The fourth game in the seminal ELITE space trading/combat series has been formally announced via a Kickstarter campaign.
The original ELITE was released in 1984 and is notable for being one of the first major 3D games and one of the first games to give the player total freedom of how they played it. It was a stunning technical achievement and arguably represents the single biggest jump forward in both technical and conceptual gameplay terms in gaming's history (it's sometimes been likened to the arrival of sound in film in being a transformative momentin the history of the form).
The sequel, FRONTIER, was released in 1993 and was almost as impressive, featuring hundreds of millions of star systems and allowing players to undertake a much vaster array of missions, fly different ships and land on planetary surfaces as well as with orbiting space stations. The game also had a Newtonian physics flight model and a superbly accurate recreation of our Solar system. Despite its technical brilliance, actually flying the spaceship was less fun in FRONTIER. The third game, FIRST ENCOUNTERS (1995) suffered a botched, extremely buggy launch which caused the creators to sue the publishers for releasing an early version of the game without their permission.
ELITE: DANGEROUS is planned for release in 2014 and will apparently incorporate the vast galaxy of FRONTIER mixed in with a more traditional (and accessible) flight model. The game will have modern, state-of-the-art graphics (of course) and an integrated multiplayer mode. However, further details on the project are somewhat thin. Videos and screenshots of the work undertaken so far will apparently be posted soon (and I'd argue that putting up a Kickstarter page without them was rather silly, but a mistake they can recover from).
The latest dev diary is up. They've had five of these so far plus a bunch of other updates. Things are looking good so far.
Elite: Dangerous space combat video and alpha info.
They're using a similar system to X-Wing and Freespace, with power distribution options to give your shields or weapons a boost. However, they're taking it further by allowing you to also shut down certain systems to 'go cold' for stealth purposes.
Combat is something that Frontier and First Encounters did very badly, so it's good to see that it's looking great in the new game.
Apparently it's a lot of fun.
Alpha multiplayer combat test, looking pretty good.
How to dock your spacecraft in ELITE: DANGEROUS.
Extremely impressive. The original ELITE made docking your starship with a space station a rather lethal affair, with it being rare to end a docking attempt within the bay rather than reduced to flaming debris. The two sequels automated it, which made more sense but was less fun.
ELITE: DANGEROUS strikes a balance by allowing you automate your spin to lock onto the station but still permitting manual docking (docking computer upgrades will be available later on). More impressively, you can fly around inside the docking bay before you land on your designated pad.
The cockpit looks amazing.
Ok, so available when?
It was supposed to be April, but that's not happening now. I think there's a feeling it might be the autumn, if not early 2015. It's difficult to say because they're going quite a few weeks at a time without showing anything, and then suddenly whacking us with multiple videos, blog updates and an already-playable alpha (now in its third release).
I think end of the year is certainly possible at this stage.
An article I wrote for Gollancz (who are publishing the ELITE: DANGEROUS tie-in books) about the dangers of docking in the original game.
A report on playing ELITE: DANGEROUS with the Oculus Rift for two weeks. It sounds awesome, apart from the Rift leaving red marks on your face afterwards.
This smuggling video is rather cool.
Illogical, it has to be said, but cool. It shows how the stealth mechanics in the game (powering down all heat-producing systems) work.
This new Elite: Dangerous fan trailer is pretty good.
Frontier will release the official, final release date on 22 November. And they are still 100% adamant about it launching before the end of 2014, so as of today the game is an absolute maximum of nine weeks away.
I've been flying since early August.
This game is costing me a fortune! I picked up TrackIR for it. Then, just yesterday, my X-55 Rhino hotas showed up. :D
I'm also in Star Citizen, but Elite is really where it's at so far. Just so much fun, and the ships fly so well, especially with my new toys!
I bought a Thrustmaster T-Flight HOTAS for ELITE: DANGEROUS and unexpectedly got to put it through its paces early when X-WING and TIE FIGHTER were re-released :)
Final release date: 16 December. This year.
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Been playing this a bit so far. The flight model is fantastic (a good blend of fully Newtonian and X-WING/FREESPACE-style space dogfighting), the spacecraft and space station designs are amazing and the game does a good job of updating the take-no-prisoners design of the previous games in the series with something more accessible. It's still not an easy game to get into though. You need to play the tutorials and get a feel for the vagaries of combat (particularly reverse and down-thrusting to get pursuers to overshoot) and supercruise, which takes an hour or so.
With a HOTAS set-up, the game is particularly amazing, although it is playable with a gamepad or even just the keyboard.
Successfully carried out my first clandestine smuggling run in Elite: Dangerous.
Normal trade runs in the early game will net you 2,000 credits if you're lucky and canny, so, since I have access to a super-fast Eagle ship (thanks to the pre-order), I decided to do a fast retrieval mission. I had to go grab some black boxes from a big battle around a remote star (picked up some nice extra cash for surveying the system at the same time) and then get them onto one of the big Federation stations. Not every ship is routinely scanned - the lore says that even the moderately busy systems still get upwards of 50,000 ships passing through every day, so it's impractical - so it's a case of having to avoid the spot checks. The station has Viper fighters on routine patrol, so I had to work out their routes and stay out of scanning range on the final approach. Then one of them closed to scanning range and started pinging me, so I screamed "F*********k it!", slammed on the afterburners and shot through the docking portal at 30kps, or about three times faster than is safely recommended. That got me out of scanning range (nearly ramming another ship in the docking tunnel in the process) and then I had to slam into reverse to avoid crashed into the interior hull of the station before pulling of a relatively graceful landing on my designated pad.
Slightly nerve-wracking but 12,000 credits made it worth it. Totally sweet.
C'mon, is no-one else here playing this?
Pretty good timing actually, as version 1.1 hits tomorrow. They've done seven minor updates since launch, but this is the first big one that has a load of graphical updates, some important stuff setting things up for later on (the addition of cities to planets, although you still can't land at them...yet), some rebalancing and a few new ships.
The game is playable with keyboard/mouse, certainly against NPCs, but if you're going to go up against other players I would recommend a HOTAS set-up. Gamepad will work in a pinch (the game's main designer actually uses a 360 pad, surprisingly) but I think a good stick set-up is the way to go. The Thrustmaster T-Flight HOTAS is cheap as dirt and very well made.
The starting difficulty could do with some tweaking. It's nowhere near as bad as EVE ONLINE, but the game doesn't do as great a job as it could of explaining things. However, the tutorials are reasonable, the downloadable manual is actually useful and YouTube pretty much covers everything else. The only thing that could do with an overhaul is trading, which is obtusely baffling, and happily version 1.1 is going some way to fixing that with a better galactic map and route-finding. That said, exploration and combat/bounty-hunting are viable alternatives to trading for making big money. Mining is terrible, but that's going to be fixed later.
Another good piece of advice is to keep an eye on the GalNet news and don't be afraid to fly over to a sector of space where stuff is actually going on. The starting area is cool with lots of interesting systems and some fun missions, but it's also a bit too stable. I took off to the Dulos system, which is in a civil war and is also located along the Federation/Imperial border (such as it is) with lots of intrigue. Today the system blew up in a series of full-scale combat engagements, leading to quite a few good missions.
At the moment I'd say the game is in a pretty good shape and will easily give out about 30-50 hours of solid gameplay before it starts to drag a little. The good news about the iterative releases (especially as it's free) is that if the game does get a little too staid you can play something, come back 2-3 months later and likely find things have changed a fair bit.
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I just started playing (yay Steam release!), so I probably won't encounter the draught for a while (and I hope future updates will bring a little more variance in missions - stubborn single-player here - and Thargoids, I am not sure what will happen with mining - if it stays in the Elite/Frontier tradition, it will stay terrible...) and it is fun, challenging but fun. Dogfights can be pretty intense, much more so than in any of the X-Games.
Fans of Space-Sims should check this one out!
The new POWERPLAY update in a few weeks will change mining. It adds drones which can recover minerals for you and better scanning options. It'll still be a niche activity, but at least it will be a bit more interesting than now. There will also be more varied missions with the greater focus on factions and sub-factions.
As I said upthread: Joystick. Keyboard and mouse is passable, gamepad is solid, but joystick (with HOTAS if possible) is where it's at.
Picked it up yesterday, enjoyed it so far. The only issue I'm having is all the crashes. I get a mission to go some place and I can supercruise right next to it, but as soon as I drop out of supercruise AT the location, game crashes.
Necro.
Just discovered this game and saw that it can be played on my Xbox. Looking forward to the Horizons add-on and get the entire set in June!
XBox is offering a 50% discount for Gold members, so I got E:D for $18.75. Now I need to learn how to pilot my ship! Based on my first training session, it's going to be a bit of a steep learning curve for me.
Pretty sure the sale ends May 16, which means the Horizons expansion is probably coming out May 17 for console. And also the Engineers 2.1 patch for everyone.