Elite Looks Set To Make a Comeback

realxmp writes "After many years in the wilderness, the BBC is reporting that the next sequel to Elite is in the works. After a long Kickstarter campaign, which squeaked through to its target in the last two days, the project was funded and soon many old gamers will be able to relive the joys of exploring the galaxy in what was one of the earliest space trading games."

Elite: Dangerous kickstarter is still open

[InspectorGadget]

So you can still jump on board if you want to.
There are (as of right now) 33 hours left to go.
And I wouldn't say squeaked through - people are still funding the project, and there is a healthy overshoot of the funding goal.

Re:$2.2 million to develop a modern PC/Console gam

[Pecisk]

Eve Online is click and point rolling dice game. In Elite and Elite: Dangerous you have actually to fly ship. There's actual collitions, you can damage many parts of the ship and it changes accordingly. Planets are real physical objects. In extenstions there's planned walking on planets and around space stations.

Also there won't be lot of hand crafted things (thus costs will be smaller than imagined for scope of the game) - most of stuff will be proceduralrly generated. And as Elite first did use this concept to keep game's universe big in small memory, I trust David will pull this off again. See this update http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous/posts/349783 [kickstarter.com] for more information.

As for money - yes, it's just nominal startup costs for core game. Lot of stuff will be in updates (free for game owners) and extentions (those will be longer in development and will cost accordingly more).

Still, it's biggest game Kickstarter for now, in goal and soon in total (for now it's still SC).

Re:$2.2 million to develop a modern PC/Console gam

[clark0r]

If you read the BBC article you will see that development has already started. The funding is to complete the development.
"Although some early work on the multiplayer title had been done at Mr Braben's game studio Frontier Developments, but needed the cash to turn the code into a finished playable product. If the game did not hit its funding target then development work would stop."

FYI: David's "Elite: Dangerous" reddit AMA

[Pecisk]

For people with lot of questions and doubts about this game, check out reddit AMA, he is already there and gives answers http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/15od2s/i_am_david_braben_cocreator_of_elite_creator_of/ [reddit.com]

Also check out updates section on Kickstarter which has lots of videos, dev diaries, concept arts, renders http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous/posts [kickstarter.com]

For those who can't wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can play the FOSS version right now OOLITE [oolite.org]
Have fun, it is an awesome game.

Procedural Magick

[dryriver]

The brilliant thing about Braben's original ELITE was that he managed to squeeze a huge, open, varied, explorable 3D universe into 32/48/64 Kb of RAM on early 8-bit computers. He also had to publish the game himself - the big game publishers of the time wanted ELITE to have "waves of enemies, short levels, collectable powerups, 3 player lives", because that was the formula popular side-scrolling space games like R-TYPE used. Braben refused to do that - it flew in the face of the 3D space sim he was building - and thus ELITE became the first space game to feature realtime 3D wireframe graphics and break the "R-TYPE" space-game formula. Many people consider David Braben to be something of a gamedesign pioneer and genius. If Braben hasn't lost his touch, the new ELITE: DANGEROUS should wind up being a seriously impressive Space Trading/Exploration/Combat game. ---- For those who prefer action to trading and exploration, there is always "Star Citizen", a Wing Commander sequel made by Chris Roberts. That game will feature high-end CryEngine 3 graphics, and will be all about space combat.

Re:early effective DMR

[radiumsoup]

I had to look it up, it was called a Lenslok device:

http://torrentfreak.com/crazy-video-game-drm-prism-1980s-style-080617/ [torrentfreak.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenslok [wikipedia.org]

(and, evidently, not all were red.)

Re:What kind of game is it?

[Simon Brooke]

For those of us who aren't familiar with the original Elite (and can't check it out on Kickstarter because we're lazy or at work) what kind of game is it exactly?

Is it a turn based game like Tradewars 2002? Or is it a real time flight sim like Wing Commander or X-Wing with economics and upgradeable ships?

If it's the former i'll definitely jump in at the last minute. I loved TW2002 in high school. If it's the later... well i liked X-Wing, but i'm not convinced about the marriage of that type of game to an economic sim. (I've tried out the X series and some similar games on Steam, but the controls kind of sucked and i never got into them at all.)

You fly a space ship in mostly-real-time (you can do 'hyperspace jumps' which cover distance more or less instantly) through a very large galaxy. There are many (~2000 on the original 6502 version) civilised planets, with different levels of technical sophistication and different levels of government control. Some are safe and wealthy, some very dangerous, and a haven to pirates and other criminals. In your travels you encounter many different types of space ships, each of which have different appearance and properties, from fast manoeuvrable fighting ships to big lumbering freighters.

You start with a minimally equipped ship and a small account of credits. You proceed through the game initially by trading between planets to build up your credits, but sooner or later you're going to be attacked by pirates and will have to learn to fight. As you get richer you can equip your ship with extra weapons, engine enhancements, a docking computer (of which more later). You can choose to become a bounty hunter, hunting down pirates for reward; to become an asteroid miner, mining asteroids for minerals; to become a pirate yourself; or continue to trade and explore. You can also take on special missions. In trading, you can manipulate markets. You can sell your initial, general purpose ship and buy a ship more suitable to your needs.

Docking with space stations is almost a mini-game in itself. They rotate - obviously, to generate simulated gravity. To dock successfully you must approach on the axis, slowly, and exactly match the roll. One of the ship enhancements you could buy was a docking computer, but the docking computer wasn't completely reliable (don't know whether this was deliberate or a bug) so it paid to learn to dock manually. Also, of course, if you got badly mauled by pirates your docking computer might be one of the things destroyed.

For sheer playability Elite was, in my opinion, the best video game of all time.