It's Been Five Years Since The Elite Dangerous Kickstarter Was Launched

Five Whole Years

It seems fitting I start this thread as I was here so long ago. This forum was dying. We had a couple of hundred registered members, but only about a dozen or so actively lurking and maybe a handful of posts each day, if that. We had not long had avatars and signatures. This forum looked very different to how it does now.

Frontier back then were publishing Lostwinds, their own title, a Wallace & Gromit game and Kinectimals for Microsoft, utilising Microsoft's Kinect hardware. We read in a games review site that The Outsider had been cancelled. This was big news at the time as it was rumoured that Frontier would work on Elite IV after they had finished The Outisder. If that game was cancelled, what was happening with Elite IV?

I pushed Michael Brookes for information. As you might expect, he didn't reveal anything. I can't say I blame him, Frontier was a lot smaller back then compared to now. It is interesting (to me anyway) that Frontier still have not made an official statement regarding the status of The Outsider. It is probably safe to say it'll never happen now.

I happened to be lurking one night in November 2012, when I refreshed the forum and a thread by David Walsh popped up ...
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/2704-Watch-This-Space

I read that post and the two or three of us lurking stayed glued to the forum for a solid hour. At midnight, David announced the kickstarter.
I had never heard of kickstarter or crowd funding. I registered with the site and backed for £20 but within an hour I had done some sums and worked out I could afford to back at the £150 level.

This forum literally exploded overnight. We watched the kickstarter all day, every day for sixty days. It seemed like forever. Would it get funded? Would it fail? I tracked each day's funding level like a hawk.

Looking back on it all, I am glad it happened. I've made some great friends, had some great times. I've made mistakes too, I'm not perfect, but I'd like to think that I've learned from them.

I thank you all, and here's to another five years.
Alien.
 
Five Whole Years

It seems fitting I start this thread as I was here so long ago. This forum was dying. We had a couple of hundred registered members, but only about a dozen or so actively lurking and maybe a handful of posts each day, if that. We had not long had avatars and signatures. This forum looked very different to how it does now.

Frontier back then were publishing Lostwinds, their own title, a Wallace & Gromit game and Kinectimals for Microsoft, utilising Microsoft's Kinect hardware. We read in a games review site that The Outsider had been cancelled. This was big news at the time as it was rumoured that Frontier would work on Elite IV after they had finished The Outisder. If that game was cancelled, what was happening with Elite IV?

I pushed Michael Brookes for information. As you might expect, he didn't reveal anything. I can't say I blame him, Frontier was a lot smaller back then compared to now. It is interesting (to me anyway) that Frontier still have not made an official statement regarding the status of The Outsider. It is probably safe to say it'll never happen now.

I happened to be lurking one night in November 2012, when I refreshed the forum and a thread by David Walsh popped up ...
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/2704-Watch-This-Space

I read that post and the two or three of us lurking stayed glued to the forum for a solid hour. At midnight, David announced the kickstarter.
I had never heard of kickstarter or crowd funding. I registered with the site and backed for £20 but within an hour I had done some sums and worked out I could afford to back at the £150 level.

This forum literally exploded overnight. We watched the kickstarter all day, every day for sixty days. It seemed like forever. Would it get funded? Would it fail? I tracked each day's funding level like a hawk.

Looking back on it all, I am glad it happened. I've made some great friends, had some great times. I've made mistakes too, I'm not perfect, but I'd like to think that I've learned from them.

I thank you all, and here's to another five years.
Alien.

Thanks for posting this, I have to say I'd never seen that original thread (or that post from David Walsh at 1:07am) and reading it literally made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Wow! It happened and we've come a long way since then.

Thank you Frontier!
 
Its bizarre, reading it all back, how small FD was. And that ED was only a 1.5 million quid KS... :eek: Man, I havent read some of this in ages. Look at how small the scope was compared to what we are all now hoping for!

Fight, trade, hunt your way across a giant galaxy of billions of star systems, starting with a basic starship and a few credits. You can make money from trading goods between the many star systems, by destroying pirate ships (and collecting bounty), or even by attacking traders and collecting their cargo (which in turn will get a bounty on your head!). There will be missions too, and exploration. Most people will do some combination of these things. Upgrade your ship and specialise in one activity - have a trader with a huge cargo bay, or use the space for weapons and maneuverability.

Real Freedom - Go where you like, be what you like - pirate, bounty hunter, trader, assassin, or some mix of all of these.


Trade - Buy low, cross dangerous space lanes, evade or destroy pirates en route, then sell high, if you make the journey!


Fight - Take on the pirates or be one yourself


Progress - Get your pilot rating all the way from "Harmless" to "Elite"


Explore - Head out to the far reaches of space and discover amazing sights


And the best part - you can do all this online with your friends, or other "Elite" pilots like yourself, or even alone. The choice is yours...
 
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Five Whole Years

It seems fitting I start this thread as I was here so long ago. This forum was dying. We had a couple of hundred registered members, but only about a dozen or so actively lurking and maybe a handful of posts each day, if that. We had not long had avatars and signatures. This forum looked very different to how it does now.

Frontier back then were publishing Lostwinds, their own title, a Wallace & Gromit game and Kinectimals for Microsoft, utilising Microsoft's Kinect hardware. We read in a games review site that The Outsider had been cancelled. This was big news at the time as it was rumoured that Frontier would work on Elite IV after they had finished The Outisder. If that game was cancelled, what was happening with Elite IV?

I pushed Michael Brookes for information. As you might expect, he didn't reveal anything. I can't say I blame him, Frontier was a lot smaller back then compared to now. It is interesting (to me anyway) that Frontier still have not made an official statement regarding the status of The Outsider. It is probably safe to say it'll never happen now.

I happened to be lurking one night in November 2012, when I refreshed the forum and a thread by David Walsh popped up ...
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/2704-Watch-This-Space

I read that post and the two or three of us lurking stayed glued to the forum for a solid hour. At midnight, David announced the kickstarter.
I had never heard of kickstarter or crowd funding. I registered with the site and backed for £20 but within an hour I had done some sums and worked out I could afford to back at the £150 level.

This forum literally exploded overnight. We watched the kickstarter all day, every day for sixty days. It seemed like forever. Would it get funded? Would it fail? I tracked each day's funding level like a hawk.

Looking back on it all, I am glad it happened. I've made some great friends, had some great times. I've made mistakes too, I'm not perfect, but I'd like to think that I've learned from them.

I thank you all, and here's to another five years.
Alien.
...and question...

If you consider those early days (eg: the Dev talks) and what the impression was you had of where the game was headed... Five years on, do you think it's fallen short, met or exceeded the depth you expected?

I remember those early days, and IMHO the impression was one of game mechanic depth; Silent running into areas trying to evade detection. Exploring for rich resources and mining them before others got to them. Huge naval fleet battles to dictate the outcome of systems... I'm seen very little of such depth IMHO. However, I've more than got my money's worth out of the game, so can't really complain!


And do you recall the video below? Still waiting for Wing combat (PvE & PvP) / combat scenarios in anyway approaching this... Whenever I drop into a cookie-cutter Combat Zone, I remember that video below... And everytime I see my CQC rating collecting dust on the status panel, I wonder why that development effort wasn't better invested in better combat scenarios/gameplay in the game.

[video=youtube;VE8B4KptyVI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE8B4KptyVI[/video]
 
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I'd never heard of Kickstarter or Crowd Funding either.

An old friend from the days of playing '84 who I still keep in touch with messaged me out of the blue one day to tell me there is a Kickstarter for a new Elite game.

I had to ask what Kickstarter was? How it worked? Where to point my browser?

I then immediately pledged... and hoped it would make the level required to launch the project.

I wasn't even a computer gamer at the time and certainly didn't have a good enough spec PC to run a 3D space sim. That computer arrived shortly after E: D Kickstarter reached its goal.

And, still, 5 years later, E: D is the only computer game I own and play.


Thanks go to all who made that possible - it is such an amazing piece of software engineering ( - even though I still can't properly forgive the abandonment of the promised off-line mode.)


Yours Aye

Mark H
 
...and question...

If you consider those early days (eg: the Dev talks) and what the impression was you had of where the game was headed... Five years on, do you think it's fallen short, met or exceeded the depth you expected?

I remember those early days, and IMHO the impression was one of game mechanic depth; Silent running into areas trying to evade detection. Exploring for rich resources and mining them before others got to them. Huge naval fleet battles to dictate the outcome of systems... I'm seen very little of such depth IMHO. However, I've more than got my money's worth out of the game, so can't really complain!

I can't speak for anyone but myself.

When I pushed for Elite IV (and that post is still on the forum, I can find it, but I'm not sharing it) I was imaging an updated version of First Encounters. The only other space exploration/trading games around were Egosoft's X series, Eve Online and Pioneer (if there were others, I wasn't aware of them).

I had not heard of Star Citizen until the kickstarter.

Elite Dangerous is not the Elite IV I was pushing for, but I think Elite IV couldn't have been anything else. There was a report that David Braben was waiting until technology was able to do what he wanted in a new Elite game, so we shouldn't be surprised with what we have now.

This is what Elite IV was always going to be, I just didn't realise it five years ago.
 
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It is a question of balancing expectations and managing hype isn't it.
I imagined having way more than what we have now but reality doesn't bend to dreams.
Still, happy with what we have now and looking forward to the next 5 years of iteration :D
 
It would be nice to see The Outsider actually make it to production. The handful of videos for it make it look like it's got tremendous potential, and could easily rival the GTA series, and give me something to do when Elite: Ennui sets in..
 
Looking back on it all, I am glad it happened. I've made some great friends, had some great times. I've made mistakes too, I'm not perfect, but I'd like to think that I've learned from them.

And what a ride it's been :)

Can't believe it has been five years... Seems both to have only been yesterday and been 10yrs if you know what I mean!
 
Thanks for posting this, I have to say I'd never seen that original thread (or that post from David Walsh at 1:07am) and reading it literally made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Wow! It happened and we've come a long way since then.

Thank you Frontier!

Agreed. I didn't sign up on this forum until after the Kickstarter was finished, so that thread is definitely an interesting read.

I especially liked this gem in particular: Elite classic video games remake seeking backers.
 
It would be nice to see The Outsider actually make it to production. The handful of videos for it make it look like it's got tremendous potential, and could easily rival the GTA series, and give me something to do when Elite: Ennui sets in..

Ten years ago maybe, it looks super dated now. They'd basically have to redo it all. If only they had another game they could fit first-person gameplay in. :p
 
I didn't even know that Forums existed at the time :) The last time I was aware of such things I was reading Usenet via the "rn" (read news) program on a green screen TTY.

So you can imagine that this experience plus Acorn Electron Elite as the game I had most played until then makes ED a rather impressive beast to this simple and inexperienced soul :)
 
Actually, I have to thank Star Citizen for introducing me to Elite.
When I heard about SC, I backed it, and spent a little time on their forums. I remember reading about some references and comparisons to Elite : Dangerous, which I had never heard of.
I decided to check it out, even though I thought the name sounded a little silly. ;)

The ED kickstarter had already finished at that time, so I just quietly watched it for a while.
Back then the SC forums were pretty brutal on any dissenters (maybe they still are, I don't know, haven't been there in years), and after taking a thrashing for questioning the fishtank addition to the hangar module as one of the funding goals, I had enough. Left the forum, pre-ordered ED, and haven't looked back since. :)
 
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