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Elite Dangerous: From Kickstarter to outer space
Spacefaring virtual reality adventures in smuggling, dogfighting and crushing ineptitude.
Elite: Dangerous
© Frontier Developments
Our most urgent problem in Kickstarter sensation Elite: Dangerous isn't pirates or asteroids, it's poverty. When you first launch into the Beta build of the open world space adventure game, the universe kindly bestows a free spaceship upon you, complete with shields, machine guns and a hyperdrive for getting around. The tools are at your disposal – it's up to you to figure out how to use them gainfully.
This doesn't come naturally to us as other games have conditioned us to hope. After whizzing through half of the tutorial missions (before stopping at a level where we are blown up over and over again by one vastly more capable opponent), we make our first foray into Elite: Dangerous' massive open galaxy. We've got a ship, a flight suit, and that's it, transportation and the literal shirt on our back.
Like a teenager being handed the keys to a supercar, we immediately go out and do something gleefully stupid. What's that we see over there on our 3D radar display? It's a ship! And it's heading towards a space station, so it must be carrying loot! We reroute all power to the engines, race over to our target, and pepper him with machine gun bullets. Then we are effortlessly destroyed by the space station's defence network, casually swatted like the larcenous fly we are.
There are lessons to be learned from encounters like this. Better men might respawn in their rickety starting ships and reflect that a peaceful space-faring society works to the benefit of everyone; they might build their house on foundations of capitalism and fair trade, and carve themselves out a nice income in full cooperation with the system's ruling powers. We reflect that if we're going to rob people we need better stuff. And so we decide to make some money.
After some fiddling in our cockpit's holographic menu displays, we find a map of the galaxy. There are different systems that we can lock on and travel to using our ship's hyperdrive, each with its own collection of trading ports. We pick one that's not too far away, accelerate full speed towards the marker projected onto our cockpit's canopy, and whoosh! Off we go on our first outwardly law-abiding (but secretly evil) trading run – Darth Vader with a shopping list.
We pull up outside a rotating space station, and after a bit of uncomfortably loud scraping against one of its walls, manage to awkwardly propel ourselves into its hangar bay. We're assigned a landing pad and told to dock. But as we don't know how, we instead point ourselves nose-first at our galactic parking space and grind our ship at an angle along the ground until the clamps mercifully engage for us. Outside in the vacuum of space, all is silent. Inside our cockpit, it sounds like someone kicking around a trashcan full of alarm clocks. But we don't explode, so on with the glorious trade mission.
What we want to buy is contraband. Elite: Dangerous already has a thriving black market (check out the video above for an example of smuggling that would make Harrison Ford blush) – but it's a high stakes, high reward sort of game. You can illegally transport weapons, narcotics, guns – you name it. But if you get caught by a space station's authorities, you and your cargo will end up as a sort of blood–and–cargo miasma drifting off into space – as we had discovered on our first sortie. The problem doesn't arise for us, however, as we don't know how to buy illegal things at this space station. Grumpily, we decide to buy some hydrogen instead.
The problem is, we don't know what a good price for Hydrogen might be. There's probably a way to find out, but we don't know what it is. So we sit in our ship, idly clicking through the station's market menu, trying optimistically to guess at a price point that seems fair. How much of this made-up currency that we also don't understand would we give somebody for an unspecific amount of hydrogen?
We reflect that these are probably not the sorts of questions that evil business empires are built upon, but then buy some anyway because, hey, we've come all this way. We also take on a bounty hunting contract to fight some pirates operating in the system, take a detour on our return leg to find them, and are blown up by a missile.
We tell a condensed version of this story to David Braben at London's Eurogamer expo. Braben is the game's creator and one of the industry's most prolific innovators – it was he who, along with fellow Cambridge undergraduate Ian Bell created the original Elite back in 1984. It was a game that pioneered the space-trading genre, as well as being one of the very first games to use 3D visuals as opposed to flat, 2D planes. He's sympathetic to our plight, but only to a point. Elite: Dangerous isn't supposed to be a game that you can just jump into and play – you're supposed to work at it, invest in it, and figure out for yourself how to make your way in its many worlds.
In return, along with the immense personal satisfaction that comes with finally figuring out how such-and-such a system works, Frontier are promising not just a bigger universe, but more and more ambitious gameplay expansions, including another 16 classes of ship (on top of the nine currently available in the Beta), on-foot exploration of planets, and even aliens – about which Braben has, when we speak to him, just finished discussing with a real-world xenobiologist.
"[We would include aliens] definitely as cultures and civilizations," says Braben. "There's a lot of richness to that. What I'm hoping is like what happened with [1993's Elite sequel] Frontier. There were lots of reports of people seeing things, some of which were true, some of which weren't true. And what's great is that we're going to have players saying things like, 'Oh, I saw an alien, it was great' and it will be this obviously photoshopped image. Or is it?"
Elite: Dangerous
© Frontier Developments
Even without these elements, Elite: Dangerous is refreshingly challenging in its complexity. From an initial Kickstarter fund of just over $2.5 million raised back in January 2013, the game (now in its second Beta iteration) is constantly expanding, adding new swathes of space with new opportunities for trade, exploration and villainy. But it's an organic, player-driven sort of expansion: as players move into new systems and discover new ways to make their fortunes, factions start to evolve to support their interests. Already the team at Cambridge-based Frontier Developments are reporting a kind of self-policing phenomenon in more populated systems, with players taking on the role of vigilantes and chasing away pirates. Just by setting up the right systems for trade and commerce, Elite's central systems are self-civilizing.
"I hope something like that happens," says Braben, when we ask him about the possibility of totally player–policed systems in the future. "What will happen is that the frontier will move further and further out. So you'll [always] have this zone of piracy and this zone of good behaviour. The boundaries will always be anarchic. It's up to you – you can kill people if you want, and you won't get in trouble for it."
Which is good news, as zipping about between asteroids dodging missiles and chasing down enemies is a good game at its best. The team's goal isn't to create a peaceful, trade-based Utopia – Euro Truck Simulator in Space – but rather to make combat something that happens mainly between human players and AI opponents. As Braben explains, when you have two players duking it out, one of them is always going to be disappointed.
Even against the Beta's AI opponents, the combat as played on a regular desktop set-up is already a tense experience. But EGX gives us the chance to try dogfighting through the lens of the second-generation Oculus Rift. The difference is like going from a biplane to a fighter jet – suddenly we're every space pilot we've ever seen in Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica. Learning the ins-and-outs of your ship's systems on a regular gaming rig makes you feel good – but with a VR headset on top, you feel lethal.
It works like this: When you take a bounty hunting mission from a space station (or just find another human player whose stuff you'd like to own), you lock onto the target, which brings up a little 3D projection of the craft on the left hand side of your HUD. This is your opponent's condition – the physical health of their ship and the charge of their shields. Then you pop out your weapon hardpoints and go at it. At its most basic level, this is Elite's combat: you pitch and roll to dodge enemy fire while doing your darndest to wear down your opponent's defences. Do this better than your enemy and you are rewarded by not exploding.
Elite: Dangerous
© Frontier Developments
But of course, if you're less-inclined toward a stand-up fight, you have other, more underhanded ways of approaching an enemy encounter. Maybe you're after a specific cargo ship and its loot, but want to avoid drawing the unwanted attention of a nearby mercenary escort. You know that enemy ships will see you on their scanners if you generate too much heat, so you bring up your list of onboard systems and disable everything but your engines. You switch off your Cargo Scoop – you won't be needing that until later. You disable shields – if the higher level enemy ships detect you, they probably won't do much good anyway. You turn off Life Support, restricting your air supply to just what's in the cockpit. Your ship starts to cool down. The canopy ices over on the inside. Then you give the engines one final, full power boost and kill those as well, leaving your ship sailing cold and silent towards your target, inert and for all practical purposes invisible.
But then, say, you screw up. As you bring core systems back online to assault the dawdling freighter, you forget to change your weapon loadout to dual Multi–Cannons – Gatling–style guns that eat real ammunition, but give off almost no heat. Instead, you're blasting away at the freighter's shields with dual Beam Lasers – powerful energy weapons which require no leading of the target, but light you up on enemy sensors like a Christmas Tree in a house fire. The cops come running, and now you're frantically rebooting shields, diverting power from the engines and weapons to make them charge faster before you're broken up like space pottery.
And this is where we probably looked quite silly to anyone watching on the EGX showfloor. Because with the Rift strapped on, dogfights like this take on a whole new intensity. Instead of relying on radar, you're craning your neck around, tracking enemies visually through the upper canopy of your ship and peering over your shoulder at the sound of an incoming missile alert. When you jerk back on a joystick or push forward on a throttle, your pilot's in-game hands move to match. And while the second-gen Rift is still a bit too fuzzy to clearly make out Elite's menu options, the urgency of combat – of slowing to your ship's ideal turning speed to track a target, of flicking a stick in different directions to divert power on the fly – while frantically looking out for death on all sides brings it all together.
With these systems mastered, your ill-fated bit of piracy becomes a questions of priorities. Do you stick around in the hope of blasting the escorts and plundering the target at your leisure? Focus fire on the freighter and hope for a quick getaway? Cut your losses and run, leaving with nothing but a bounty and depleted ammo stores? Elite: Dangerous is, even at this relatively early stage, a game about complex systems – and the spoils go to those who can make them work as one.
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