Big news in from Gamescom (for me, anyway). The team behind Elite: Dangerous have just confirmed that the next planned add-on for the game is going to be a biggie. Elite Dangerous: Horizons* is coming this holiday season – which Frontier is calling Q1 2016, apparently – and will be a series of planned add-ons released over a period of time. The first, Planetary Landings, will give players the ability to land their ships on planets.
Touching down on planetary surfaces was always intended to be part of the game, and will open up the galaxy to a very new style of play – one which will no doubt refresh players’ interest.
And of course, there’s a teaser video for it too.
According to the devs, Elite Dangerous: Horizons will model planets on a 1:1 scale, and there’ll be a new ground based vehicle – the Surface Recon Vehicle, aka SRV aka Scarab – to allow exploration. From the release:
Scanning worlds will reveal all-new surface gameplay opportunities as players detect signals, crashed ships, mineral deposits, outposts and fortresses, and embark on raids on the surface. Playing alone, or with friends on the ground and in the skies above, players can explore, mine, engage hostile forces and attempt to infiltrate strongholds guarding valuable rewards.
The 400 billion star systems of the Elite Dangerous galaxy are all created with a sophisticated simulation that re-creates the Milky Way in exacting detail, and that simulation continues to the surfaces of worlds. Players will seamlessly journey from space to surface, coasting over mountaintops, diving into canyons and venturing out on the ground in the SRV, without loading screens or breaks in gameplay.
Based on my experiences in Elite so far, this will be a major step for the player-based economy and political groupings. Already we’re seeing the largest player factions start to take control of bits of space, or operate player-run organisations for rescuing ships in distress (especially those that run out of fuel while exploring).
Interestingly, when new NASA imagery of Pluto was released last month the developers of Elite said that they weren’t going to update the look of that planetoid in the game until they could make their planet simulation engine create it accurately. The reason they gave was that if they’d just textured a model of Pluto, it wouldn’t have worked when they came to allow players to land their ships.
*Apparently the colon has moved now.
