From the desk of Executive Producer Michael Brookes...



Hi everyone,



It was good to meet some of you at EGX last week. I don’t go to many of the shows and was impressed by our stand there and pleased to see that it was always busy and with a long queue to see Elite Dangerous on the Vive! The dev panel with Sandy and David was a lot of fun as well and I hope you all enjoyed the announcements.



I’m back in the office now and there’s been a lot of progress for the upcoming Xbox One and CQC Update release. These releases will require some server downtime – we’ll announce the details nearer the time once everything is confirmed. Many of the teething issues with matchmaking should now be addressed, but please raise a bug if you continue to experience issues on either platform.



This week sees a new (and hopefully the last) gamma release for the PC CQC update. The release date is still expected to be October 6th, but we’ll confirm once all the details are in place.



Earlier in the year we updated the mission system to allow us to add more variety and mission related content and that process has progressed throughout the year and will continue into the Horizons season and beyond. There are a number of changes and additions coming in the 1.5 Ships update and so will be available to both season one and two players.



Missions can now be received in space, so they’re not always taken from the Bulletin Board and can be received from encounters with other ships. A variant on this are missions that can be triggered by scooping certain items in space. Timed assassination missions will be available from the Bulletin Boards, similar to the assassination missions in FFE you need to find your target at a certain time and place.



This timing mechanism is also available for other mission types where the mission target can only be found at a specific time. Alongside this, missions can now have multiple stages – this applies as sequences of the same mission type, so delivering goods to a station and then bring something else back. Note that this isn’t fully chained missions yet (which we define as different missions in a sequence), although these are planned as part of the Horizons season. A specific variant on this are tasks that have to be completed after a successful assassination.



A survival element to missions means that a player will have to survive specific encounters before being able to complete a specific mission, for example delivering secret information to a contact while being hunted. Another aspect for a player to be aware of are those that require them to be completed without being scanned – something I’m sure skilled smugglers will have an advantage with :-)



There are a couple of other elements too – but I’ll keep them as a surprise for you!