One of the major features of the upcoming expansion for Elite: Dangerous, and one of the biggest drawcards for the latest round of space simulators in general, is the ability to land on any planet you discover.
David Braben, founder of Elite Dangerous developer Frontier Developments, posted a video on the weekend showcasing how the creation of planetary landings was coming along. And going off the footage, there’s a fair way to go.
In the YouTube video, which only runs for 22 seconds and is captured without sound, the footage shows the crash site of one planet, with little detail on what Braben calls the “potato-shaped planetoid”. The textures look a tad shiny in the way a lot of games in the last 5 or 6 years did, and there’s not a great deal of debris on the planet. But it does illustrate the game’s growing scope — and some of the difficulty faced by modern space epics.
Braben said the footage was captured using a “debug camera on an SRV” and was a “quick-and-dirty un-edited capture”. “There are tons of little details we plan to tweak or fix, but I thought it would be great for you guys to see where we’re up to with this,” he added in the video’s description.
The planetary landings are due to be patched into E:D before Christmas, although it’s pretty clear from the footage that what’s added will be pretty threadbare. And when you consider the level of detail that players want and expect — everyone is still chasing the Freelancer dream of being able to roam around on the planet, or something with a little more activity than wandering around rocks — it’s obvious that planetary landings might take quite a while.
It’s certainly a lot more interesting than the dreary platforms in X: Rebirth. But even Egosoft’s atrocious release in late 2013 highlighted the supreme difficulty of allowing players to fly around a gargantuan universe and the planets that inhabit it.
It may be the case that by the time the full vision of E:D’s planet landings are fully realised, No Man’s Sky will come out and scratch the itch that space tragics (my new term for people who can’t get enough of flying, trading and dog-fighting their way around virtual galaxies) have been tolerating for so long.
Will it be too late by then? I guess we’ll find out in December.
Comments
11 responses to “Planet Landings In Elite: Dangerous Have A Long Way To Go”
Still, the scale of it, that’s amazing…
I actually think it looks pretty cool. Now just make an offline mode and I’m back in 🙂
What about solo mode?
you mean everyones trying to catch the escape velocity dream…. you know the awesome shareware game that freelancer was based off
Both of which are probably based heavily on the original Elite (and that in turn probably based on something else!). Elite had space stations to dock with. No idea if it had planetary landings.
Anyway, the planetary stuff here looks a lot more free-roaming than the fancy menu for “read bulletin board”, “purchase ship”, “trade materials” of Freelancer.
Yeah, I go back to 1979’s Star Raiders, which had Space Stations to dock with, A full galactic map, long range scanners, variable ship damage that would damage or take out shields, engines and computing to varying degrees, true 3D ‘laser balls’ and all in under 16K…
No planet landings on the original. Made for a 32kb computer.
Freelaner alpha 1 – 1 you are free to enter
And if you look carefully, within those 22 sec you can see a small base on the left hand side about 15 sec into the video if I remember correctly.
I dont need a whole planet. I just want to get out of the pilot seat and walk to the back of the ship. It feels like a wheelchair tour of the universe. I sure hope planetary landings are not limited to being confined to the seat of some moon buggy.
At first it will. I think the whole walking around will come either late in horizons or in the event expansion.