Development Plans

Elite Dangerous has a truly huge scope and Frontier has ambitious development plans. During an interview at Lavecon 2015, Frontier stated to have a clear intention of a 10 year development plan. This includes small free updates and paid major updates. Frontier uses an iterative approach which means gradually build upon features to expand and improve them. This page gives a rough overview of planned additions for ED.

Features

The expansions will include significant new features such as seamless freeform (manual pitch/yaw/roll) atmospheric flight and landings and on-foot and out-of-ship activities (such as FPS combat, walking around and boarding ships, walking in stations and walking and driving vehicles on entire 1:1 scale populated living planets), multi-player crew and player executive controlled capital ships.

Frontier intends to release small, free updates after launch. Expansions that include significant new features and content will have to be purchased.

For example, the roadmap is to add these features with major updates (in no particular order):

• Landing / driving / prospecting on airless rocky planets, moons & asteroids - Elite Dangerous: Horizons
• Walking around interiors and combative boarding of other ships. - see the Space Legs page.
• Combat and other interactions with other players and AIs in the internal areas of star ports
• Accessing richly detailed planetary surfaces
• Availability of giant ‘executive control’ ships to players. - see the Capital Ships page.

The scope for Elite is huge, so a sensible strategy is used to add to the game in stages.

For detailed information about the Horizons season of updates see the Horizons page.

Keep in mind that the game has been well planned and designed from the start with all these features in mind (it is not an afterthought) and Frontier Developments already has the technology for this.

Developer Comments

During the 2016 Elite Dangerous 24 Hour Charity Livestream! David Braben confirmed a 10 year development plan and he hopes it'll be a lot longer than that. "Looking back at those (developer videos), you can see what we've done, were executing on the plan. There's still a lot of things that are to come and those are very exciting. We do have a long plan. It would take us a long time to deliver all the things that we want to do. The great thing is the more things get added to the end of it. So it may well be never ending. I've said sort of 8 years, 10 years, but actually it could end up and I'm hoping it'll be a lot longer than that. The key point is we'll keep doing exciting things and we'll work out how best to do that."

Related Links

• The Future of Elite: Dangerous
• Elite: Dangerous - Development Plan video
• Q&A about Development Plan
• Newsletter about Landing on Planets, Ship interiors and Walking around
• In-depth Yahoo interview with David Braben about the scope of Elite.
• In-depth Edge article with David Braben and Jonny Watts about the scope of Elite.

Gallery

• File:Elite Dangerous Development Plan
• File:The Future of Elite Dangerous
• File:PlanetaryLanding 2.jpg
• File:Flightsuit combatsketch01.jpg
• File:Stationinside 08.jpg
• File:Wallpaper12.jpg
• File:Wallpaper09.jpg
• File:00overall2.jpg

• Elite - 1984
  Elite - 1984
• Frontier: Elite II - 1993
  Frontier: Elite II - 1993
• Frontier: First Encounters (Elite III) - 1995
  Frontier: First Encounters (Elite III) - 1995
• Elite: Dangerous - 2014
  Elite: Dangerous - 2014