Elite: Dangerous – What is it?

Elite: Dangerous is a game from Frontier Developments in the United Kingdom. The game is the long awaited Sequel to the Elite games of the mid 1980′ to mid 1990’sand the brain child of David Braben and Ian Bell. They wrote and developed Elite from the BBC micro and Acorn Electron.

Now move forward to 2012 and Frontier Developments decided to move to a kickstarter campaign to get funding after being unable to agree funding with any major publisher.  They were able to raise £1.2 million with a further £1.7 million coming from a campaign from Frontier Developments own website. This allowed them to get a playable “alpha” version of the game to kickstarter backers by December 2013 and a beta version by May 2014.  The game was finally released December 2014 with Elite: Dangerous. By the end of April 2015 they had sold over 500, 000( estimated) copies of the game.

So what is Elite: Dangerous?

Elite: Dangerous is a game in a persistent sandbox universe, our universe with every known star in the universe. Were every action a player makes can effect the rest of the universe. Within this universe you can play the game any way you choice. You can be a bounty hunter, pirate, trader, explorer or all four, it is entirely up to you. With some 400 billion stars, you have the room to play this game your way.

The game was originally supposed to have an off-line and on-line mode of playing but this changed to an on-line only game. This was greeted with mixed feeling from the backers, many saying this would not be good for the game. But to have a universe were every action can change something in the universe they decided to go to an online mode. Although the game has 3 modes of game:

• “open” where it is a true online multiplayer experience.
• “private”  where only players you invite can play with you.
• “solo”  which is exactly what is says – just you in a universe of NPC’s

All three modes contact the games servers to give all three the same universe to play in.

Frontier Developments plan to release a new “season” or expansion to you and me, every 12 months and within this season there will be 4 major updates per season. Horizon was the first season to be released and this aimed to add planetary landings, upgrades to ship parts via crafting and looting, multi-crew ships and alien contact. At this point in writing only crafting and looting and planetary landings (moons and small planetoids)(they are planning to expanding landing to every planet in the future).