A decade of Elite Dangerous rejection, rival comparisons and 'shocking' developments
EXCLUSIVE: We had the opportunity to talk to Frontier Developments President and Co-Founder David Braben about the legacy of Elite, from its earliest days to the 10-year anniversary of Elite DangerousTech15:00, 16 Dec 2024Updated 16:57, 16 Dec 2024Elite Dangerous has been here for a decade(Image: Frontier Developments)If you're anything like me, there's magic to be found in deep space. The freedom to chart a new course, save the universe, or just run a mildly successful freighter business.One of the most popular space sandboxes is Elite Dangerous, and it celebrates its ten-year anniversary this year. The latest entry in a series that began back in 1984, every Elite game has been built on a series of ambitious promises to players.Go where you want, play how you want, and create your own story among the stars, is essentially the series MO, but with the 40th anniversary of Elite as a whole, and the tenth of its current instalment, I was lucky enough to speak to its creator, David Braben, President and Founder of Frontier Developments, about the long, winding journey that brought us to this point.Strap in, Commanders.All we learned from Witcher 4 reveal trailer as fans desperate for moreGTA 6 fans pray new trailer release date is closer than ever as CEO dubs game 'extraordinary'Come and join The Daily Star on Bluesky, the social media site set up by ex-Twitter boss Jack Dorsey. It's now the new go-to place for content after a mass exodus of the Elon Musk-owned Twitter/X.Fear not, we're not leaving Twitter/X, but we are jumping on the bandwagon. So come find our new account on https://bsky.app/profile/dailystar.co.uk, and see us social better than the rest.You can also learn more about The Daily Star team in what Bluesky calls a Starter Pack.So what are you waiting for?! Let's M.S.M.F.A (Make Social Media Fun Again)David Braben has been developing games for 42 years, founding Frontier 30 years ago to work on Elite.In that time development, and just about everything around it, has changed dramatically, he tells me. In the early 1980s it was super-amateur (not always a bad thing).All the best games start as a labour of love but getting them into the hands of players was a big challenge back then, when the internet as we know it today, was a distant dream.Most games then were still sold by the people writing them, via small ads in the back of computer magazines. They would use a cassette-tape duplicating machine to put their games on to blank cassettes, put them in jiffy bags, and then post them off to customers.My first game, 'Elite, which I wrote with a friend at University, Ian Bell, came out in September 1984 and was not like this, but was published first by Acornsoft for the BBC Micro.The original Elite was seemingly too ambitious for one publisher(Image: Frontier Developments)It had previously been rejected by another publisher because it was apparently too different to the other games in the market at the time it needed a score, three lives, and a total play time of no more than ten minutes a go, and should not require a save. They saw the game arcades of the time as the best-in-class, and lost sight that the game was going to be played at home by a very different audience.For the first decade of game development, there were no tools to help you develop. No 3D modelling tools, no debuggers as we know them now, no audio tools, no third party game engines.Computer code was almost exclusively written in native assembly language, with no debugger, and few restrictions, and it was difficult, and often ground-breaking. If you need a tool to do something, you made it. Much midnight oil was burned, but it was also great. It felt quite swashbuckling!So how does one go from developing a game too ambitious in scope for one publisher to forging a career from it?It's easy to spend hours in Elite Dangerous seeing what kind of mayhem you can cause(Image: Frontier Developments)At the launch of the original Elite game at Thorpe Park, all the press got to ride on the newly opened Space Station Zero rollercoaster, now sadly closed, Braben recalls.This was Thorpe Parks first coaster and one of the world's first underground coasters. The ride was space-themed, with the ride starting off in a dark launch tunnel with dim lights along it, launching into utter blackness, then after a steep bend, emerging into a brightly lit cavern, with a large model of a moon scape with a base in it, which the coaster swooped above, before it re-entered another black tunnel, he says, comparing it to the feeling of launching into the vastness of space in Elite.This whole experience the process to get to this point, giving interviews to the press, the setting, showed what potential there was. I think it was at that point I realized my University work had become my hobby."There's a huge galaxy to explore, even ten years on(Image: Frontier Developments)In a world of live-service games, Elite Dangerous launched in the same year as Bungies first Destiny game, not too long after Warframe, and before Tom Clancys The Division and Rainbow Six: Siege. While those titles have seen varying degrees of success in their commitment to regular updates, Elite just keeps on (space) trucking."With Elite Dangerous, we are still on a journey, Braben explains.We have an epic player-led story reflecting the worst and the best of humanity, and there are more surprises and interesting player decisions to come. I love the player creations like The Fuel Rats, The Distant Worlds expeditions, and look forward to seeing what players will do with System Colonisation, which is coming soon.There are the exciting new ships of course, but there is also the epic Thargoid story, a continuation from the three previous Elite games across five decades which is unfolding in the Sol system.Elite Dangerous lets players fly some colossal ships(Image: Frontier Developments)That continual narrative is something even industry juggernaut World of Warcraft would struggle to beat in terms of pure longevity.That Thargoid story started in the 1980s with alien ships attacking human ships in hyperspace, but as the story unfolded, humanity came up with a deadly mycoid, a fungus that ate away at the Thargoid ships (grown from seeds), and the Thargoids themselves, based on an engineered version of the terrifying cordyceps mycoid," Braben explains.It was down to the players whether to release this and we almost wiped them out. And now theyre back and were going to wipe them out again.For all of Elite Dangerous popularity, theres certainly other titles that play in the same sort of sandbox, with the most notable one being No Mans Sky from Hello Games. The game arrived atop a wave of promises, but was met with criticism for missing a lot of proposed features at launch.Elite lets players explore space at their own pace(Image: Frontier Developments)Given many of those features, like multiplayer, were already available in Elite Dangerous, I was curious as to how the team at Frontier reacted.The internet is a funny place, and there are a great many people that care passionately about games, and unsurprisingly there is criticism too, Braben said.The key thing is to make a great game that is enjoyable and memorable for all the best reasons. I think the team have done a great job with Elite Dangerous, and that is what matters. We have the real galaxy to explore, all roughly 400 billion star systems of the real Milky Way. We have real distances, a real night sky, and many millions of players have experienced it over the years.Hes not kidding, either. At last count, Frontier told me only 0.06% of the games rendition of our universe has been seen in ten years.Odyssey added on-foot exploration(Image: Frontier Developments)So, how does a team continue to deliver for fans that may never see everything their game has to offer?The game has added new ships, new weapons, new modules, new threats, entire fleet carriers and more, but Braben says the teams biggest accomplishment is the Odyssey update."Changing the galaxy from (essentially) metre scale to millimetre scale. Mixing players on foot, in vehicles, and in ships that can travel at huge speed in the same play space and having them interact" is how he described it.This is not a session-based arena shooter, perhaps 10 miles across where everyone joins at the start, but on the surface of a real-sized planet ten thousand or more miles across, rotating, and orbiting a star at tens of thousands of miles an hour within an environment that is light years across, and any player can walk/drive/fly in any direction and meet each other seamlessly.It brought a wide range of additional experiences to an already great game.Players can now explore planets on foot(Image: Frontier Developments)Still, Odyssey wasnt without its challenges, and many subsequent updates were shelved to deliver the best experience possible to players.The game worked well during the beta, and seeing players taking their first steps on foot was a wonderful moment, Braben explains.However, we found that adding all of these extra features had an impact, particularly on lower-spec machines. It was essentially merging a whole new game into an already well-oiled, live-service machine.We worked closely with our Commanders [the games community] to identify what we could change, but we continued to enhance Odysseys additions, and that work continues today with the introduction of entirely new gameplay experiences such as System Colonisation.There are still plenty of stars to see, and claim(Image: Frontier Developments)System Colonisation is another ambitious feature which will let players claim star systems as a solo entity, a group, or a faction, with a beta slated for early 2025. Itll tie into Powerplay 2, a recently redesigned way in which players can work to help or hinder various entities in the solar system, but with so much added, I wondered if the team would ever consider moving onto a new game something the team isnt looking to do."I look forward to the expanding stories within the game, and how players will choose to react in the future, Braben said.Some shocking things are happening right now in Elite Dangerous but the consequences are not yet clear, he teased.Heres hoping were back to discuss the games 20th anniversary soon, but for now, I need to get back to space trucking in celebration.Article continues belowFor the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletters.RECOMMENDED
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