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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."
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.
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 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).
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
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."
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/
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
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
You can play the FOSS version right now OOLITE
Have fun, it is an awesome game.
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.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
I had to look it up, it was called a Lenslok device:
http://torrentfreak.com/crazy-video-game-drm-prism-1980s-style-080617/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenslok
(and, evidently, not all were red.)
£1.3M is what they've got in Kickstarter pledges. I'm sure that won't be their only source of investment.
Now they can go to a publisher, an angel investor, or a business bank and say '22,500 people were excited enough to back us on Kickstarter, to the tune of almost £60/head on average . Give us an advance and you can be our publisher. Invest some money and you can be a shareholder. Lend us some money and you can have some confidence we'll be good for it."
And people wonder why Hollywood sticks with sequels, prequels, re-makes, and re-imaginings. They shouldn't - it's where the money is.
It's a flight sim type game. Trading is an aspect and the most effective way to make money and buy upgrades but there's also plenty of space combat, and the option to go into piracy.
The original Elite is a trading game in which you run goods between planets. Buy low, sell high. The journey between planets involves realtime 3D space flight and, potentially, realtime space combat. Going to planets with unstable governments, dealing in illegal goods, bounty hunting, are all ways to make more money, while attracting more badass enemies.
Ostensibly the aim of the game is to achieve 'Elite' ranking, which involves shooting lots of enemy ships -- and looking for fights is necessary if you want to do that. But, you could if you wanted, shuttle back and forth between peaceful planets making money.
The disk version included missions.
Elite: Dangerous, of course, adds loads of intricacies. Braben says things like: there's abandoned wrecks floating around in space ripe to be scavenged for cargo. Of course they might not be as abandoned as they appear... Or you might take payment to carry a valuable cargo - but you can't hope to get through without an escort, so you'll pay some other players for their services.
Perhaps I'm an optimist, but I think Roberts has demonstrated that he has the know-how and ability to produce this game. The information available about the game, the time table, the apparent openness and speed at which questions have been tackled make me believe that the game is being well thought out. Not just the design and gameplay, but the entire lifecycle. The hefty 7.2 million war fund helps too.
I've got doubts and questions, but they're mostly about the multiplayer experience. If they can deliver on the single-player game alone, I'll feel well satisfied.
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.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
David Braben will not want to let any publisher anywhere near his baby after the Gametek fiasco with Elite 3 (FFE) http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Gametek
I drink therefore I am!
Eve Online is click and point rolling dice game. In Elite and Elite: Dangerous you have actually to fly ship.
Wow. Two comments about this.
1. If you are saying they are two different games so they will appeal to different audiences I'm afraid you may be mistaken. Eve is very much based on the work that came before it (Elite, and Homeworld) and that particular genre of game is going to (and does) appeal to a very specific audience. Elite is going to be competing with Eve. If it can't, then it will die, and no amount of hoping it's something different will change that.
2. Eve (if the developers are to be believed) has the rolling dice mechanic you sited for practical network bandwidth, latency, and rendering reasons. The idea is that the client knows the parameters of every ship in the game and knows what commands are given to every ship and only transmits those commands to all of the other clients on-grid which subsequently renders them correctly. What Elite wants to do is allow you to fly the ship free-form. Fine, but that is a lot more information to transmit to each and every client on-grid (because you end up transmitting real-time coordinates). Good luck. Once Elite has 1000+ ship space battles with the mechanic you site as superior you may come back here and gloat. I suspect what you are able to do in-game will end up having to be artificially limited out of necessity and probably sold to you as a feature or design element.
I used to play Elite. I used to play Homeworld. I play Eve. And I sincerely hope to play Elite: Dangerous. But Elite will be competing with Eve for my monthly dollars, and they have some serious architectural challenges ahead of them.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
That's very original.
So, I am not a big Eve fanboy (even though I do play), and I have criticized it publicly here on slashdot before (as SimCity in space (which has limited appeal)). And I would love to have good competition in the genre. But (and not to try to be an asshole here), your description of Eve misses the mark of what it is and if the concept you describe has put you off it may be you've misunderstood it from the outset.
You've probably heard it described as a sandbox. That is what it is. I've never seen a 1k x 1k battle, and frankly I've never seen more than a half dozen ships duking it out at a time, and I have never participated in any such battles of any size. What you do and what you see is your choice (that is the point). Elite (the original) had the concept of the sandbox insomuch as there were markets and systems and what you did in the universe was entirely up to you. I hope the games are similar in that way. The point I was making about the OP's remarks was where that sandbox breaks down, and my supposition is that Elite will put limits on the sandbox out of necessity because of the game mechanic the OP was espousing.
You do not ever have to grind in Eve (unlike most MMORPGs which require it to progress). In terms of ability Eve progression is done in real-time (the longer you are a subscriber the more you can progress), but again, in what skills you progress is a decision you can make for yourself. There is no "dps/tank/support" tracks and you should really choose just one or you're going to be lame, etc. There are hundreds if not thousands of skills and they affect how you perform in whichever of the hundreds of ships you choose to pilot, or industries you choose to get into or occupations you try to excel at.
It's not a grind, but it *IS* another job... :)
Is Elite going to excel at gameplay and also at the sandbox? I hope so, but I fear the challenges are huge. I agree with everyone here who has said that it is not enough money (or time). Eve is still working at getting the balance just right and they've been doing it for 10 years.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
First of all, i actually started out loading up the wikipedia article on Elite. I spent about 30 seconds skimming it without seeing anything that obviously said "real time sim" vs "turn based sim" before deciding i could instead, i dunno, start a discussion about it with the other people on slashdot. I'm sure i would have found what i was looking for if i'd spent longer at it, but aside from the first AC and yourself everyone else here has been polite and informative and i (and anyone else who had the same question and came across the thread after me) have learned far more from them than i would have learned from just reading the full wikipedia page.
As for the rest, really? You think there's some different set of games that _is_ especially impressive? If i'd played more obscure things and less popular stuff i would have more geek cred in your eyes? That's... rather sad actually.
What i've played isn't impressive, and i'm sure isn't really any more or less geeky than what anyone else here has likely played. All my list "proves" is that i've played a number of games, so by any reasonable standard whether any one particular game is in the list or not ought to be entirely irrelevant.
The whole "turn in your geek card" thing was kind of amusing back at the beginning, when people just used it for things like Star Wars and Star Trek. But the idea has become much more insidious since then. People are actually grading people on their geekiness in real life on a pass/fail basis. Most recently a lot of males have been trying to eject female geeks from geekdom because they supposedly don't measure up. The geeky things they do aren't geeky enough because of... reasons.
You yourself are aptly demonstrating the trait. Have you considered the possibility that maybe your grandma _is_ a geek? I don't know her so i can't say, but just from what you've said she already sounds a lot geekier than a lot of the other grandmas i've heard about. But on the other hand even if she clearly isn't a geek, how does her having played a game in the Civilization genre make that genre less geeky? Did it get grandma-cooties when she touched it? Despite your claims Civilization is pretty damn geeky. Take a look at Sullla's pages about Civilization and the incredibly complex succession and internet games he's participated in, and his rants about the failings of Civilization 5 and just try to claim that he and the other people like him aren't geeks.
Or is the problem less with your grandma and more with it being "immensely popular"? But you know what? The Avengers movie was pretty immensely popular too. Has that made the Avengers, or comics in general, less geeky than they were before? Or are you just cherry-picking attributes so you can deny geekdom to whoever you happen to disagree with? Are you viewing geekdom, whether consciously or not, as some kind of private club whose value only increases the smaller the membership is, necessitating you do your best to keep all the "noobs" out?
Maybe it's not a conscious process, but i've seen the same thing happening to a lot of geeky conventions. Many of the old SF conventions are starting to die out. In at least one of those cases i know for a fact that it's because a decade ago or so a decision was made to purposefully demphasize anime, ie "that new fangled stuff those damn young whippersnappers watch." So those "damn kids" went and started their own con (with anime, and hookers, and blackjack! Okay, maybe just the anime) which has gotten bigger every year, while the original con has gotten smaller, and the demographics noticeably older, every year since.
Being elitist and alienating new fans (whether intentional or not) only just hurts the group in the long run. Other conventions (ComicCon and DragonCon being pretty prominent examples) have said "you kids have some new thing you are geeeky about? Why don't you show us, and we'll show you the things th
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