I saw you were on, but didn't see any messages. I was having a nightmare any way, over heating, ship systems lost, reboots, jump drive failures. Hobbled to a station that didn't do repairs then had to turn it off. Sorry, next time Kow.

I saw you on the map, it was about 80ly away.

I picked up some floating contraband. Flogged it down the local black market. Rozzers non the wiser.

And I've just landed a 84k drug run for a total of 122k in the bank. Booyaka.

I had a brief go at one point I think, didn't persevere. I really liked Orbital (dead realistic space flight sim) and plenty of other such sims. I guess what I'm wondering is how good the gameplay/story/world is, is it believable and engaging and all that?

Well. 
It's original Elite with knobs on. 
But it's not as complicated as Frontier. 

The flight controls are gorgeous. The sliding and banking and rolling are just sex wee when you pull them off nicely. 

As for the rest of it. There's no celestial mechanics involved really, you do seem to get slingshot around suns and planets but there's no plotting of vectors etc...

Missions, there are loads of them at each station and they depend on your ranking, station relationship (i.e. Friendly or criminal), they can be as simple as deliver these machine posts for a few quid up to raid convoys or hunt specific people. The hunting is interesting. You have to hang around systems targeting craft until you find the target then you either follow them, wait for then to drop out of warp or you can interrupt their warp with the right equipment. 
It's really up to you. It's an open universe, there's no story, you can be a pirate, a miner, a smuggler, a mercenary or a trader. 
You make your own stories.
The atmosphere is nice but at three end out the day you are playing this for the experience, there no global leaderboards, you are a speck in a massive galaxy doing what you want.

There are a couple of things that would imerse you even more and they are meant to be in the works, like a fps on stations and planets mode.

Edit.
I'd say it's an arcade-sim and not a sim.

Think I'm going to start again and specialise in bounty hunting/pirateering.

Fucking excite!

I presume the factions evolve. And pirating other players is possible. The economy reacts to trade routes too.

You get inter systems conflicts or civil wars in a system. 

You also get flagged as you are flying about and asked to follow people and drop out of warp and have a chat etc...
It definitely feels alive. There's loads of things buzzing about and 'unknown' radio sources to go and have look at.

How the fuck do you find missions or what to do?

I've been flying around the first space station like a fucking numpty

Kow wrote:

People don't even answer my messages...

Hope they answer mine

In the station when you dock, go to station services, and check the bulletin board, it's in the list.

GurtTractor wrote:

Are there good opportunities for emergent gameplay? Does the world feel alive? Like, are there large scale events involving the factions out whatever that can radically alter the NPCs interaction with each other and with you ? I played Evochron Mercenary and it seemed that every mission and task was there to give the player a bit more cash so they could get a better ship and do a slightly trickier mission etc etc etc. The world felt totally dead. So many games are like this, nothing really happens until the player makes an action. I would like a game in which the world continues to evolve in spite of the player.

Evochron Mercenary was great online, there's actually more to do in it I reckon but elite has much better polish/UI/sound and slicker graphics (to be fair, EM was made by 1 guy).

I had about 5 millions credits in this back in the PC beta before it got wiped, tough facing that grind again. Was waiting for consumer VR before jumping back in, but if people are playing mp now may as well join in. CMD name is vicinity.

Oh. Did it.