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Differences between Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen according to Elite Dangerous wiki: http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/E ... gerous_FAQ" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Differences between Elite Dangerous and Eve Online from same wiki:What are the general differences between "Elite: Dangerous" and "Star Citizen"?
The differences are predominantly in issues surrounding scale, complexity of background simulations and adherence to recognised science of the universe.
Star Citizen comes with a single-player focussed cinematic scripted campaign which will be updated with paid DLC expansions.
In Elite: Dangerous, the ships are generaly larger and atmospheric capable ones are engineered to be aerodynamic, therefore carry their weapons within a bay. This provides ships with hulls that are able to enter and freeform (manual pitch/yaw/roll) fly through 1:1 scale planet atmospheres at hypersonic speeds.
In Star Citizen the ships are less aerodynamic and carry their weapons outboard.
Landing on planets in SC will use scripted in-game cinematics and will be limited to several star ports.
Elite: Dangerous has freeform (manual pitch/yaw/roll) interplanetary fast travel with combat maneuvering and because it takes place in a realistic 1:1 scale galaxy with proper distances it necessitates faster than light speeds, up to 2500 times the speed of light (2500C) to make travel times practical, with very long range sensors and combat interaction and you will be able to seamlessly enter hyperspace from anywhere to another star.
Star Citizen's interplanetary fast travel will allow a speed of up to 20% the speed of light (0.2C) which necessitates compressed scales to make travel times practical, it also won't be freeform (Autopilot Only) nor have combat maneuvering in this mode, so you will not have the ability to specify an exact random location in space. You can navigate to known locations or tag a ship they want to track or ambush. Also you must fly through wormhole-like jump points (which will allow some interactivity) at fixed locations to other star system.
In Elite: Dangerous the galaxy will include around 100 billion star systems. The Elite Universe is modelled on current galactic charts. Planets and moons will rotate and orbit in 1:1 scale real-time, therefore constantly changing a system's environment.
Star Citizen's galaxy will have 120 star systems at launch, with time compressed to 2 hours for each day (1:12 scale time) and a more casual take things regarding spatial size and distance of celestial bodies, so planets won't be properly scaled and they might also not orbit. To give you an example, Elite: Dangerous will have stars alone that can engulf whole star systems of Star Citizen multiple times. Also see this video to give you a sense of scale.
Given what we know about our solar system, the orbits of exoplanets and the fact that the maximum speed in SC will be 0.2C with a targeted travel time of around 30 minutes to cross a star system, it is estimated that the size of SC star systems will be compressed to around 1:100 up to 1:2500 scale.
Elite: Dangerous has lightspeed pulse and beam lasers on all ships fitted with energy weapons, as opposed to Star Citizen which has slow moving beam weapons only on capital ships. The remainder of the SC fleet will have slow moving laser bolts like you would see in Star Wars.
Elite: Dangerous will have freeform (go wherever you want) planetary exploration on full 1:1 scale planets.
In Star Citizen planetside aspects take place only in specialized locations, such as star ports, bars and FPS arenas.
In Elite: Dangerous there is no artificial gravity, so space stations are designed to rotate as opposed to Star Citizen.
There are major differences in how each game handles close combat flight as you can see from this video. There is an inherent flaw with the premise of close combat space flight leading to endless turreting and circle-strafing especially in PVP multiplayer due to the lack of terrain features in mid space.
Elite: Dangerous deals with this by limiting the yaw rate and enforce an optimum corner speed in the flight control computer so you are forced to roll and then pitch to get the most efficient turn rate (less efficient, but most comfortable for a human pilot), in addition there is a G-LOC system, a preliminary version can be seen here.
In Star Citizen you can point your ship more intuitively like in an FPS fashion, since yaw is very strong (most efficient, but discomforting for a human pilot). It deals with turreting by having a G-LOC system as seen here, but this alone doesn't alleviate the problems completely, but it is less critical due to the lack of lightspeed lasers on the smaller ships.
Star Citizen allows players to control capital ships.
While Elite: Dangerous allows players to own and fly relatively large executive ships, it leaves very large capital ships to NPC control only for the time being.
Multiplayer is handled with a grouping system in Elite: Dangerous and a PVP-PVE slider which doesn't completely control engagements in Star Citizen.
What are the general differences between "Elite: Dangerous" and "Eve Online"?
Elite: Dangerous is pay once and play, therefore does not have a periodic subscription like Eve Online.
Another major difference is that in EVE everybody within a star system is in one big instance and when there are too many people within it they slow down the update rate of the game.
Elite: Dangerous features dynamically created free moving multiplayer instances that are decoupled from the star system itself (but you can also play solo).
The galaxy is totally seamless for the case of Elite: Dangerous and the sessions within it can move around, only bubble range and interest determine the players you will see during flight.
Due to a lot less network traffic, this allows Elite: Dangerous to have twitch based action instead of classic MMO click 'n' roll (where actual world updates are comparitively slow depending on server load and all attacks are caculated on servers using modified D&D system) which is used in EVE. That means that Elite: Dangerous combat is more skill based.
The Elite: Dangerous galaxy is based on the real Milky Way and planets will rotate and orbit their stars, thus constantly changing a system's landscape and adding lot of depth - and it has around 100 billion star systems, as opposed to EVE where the planets are static and don't move.
Elite: Dangerous has freeform (manual pitch/yaw/roll) interplanetary fast travel up to 2000 times the speed of light (2000C) and you will be able to seamlessly enter hyperspace from anywhere to another star. EVE on the other hand has point & click travel and you must fly to a jump gate to enter another star system.
A major feature that Elite: Dangerous will have is freeform (manual pitch/yaw/roll) atmospheric flight and seamless landing on planets and walking on living planets with cities and wildlife as part of expansions soon after the initial release.
Another important difference is that EVE has a lot of empire building and RTS elements, while Elite is what it would be like to be a spacefarer in a galaxy from a first person’s perspective.
Another important difference is that EVE's economy is totally player driven - so to have ships and weapons in the game have to be manufactured by players themselves, by collecting resources and providing them to factories. Elite: Dangerous uses a carefully tuned statistic model to simulate the flow of products, which also have all player trades as input to emulate a shared universe. This allows for more casual game play and a much bigger galaxy.