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Elite Dangerous

The fourth Elite, crowdfunded by its players and set in a full-size Milky Way

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Elite Dangerous is Frontier Developments' return to Elite, thirty years after the original. Funded on Kickstarter in 2012 with £1,578,315 from 25,681 backers, it came out on PC in December 2014, then on Mac, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Like its ancestor it generates its galaxy instead of storing it, now a full-scale model of the Milky Way. Expansions added planetary landings in 2015 and walking on foot in 2021, and the game is still being updated on PC.

In November 2012 David Braben asked the public for £1.25 million to make a new Elite. He had been promising a fourth game for years, and his studio, Frontier Developments, had worked on it “on and off” since 2000, “mostly building technology to make the game possible”. This time he wanted no publisher in the way. “Our experience with publishers with the Elite game hasn’t been very good,” he told Retro Gamer. The backers gave him £1,578,315. Two years later Elite Dangerous came out, set in a galaxy built the same way as the 1984 original’s: generated by a program instead of stored.

Fast facts

  • Developer and publisher: Frontier Developments, Cambridge, led by its founder David Braben.
  • Kickstarter: launched November 2012 with a £1.25 million target; raised £1,578,315 from 25,681 backers.
  • Released: PC, 16 December 2014; Mac, May 2015; Xbox One, 6 October 2015; PlayStation 4, 27 June 2017.
  • Expansions: Horizons (15 December 2015), with planetary landings; Odyssey (19 May 2021), with walking on foot.
  • The galaxy: a full-scale model of the Milky Way. Frontier’s 2013 prospectus spoke of “the 100 billion star systems of the Milky Way galaxy”; its store page now says “400-billion”.

A game for the backers

The pitch was a big one for a small sum. Braben explained to Retro Gamer in January 2013 why £1.25 million could pay for a game when others cost tens of millions: story-led games have to build “lots and lots of locations” by hand, but “the beauty with something like Elite is that we can use procedural generation to generate a great deal of that content.” The main new feature, he said, would be multiplayer: “I think people will look back and go ‘Wow’ with the multiplayer.” The name was a nod to the original’s combat ratings, in which Dangerous is one rank below Deadly and two below Elite. “It really is just a reference to the original,” Braben said.

The plan was to release it in March 2014, the original’s thirtieth anniversary. In October 2013 Braben told Edge the team was “still around 60 people”. When the interviewer called that modest, he agreed: “It is, but that’s partly brought about by the fact that we have a procedurally generated game.” The game came out on PC nine months late, on 16 December 2014.

Not every backer was happy with it. In November 2014, a month before launch, Frontier dropped the offline single-player mode it had promised. Braben said an offline game would be “fundamentally empty” without the shared, persistent galaxy. Frontier offered refunds only to people who had pre-ordered and not yet played; backers who had already played the alpha or beta tests were not eligible.

The galaxy

The original Elite fitted eight galaxies of 256 star systems each into a BBC Micro by generating them from a few numbers (see procedural generation). Elite Dangerous uses the same idea at a vastly larger scale. Frontier’s Steam page describes “the stars, planets, moons, asteroid belts, and black holes of our galaxy” at “true galactic scale”, constructed using real astronomical data where it exists and generated everywhere else.

How many star systems that means depends on when Frontier was asked. Its admission document for the stock market in July 2013 described the game as recreating “the 100 billion star systems of the Milky Way galaxy”. Its current store page opens with “the 400-billion star systems of the Milky Way”. Both figures are Frontier’s own, and neither is a count of anything a player has visited.

Elite lineage

Game Year First formats
Elite 1984 BBC Micro, Acorn Electron
Frontier: Elite II 1993 Amiga, Atari ST, PC
Frontier: First Encounters 1995 PC
Elite Dangerous 2014 PC; later Mac, Xbox One, PlayStation 4

Horizons and Odyssey

The game kept growing after release. Horizons, the first paid expansion, arrived on 15 December 2015 and let players land on airless worlds and drive across them in a buggy, the SRV. PCGamesN’s Kirk McKeand found it would “have you marvelling at the Milky Way all over again”, though after the first few hours “it got a bit dull”.

The Mac version, which went on sale in May 2015, never got Horizons. Frontier said it had been unable to bring the expansion to the Mac “due to technical barriers”, and in April 2018 announced that the Mac version would stop working after an update at the end of that year.

Odyssey, the second expansion, came out on PC on 19 May 2021. For the first time players could leave their ships: walk around station concourses and planetary settlements, and land on worlds with thin atmospheres. The launch went badly, with performance problems, bugs and server outages, and within a week Braben wrote to players: “I would like to apologise wholeheartedly to those who have been suffering from these problems.” In March 2022 Frontier cancelled Odyssey for consoles. “We need to focus on a single codebase,” Braben said. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions stayed playable, with critical fixes only, and new content since then has come to PC alone.

Wireframe, looking back in 2019, summed up the first five years: “It had its issues, but in the modern era it was much easier for the team to fix and improve – and with Frontier exercising full control over its product, there was no room for naughty publishers looking for a quick buck to ruin the party.”

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