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Making first contact in Elite Dangerous
The Thargoids have arrived. But what do they want? We asked the first player to ever encounter them.
They come in peace. For now
© Frontier Developments
Most games publishers like to shout about new additions to games, but when it came to adding an entire new species in Elite Dangerous, the popular online space exploration game, the developers at Frontier decided to pick on one lucky gamer to break the news to the wider community.
Veteran space pilot Robert Bettig – better known by his callsign ‘ DP Sayre’ – wasn’t out looking for trouble while playing Elite Dangerous last week. But trouble had already found him.
Somewhere on the lengthy, 36-jump mission to the Maia System to upgrade his ship, Bettig had picked up a bounty hunter. Trailing somewhere behind his Corvette – a fast warship and comparatively rare piece of in-game hardware – the bounty hunter in their heavy Anaconda couldn’t hope to be much more than a nuisance. But after several days of planning the Corvette’s refurb, it was still a nuisance Bettig could have done without.
“I was headed to an engineer, Professor Palin in the Maia system, for ship upgrades,” Bettig tells Red Bull Games. “I've got a bounty hunter on my tail, but that would just spice up what was going to be a relatively long trip for the Corvette.”
Bettig readied the ship for another jump, and blasted into hyperspace (or ‘Witchspace’, as it’s known colloquially in the player caste’s in-game vernacular). Like much starfaring sci-fi before it, hyperspace is Elite Dangerous's system for travelling vast distances between systems and planets in moments: a hop, skip and a standing-start jump across light years of empty void. Only mid-jump did Bettig realise something was wrong.
“I'd been working on the prerequisites for the upgrades for the past few days, and was deep in conversations [with fellow players]... when the – newly-coined term – ‘Hyperdiction’ occurred.”
As the stars slammed suddenly and unexpectedly back into view and his HUD flickered and failed, Bettig made an urgent transmission to his in-game compatriots.
"Guys... I'm getting ripped out of Witchspace!"
This was not supposed to happen. Worse, his bounty hunter had dropped out just ahead of him, within easy weapons range. Worst of all, however, was that his ship – weapons, propulsion, shields - had been rendered almost entirely off-line. With Bettig drifting, his pursuer righted itself, locked, and fired off a missile before Bettig’s warning systems began to blare that he was under attack from laser fire. While his systems had failed, the bounty hunter was fangs-out and engaging.
But, resigned to his fate (and hefty fee to purchase a replacement Corvette), Bettig was not alone.
" I can tell something big is going to happen"
“I'm on comms telling everyone what I see,” he recalls. “They don't want to believe me. As my descriptions of what I see come in [the other players in my chat] start searching the web for any similar [reports]. As the strange vessel flies overhead and comes about to face me, while I'm completely disabled, I'm thinking that I'm about to enter a world of hurt. This is going to cost a rebuy (40 million credits for that Corvette, no small achievement for sure). I just [watch] through my canopy, dead in space, as an NPC bounty hunter opens up on my ship while the creepy (and seriously awesome) music builds. I can tell something big is going to happen. I just want to see my system status! I want control! I want all power to shields! I want...
“...What am I looking at?”
What Bettig was looking at was the first recorded encounter in the entirety of Elite Dangerous with what, the community assumes, are the Thargoids. Making a first, less-threatening-more-pixelated appearance in 1995’s Frontier: First Encounters, the Thargoids, despite sounding like something best combated with a twice-daily dose of soothing cream, are the other spacefaring race in the Elite universe: weird, sinister, insectoid aliens that historically don’t much care for spacefaring Johnny-Two-Leg races like humans. Thargoids are floaty, spirally, near-mythical space oddities to be feared by any pilot reliant on poxy, old-fashioned oxygen and reasonable air pressure to not disintegrate in the vacuum.
Bettig was awestruck, though thankfully for posterity, still able to capture the footage.
“[When] the giant space jellyfish appeared, I was in shock: hands shaking, thinking just clearly enough to spam the record button,” says Bettig. “I knew I was dead. But at the same time, I was thrilled to be experiencing something completely new and unknown. It's a once in a lifetime experience. I survived the encounter with the alien ship, but the bounty hunter was still there firing away, chipping away at my hull. So as soon as power was restored I punched it to safety.”
"I survived the encounter with the alien ship, but the bounty hunter was still there firing away"
But the space jellyfish were not finished with Bettig. During a second excursion through hyperspace, his Corvette was once again dragged out of its jump by their (thus-far metaphorical) tentacles. But mercifully, once again, the aliens’ intentions seemed to be blessedly benign. Oddly so, even.
“[I] had a close friend nearby and was able to wing up with him and after a few jumps together the same thing happened again,” says Bettig of the subsequent encounter. “Without the bounty hunter, and knowing how this was probably going to play out, I was a lot less concerned. I was able to soak it all in (including whatever kind of radiation I was just bombarded with) and enjoy the show.”
Inspector! Blorgons!
© Frontier Developments
After the second encounter of the Third Kind, Bettig began to piece things together. While he’s flown a marathon 12 weeks of sorties in Elite’s most recent addition to the franchise, Bettig was a series newcomer, with only an inkling as to what he might have discovered. To his shipmates listening in, he was essentially that weird guy hanging outside the Target with a tangly beard shouting about how he’d been ‘taken’ and woken up in a cornfield.
“I was in comms the whole time with Ryder’s Rangers, the Elite Dangerous chapter of the gaming community I play with,” says Bettig. “They immediately started searching Google for anything and came up empty. Just theories. I knew enough to suspect it was possible [that I’d discovered an alien race], but the PC players always [discover] things first. Then my videos started becoming available for public view, and they exploded fast. It was about then I realized, and was told, that I really was the first.”
But Bettig’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind raised more questions than they answered. Frontier Developments would later confirm that Bettig hadn’t gone space-loony and that the brush with higher beings was legit, that this was a savvy, hype-building way to draw players both new (and old back) in. But why Elite’s new alien overlords had seen fit to wrench him out of hyperspace and not scatter his atoms to the stars was still a mystery.
“I like to joke that, if they are Thargoids, they scanned my ship and ran home to re-outfit and upgrade,” he says, modestly.
Much like The Goldblum in Independence Day, the community has its theories about the true reasons that the human race has finally made first contact – and why it hasn’t as yet vaporised anybody. Possibly the space jellyfish are scouts for a larger Thargoid force. Maybe the Thargoids were always neutral, until provoked into hostilities by trigger-happy flyboys (in which case, the universe is surely doomed). Whatever their intentions, Bettig sums up the situation with eloquence. Much like the heartwarming message of coming-together-i-ness at Independence Day’s End, Bettig’s message is a clarion call for unity against whatever awful galactic giblets are yet to come.
“After all,” he says, “defending against the Thargoids, or even maintaining peace, will take galactic cooperation.”
Elite Dangerous is out now on PC and Xbox One and will release on PS4 in Q2 2017. For more gaming coverage, be sure to follow @RedBullGames on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
