also proves something important about space games: scale alone isn't enough.

You need reasons to care about what you're finding.

Elite provides astronomical scale and a strong sense of distance. No Man's Sky constantly tries to populate exploration with novelty. Star Citizen concentrates detail into fewer locations.

My ideal space game probably steals shamelessly from all three.

So Which One Do I Actually Prefer?

Right now, I spend more time in Star Citizen.

Not because I think it's objectively the better game. In several important ways, it isn't.

Elite is more stable, dramatically larger and still gives me a better pure exploration experience. It respects my time more consistently and has years of completed systems behind it.

Star Citizen gives me more physicality, stronger multicrew experiences and a level of environmental detail that makes its smaller universe feel unusually tangible. It also gives me more frustration, more waiting and significantly more opportunities to wonder why something that worked yesterday has suddenly stopped working today.

The reason I continue playing is the potential created when those systems overlap.

I want Elite's sense of distance with Star Citizen's ships.

I want to travel somewhere genuinely remote, walk through the ship while we're underway, manage supplies with a crew, use scanners to find something nobody handed us a mission marker for, and occasionally avoid another player by shutting everything down and disappearing into the dark.

Elite has already given me parts of that fantasy.

Star Citizen is trying to build different parts of it.

After years playing both, I don't need one to kill the other. I want them to keep pushing in the directions they're best at, and occasionally steal the good ideas.

Elite Dangerous gave me a galaxy worth getting lost in. Star Citizen is trying to make getting lost feel like an actual adventure. I'm still waiting for the space game that completely nails both.