"Elite: Dangerous" is the fourth game in the Elite series of games.
In the game, you will of begin with a spacecraft and a small sum of Credits. You will be able to trade, pirate, bounty-hunt, explore, and salvage your way to wealth and fame, building on those key elements of the previous games, and with sumptuous graphics only now possible with the performance of today’s machines. Only this time some of the ships out there will be other players like yourself – other members of a secret ‘Elite’ group of space-farers…
Features
Please note that this information is about game yet in development and is a subject of change
Single player
Single player by default will mean playing alone, but within shared evolving universe. That means regular updates from central server. However, Frontier Developments has promised that players will have option to turn synhronisation off when creating new commander. They won't be able to play with this commander with other players online though, and their universe will stay mostly stastic.
You will be able to control who else you might encounter in your game – perhaps limit it to just your friends? Cooperate on adventures or chase your friends down to get that booty.
The game will work in a seamless, lobby-less way, with the ability to rendezvous with friends as you choose. This technology is already working, using a combination of peer-to-peer (to reduce lag) and server connections.
You simply play the game, and depending on your configuration (your choice) some of the other ships you meet as you travel around are real players as opposed to computer-controlled ships. It may be a friend you have agreed to rendezvous with here, or it may be another real player you have encountered by chance.
All players will be part of a “Pilot’s Federation” – that is how they are distinguished from non-players – so you will be able to tell who is a player and who is a non-player easily.
Procedural generation of content is a technique where content is generated from rules. It abstracts repetitive or arbitrary elements of content creation in a very efficient way.
Imagine a medieval landscape. Laying out towns, roads, castles, farm land, forests and so on can be done by a system of rules – putting castles widely spaced out on vantage points, towns near rivers but under the protection of such a castle, roads between them, then with farm land to support them all. An artist can still design the castle, the houses in the towns, but this approach greatly magnifies the content that can be created. “Frontier” did this for the star systems, and planets, and with Elite: Dangerous, Frontier Developments will go further.
Larger ships will have multiple shield generators which can be targeted and will fail individually.
This will add an extra level of skill where attackers can inflict hull damage by firing weapons at a single point and the prey navigates in a way that draws fire to working shields.
Unlike previous Elite games where ships would simply explode once the hull integrity hit zero, the ship models will be divided in to sections so that damage will be localised to where weapon fire impacts. This means that the cargo hold can be exposed (shedding cargo) but thrusters, hyperdrives and weapons could not be affected.
