Elite: Dangerous dev talks Beta 2 features

Elite: Dangerous designer David Braben revealed several features of the upcoming space adventure, trading and combat simulator during his panel at EGX. His presentation and the Q&A session that followed was streaming to Twitch. You can watch the video below.

The first thing revealed to us in the video is that there are going to be different asteroid rings in Elite: Dangerous, such as ice rings or metal rings. Braben then showed the Exploration gameplay. He stated that the development team wanted players to constantly head out into the unknown and discover things they hadn’t seen before. As it was previously revealed, the game featuers a huge world, which contains a galaxy worth 400 billion systems, each containing around 100 places to explore. After players explore an area they have to take the intelligence acquired back. However, if another player scans the same system as you, there are several ways to proceed. You can either take him out, race him to the destination so you’ll deliver the intel first, or even collaborate. Speaking of collaboration, Braben also explained another feature of Elite: Dangerous, called piracy. Basically, while several players collaborate to gain intelligence and to mine for artifacts, one player can take the role of the pirate and attack them for their resources. While you can fight others and proove yourself, you can also choose to use stealth during the game. For instance, you can try to infiltrate bases and steal stuff without being noticed.

Braben also went on describing the features that will be available in the second Beta of Elite: Dangerous. First of all, they have added stations that can be transported easily. The reason for this is that a player can find, for instance, a lot of gold in a system and then a lot of other players will show up to mine it as well. The station acts as a base where the resources can be delivered. According to the developer, there will be more and more things to discover in the game. The Federation and the Rebels are moving towards a Civil War. Players can react and take whichever side they want during the game. One last feature that was announced for Beta 2 is that there will be an in-game news feed, notifying players of what happens within the game world.

Elite: Dangerous is a kickstarter financed game, developed by Frontier Games. It will be released for PC and Mac soon. Initially, it was supposed to come out in March 2014, but eventually the release date was pushed to Q4 2014. Since there’s no exact date given yet, we can only assume that it will come out when it’s done, as they don’t have a publisher forcing them to release before they are happy with their product.