Elite Dangerous is a game full of drastic swings between peaceful, poetic moments like this, others that are full of danger and action, and some of the most boring stretches of empty space I’ve ever navigated.Though this deep and vast space fighter sim has been out (first on PC and then on Xbox One) for a few years now, Elite Dangerous has finally brought its 1:1 scale model recreation of our Milky Way Galaxy to the PlayStation 4. This peaceful moment leaves me awestruck as I take it in, making me hesitant to move on to the next leg of my journey. The purplish light of the star bounces off the dashboard of my spacecraft, filling the area with a melancholy glow. If it helps, try to think of this as how planes fly - to go left, they roll left then pitch up - they don't make the entire plane turn left using the rudder controls.As I drop out of hyperspace flight, the whine of my engines resonating throughout the cockpit of my Cobra Mk III spacecraft as they screech to a halt, a Methane Dwarf star stares back at me. This can be counter-intuitive if you are used to FPS style games where left on the mouse means “turn left” in the game (in Elite Dangerous it would actually roll the ship, spinning the screen). The rationale for this was that Frontier were concerned that by having a fast yaw and pitch would cause multiplayer games to become simple matters of stopping the ship and then just rotating around to point-and-shoot at the target (the so-called “turrets in space” argument), rather than the “dog fighting” that is required by the deliberately ham-strung yaw rates.
The “preferred” way of controlling ships in Elite Dangerous is pitch (aka up and down) and roll (aka “spin”) - apparently Frontier have deliberately made yaw (aka left and right) deliberately slow as they want to promote pitch and roll as the preferred way of controlling the ships.