Elite: Dangerous (2014)

I got your hangar module right here. That’s a… um… joke for Star Citizen backers.

For Americans, Frontier: Elite II was the original sand box in space game - Elite came out earlier in England, with ports to US microcomputers later. To varying degrees, all subsequent space games inherited some of its conventions. Eve Online is the most refined realization of Elite’s fundamentals. The Elite franchise was soon totally overshadowed by Wing Commander in budget, sales, and world wide popularity. Elite was also one of the original games to introduce grinding, playing a game for many hours just to accumulate resources and better stuff in order to progress further into the game. Wing Commander was a far more action oriented linear story with a strong narrative and characters. In contrast, Elite had none of that opting to give the player total freedom instead to explore. Many space gamers hold both games in high esteem to this day.

And as if to give notice Elite came first, this trailer captures the much sought after next generation Wing Commander feel much more so than slightly antiseptic Star Citizen has to date. Unfortunately this taste of the game engine wasn’t available before the Kickstarter campaign ended. Chris Roberts wisely delayed his appeals until he could lead trailer first.

elite.frontier.co.uk

You may want to check out David Braben’s earlier dev diary videos (same YouTube channel) over the course of this year. Lots of interesting ideas that might flat out revolutionize the sand box genre period. But they weren’t this shiny! :smiley:

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Yes, please!

I had never heard of this franchise before, but it looks good to me; thanx for bringing it to my attention. I used to play the Hell out of Wing Commander back in the day… (Though the Wing Commander movie was such a let down :() I would enjoy a good space RPG/Flight Sim.

I wouldn’t say a lot but there was some criticism over this trailer, mostly charges that it was all pre-rendered but also more sane sounding skepticism. In large part because Frontier’s COBRA engine is a proprietary in-house black box. No one knows its capabilities. Star Citizen is largely spared such scrutiny because of the considerable publicity of fourth generation CryEngine’s feature set carpet bombed across the internet for free by Crytek.

David Braben commentary on what was done in real-time with the in-game engine, what was added video post-processing, and how the eye candy relates to actual game play. Hurray for transparency. Most encouraging about Elite: Dangerous: he easily identifies every space opera trope visible in the trailer. Hard SF high fives all around.

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Also: The 1985 version :slight_smile:

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