Ah ok. I was mainly wondering about the exploration. Are there a lot of interesting things to discover, or is mostly just about obtaining wealth?
Hmmm... that is very difficult to answer and depends a lot on what you call "interesting". At first when you start the game many things are quite interesting like the
different kinds of starports or oribtal docks you can land at or the planetary/asteroid bases etc.
Then when you get into
advanced exploration, you could fly to some of the sites that have
alien ruins or
barnacles or simply to some planets and explore icy canyons, mountain ridges etc.
It will be time consuming to find such things on your own. You would have to check guides for system names and coordinates since the game itself completely fails at pointing you in any direction via in-game means.
Finally, you could take off
into the black and travel thousands of light years to interesting constellations,
nebulae, asteroid belts and so on.
Or head off towards the
galactic fringes and see how far you can get... or create challenges for yourself like a galaxy circumnavigation (there is a community-driven exploration tour with that goal ongoing and they plan to take -IIRC- 18 months or so to pull it off).
The game has 400 billion(!!!) star systems and is a mix of an accurate astronomical model (e.g. our solar model and many known stars are represented accurately) of our milky way and of procedural generation to fill in the blanks.
So, even though the game has ~3 million lifetime sales so far (including the expansions so the number of actual lifetime players is lower), there is still a lot of unexplored galaxy out there. According to statistics it is still less than 0.1% discovered.
Personally, I went on a longer roundtrip in the game a few weeks back and discovered a few hundred unexplored systems on the way.
The exploration mechanic is rather unremarkable. You jump to a system, you fire your discovery scanner and then this populates the system map so when you open it, you can see all the astronomical objects in the system.
The vast majority of systems consist of one (or several) stars ranging from white/brown dwarves to neutron stars or red giants which are orbited by icy rocks. Very unspectacular... unless you are inclined to get close and personal, fly down to the surface of a planet and discover some cool landscapes.
What most people are after when exploring the black is earth-like worlds, water worlds and so on. They yield lots of credits as a reward and it's just nice to find such relative rarities. You also get your Commander's name on every previously unexplored "virgin" object if you are the first to turn in the data (yes, you have to make it back safely
).
So, the fascination with exploration in Elite Dangerous is mostly for people interested in the physical accuracy of the galaxy, the astronomy, the vastness and scope of space (the Elite galaxy is absolutely daunting in that regard)... you know, the sense of being WAY out there and away from the human bubble with just your tiny, fragile little ship against the odds the universe might throw at you.
Prevalent risks are e.g. running out of fuel, overheating when refueling with a fuel scoop near a star, crashing into a neutron star/white dwarf, crashing while attempting to land on a high gravity world etc.
Many people are
hoping for more meaty exploration gameplay in the future since it does get old relatively fast at the moment. You just jump, scan, jump scan, jump, scan, hoping for a rare "spectacular" find.
Other than that, yes, the game is more about acquiring wealth. The basic concept of Elite has always been "
here is 100cr and a crappy ship, good luck".
So what most people do in the game is trade, haul passengers, mine, explore, bounty-hunt etc. to increase their balance to buy bigger, better ships which you can then modify via engineers if you own the Horizons expansion so you can do the above mentioned things faster, better, more effective etc.
In a nutshell most of the gameplay fun lies in owning, upgrading, buying, modifying, outfitting ships or equipment for whatever gameplay mechanic, whether it is combat or non-combat related, is the most fun to you.
As you might have guessed from the links above, one of the go-to YouTubers for all things Elite: Dangerous is
ObsidianAnt so if you want to take a closer look that might be a good destination. There is also the
official channel, of course.
Elite is unfortunately doing a poor job of presenting info in-game and has a much steeper learning curve than necessary so YouTube and other outside sources are pretty much required to play the game.