“It’s a work in progress, but what a work in progress it is,” one of the developers exclaimed during the recent Elite: Dangerous livestream.
And he’s right. Imagine taking the car from Little Big Adventure 2 and throwing it slap-bang in the middle of Activision’s 1998 reboot of Battlezone. That’s what Elite: Dangerous is working with right now, and it looks fun as hell.
Elite: Dangerous is getting planetary landings later this year as part of its gargantuan Horizons update. Even though I paid — quite a lot of money, actually — to jump into the beta last year, I’ve been patiently holding off until the in-game world has been filled out a little more to my liking.
The prospect of planetary landings, as far as they have to go, is incredibly exciting. It’s what everyone has wanted since Freelancer, and probably long before then. (I always remember Hardwar being a sick game. I wonder if you can still buy that today.)
Anyway, Frontier Developments recently livestreamed an hour of gameplay from the surface recon vehicle, or SRV. There isn’t much else shown besides the SRV skidding around, floating or doing burnouts and backflips.
Which actually is pretty awesome, when you think about it.
It doesn’t do much to alleviate the concerns of those who are worried that planetary landings will be a one-note experience, much in the same way they were in X: Rebirth (albeit of a very, very different nature).
But I’ll be dammed if the handling model doesn’t look fun. It’s certainly lively enough to break up the solitude of supercruising through the cosmos. The Horizons update is due out before Christmas, and I’m looking forward to seeing how far it’s come.
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4 responses to “The Dune Buggy In Elite: Dangerous Looks Fun As Hell To Drive”
The video doesn’t start until 7mins 30s in, , and the driving doesn’t start for about 10 mins, so feel free to jump ahead 🙂
I love Elite: Dangerous to bits and frequently roam the galaxy, also that new quake style game mode is great. However what I am still a bit sore about is that as a person who bought the original game before it was on Steam for I believe it was 29 pounds, that Horizons didn’t come as part of a less expensive update. Seasonal updates which cost MORE than the actual game to update to be able to land on asteroids and some planets? I don’t mind paying for updates or expansions to a game, but this is going to be 39 pounds for each update each season apparently, just to be able to do what you could do in previous Elite games without expansions.
I am also wondering how Frontier is going to manage all the people who have and haven’t in their open play universe, because they are still supposed to be able to play together.
Well, I guess if someone with Horizons wants to escape someone, they just land on a planet – a person without just might crash into it, or bounce back from a barrier that is only be able to be breached by people with the expansion.
I am looking forward to it.
It isn’t 39 pounds for each update each season.
Current ED players receive a £10 (or currency equivalent) discount, so it’s £30 for the full, year-long Season, which gives you access to all updates/expansions released during that time: Landings, bases, defenses & crash sites; loot & crafting; multi-crew & character creation; ship-launched fighters.
The £10 discount is available to all ED players until sometime after Horizons’ initial release, and we’ll be warned before discount availability is ceased.
Come December 2016, Season 3 will likely be released and on a similar pricing policy.
I’m a big fan of E:D in general, but I feel it does have a few things holding it back. If they incorporate both this and the arena combat into a single persistent game it could become a game I’d sink years into. Look at MGSV – everything you did in that game contributed to the end goal.
I loved playing arena combat but stopped after a single night because I felt no real connection to it and the ‘real’ game. If, in our own reality, sports stars can make serious cash in arenas why not in E:D too? And on that note – buggy combat or racing on a hostile planet? Hell yes.
Too expensive for Australian customers. $60 with loyalty discount… $80+ without. Forget about it. Base game cost $40. FDev are retarded.