Elite: Dangerous (aka Elite IV)

[buzzmong]

So, Braben's gone and launched a Kickstarter campaign for Elite Dangerous aka Elite IV.

RPS linkypoos.

Kickstarter link

BBC Link (which actually is more informative than the KS page currently)

He's asking for £1.25 Million, and has already got 250k of that despite only being up for a couple of hours and having no real details on the page.
It does pique my interest that there's been background work on it done for quite a while, and that they're thankfully, pushing procedural content to the fore again.

I've pledged for £20, as I not only reckon it'll reach it's goal as it's going to run for two months, but christ-on-a-bike that limited reward tier is going down quickly and I might as well save a tenner.

Edit: Also, could be a massive cash grab. Be aware and keep in mind you can exercise the option to cancel your pledge if more negative details emerge.

[TheJockGit]

I loved Elite. .. and though I dabbled with Eve, it just didn't grab me.

If his vision, if I read it right, is to have an online, perpetual, elite universe, I think he may be on to something.

Simplify, and expand... might just do the trick

[spoodie]

Backed for £20. Estimated Mar 2014, so that's mid/late 2014 at best. Let's not hold our collective breaths.

[FatherJack]

I've backed this, here's hoping.

[Dog Pants]

Elite has had two sequels already, each successively less popular. I think the reason isn't that the sequels haven't been as good, rather that the concept is a catch 22. If you make a game just like Elite, but with modern graphics, there isn't enough to hold the attention of a modern gamer. If you add enough to keep it interesting it isn't Elite any more. I hope they can do an Xcom and keep the feel while making a great game, but whatever they do it will attract a lot of criticism. Also, this may be timed to compete directly with Star Citizen, and splitting the audience like that might cause both to suffer.

[FatherJack]

I backed both this and Star Citizen, as I think it's daft that you can't somehow like both games - like if you can like Batman but not Spider Man, and in a move that surprised a little, but has pleased a lot me a four-part interview has gone up with both David Braben and Chris Roberts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvPU8e2ezgo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoLYNN7NltY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9ENkIB0cic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGE0_WSHGHc

In the last part they talk about how they're both backing each other's games and Chris Roberts very generously offers to mention the Elite project to his own backers as the deadline approaches, which with perhaps around 5x the potential audience should see this easily make the last £300k or so in the next nine days.

They recently doubled the number of available £20 slots (minimum for the game at launch) to 10,000 and there are already less than 100 left, although that number seems to be increasing as people move to higher tiers - there's a particularly tasty one at £35 that includes a downloadable novel: I still remember some of the stories from the novella which shipped with the original.

[friznit]

7 days to make 250k, it's going to be tight. I rather agree with Pantsu though - Star Citizen is offering a next gen space game with all the bits you'd expect from something made in 2014. Elite is offering a reskin of a game I got bored of 20 years ago. It may just be poor marketing, but I'm really not that excited by a rehash of Elite.

[Anery]

This has finally scraped over the requirement with only a few days to go.

[spoodie]

Now that can stop spamming me.

[buzzmong]

Probably the final dev video:

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg9k7E4ngFw[/media]

What's made me happy with backing it is the detail in the ideas.

Have a listen to the above video, especially the bit about the damage to the cargo hold. Ideas like that for locational damage, with a hole being ripped into the cargo hold causing the cargo to spew into space ready for collection in this example, could possibly give rise to a lot of interesting interactions.

It sounds simple, but if you can be a pirate in this game and not actually have to kill your target to get fat lewts then I can forsee people doing things like smash and grabs where killing isn't the prime objective. In pretty much all other MMO's, you normally have to kill your target to get loot, even EVE does it that way.

It does sound like it might be quite a deep game on the mechanics front, if of course, they manage to pull it off.

[FatherJack]

It sounds simple, but if you can be a pirate in this game and not actually have to kill your target to get fat lewts then I can forsee people doing things like smash and grabs where killing isn't the prime objective. In pretty much all other MMO's, you normally have to kill your target to get loot, even EVE does it that way.

It does sound like it might be quite a deep game on the mechanics front, if of course, they manage to pull it off.

That's nice idea which got me thinking - while not perhaps within the scope of this game - about how one might actually really go about robbing someone's cargo.

Rocking up in a battleship and blasting them to shit is a pretty inefficient method compared to say sending out an EVA or probe, cutting a hole in their cargo hull and plundering all their stuff without them even noticing seems a much better idea. You only need to blow the bloody doors off.

[tandino]

Tandino casts 'Resurrect' on Fred

After grabbing a brief flight on this at a friend's place a couple of weeks ago, I felt I should throw some money at it (which had the entirely happy consequence of me getting access to the beta). I have to say, if you're into your space sims, this has the potential to be something very special indeed. It's already pretty well put together, more so than a lot of the betas I've seen in recent times and some actual tangible game in there - I've spent a good amount of time docked up and just looking at the folks flying into the station above me. I've also spent a good amount of time on the galaxy map, watching the animations of the trade routes and looking at the "scientifically accurate" Milky Way they've implemented. It is still a beta however which means there isn't a great deal to do besides dogfighting and trading (though I would say that both of these are an absolute pleasure even at this early stage).

There are a few features that have been thrown in in a fairly basic state so as to represent in some small way the features that will be part of the final game too, but don't let that put you off. Docking and flying are also shaping up really well, docking is almost enjoyable - it's easy to carelessly fuck it up but equally as easy to land perfectly if you take the time (and very satisfying). I'm playing with a nifty peripheral called TrackIR (in case you're not familiar with it, it tracks my head movements and translates them to similar movements in game) which adds a whole new element to dogfighting and sightseeing. The ship's HUD/UI makes great use of it too.

The community on the official forums seems to be pretty standard Internet where's-my-free-lunch-you-dicks-I'll-kill-your-family types - almost unheard of is the fact that the Elite Dangerous subreddit folk seem to be a much nicer bunch than those polluting the Frontier forums.

Overall I'm already enjoying it but obviously trying not to spend too much time with it - it'd be a shame if people were to tire of it before it's properly released. It's definitely worth casting an eye over to see how well it's coming along.

And the sound! By the gods, it sounds delicious

[Imperatore]

Tandino makes a great little summary there. I would like to raise awareness of a similar device called EDTracker which started off as a community based project and is a very cheap way of getting the same results as the TRackIR for a fraction of the price (£10 if you can solder). I have been using it and it really adds a lot of immersion to the game. My quest for a decent joystick goes on however after a very short stint the the Saitek X55, possibly the most overpriced piece of junk PC peripheral I have ever come across.

http://edtracker.org.uk/

[tandino]

Update 2 for beta 2.

I jumped back in last night to watch the madness unfold. Many folks who've played a lot of this - amassing a huge amount of credits and kitting out the fanciest of ships - we're in high spirits, despite an incoming complete wipe for the launch of beta version 2.0. There were super expensive ships cannonballing into space stations, random attacks on NPCs, people dropping cargo containers filled with millions of credits worth of gold in busy systems and other nonsense. It was entertaining end-of-the-world chaos.

This all arrived on the back of a (beautifully meta) Civil War (that forum is the only source I could find with a complete list of Civil War happenings) between an independent communist system and the Federation empire, all owing to celebratory (and illegal) booze flooding federal markets. I was getting regular email updates about the war (right down to which human pilots had contributed most to war efforts with trade or kills). There was also a human run blockade of the system too, stopping and scanning traders and such. All this in one system (there will be approximately 400bn systems at launch) over a few days of the beta. I'm pretty excited about where the game is headed.

Anyway, things added in beta 2 are shown in the video below (try to ignore the horrible text on the thumbnail, it doesn't last nor reflect the content of the video), but the thing that excites me the most right now is that the exploration mechanics are now live.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJzizYUEF9c[/media]

Any of you see yourselves getting involved?

[FatherJack]

Any of you see yourselves getting involved?

I backed it, and early, but clearly not at a sufficiently high enough level to gain access to any betas. My interest in the game is larger than my bank balance, but the value of my opinion and feedback is sadly tied to the latter.

[spoodie]

Any of you see yourselves getting involved?

I backed it, and early, but clearly not at a sufficiently high enough level to gain access to any betas.

I just checked and the minimum to get the game at some point was £20, which is what I paid. £50 gets you access to the beta, or you can pay for an upgrade now I think.

[tandino]

They seem to be offering early contributors an upgrade path of sorts based on how much they paid initially. A friend of mine backed it for £35 when it was on Kickstarter and was able to buy into the beta for £15 a month or so ago, so it's possibly an option if you've backed already.

Beta 2 was pretty broken yesterday (at time of writing it's at 2.02 already). Whilst I couldn't get into online play last night owing to server issues, I got a good couple of hours in single player (including a pitched 20 minute dogfight in some planetary rings which I won - I'm not as shit as I thought I was) and it was a treat, made better by the 1500 bounty on the NPC's head. New missions are in, including a number that are directly influenced by the ongoing civil war - big mission payouts for war resources such as weapons for the feds, booze for the commies and with respective faction gains I would assume.

It's going to be a while before I can get some exploration under my belt, but slowly building up the required funds for a way into it is a damn treat.

A standout moment yesterday was me starting the game post-wipe on an orbital outpost - or space truck stop - rather than in a station, without realising (I started in the hangar) and taking off at sunrise, post pre-flight checks - beautiful. It's the kind of game you want to passionately tell your mum/dad/non gamer friends about, knowing full well they won't give a fuck.

[FatherJack]

They seem to be offering early contributors an upgrade path of sorts based on how much they paid initially. A friend of mine backed it for £35 when it was on Kickstarter and was able to buy into the beta for £15 a month or so ago, so it's possibly an option if you've backed already.

I paid £20 on Kickstarter and £50 at that time was the minimum for 2nd round beta. The higher levels also had extra starting credits and ships, which I kinda didn't want, just 100 creds and a basic Cobra (or equiv) for me, ta

[tandino]

They seem to be offering early contributors an upgrade path of sorts based on how much they paid initially. A friend of mine backed it for £35 when it was on Kickstarter and was able to buy into the beta for £15 a month or so ago, so it's possibly an option if you've backed already.

I paid £20 on Kickstarter and £50 at that time was the minimum for 2nd round beta. The higher levels also had extra starting credits and ships, which I kinda didn't want, just 100 creds and a basic Cobra (or equiv) for me, ta

Yeah, they've recently said early access backers (I missed the kickstarter but bought into the beta) will get an exploration ship and some decals for it. As it stands, your starter ship is a sidewinder and you get 100cr for fuel. I've noticed that the amount of missions available via the station bulletin boards have increased quite a lot in beta 2. Exploration is a bit buggy right now, but already a good (hugely pleasant) way to make some money, via selling system data.

[buzzmong]

I'm really tempted to pay the extra £15 and bump myself up to the £35 to get on the beta. Although it literally is just for beta access, as the earlier backers are already getting the same bonuses.

Edit: I am weak.
Edit 2: It was a good decision. I'm very impressed.