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Elite: Dangerous won't feature offline play after all
Elite: Dangerous developer Frontier has seemingly reneged on an earlier promise to deliver an offline version of its popular spacefaring title. Fans of the crowdfunded hit caught wind of Frontier's plans via the game's 49th newsletter, and executive producer Michael Brookes confirmed the decision in subsequent forum posts. "We have always said the way to play the game is online - indeed it says so in the quote of me being circulated," Brooks wrote. "The choice was develop the game in the way we wanted, or not. Trying to make it offline would have made both experiences worse than we were willing to tolerate. We had to make the decision and have done so. I would say that an offline rewrite of the game is unlikely for the future." [Thanks golden radish!]
The Daily Grind: Should EVE Online add manual flight controls?
On Friday, developer CCP Games stunned us with the news that EVE Online will be adding manual flight controls in December's Rhea update. Gamers have been asking for twitch controls since EVE launched in 2003, but the idea has always been shot down as infeasible because it would put the server under extremely heavy load. CCP mentioned its interest in twitch controls during Fanfest 2013, and I speculated on a possible server-friendly implementation in an EVE Evolved article shortly after, but the fact that the feature is about to be released still comes as a huge surprise. The new controls will be optional and quite limited. Ships will be able to rotate clockwise or counterclockwise and pitch their ships up vertically up and down, but we won't be able to do loops or rolls like in a dogfighting game. Developers also want to add joystick support soon, but so far there are no plans to add manually targeted ship weapons. Many players are excited for the new controls, and some of them are already asking for further features like the ability to lock the camera behind their ships for a more hands-on flight experience. The announcement has prompted debate in the EVE Online community, and not everyone is convinced it's a good idea. Some have complained that twitch controls don't suit EVE as the ships are supposed to be massive starships with full crews rather than single-pilot fighter craft. There's also some cynicism over whether the feature is only being worked on now due to the growing popularity of Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous. EVE could be positioning itself as a viable alternative for any players who are disappointed with the new space games, a strategy that has worked in the past to help it absorb players from games like Earth & Beyond and Star Wars Galaxies. What do you think? Should EVE add manual flight controls, and is this an attempt to appeal to the mass market? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Braben says Elite: Dangerous' December 16th launch date is 'sensible'
Frontier's David Braben has announced that Elite: Dangerous will launch on PC on December 16th. Braben told Eurogamer that a game is "launch-ready when it is a great game," in spite of the flaws those close to the title might still see. He expressed concern over feature-creep and diminishing returns from gameplay polishing. "At Frontier we have been doing this for a long time," he said, "so we are confident the date we have announced is a sensible one." Elite's third beta phase, open to those who've already ponied up for the game, began at the end of October. After spending September playing through the beta 1 release, Massively's Mike Foster wrote that he "would happily recommend it" but for the beta price tag. The Mercenary pre-order edition is available for $50 from the official site.
Elite: Dangerous' third beta is now live with new systems, ships, and interdiction mechanics
After a brief technical delay, Elite: Dangerous' "Beta 3.00 is now available," declares a post on the official Frontier forums. The patch notes are extra long; new and updated features include new ships, player-driven interdiction, fuel scooping from stars, asteroid mining, visual overhauls to planets, philanthropy missions, and an expanded game map with now over 2400 systems. Frontier has also added hundreds of audio tweaks and bug fixes. Players have continued reporting stability issues with the new patch. This episode of beta, like the phases before it, is exclusive to those who've pre-purchased the game and beta access. Massively's Mike Foster spent September playing the game in beta 1 and had enough fun to say that he "would happily recommend it" but for the beta price tag. We've included the new beta 3 trailer below.
Elite gets mining on October 28, premiere event on November 22
The latest Elite: Dangerous newsletter brings word of a premiere event for the space sim sandbox to be held on November 22nd. It's all happening at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, Cambridgeshire, UK, but if you can't make it in the flesh you can tune in via Twitch. Newsletter #45 also looks at mining, which is scheduled to arrive in Elite's Beta 3 on October 28th. Click through the links below to give it a read. [Thanks Cotic!]
Elite: Dangerous launches Beta 2, Beta 3 coming later this month
Elite: Dangerous is officially in Beta 2 as of today. Frontier says that the current build is a "major update to the game," which includes new outposts, a new starport, and ship wear and tear, to name just a few. What? You want to hear about a few more? OK, how about pre-flight control checks, new music, and SLI/Crossfire support? You can view the full release -- and the full feature set -- after the cut. Beta 3 is currently scheduled for October 28th. [Source: Frontier press release]
Nissan's built an electric pickup that it'll never sell
There are probably lots of justifiable reasons why carmakers haven't got around to making an electric pickup that anyone can buy (range and demand would be just two), but that doesn't mean such vehicles don't exist. Engineers at Nissan, with a little too much time on their hands, wanted to create a neat way of ferrying people and parts around their Test Center in Stanfield, Arizona. Using the project as a team building exercise, designers Roland Schellenberg and Arnold Moulinet took a Leaf EV, cut off its roof, replaced it with the top of a Titan pickup and added a shortened rear bed from a Frontier. The end result is "Sparky," a stylish little electric pickup that won't ever leave Nissan's 3,050-acre test facility, but gives us hope that we'll one day see a little more EV variation on our roads.
Choose My Adventure: Basically Han Solo in Elite: Dangerous
When Frontier Developments' Elite: Dangerous eventually launches, I'm guessing there will be two primary types of pilots cruising its vast expanses: quiet, peaceful types who enjoy exploring and courier-ing, and destructive, violent types who prefer interacting with NPCs and other players via pulse lasers. Elite's loose structure has room for other archetypes, though, such as the savvy trader working the marketplace and the under-the-radar smuggler who lives on the wrong side of the law but avoids drawing attention to himself. Being peaceful doesn't mean you have to be lawful. Last week's Choose My Adventure poll set me on the path of the smuggler, challenging me to secure illegal goods and to sneak those goods by the feds to net a healthy profit. Results were mixed.
Elite: Dangerous beta 2 coming September 30
Those cockpits weren't meant to look fresh off the factory floor forever; it's time to take Elite: Dangerous' ships out for another tour of duty. Frontier announced that beta 2 for Elite: Dangerous will begin on September 30th. This round of testing is being promoted as a great improvement on the last, with combat ratings, reputations, 500 new star systems, and the Lakon Asp Explorer ship added to the mix. The team is still on track for a late 2014 release for the space sim, but in the meanwhile Frontier is giving away free copies of the original Elite as part of the franchise's 30th anniversary celebration. [Source: Frontier press release]
Choose My Adventure: Exploring exploration via Elite: Dangerous
Being an explorer is overrated. Sure, Lewis and Clark are remembered as bold adventurers who set out across the untamed American west, charting charts and mapping maps and becoming famous along the way. It's less memorable that the expedition frequently feasted on dogs, slept with more locals than a touring indie rock band, and included at least one accidental butt shooting. In other words, between an explorer and fame there lies a whole lot of gristle. Last week, Choose My Adventure voters set me on the exploration path in Frontier Development's Elite: Dangerous. While exploration hasn't yet been implemented as a viable career, it's still a thing you can do just because you feel like doing it. It's also a pretty great way to see your life end in a cacophony of flames and shrapnel or to find yourself staring at a map in complete and utter confusion. Still, it beats roasting a Labrador and passing it around the campfire.
Elite gets release pricing but no release date yet
Elite: Dangerous is still on track for a Q4 2014 launch. As such, Frontier today revealed the sci-fi sandbox's launch pricing plan as well as a pre-order option. The standard game will set you back $59.99 (or £39.99 and €49.99 for our friends across the pond). The pre-order Mercenary edition -- available to purchase from now until release day -- will run you $50 (£35.00 or €40) and features an Eagle fighter, a digital guide, a digital concept art book, decals, and more. If you've already pre-ordered or backed through alpha and beta, you'll receive a Merc edition by default. In other Elite news, Eurogamer reports that the game's original budget was £8 million, most of which came out of Frontier's own pocket prior to its successful crowdfunding campaign. And don't forget about this week's Elite newsletter, which talks more about the Mercenary edition and plans for the franchise's 30th anniversary celebration. [Source: Frontier press release]
Choose My Adventure: I am Elite: Dangerous
Space is not a very good place for people to hang out. Humans have a specific list of things that are needed for survival, and space is in a continual state of being fresh out of all of them. Thus, the space race isn't just about firing objects into the universe and seeing how far they can go but about building contraptions that deliver enough tender love and care to keep folks alive for the journey. Space travel is immensely expensive and complicated; humanity is still decades or even centuries away from easily accessible personal spacecraft. Space sims like Frontier Development's Elite: Dangerous let you skip ahead a bit to see what things might be like when launching yourself into space will come with all the grandiosity of running to the store for some bread. "Yeah, you have a spaceship," Elite says, "but what exactly do you intend to do with it?" In this, the second week of our Elite-focused Choose My Adventure, we'll be seeking an answer to that very question.
Elite: Dangerous explores the path of... exploring
So what do you want to do in Elite: Dangerous? Do you want to get into space dogfights? Build up a trade empire? Or do you really just want to accelerate to high speeds, jump out into the unexplored portions of space, and start seeing what's there? The latest newsletter for the game discusses precisely that with the exploration mechanics. Just exploring in the broadest sense is fairly simple, but being the first person to visited an unseen system won't count as exploring a heretofore unexplored location. To really explore a system, players need to determine how many major bodies there are in orbit around the star and scan the lot of them before returning home to tell about it. Having a full set of data and being the first to return with it will provide big rewards to the explorer, but if another ship comes across yours and it wants the prize of being the first to explore the system... let's just say there are no laws against loading weapons and opening fire.
Choose My Adventure: It's lonely out in Elite: Dangerous
In 1990, hurtling across the edge of our solar system at around 40,000 miles per hour, NASA's Voyager 1 space probe performed a quick rotation and snapped a parting photograph of the planet on which it had been conceived, built, and launched. The resulting image, known as the Pale Blue Dot photo, features a tiny Earth surrounded on all sides by an infinite blackness. It was this image, transmitted a distance of 3.7 billion miles at the speed of light, that inspired Carl Sagan to write, "There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world." In other words, space is big. Really big. And it is into this great unknown, this unimaginable void wrapped in darkness and silence, that Choose My Adventure now boldly goes via Elite: Dangerous, a crowdfunded space simulator (no, not that crowdfunded space simulator) from Frontier Developments. With 55 star systems and 38,000 cubic light-years of space to explore, Elite's Beta 1 release should offer us plenty of freedom to sate our interstellar cravings and to thrive or die as an independent pilot.
Elite's latest newsletter talks upcoming mission additions and more
Itching for the latest Elite: Dangerous news? Newsletter #38's got it in the form of blurbs about ship weathering, the Ocellus starport, and Frontier's plans to expand the space sim sandbox's mission framework. "We plan to build this out as we move through the beta to release and beyond, with escort missions, assassination missions, tail-and-report missions, group missions, policing duties, in addition to guns-blazing mercenary assignments," the firm says. [Thanks Cotic!]
New Elite newsletter features outposts, smuggling, and more
The latest Elite: Dangerous newsletter is here, and it's worth parsing if you're high on Frontier's gorgeous space-sim sandbox. Outposts are coming to Beta 2, which might cause some of you to ask "what's an outpost?" Well, it's the "equivalent of the run-down road-side cafe, the isolated fuel station, the research outpost, the deep-space shack where Joe the Hermit lives." Outposts are generally exposed, zero-G, and unsafe, but they do offer cheap fuel and a place to temporarily lie low. Speaking of lying low, this week's newsletter also features a player-made video illustrating how Elite's stealth mechanics may be used for smuggling. You can view that after the break. [Thanks Cotic!]
Elite: Dangerous' Stellar Forge tech powers planetary creation
Maybe you think that creating solar systems for an MMO is nothing more than plunking down a few spheres and programming in physics for a gravity well. Well, you've got some nerve! The developers at Elite: Dangerous think about nothing else day in and day out, and as a result the team has come up with special tech to create the billions of systems that players will encounter in-game. In a recent newsletter, the team elaborates on the Stellar Forge system that it uses for most of the game's celestial bodies: "In Elite: Dangerous, when we are generating a system procedurally, each planetary system is formed from first principles. Bodies are gradually aggregated over a very long simulated time from available matter, taking into account its chemical composition. Depending on the angular momentum, this might begin to form into a single central body, or into multiple co-orbiting bodies." This explanation goes on in detail -- great detail -- and if you haven't appreciated how planets are made before now, you certainly will by the time you finish reading it. [Thanks to Cotic for the tip!]
Elite: Dangerous prepares for beta 2, official app release
With Elite: Dangerous' first beta test now a thing of the past, it's time for the team to reflect and prepare for the next round of hot plasma space action. In today's newsletter, the team reports that it saw players from 122 countries in beta 1, with 4.2 million light years travelled collectively. The devs are working hard on beta 2, saying, "The key areas of focus for development now is extending the online mission system to deliver a compelling experience, the accessibility of the game for those that haven't been intimately involved in its evolution like our alpha and premium beta backers, and of course vast quantities of new content, polish, and optimizations." In other news, the official app for Elite: Dangerous will be available soon on the iTunes Store with an Android release to follow. Also, players excited for the game can get together at FantastiCon in the UK on August 16th, where Elite will be shown on the Oculus Rift and the team will be there to hobnob with fans.
Elite's Beta 1 starts today, here's a new trailer
Frontier has released its Beta 1 build of Elite: Dangerous. It "covers a greatly expanded 38,000 cubic light-year volume of Elite: Dangerous' accurately modeled Milky Way galaxy centered around the Boötes constellation." Beta 1 also introduces new features including fuel consumption, player communication, docking computers, mission system functionality, and friend management/matchmaking capability. There's more, including a new trailer, which is embedded along with the official press release after the break. [Source: Frontier press release]
Elite's expansions to include planetary landing, ship interiors
Frontier's latest newsletter for Elite: Dangerous talks post-launch plans for the sci-fi space sim sandbox. Launch is currently scheduled for sometime in Q4 of 2014, after which Frontier will continue to expand the game. "Major new features will include planetary landings and even walking around inside ships, stations, and planet surfaces," the firm says. Elite users with a lifetime expansion pass will get "all such significant expansions" at no extra charge. The LEP is currently packaged with the game's premium beta access or available separately via the Frontier store. [Thanks Peteris!]
