ELITE: DANGEROUS combat alpha begins

Elite: Dangerous, the forthcoming, Kickstarted fourth game in the highly influential Elite franchise, has launched its combat alpha for backers of the project. This will allow backers to play a series of combat missions to get a feel for the game's user-interface, combat mechancis and spaceflight model.

The second and third games in the series, Frontier (1993) and First Encounters (1995), were lauded for their use of Newtonian physics and vast universes, but criticised for their combat which was confusing, messy and unenjoyable. The new game will employ a system more akin to that of the original Elite (1984) and games like the Wing Commander and Freespace series, allowing players to pull dynamic maneoeuvers and shunt energy from one subsystem to another for a quick boost to speed, shields or weapons. However, this system will be more complex in Elite: Dangerous and allow players to mask their energy signatures altogether to go into stealth mode (at the risk of overheating).

In the linked interview, David Braben also talks about the modelling of star systems within the game, with the 150,000 star systems closest to Earth modelled accurately (even down to their exoplanets, if known).

Elite: Dangerous will enter its beta stage in the New Year, with a full release hoped for by the middle of 2014. UK SF publishers Gollancz will be published a range of novels to tie in with the release of the game as well.

New ELITE: DANGEROUS trailer

Frontier Developments have unveiled a new trailer for Elite: Dangerous, the fourth game in the series. Made with money from Kickstarter, the game will be released in 2014, which is also the thirtieth anniversary of the release of the original Elite.

They've come a surprising way quite quickly and this is starting to look very promising indeed.

ELITE: DANGEROUS starmap is a thing of beauty

Frontier Developments have posted a new screenshot from their Kickstarter-funded space trading/combat game Elite: Dangerous. This screenshot shows their starmap, which the player will use to travel from system to system and within systems as well.

The starmap used in Frontier: Elite 2 was a phenomenal piece of work (considering it was an addendum to the main game) and it looks like the map in the fourth game is shaping up to be far more impressive.

As a bonus, see if you can catch all the SF references on the image.

Gollancz to publish three ELITE novels

Gollancz have announced that they will be publishing three novels based on the Elite series of computer games in 2014.

The new Elite game, Elite: Dangerous (the fourth in the thirty-year-old series), recently passed its funding goal on Kickstarter, ending with more than £1.5 million raised for game development. The title is expected to be released by mid-2014. To help the game reach its goal Gollancz pledged a significant sum on Kickstarter to buy the rights to publish three novels based on the Elite universe.

Gollancz had already been in discussions with David Braben and Frontier Studios about adding the original Elite tie-in novella, The Dark Wheel, to its SF Gateway online store. The Dark Wheel is notable as it was written by the late Robert Holdstock, best-known for his Mythago Wood series of novels. The Dark Wheel was packaged with the original BBC Micro release of Elite in 1984 (I still have a copy in a box somewhere). Frontier: Elite II, released in 1992, was also accompanied by a book of short stories entitled Tales of Life on the Frontier. Whether this will be reprinted at some point is unknown (but unlikely; it was not as good as Holdstock's novella).

The three novels will be published in 2014. The identities of the potential writers have not yet been revealed.

ELITE 4 Kickstarter announced

David Braben and Frontier Developments have put up a Kickstarter page for Elite: Dangerous, the long-awaited fourth game in the Elite series.

In visual terms, this was 1984's answer to Crysis II.

The original Elite was released in 1984 on the BBC Micro and is one of the most famous, seminal and game-changing titles of all time. It was an open-universe game in which you took a spaceship and could trade and fight your way across eight galaxies and some 2,000 star systems, all in (wireframe) 3D. It was the first major 3D game and one of the first games to give you total freedom in how you approached playing it. The sequel, Frontier: Elite II was released in 1993 and featured filled-in 3D graphics, multiple controllable spacecraft, an even vaster universe (hundreds of millions of procedurally-generated star systems in a - somewhat - accurate recreation of the Milky Way) and the ability to land on planets. The third game, First Encounters: Frontier II was released in 1995 and was notable for the number of bugs present in the game, resulting in a lawsuit between the developers and the publisher.

Braben has been teasing fans with the possibility of an Elite IV for many years before announcing this Kickstarter project. Braben indicates that raising funds the traditional way has been difficult, and he's only been able to spare a few developers to work on the project in moments of spare time, hence the decision to go down the Kickstarter route.

So far, mixed feelings. On the one hand, Elite was a seminal, brilliant game, a total gamechanger and one of the biggest steps forward in the history of the form. Frontier was also a very solid game, even if its ambition exceeded its grasp. However, the Kickstarter page is scant on details about the proposed title: no graphics or videos have been posted, which is odd for a game that's been in development (even if at a low ebb) for several years already. So far the only hard info that's been released is that the game will have modern graphics (as you'd expect) and some form of multiplayer component (as you'd expect). Otherwise there seems little to distinguish it from the X series of space sims or Chris Roberts's recently-announced Star Citizen (or even EVE Online, though presumably Elite IV will have direct 'twitch' controls rather than the mouse-driven interface of that title).

Still, with 10% of the funding already raised within hours of the announcement and even the BBC running a news story on it, it looks likely that this will be funded. Certainly a project worth keeping an eye on.