Elite: Dangerous has bold plans for the future

The developers talk content updates and VR

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Things have been going well for Frontier Developments. With the success of Elite: Dangerous, which features a sizeable and passionate community of space explorers, and having won the prestigious Audience Award from the 2015 Game Developers Choice Awards, the creators are already hot at work on new updates and expansions. And with players still hungry for more content, there’s already a clear vision for the future of the massive space sim.

Coming after the announcement of the Xbox One, PS4, and Mac releases for Elite: Dangerous, game creator David Braben spoke with Destructoid on the GDC show floor about the team’s plans for the future of Elite: Dangerous. It’s looking like the sprawling universe will get much bigger soon.

“It’s always brilliant to see how many people were supportive of the game,” said lead designer David Braben as he reflected on the initial debut of Elite. “So many people helped us do that, and one of the great things about Kickstarter is that it brings together a crowd of people who all have very similar goal. So it’s worked overall very, very well for us — I’m actually very proud of what we’ve done. And another thing, we’ve not only shipped the game, but we’ve continued support of the game.”

As one of the early Kickstarter success stories, Elite: Dangerous grabbed a lot of attention for its vision as a space-exploration title across a massive and ever-growing universe. As a sequel to the ’90s space sim Frontier, many fans of the genre yearned for a return, which they got in Frontier Developments’ crowdfunded title. Despite its scope and breadth of content so far, the creators already have much of the development mapped out for the next few years.

“I see [the vision] for a very, very long time growing, and it’ll keep us occupied. We said there would be paid updates, and some of the things we said you could do in those is going down to planet surfaces, get up out of your chair and explore the cockpit, boarding other ships, big-game hunting, driving other types of vehicles on the surface to explore cities; but designing each one is like a whole new type of game. We have to be careful, but to me those are the perfect types of game experiences.”

With the success of previous updates and expansions, such as patch 1.1, the developers fully plan continue support with new patches and paid content packs in the future. With the Wings update, which seeks to add more PvP content, co-op play, and other enhancements to matchmaking, there is a sizeable amount of content on the horizon.

“We’ve had amazing dedication from a lot of players, many players have played a significant amount of time — more than a thousand hours. We’re listening to a lot of players and quite a few of the people who’ve played that length of time are saying ‘oh, I’ve seen everything now,’ and they actually haven’t. The great thing with this model is that we can add content continually, such as the Wings update and the community events. We’ve only been out for around three months, and people are already sinking so much time into it.”

The most surprising announcement from this week was that Elite would be making its way to consoles. Though the space sim genre is somewhat notorious for its complexity and dense gameplay, the developers were adamant that the title would not only feature all the content released thus far, but also that it would not be watered down for consoles.

“I don’t want to dumb it down,” said Braben rather bluntly. “I’m an Xbox gamer, and I love games on my Xbox, but there are some games I feel that have been dumbed down a bit [for console port]. I get sick of tutorials, that are giving you very obvious instructions. So overall, I’m very excited about the console. It’ll offer a different feel for players where you’re sitting back on a comfortable chair or siting up close to a desk.”

Of course, with the recent trends seeing virtual reality as the future of games, the developers wanted to get ahead of that by being among the first to officially support the device. Which certainly plaid off, as it’s one of the most used games for the Oculus Rift headset. As more companies are announcing devices, Braben is optimistic about the potential VR has for gaming.

“[Working with VR] has been a good experience,” he said. “The great thing about being independent is when we first released [a beta] in 2013, there was Oculus Rift support five or six days later, which we added. We were always excited abut it, and we thought our game would make great use of it. What’s good to see now is that the number of new head-mounted displays coming out, and I think that’s exciting — what’s interesting is that I think there aren’t any other triple-A titles like Elite: Dangerous that are officially supporting it right out of the box. We see lots of demos, but it’s surprising to see there isn’t a consumer release VR headset.”

It’s great to see that a hardcore space sim has been so widely accepted by fans. And as the game grows every few months with its updates, players will have plenty of content to dive into. The future looks bright for Elite: Dangerous, and with the console releases on the horizon, the barrier for entry is much lower now for those looking to dive into interstellar exploration.


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