Elite: Dangerous is arriving on Xbox One this summer, and in fully up-to-date form, no less. Owners of the mean green machine will be able to explore, dogfight, and trade through Frontier Development’s incredibly vast 400 billion star systems, alongside the new Wings patch, which enables fluidly integrated partying capabilities.
Put Rings On It
You may be wondering if this living room-capable version will incorporate head tracking with the use of Kinect. While the little black bar has come under intense scrutiny, we can’t think of a better use for it than replacing the expensive head tracking kits that money-laden PC owners use to look around in their cockpits. “We don’t have any plans to support Kinect, but we will keep that in mind,” Braben assures us. Sigh.
After the announcement of the Xbox version, Braben tweeted that Elite will arrive on PS4 too… as soon as an exclusivity deal with Microsoft runs out.“To me that’s very exciting,” says David Braben, the brain behind elite and one of the greats of British game development. “What we have said is we won’t keep the platforms in sync all the time. We don’t want to make a rod for our own back where it’s not realistic. Also, from a PC point of view, you’ll still get the updates straight away. We don’t need to wait for any approval cycle.” Braben is quick to calm Xbox owners’ fears that patches will take cosmological decades to arrive. “Having said that, we will do our best to keep them in sync where we can,” he says. “The point is it will be a great experience on Xbox, not dumbed down.”
Put Rings On It
You may be wondering if this living room-capable version will incorporate head tracking with the use of Kinect. While the little black bar has come under intense scrutiny, we can’t think of a better use for it than replacing the expensive head tracking kits that money-laden PC owners use to look around in their cockpits. “We don’t have any plans to support Kinect, but we will keep that in mind,” Braben assures us. Sigh.
“Some of the Sights that i’ve seen on Youtube are amazing. i hadn’t seen them in the game.”As to what future feature Braben is most looking forward to seeing arrive in the game when it makes the shift? “Obviously there are long-term features that I care hugely about,” he tells us, “including being able to go down to planet surfaces and also walking around inside your ship. I suppose for me it’s the wonder of standing on a distant world. That will eventually come, but also, we have it now, just the sheer scale. Being able to head out into the unknown and see something that no-one has seen before,” he adds, excitedly. “I mean, some of the sights that I’ve seen on YouTube are amazing. I hadn’t seen them in the game some of the wonderful binary planets people have found where they have spectacular ring systems. It must have been a relatively recent event to have created them. It’s strangely interesting in that we’re the developer and even we haven’t seen it.”