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Development Plans

From Elite Dangerous Wiki
Revision as of 12:48, 5 June 2017 by Fandom>Univero (added a video)

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. [1] 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): [2] [3]

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

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.

Horizons

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

Major Updates after Horizons

On May 24, 2017, Frontier's head of communications Zac Antonaci commented on future major updates after Horizons: "So with the Horizon season of expansions coming to a close, what is beyond 2.4 I hear you ask? Well, it certainly isn’t the end of this amazing journey… we’re only just getting started!"

"Our awesome dev team are dedicated to continuing to build and improve the Elite Dangerous experience with an exciting long term vision in mind. We’re happy to be able to confirm that the next major updates following 2.4 will focus on core gameplay, existing features, quality of life and other improvements! We’re delighted to be investing a considerable amount of development and effort into making the core gameplay experience even better for our fantastic community or players."

"We’ll be sharing more news on that content and our roadmap at a very special event coming later in the year - more details on this event will be released in the weeks after E3."[4]

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. [5] "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."

References

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