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[PC] [MAC] [ONE] [PS4] Elite: Dangerous

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[PC] [MAC] [ONE] [PS4] Elite: Dangerous

Unread postby dinopoke » 30 Jan 2013 01:21

http://elite.frontier.co.uk/

Concept art:

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Our galaxy. It's an awe inspiring, beautiful, vast place; with billions of star systems, planets, moons and asteroid fields just waiting to be explored, and exploited. The triumverate superpowers of the Empire, Federation and Independents dominate their core system volumes and constantly skirmish to outmaneouver one another on their frontiers. Outside their influence, in the vast majority of the galaxy, anarchy reigns supreme and spectacular discoveries await the bold.

It's dog-eat-dog out there – you need to keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Whether you want to trade for profit between systems, take part in multiplayer co-op mission alliances, free-for-all group battles and team raids to bring down planetary economies, even tip the balance of power in the galaxy (for your own advantage, of course..), or simply explore the wonders of the galaxy (and who knows what you’ll find out there..) is up to you.

Your second-to-second actions could have you taking the roles of trader, pirate, bounty hunter, leader, team player, opportunistic assassin, grand schemer, and more. You are at the centre of the action any time, any place and any way you choose – each action has a consequence, and influences the galaxy around you.

Starting with a few credits and a basic starship, carve your own path through the richest, largest gaming sandbox ever created, set against a backdrop of raw anarchy, galactic powerplays and intrigue. Do whatever it takes to upgrade your ship’s hull, engines, weapons, defences, cargo hold; constantly improve your capabilities and influence on your journey towards the most coveted rank in the history of gaming - ‘Elite’.


"This is the game I have wanted Frontier to make for a very long time. The next game in the Elite series - an amazing space epic with stunning visuals, incredible gameplay and breath-taking scope, and also fully multi-player." said Frontier founder and CEO David Braben. "Frontier has been working on this project in the background for several years now, building a foundation of technology and tools. Imagine what is now possible, squeezing the last drop of performance from modern computers in the way the previous ‘Elite’ games did in their days? It is not only a question of raw performance (though of course this will make it a gorgeous and incredibly rich experience), but we are pushing the multi-player networking implementation too."


Teaser Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGHM6wu1WY4

Scavenger Hunt Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44K9bnjcUSc

Development Diaries:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5JYRyhxYhI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uKD1ap5hsI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gMbLjUjs1w

The Kickstarter has been completed and successfully raised over £1.5M. However it is still possible to contribute via PayPal on the main website.

The estimated release date according to Kickstarter is March 2014.
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Unread postby dinopoke » 30 Jan 2013 01:22

From the Kickstarter FAQ:

How does multiplayer work?

You simply play the game, and depending on your configuration (your choice) some of the other ships you meet as you travel around are real players as opposed to computer-controlled ships. It may be a friend you have agreed to rendezvous with here, or it may be another real player you have encountered by chance. All players will be part of a “Pilot’s Federation” – that is how they are distinguished from non-players – so you will be able to tell who is a player and who is a non-player easily.

You will be able to save your position in certain key places (probably just in space stations, but possibly while in hyperspace too, if we feel it is needed). A save-and-quit option will be freely available at those points, as will the subsequent reload, but there will be a game cost for a reload following player death. Your ship will still be intact in the condition it was when the save occurred, but there will be a game currency charge (referred to as an insurance policy) for this. This is to prevent the obvious exploit of friends cooperating and killing each other to get each other’s cargo. If you can’t pay, then it will accumulate as an in-game debt, and the police may chase you!

There are no multiplayer lobbies, and the game will be played across many servers, augmented by peer-to-peer traffic for fast responses. Session creation and destruction happens during the long-range hyperspace countdown and hyperspace effect (which is a few seconds only), so is transparent to the player.
We have the concept of “groups”. They can be private groups just of your friends or open groups (that form part of the game) based on the play styles people prefer, and the rules in each can be different. Players will begin in the group “All” but can change groups at will, though it will be possible to be banned from groups due to antisocial behaviour, and you will only meet others in that group.


How will single player work? Will I need to connect to a server to play?

The galaxy for Elite: Dangerous is a shared universe maintained by a central server. All of the meta data for the galaxy is shared between players. This includes the galaxy itself as well as transient information like economies. The aim here is that a player's actions will influence the development of the galaxy, without necessarily having to play multiplayer.

The other important aspect for us is that we can seed the galaxy with events, often these events will be triggered by player actions. With a living breathing galaxy players can discover new and interesting things long after they have started playing.

Update! The above is the intended single player experience. However it will be possible to have a single player game without connecting to the galaxy server. You won't get the features of the evolving galaxy (although we will investigate minimising those differences) and you probably won't be able to sync between server and non-server (again we'll investigate).
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Unread postby mothmanspirit » 11 Aug 2013 22:24

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Unread postby Gaius » 26 Jun 2014 08:16

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[PC] [MAC] [ONE] [PS4] Elite Dangerous: Odyssey

Unread postby icycalm » 20 Aug 2020 00:16

So they are adding planetary walking to this, and perhaps even bases, bars and shops you can visit and walk around in (though no base-building), so it's becoming more of a competitor to Star Citizen. This is a decent video that explains this stuff (as if he's talking to children, but it's still worth a watch, since it's brief anyway):

Elite Dangerous: Odyssey - A Star Citizen Competitor?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X9raVhy9lU

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Here's the (rather boring) trailer, which I just added to the trailer reel:

Announcement Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wu8oqlXUag

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Much better is this developer video that was posted a couple days ago with lots of footage of the cool planet tech:

The Road to Odyssey Part 1 - One Giant Leap
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpe7ULtkYbU

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Bottom line is this game looks cool now. It's MMO too, so it's definitely War Journal material, and we will definitely try it. Besides, the more stuff we can play to delay getting into SC, the better. So our MMO space schedule currently looks like this:

1. Dual Universe (coming up next week, check the calendar for the date and make sure to post on Patreon to sign up, otherwise you won't be able to play: https://www.patreon.com/posts/40168680)

2. EVE Online (I think sometime in the autumn)

3. Starbase (hopefully before the end of the year)

4. Elite Dangerous: Odyssey (sometime next year, though I might schedule us to jump in a bit before the expansion lands so we can get an idea of what the game was like without it)

5. Star Citizen (whenever we've run out of space MMOs to play)

And of course we'll have to start thinking of flight stick setups soon, so if you have recommendations to make, post them in the Hardware forum, otherwise I'll post mine once I've done my research on them. We already have a very old thread on this, we just need to update it: https://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=3136
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Unread postby Beakman » 10 Feb 2021 14:04

An awesome scheme some Elite players (see what I did there?) are pulling off to enslave others: https://www.polygon.com/features/2021/2 ... rced-labor

Charlie Hall wrote:Elite Dangerous players say they’re being scammed, trapped in space, and forced to work

Last month, a group of players worked to create a deep-space gulag, an in-game space prison designed to quietly trap new players and exploit their labor. And they almost got away with it.

[...]

Polygon spoke with four commanders who had been trapped this way. Looking into the details of the scheme, it was actually quite clever.

[...]

The perpetrators hung out around star systems heavily populated by new players, many of them brought into the game by a free giveaway on the Epic Games Store in November. They said they were looking for recruits, and offered to give these players money to buy a better ship, but also training in how to farm Void Opals and a free ride to a good spot to find them. Behind the scenes, they were exploiting in-game systems to isolate these new commanders from everyone else in the game.

First, they required new recruits to join a private instance of Elite called a Player Group (PG). Playing in a PG is a good way to make sure you can meet up with your friends and allies, but it also cuts you off from ever seeing anyone else. Contributing to that isolation was the fact that this all happened on Xbox One, which has a markedly smaller player population than the PC version of the game.

Travel in Elite is accomplished by folding space and “jumping” between star systems, using a neighboring star cluster as a kind of beacon. Once in the PG, players were instructed to outfit a new starship in a particular way that limited its range to less than two light-years. As a consequence, they were unable to travel to another star system without the help of a Fleet Carrier.

Elite: Dangerous players are getting stranded while traveling with the new Fleet Carriers
Fleet Carriers are relatively new to Elite, and were added to the game just last year. After a buggy first few months, they quickly became the preferred way to travel long distances thanks to their 500 light-year jump range — nearly five times further than any other ship in the game. But they also helped to isolate these new players even more. Once docked on board with their custom-built mining rigs, recruits were ferried 800 light-years from the heart of the Milky Way and left to rot. Their only gameplay options? Mine Void Opals and sell them back to the carrier that brought them in for roughly one sixth of their fair market price or self destruct.

Some commanders actually took their entrapment pretty well.

“I actually felt amused by the whole situation,” one told me on Discord. “I mean, I genuinely wanted to help, but seeing how deep some people can get into this sparks curiosity. That’s why I wanted to participate in the first place. My current state of mind is that I’m a grown up that understands consequences of decisions and putting a blame on my consequences to someone else is simply wrong. This is a classic case of good vs. evil that keeps the balance.”


And the tale about an ongoing rescue operation from another group of players:

Charlie Hall wrote:Others had very much the opposite reaction. A handful quit the game entirely. Still others tried to reason with their captors, but they say they were quickly shouted down or otherwise silenced on Discord. But one brave commander actually tried to get help. They called in the Fuel Rats — a player-organized faction in Elite Dangerous dedicated to rescuing players who have run out of fuel.

“Do Fuel Rats rescue pilots trapped in essentially concentration camps?” reads the chat log, to which the dispatcher on duty that evening responded with confusion — “o.O”

The dispatcher assumed that the player was referring to an in-game mechanism that puts misbehaving players in “jail,” sending them to a penitentiary ship for high crimes and misdemeanors against AI-controlled ships. But it quickly became apparent something more sinister was going on.

The Fuel Rats are a good bunch. In fact, they recently logged rescue number 100,000, an achievement that was celebrated by Elite Dangerous publisher Frontier Developments in-game. But they don’t actually offer a service whereby they save people from labor camps. So the Fuel Rats called in the specialists. Known as the Hull Seals, the newly-formed group performs high-risk repairs and other oddball rescues.

A player in the Fuel Rats named Commander Lead was among the first to start organizing a rescue. Commander Modemus was put in command of that effort and, using various Hull Seal assets — including multiple Fleet Carriers of their own — they mounted a rescue operation. After several weeks of work, around a dozen newbie commanders have been pulled out and brought to safety. He tells Polygon that they think as many as 15 more players are still trapped, although at least some may be willing participants. The operation is now under the control of another player, Commander Either. Those interested in helping out — or getting rescued — are being directed to the New Pilots Initiative Discord server. The entire affair will be discussed in detail soon on the Squeaking Fuel podcast.


It reminds me of the cool stories that have come out from EVE Online.

In typical Polygon fashion, there's a lot of virtue signaling and politically correct horseshit (the enslavers almost trapped a 7 year-old kid or whatever), but what's happening in-game (both the space-faring gulag and the Fuel Rats' ongoing rescue operation) is so cool that the rest of the article is still worth the read. Noteworthy that this scheme emerged from the player's interactions with the game's systems that were not explicitly designed to enable enslavement. From Frontier's comments, it seems they didn't even consider the possibility.

A quote from the enslaver's scheme designer:

Elite enslaver wrote:Considering the cat’s out of the bag and people will now try to mimic my method, yes, [I will keep doing this]. Not only will I keep doing it I’m going to step it up a notch. I’m going to recruit harder than ever before. I along with my cohorts are going to build the greatest noob army this game has ever seen. We will truly be able to shape the galaxy with our wealth and influence. All this publicity has thrown us into a frenzy. And we will not go into private play like some are saying. We’re going to do it in the open. So all can witness the glory.


I have played 82 hours of Elite: Dangerous (most before the Horizons expansion came out) and I'm excited to go back when Odyssey launches, now in VR and a full HOTAS setup.
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