We had a great year leading up to the release of Elite: Dangerous from the first Alpha release in December 2013 up to the full release of Elite Dangerous in December 2014, and have now completed another great year with the release of Elite Dangerous: Horizons.
It is incredible to think how far we have come since last year, and the huge amount of work our excellent team have done in that time. This year really is a year of outer space. Not only is our space genre back in games, but we have excellent films like The Martian (truly great and well worth watching if you haven’t seen it), and I so hope the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens film is great. I think it will be. It has to be! I am seeing it tonight, and I’m sure it will be a blast of incredible nostalgia for me.
If that weren’t enough, we have the British astronaut Tim Peake launching from Kazakhstan to the ISS – he launched on the same day as Horizons. We also had Raspberry ‘Astro’ Pis launched to the ISS a few weeks ago, with Tim Peake’s experiments with them to come. A great year.
It is good to have the first part of Horizons finally out, and the team have done a truly great job, with much more to come in 2016. Even in this first Planetary Landings expansion we just launched, we have had to move forward with our minimum machine specs to accommodate this otherwise we would be held back by what we could do. Requiring DX11 and 64 bit OS has enabled us to do truly stunning things on the planets. Elite Dangerous has always been 64 bit internally, but we couldn’t continue to support older 32 bit OS tech. This has meant we needed a new minimum spec, so it needs to be a new game, and as a new game we can set a new minimum spec. We do understand some of the issues players have mentioned with Steam because it is a separate game – for example wanting recorded play hours to be combined across the seasons. We know this is frustrating for some people, and so it is something we plan to address shortly.
There has also been some discussion about pricing; if you buy the game as soon as it comes out, we expect it to cost $60/€50/£40 for your first season, then $45/€37.5/£30 for each subsequent season, including all expansions, ships, vehicles, and features through the season in that price, with just vanity items and clothing etc sold on top of that. It is much less than other multiplayer annually-updated AAA games, and works better than subscriptions, paying for each expansion separately, because these would be more expensive overall, and would not keep the player base together in the same way. The season model also enables us to discount the original game over time, to bring more players to the world. What we are doing is unique in having forwards and backwards compatibility, and our model enables us to do that while moving the game forwards in terms of hardware spec, and keeping the central servers running. I am strongly against pay-to-win by charging for ships or in-game money, so this seems to be a good solution.
Landing on planets seems to be ‘the new black’ as they might say in marketing circles… You can do it now anywhere on the surface of countless 1:1 scale simulated planetary surfaces in Elite Dangerous: Horizons and landing is coming in the future in No Man’s Sky, Star Citizen (as I heard just now – a major new future feature they announced last night), Infinity: Battlescape and many others. This is a great thing, as open world space games have now truly come back with a bang, and I look forwards to playing them – and also huge congratulations to Chris and the team for raising $100M for Star Citizen!
What both Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous are trying to do is very hard indeed. Both games are incredibly ambitious. I am proud and excited about what we are doing, but what they are doing is ambitious too, and I am looking forward to playing Star Citizen when it is finished. What we are both doing is new; we are trailblazing. The scope of both is vast and quite different, and neither have been done before, so there is no right answer for either of the approaches. It is frustrating to see some of the criticism of Star Citizen online. We should applaud when someone tries something that is hard, that hasn’t been done, not discourage them.
Game development is hard, with a great many independent components to get right. The very best development looks easy, but this is because of a great deal of careful planning by very experienced people behind the scenes working hard to make it happen. Like a swan, there may be frantic paddling of feet underwater, out of sight, but the view on the surface is one of serene beauty with barely a ripple. We are very proud of what we do, we have an incredible community supporting the game, and we have an amazing future.
Come and join us!
