No Man's Sky versus Elite Dangerous
What’s better, No Man’s Sky or Elite Dangerous? These two space exploration games couldn’t be more different, with Elite Dangerous offering a one-to-one replica of the Milky Way galaxy and No Man’s Sky featuring a more fantastical version of the universe, with over 18 quintillion planets to explore. The two games couldn’t have more diverse goals, but what about mechanics?
No Man’s Sky focuses on exploration and survival, allowing players to collect resources, build bases, and face various threats as they venture deeper into the universe. The game excels in the experience of exploring unique planets, discovering minerals, plants, and animals, and naming and uploading them for credits. When considering the enormity of the No Man’s Sky galaxy, the genius of the gameplay design starts to become apparent.
Elite Dangerous, on the other hand, is more about the journey than the destination and certainly has an abundance of content both on the journey to the center of the galaxy and once there. It features a multiplayer mode with a galaxy full of procedurally generated planets as well. Here’s our No Man’s Sky future content guide to help players get the most from one of the biggest space games on PC.
Elite Dangerous versus No Man’s Sky
The answer to the question ‘which is better, No Man’s Sky or Elite Dangerous’ depends on which aspects of the game are most important to the player. No Man’s Sky has a vibrant community, fantastic content updates since its rocky launch, and continues to offer free updates in the future. If players feel like they need a guide through the universe, they can take a look at our No Man’s Sky hub for everything they need to know about the game. However, by a narrow margin, Elite Dangerous takes the lead as the objective winner due to its varied gameplay, realistic space combat, and deep community involvement.
In fairness to No Man’s Sky, since its rocky launch, the game has had several significant updates and continues to be supported with free updates in the future, cementing its position as the better of the two. There are less mechanics and gameplay elements to master too, which is appealing to new players. While both games offer tremendous enjoyment and engagement, players should consider which aspects are most important to them when making a decision.
No one likes a tie game, so Elite Dangerous takes the belt as the better game in this comparison. By being so comprehensive, Elite Dangerous has set itself an extremely high standard, but Deep Silence fills in many of the gaps to create a truly seamless experience. Where No Man’s Sky generates its planets from algorithms, Deep Silence generates them from hand-crafted blueprints, offering much more varied planets.
There are a wider variety of ships to build too, making the potential for intimidating combat vessels very real. Once players add all of these things together, the gameplay becomes much fresher for a lot longer. While the end-game content in both games comes from the community, Elite Dangerous offers personal goals and challenges created by the community.
Players can also become a part of the Elite Dangerous community by contributing to Elite-Down, a website that collates all of the notable events, results, and updates coming from the game. Elite-Down is overseen and moderated by the passionate community member Inu, who aims to ensure it contains everything relevant to the game, making it the perfect place to visit whenever players need to keep up to date with all the goings-on.
The game also offers tremendous depth in terms of the community. Designing modules with lots of variables and interacting parts can be an intimidating prospect when players are first getting started, but they’re never short of advice and FAQs from the veteran gamers on the official Frontier support sites.
