Elite Dangerous

[Warlock-]

 

Elite: Dangerous is a space simulation videogame and the fourth installment of the Elite series. On board a spaceship the player explores a galaxy at a scale of 1: 1 based on the true Milky Way, being the first of the Elite series to offer a massive multiplayer experience (MMO), in which the actions of the players directly affect to the persistent universe, while maintaining the options of a single player. It is the sequel to Frontier: First Encounters, the third game in the Elite series, released in 1995. After not having reached a financing agreement with the distributors for many years, the developer created a Kickstarter campaign in November 2012. Fans have been able to access the initial versions of the game since December 2013.

 

Elite: Dangerous maintains the basic premise of the previous games, players start with a spaceship and a small amount of money as a starting point to make their way into the galaxy, either legally or illegally, through trade, piracy, murder or being a bounty hunter. David Braben has described the game in some way as a mixture of the original Elite and the sequels Frontier: Elite II and Frontier: First Encounters, describes it closer to the sequels, more like a scientifically accurate galaxy.

The player will be able to explore the Milky Way at 1: 1 scale, around 400 billion star systems, with planets and moons that rotate in orbit and in real time, resulting in dynamic day and night cycle, is based in the generation by procedures according to the real scientific models, of which about 150 thousand star systems are taken from astronomical data of the real world. The developer said: "It is very common to see space games making botched scales so that things look good, however this translates into unreal space locations." In Elite everything is at the scale that it should be, so the planets are of the correct size and the distances between the objects are also correct.

In the GDC of 2011, Braben confirms the development of a new game of the Elite franchise, the project, initially called Elite 4 had difficulties finding funds, however Braben himself was already interested in crowdfunding. In November 2012, a few days after the Kickstarter was launched in the United Kingdom, Frontier Developments announced that the game would now be called Elite: Dangerous and that it would be financed on that site, with the goal of raising 1.25 million pounds and launch the game in 18 months. On October 10, 2013, the development team officially announced the compatibility with Oculus Rift and by the beginning of 2014 it could already be used with the alpha version of the game.

In March 2014 the Kickstarter project was available for 60 days, the rewards included a digital copy of the game (standard and premium), a t-shirt and early access to the alpha and beta versions of the game. The financing was also possible thanks to the website of the game, through PayPal. The campaign raised 1.7 million euros in April 2014 and Braben had reacquired the rights to the Elite franchise. The game entered Phase Beta 1 in July 2014 and in Phase Beta 2 on September 30, 2014. During the Kickstarter many asked about the release of the game to other platforms and it turned out that they seemed interested, but the PC version was the priority at that time, anyway they also announced a version for Mac OS X three months after the launch in Windows. David Braben answered some questions about a possible port for Linux to the digital magazine Tux Radar, although he did not confirm that version, he said that the Linux platform was something that they were seriously considering and that there was no reason why COBRA, the game engine itself of Frontier Developments could not run on Linux, because it uses OpenGL.