Blast off into realistic galaxy in massive space sim Elite Dangerous

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So pretty, so big. So...Dangerous. Photo: Frontier Developments
So pretty, so big. So...Dangerous. Photo: Frontier Developments

Space travel is bound to be essentially lonely. Even in our one galaxy, there’s something like 300 billion star systems. Three hundred billion. It’s hard to even conceive of that number, to be honest.

Frontier Developments, the developer of Elite: Dangerous, has gone to great lengths to give players that feeling of loneliness, balanced with the excitement and multiplayer action that current gamers expect when they launch a video game.

“With a real full scale galaxy it’s easy to head off into unexplored space,” executive producer Michael Brookes told us. “We think that’s a good thing; players can choose the life of a pioneer on the unexplored frontier, or stick to more populated places for cooperative and competitive play with other players.”

Even better, this stunningly gorgeous fourth entry in the Elite game franchise is coming to your Mac soon.

The game’s scale model of the Milky Way Galaxy was created from real star catalogues, like Gliese and Hipparcos, said Brookes.

“We also used NASA’s exoplanet database to make sure that known exoplanets were included. There are 140,000 real stars, nebula and star clusters in the game, all with the correct data as best we understand it.”

That’s as many star systems as we can currently see, but the team went even further, creating the rest of the hundreds of billions of star systems using strict algorithms and scientific data on how the rest of our galaxy is made.

That’s what makes Elite: Dangerous a compelling massive space combat and trading sim, letting you trade, hunt bounties, mine, pirate, or assassinate your way through the massively multiplayer in-game galaxy with joy. You can also head off into the distant reaches of the Milky Way, avoiding all contact, or visiting the various hubs that have arisen since the first game was launched in 1984.

The team has been itching to do something to this scale for quite a while, and the current rise of massively multiplayer online games has given them a grand opportunity.

“We wanted to go beyond a space trading sim and really do justice to combat, exploration, mining and more,” said Brookes. “Elite: Dangerous is in ongoing development, and we’re often adding features based on community feedback.”

The Cambridge-based UK team also boasts many Mac users, which is probably why we’re seeing Elite: Dangerous coming to the Mac.

“Most were already playing Elite: Dangerous at home using bootcamp,” said Brookes, “but of course they’ll tell you they’re happier to see a native Mac version being released. The same is true for many of our players, and it was the popularity of the platform among our Kickstarter backers that encouraged us to set the Mac version as a stretch goal, which we hit.”

The game is available now on Windows PCs, and is entering a Mac beta phase before the eventual release in the second quarter of this year. Plans are also underway to put the game on Xbox One, as well.

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