Elite: Dangerous
Frontier Developments and David Braben have announced a high-end multi-player sequel to the classic open-world space trading / combat game ‘Elite’, to be released 1Q 2014.
Contribute to Elite: Dangerous on Kickstarter
"This is the game I have wanted Frontier to make for a very long time. The next game in the Elite series - an amazing space epic with stunning visuals, incredible gameplay and breath-taking scope, and also fully multi-player." said Frontier founder and CEO David Braben. "Frontier has been working on this project in the background for several years now, building a foundation of technology and tools. Imagine what is now possible, squeezing the last drop of performance from modern computers in the way the previous ‘Elite’ games did in their days? It is not only a question of raw performance (though of course this will make it a gorgeous and incredibly rich experience), but we are pushing the multi-player networking implementation too."
Frontier is using Kickstarter both as a means of test-marketing the concept to verify there is broader interest in such a game extending beyond the individuals who regularly contact David about the game, and raising £1.25M funds to complete it.
"Kickstarter is great because as long as we hit the threshold, it commits us to making the game." added Braben. "From where we are now, £1.25M will get us the minimum game as we are using existing tech and artist-directed procedural generation techniques, but I am of course hoping we can get more than that as it will allow us to be more ambitious and potentially cover other platforms – the community of contributors will be part of the discussion about the specifics of any such decisions."
David Braben co-authored “Elite”, which was one of the most successful games of the 1980s, being the first ‘open world’ game, the first true 3D game, and set many other benchmarks. It made extensive use of procedural generation of content to fit eight galaxies each with 256 star systems and associated planets, economies. legal systems and so on into 22k bytes, less than the size of a typical email today.
His "Frontier" sequel, which his company is named after, greatly pushed such techniques further, containing a model of the whole of the Milky Way galaxy with all 10^11 or so star systems, and many more planets and moons, each of which you could visit.
Frontier Developments is an established game development company with 235 talented developers in the UK and Canada who have used Frontier's own state-of-the-art technology to deliver an outstanding track record of high quality games on time and to budget with publishing partners such as Microsoft, LucasArts, Atari, and Sony.
Be part of Elite: Dangerous - Link to Kickstarter and contribute now!