Elite: Dangerous

[Hotfoot]

So the latest game in the Elite series launched today. I've been playing the early access version off and on for a while now, and so far it's pretty good. While I am still waiting and drooling for the Wing Commander/Freespace fest that will be Star Citizen, that's still at least a year out, and Elite Dangerous is here.

Having never played the original games, the closest I can come to describing this one is Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos. You fly a relatively large ship in Newtonian flight model with realistic lasers, cannons, and missiles. You can trade, hunt bounties, pirate, explore, and so forth. With the singleplayer aspect effectively removed from the game, multiplayer is the way to go. This will lead to inevitable comparisons to EVE online, but with more action oriented combat. This isn't entirely unfair.

The galaxy is open to you, and I do mean the Galaxy. The entire Milky Way has been plotted and given things inside of it for you to explore to your heart's content. Tired of the constant piracy and warfare near Sol? Head off a few hundred or thousand Light Years and go beyond the edge of known space to do whatever the hell you want. Since you can scoop fuel off of stars on your way, you can get pretty far even if you don't find any space stations to help you out.

That said, we should probably form some sort of group, perhaps set up some sort of base of operations somewhere. I know it's my intention to get an Asp and start making mad exploration dollars down the line, but that's several million credits from now.

I'm Commander Jon Cameron, and I await your contact information.

[rhoenix]

More info, courtesy of ArsTechnica:

After about a year in semi-closed testing, Elite: Dangerous finally opened its doors to the public this morning. The release of the PC-only space combat and trading simulation comes two years after the game’s successful Kickstarter campaign, and it marks designer David Braben’s return after 19 years to the game universe he co-created with Ian Bell in 1984 with the original Elite.

A lot has changed with Elite: Dangerous since we first plunked down our $150 to join the game’s "premium beta" phase back in June. Six months ago, the game allowed you to shoot players and shuttle cargo around in five star systems and gave you five possible ships of varying size and cost in which to do it. Now, there are fifteen ships and billions of systems (although, to be fair, the overwhelming majority of those systems are procedurally generated and unexplored).

For the past month, Braben and his team at Frontier Development have been running the game in a pre-release "gamma" stage, activating more and more of the game’s big features and using the ever-growing pool of paying beta testers to stress-test them for stability. At launch, the game features a live, evolving economy of constantly shifting supply and demand, with both players and NPCs moving goods between the web of space stations in the inhabited portions of the galaxy. There’s also an overarching story taking place, with the galaxy’s three main political factions clashing in a struggle for power that players can participate in or ignore as they like.

Progression in the game is marked by a set of rankings assigned to each player. As players trade, fight, and explore, their rankings increase, and if the player puts in enough time, they’re ultimately granted the ranking of "Elite." This concept of advancing rankings has been a staple of the series since the original game back in 1984, which required the player to blow up thousands of enemies to earn that rank (the exact number varied by platform). This time around, Frontier Developments is offering a $1,000 cash prize for the first players to reach an "Elite" ranking in each of the three disciplines and another $10,000 for the first player to reach an "Elite" ranking in all three.

The development of the game hasn’t been without its bumps. Although Frontier has been very good about communicating milestones to beta players and then hitting them, the game has launched with a number of promised features missing. Most notably, the ability to play the game fully offline was removed relatively late in development—playing the game as shipped requires a persistent Internet connection (though players can opt for a "solo" mode where they encounter only NPCs). Also not making the cut for the final game is the promised ability for players to link their faster-than-light drives together and jump in and between systems in formation, which hinders cooperative play and makes it more difficult for players who want to play together to actually stick together.

We’re working on our impressions of the release right now, and we expect to have a final release review ready at some point in the next couple of weeks, once we’ve had some time to immerse ourselves in the game. Elite: Dangerous can be purchased for $59.99 (or £39.99, or €49.99, depending on where in the world you are) directly from Frontier Developments, and is currently available only on Windows PCs. A Mac version will be released within a few months, and a Linux version is possible but not currently in work. No console versions are currently planned.

Certainly looks interesting, though I suspect I'll need a proper joystick to play it properly. Luckily, as Hotfoot pointed out, Saitek makes pretty good joysticks that aren't very expensive.

[Hotfoot]

The game does allow for mouse and keyboard control, try the tutorials with it and see how you do.