Did Elite Dangerous retconned the timeline?

[MacAdler]

Greetings Commanders. o7


I come to you today a little confused about the history of our Galaxy. I was reading Imprint, which came out with Elite Plus in 1991 and got confused about a couple of things:

• The book mentions 8 galaxies. I could understand this as sectors instead of actual Galaxies, but nonetheless it seemed odd.
  
• Other sentient races are mentioned. Aside from the Thargoids, the existence of other races is pretty much assumed, and at least other one is mentioned, the Atch 'Ruk.
  
  

I assume that because the story came out officially with the game it is Canon, which then means that there's something that I am missing in terms of what/who's out there.


Any idea on this? Or did Elite Dangerous retconned everything and we are in a different "timeline" than the original Elite?

Thanks.

 

[Mack Winston]

Frontier: Elite 2 pretty much retconned it all back in the early 1990s when it adopted a model of the real Milky Way and dropped all mention of alien races (apart from the Thargoids, who reappeared in Frontier: First Encounters in the mid 1990s).

 

[MacAdler]

Frontier: Elite 2 pretty much retconned it all back in the early 1990s when it adopted a model of the real Milky Way and dropped all mention of alien races (apart from the Thargoids, who reappeared in Frontier: First Encounters in the mid 1990s).

So wait... I thought that The Dark Wheel novella was 'the' Canon one. So... is only partially canon? I'm even more confused now.

 

[Momoka Azuka]

There are quite a few inconstancy issues plaguing Elite Dangerous. Some of it is retcon but some of it is just down to development of the current build of ED. Some of it will be address over time like the aliens, Thargoids and otherwise, once development reaches a point where those things can be added.

Some of it though like Capital in Achenar, and the fact the Alliance has no fleet of its own is just plain different.

 

[Mack Winston]

The Alliance never did have a fleet (in the official lore, unofficially it had a fleet during the 3260s-3280s timeperiod, but that was all written when we were all convinced that Elite IV would never be written and the series was done for good), although there was an Alliance shipyard (AAAI). There may be plans to bring that back from what Frontier have said recently, but in what form - we'll have to just wait.

The lore of 1980s Elite was limited by the computer technology of the time, a representation of the Milky Way was just not really feasible so they procedurally generated 8 tiny galaxies of 256 systems each.