Elite: Dangerous’ Aliens Are Attacking Space Stations Now

Elite: Dangerous’ Aliens Are Attacking Space Stations Now

Elite: Dangerous‘ enigmatic Thargoid aliens have been splattering players’ ships for months in apparent self-defence. Now, they have gone on the offensive. The outer-space starfish have begun destroying space stations, forcing players to rescue their inhabitants.

Today, players of massively multiplayer space game Elite began receiving SOS messages from stations that had been devastated by Thargoids. Here’s a video of one such station from player and YouTuber Gluttony Fang:

“Station interior has overheated, everything’s on fire, and the storage/engine department of the station is giving off abnormal interference with our ship systems,” Gluttony Fang wrote in the video’s description.

It’s a fact of life that games add more content after release, but few have done so in 2017 with as an effective a sense of mystery as Elite. Elite: Dangerous has been building to this point for years now, beginning with hints that extraterrestrial life was out there back in 2015. All the winks and mysteries finally began to pay off earlier this year when Thargoids warped into player space and, when approached, defended themselves in vicious fashion. In response to advanced new “anti-xeno weapons” developed by players, they evolved and became resistant to certain forms of damage. Still, the Thargoids have largely been reactive up to this point, and some players weren’t sure if fighting them was even the right thing to do. Now they’re taking initiative, though players still aren’t certain exactly why.

Players who’ve plunged into the game’s burning space houses and lived to tell that tale recommend kitting your ship with passenger cabins so that you can help evacuate computer-controlled residents. Also, and this part is kinda self-explanatory, they advise everyone sure to steer clear of the fire.

At first, players on Elite‘s subreddit and forums weren’t 100 per cent certain that the Thargoids were to blame for these ugly cases of space arson, with some even calling it a “false flag” operation intended to implicate Thargoids. A new story video released by developer Frontier, however, has confirmed that Thargoids are definitely to blame for the attacks.

In short, the Thargoids have figured out how to fry space stations’ defences and carve them up like Christmas turkeys. That doesn’t bode well for the whole of virtual humanity, but at least Elite players will have an interesting next couple weeks.


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