Elite: Dangerous – Cobra commander

GameCentral gets to play the Oculus Rift version of Elite: Dangerous and talk to creator David Braben about the ultimate Han Solo sim.

We’ve been waiting to play this game for over 20 years. Although the series is not generally well known in the US any British gamer in the ’80s and early ’90s will have known Elite as one of the biggest franchises in gaming. A space trading simulator so ahead of its time that it was doing open world exploration and free form gameplay of a style that would only return again with the likes of Grand Theft Auto and Skyrim.



But because it’s only well known in the UK and Europe many Americans and younger games know only later equivalents such as Wing Commander: Privateer and Freelancer. There was a sequel, subtitled Frontier, in 1993, and a quick follow-up in Fronter: First Encounters two years later, but since then nothing at all from creator David Braben.

And until the advent of Kickstarter almost no big budget, modern equivalents of any kind except EVE Online. But as we discussed with Braben the rise of indie gaming, and the ability for fans to help fund games themselves, has brought with it a whole host of new space combat sims and space traders, from Star Citizen to No Man’s Sky.


Before we spoke to him though we got to play the game itself, already in beta and available to backers of the original Kickstarter campaign (a boxed product will be released later this year). But if you’re not familiar with the series, or the concept, simply imagine Skyrim but with you playing a Han Solo type character exploring, trading, and pirating your way across the gala

We start the demo docked at a spacestation and are immediately struck but how good the graphics are. The Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter was successful, but it still has a much lower budget than Star Citizen. Even so, the visuals are exactly what our young selves would’ve imagined of a 21st century space trader, especially as we’re viewing it all through an Oculus Rift headset.

We’ll have a separate feature soon on all the Oculus Rift games we played at E3 (including fellow space combat sim EVE Valkyrie) shortly but one particularly cool feature was that glancing to the left or right causes (currently non-interactive) menus to automatically pop-up, which we’ve not seen before in a VR game.

It’s also the only VR title we’ve seen where moving your hand on the joystick also sees your virtual hand move as well, although admittedly that’s easier in Elite because we’re using a joystick throttle – and so the game already knows exactly where your hand is.

Flying out of the spacestation the controls do feel remarkably like the original Elite, and not the fussy, unsatisfying set-up of Frontier – which was based on accurately modelled Newtonian physics. It’s still not as fluid as something like X-Wing or Freespace, but then it’s not meant to be. Elite is not pure fantasy and both the movement of the ship and the map of the galaxy are based on real science.



(In fact we’re told, before Braben turns up, that to travel from the outer rim to the centre of the galaxy would take several months in real-time; giving the developer time to plan what will be there when players finally arrive. Although they can’t put off that decision forever as some fans are already planning a ‘Great Expedition’.)

Since we only have 15 minutes or so to fly around there’s no time to worry about cargo or missions, so instead we just have fun shooting what we think (but aren’t too worried about verifying) are pirates. Again the action is reminiscent of the original but more nuanced, with the other pilots seeming to react sensibly to our attacks and none of the simpler tricks of the original games working for long.

Just like Skyrim, Elite is a game to savour over hours, not minutes; but despite the impossible weight of anticipation this is already looking like it will fulfil many of our childhood hopes for the game. And if all goes to plan it’ll only get better with time…

Formats: PC

Publisher: Frontier Developments

Developer: Frontier Developments

Release Date: 2014

GC: I don’t know what I’m going to do about E3 previews now, if I can’t warn people that Elite IV won’t be there.

DB: [laughs] I know, I know. It’s taken a long time for us to get to this stage.

GC: And yet it’s very strange that suddenly there are all these other space combat simulators emerging at the same time. The genre’s been dead for at least a decade and now they’re arriving like overdue buses.


DB: I think it’s because… I’m trying to think what the last one was, Freelancer?

GC: Yeah, probably that was… early 2000s. That was the last big one for the PC. But it never did that well.

DB: Exactly, and one of the problems for publisher-funded games is there’s a lot of caution. Understandably and sensibly so. And what they look at is what game will it be like? And they say, ‘Right, okay return on investment will be comparable to that’.

It might be 20 per cent better or 20 per cent worse and they go, ‘Oh, that’s not very good’ and ‘Do we really want to make another one of those or do we want to make another Call Of Duty or, you know…’ And so to them it’s an easy decision to say, ‘No, we don’t want that’. So there’s been a real lack, for a long time, of space games. I also think that the way they categorise them is not very sensible.

GC: Space combat simulator is a horrible phrase.

DB: Yeah, but it’s not… I see Elite as an open world game. I see Elite as similar to the… the nearest game to Elite is GTA; and it just happens to be in space. Because when Elite was originally conceived I wanted to make a game that was free, free to do whatever you like. And back in the ’80s space was the one thing that was easy to render. [laughs] Space, the clue is in the name.


And it fitted really, but actually I’ve always been a huge fan of astronomy anyway and hopefully you’ll see some of that in this game. We’ve gone a bit over the top in the background, I don’t deny it, but it makes the world rich. I just love the idea that you can look back at…

GC: I was talking to the Destiny guys before, I don’t know how much you know about that game?

DB: Only a little bit.

GC: They’ve got things like Venus and Titan represented fairly realistically, and it’s always frustrated me that games and movies don’t use real planets as their settings. With lakes of methane and sulphuric acid rain. That almost sounds too silly, except it’s completely real.

Elite: Dangerous – hot stuff

DB: That’s right. Well, it’s the Star Trek rubber suits. They’re all basically the same shape as people…

GC: But with funny eyebrows.

DB: Exactly! Funny eyebrows, funny ears and that’s it.

GC: You must’ve been thinking about all this for literally years.

DB: Yeah.

GC: So I’m curious, that golden era of space combat simulators, that came after Frontier, have you taken anything from that in this new game? Because the fluidity of combat in something like X-Wing is very different to Frontier in particular, but does that mean it’s just too fantastical to be of interest to you?

DB: We’ve looked at many of them, but I’ve wanted to make this game for a long time and it’s really trying to build out every part of the game in a way…

GC: Just now it still felt a lot like you were playing it on the Amiga, which I assume is because it’s still based on the same physics theories?

DB: Ah no, it’s all new, everything in the game is new. But we tried to get some of the similar feel, and with all these… the detail we’re putting in, we’ve tried to work out how to best do the project in a way that addresses each stage in a sensible manner. The first one is the moment-to-moment gameplay, which is the feel of the ship. And if we can’t get that right there’s not a lot of point carry on!

So we put a lot of effort into the single-player combat, which was the first alpha phase we released and then we added things like Oculus Rift – mainly as a Christmas present to the backers, because they all wanted it and 3DTV. And then we followed on with multiplayer, which is the next biggest risk.

And we’ve just followed on that sort of way, addressing the list one at a time – being quite focused, quite narrow. But the way it feels is really important, and what’s great is different people say it feels like different favourite games they’ve played. And what I mean is, I think they have in mind things that they really liked; and it feels solid, it feels heavy, it feels rich in terms of what you can do.

GC: Where exactly do you find the balance between realism and fantasy? Because I think trying to be too realistic did hurt Frontier.

DB: It’s about feel. And the sad thing is, I think, if you go back to play Elite or Frontier now you’ll actually realise it’s quite simple. But your mind was saying, ‘It’s a giant craft and you’re pulling a great heavy stick back, and you’re jousting in space with these other big ships!’ One of the things we’ve had to address in this, which we didn’t have to in Elite or Frontier, is the symmetry of the situation.

What I mean by that is that to make the game fun we could adjust the AI to make it fun, with them tending to come in front of you. But we can’t do that now because the other guy might be a player. So we’ve got genuine symmetry, so we’ve done a lot of testing of the control system against other players.

GC: The other thing about Elite is, you would play it for a certain amount of time – I’m not going to say how much…

DB: [laughs]

GC: And you would learn the controls and the enemy AI to such an accurate degree that it not only became very easy but you’d literally seen everything the game could do. The combat wasn’t one note per se, but it was possible to have a plan for pretty much every eventuality. A lot of that was just the limitations of the time but how do you avoid that problem here?

DB: Oh yes, that’s right. Well it’s the amount of variation, it was very small in the originals. The great thing with Elite: Dangerous of course, is that we’ve introduced real players. So that introduces infinite variation all by itself. And also, all the AI pilots have different skill levels, so they do different things. Some of the AI pilots don’t use a lot of the fancy features in the ship, whereas others will use them to really great effect.

Bizarrely it’s easy to write an AI that’s utterly unbeatable. The hard thing is to come up with AI that feels about right. So we have to do things like delaying all the decisions: they notice something but they don’t react instantly, just like a real person doesn’t. So building all that sort of thing, so you get a good feel for how good a pilot the guy is you’re chasing, if it’s an AI, is very important.

GC: So how does the multiplayer work? I’m guessing that’s not a separate option on the main menu or something?

DB: No, it’s always multiplayer.

GC: So at any point a player could appear and do whatever they do, and there’s nothing you can do to filter them out?

DB: Well, we do have the option – this is coming, but it’s not in yet – where you can filter whether it’s just your friends list that you see, or whether actually it’s essentially a single-player experience. Still connected online but you won’t see anyone else. Which is a shame, and I hope people won’t do that…

GC: Oh, sure. I’m not suggesting it’s a good idea. I’m just curious if the option is there. But another great thing about the original, and it seems odd to critique a game that’s 20 years old…

DB: 30, this year. The original Elite is 30 this year.

GC: Don’t say that! Well, the Amiga version must’ve been what, 25?

DB: [laughs] I guess so.

GC: And I suppose Frontier is what, 20? I remember going to see that at ECTS during the school holidays or something.

DB: ECTS! I remember that.

GC: But one of the big differences between the first one and the second one was the humour. The original was very funny and very British and very obviously influenced by Hitchicker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The second one though was a lot more dour, it took itself a lot more seriously.

DB: Well I wanted to… but yeah, you’re right. It probably was.

GC: So how are you going to handle that side of things this time?

DB: It’ll be something of its own. I think each game…

GC: Because a sense of humour is not what these sorts of games, any game really, tend to be known for. And it’s another way to differentiate yourself from all these American-made games.

Elite: Dangerous – VR makes even menus cool

DB: Indeed, there’s a balance to be had between sort of taking itself too seriously and just being silly. There were some things where I think the original Elite took it a bit far, because we had the original planet descriptions. You had things like ‘edible mountain poets’, which annoyed me most.

GC: [laughs] But couldn’t you have that just be a rumour and you get there and it’s just a misunderstanding?

DB: Yeah, you could but then that’s making it dour again. That’s what I’m saying: it’s a balance.

GC: And in terms of balance, the trading… again I remember in Frontier… Sorry, I don’t like to complain to you about 20-year-old video games.

DB: [laughs] No, go for it!

GC: But again, by taking itself that much more seriously, it became a lot more complicated and seemed to lose some of its accessibility. It forced you to deal with things you didn’t really care about. I wanted to trade but I didn’t want to get into that much detail about it…

DB: The first one was great because it was very straightforward, but what I liked about the second one is that it didn’t have the symmetry of illegal goods. In the first one illegal goods were always illegal, whereas in the second one you could by something legally, like firearms, and then take them somewhere where they were illegal. I liked the asymmetry.

GC: No, that was better, I agree.

DB: The same with narcotics.

GC: I get the impression this is going to be an ongoing game, essentially like a MMO?

DB: It is an MMO.

GC: It is an MMO, okay. So you’ll be adding stuff ad infintium then by the sound of it.

DB: Yeah.

GC: But is there an end goal at all? Or at least a point where you say that’s stage one complete?

DB: We have a first release. And then other things will build on that first release. We’ll build all sorts of additional functionality, like walking around inside your spacecraft, landing on planets, all this sort of thing…

GC: This is really surreal for me because now I’m going to talk to you about rumours I read in C&VG when I was in English class back in the ’90s. And the next Elite was going to have all this amazing stuff, the things you’ve just spoken about… so all that was true? You are planning to put it in?

DB: We intend to do it, yes.

GC: So in the end it will become… my dream game is a Han Solo simulator. I can’t believe human society has advanced to this point and such a thing still doesn’t exist.

DB: [laughs] I agree! I know exactly what you mean.

GC: I don’t mean necessarily in terms of an official Star Wars game, although that’d be nice, but just a game that lets you do all the things you imagined him getting up to.

DB: No question, absolutely. Doing dodgy deals and all that stuff.

GC: I’m glad you were actually thinking the same things I assumed you were all those years ago.

DB: [laughs] It will take a while to get there though.

GC: Oh, that’s fine. But would you put a ballpark on that? Two, three years?

DB: That sort of time scale.

GC: That’s great, thanks very much for your time.

DB: No problem, lovely talking to you.

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