Elite: Dangerous Brings All the Space to Xbox One
Pax East 2015 should be dubbed “The year of the remake.” Sure, many exhibitors are showing off new IPs, but there’s a large chunk of older titles games that deserved some remake love getting said remake love. Elite: Dangerous is one of those titles. The original Elite made it’s debut in the gaming world back in 1984.
Fun fact, I never played the original title because I was born in 84…and my motor skills were seriously lacking.
In the original game, you were in charge of a cobra ship and your objectives varied from exploration to discovery while simultaneously testing your ability to properly navigate through the universe. No exploration mission based game would be complete without side missions, and Elite’s side missions included trading goods between countless planets. Upgrading your ship for the infinite threats in space like combat and evasion were things you had to consider as well.
Back to the present.
Elite: Dangerous is the fourth release in the series and is the direct sequel to Frontier: First Encounters which came out back in 1995.
This game has a 1:1 scale open world galaxy based on the actual Milky Way. And trust me when I say that it feels as big as that sounds. So, what makes Elite: Dangerous so unique? It is the first of the series to attempt multiplayer on a massive scale. A player’s actions will forever have an impact in the game’s persistent world state. And it’s not just your actions as a player that affect the world, but other players who are in the universe also drive and affect the world state. You are not alone in shaping your narrative. The universe in this game is as close to being “alive” as a game has come in a long time.
To make this game feel even more vast you can strap yourself into an Oculus Rift and be fully engulfed in the universe. To gain the full experience I attempted to play this game in three ways: the first was using the Oculus Rift with an addition throttle and joystick set up, second was without the Oculus Rift but with the throttle and joystick controls, and lastly with just the keyboard and mouse configuration.
Note: My original intention was to play only with the Oculus Rift, but I learned that I suffer from moderate to severe motion sickness using Rift, so I threw the other options in to make sure I actually made it through the game demo.
By the end of my adventure in video game space, I could confidently say – with a smile -that I’d never be an astronaut. No way. No how. Never.
And for those of you who like to game but aren’t fans of desktop gaming, Frontier has you covered. The team announced that along with the Mac version being released sometime in spring of this year, Elite: Dangerous would make its way to the Xbox One console.
Maybe — just maybe — I’ll be able to be space pirate after all. Time will tell.
