Space truckers go space buggying
Elite Dangerous may be a pretty good space trucking sim (among other things), but it’s been missing something: Ground trucks. Until now!…or rather, until recently, when the game’s Horizons expansion landed on PC late last year. Horizons, the umbrella name for “season” of planned gameplay additions, opened by adding the ability for players to land their ships on planetary surfaces and faff about on the ground in a Surface Recon Vehicle (aka a ground truck), doing missions and gathering materials for the also-newly-introduced crafting system.
Now Xbox One players can get in on that hot faffing-about action as well, as Horizons is set for a console debut soon. Exactly how soon is as yet unconfirmed, but Frontier Developments has pegged a Q2 2016 window. Horizons will also open on Xbox in a more content-rich form than its initial PC release, as the expansion will also include the content set for the upcoming “Engineers” and v1.6 updates. Entering beta next week on PC, the updates revamp the game’s mission system, to give the galaxy a bit more personality, while introducing the titular Engineers, secretive individuals that reward loyalty and reputation grinding with exotic and hard-to-find upgrades for players’ ships. Other planned updates include multi-crew ships, allowing players to cooperate in a futuristic version of Air Buccaneers, avatar generation and customization, and the ability for larger ships to store and launch their own fighter craft.
Sounds good to me. I’ve actually been playing a bit of the game lately, having scrounged up the cash to outfit a brand new Asp Explorer for a visit to Beagle Point on the other side of the galaxy, in the footsteps of the recent Distant Worlds expedition. Here’s to hoping I don’t accidentally cook myself in a binary star or something.
