There was a slew of exciting announcements during the Game Awards this year, but fans of Elite Dangerous were in for a particular treat. The expansion that many players have been dying for ever since the game released, and one that the developers have said is on the way for years now: for the first time ever, players are going to be able to disembark from their ship. Not on an SRV; players are going to be able to play Elite Dangerous on foot in Odyssey.
With this expansion coming in early 2021, Elite Dangerous is starting to look pretty similar to another space simulator that people have been excited about for a long time: Star Citizen. Both of these games have had long development cycles, though Star Citizen has had a much rockier go of things, and has had its development roadmap seemingly thrown out the window repeatedly with players unhappy with the developer's communication. So, with Elite Dangerous adding more and more intricacies into its own space simulator, it begs the question: is Elite Dangerous becoming the game that Star Citizen claims it's going to become?
Star Citizen's development hell has been well documented, but it's worth going into a little detail, just for context. After a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012, Game Director Chris Roberts said the game may release in 2014. That, clearly, did not happen, but an Alpha version of the game's persistent universe was released in 2015, a year after the full release of the game was intended.
The Alpha still receives updates, and different modules of the game have been released, including the Star Marine module, which is the FPS module. Initially targeted for a 2015 release, the Star Marine module was eventually released in December of 2016. The game's persistent universe is still in Alpha, with its Alpha 3.0 release having missed its release date by a year, as well. The latest persistent universe update was 3.11, which released in October of this year, as Star Citizen recently hit 730K backers.
Squadron 42, Star Citizen's single-player campaign module with an all-star cast including Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson, Andy Serkis, and more, was originally planned to release in 2014 when the rest of the game was supposed to release. It's also received repeated delays, and still isn't available to play in any form. The latest developer update stated that it was going to be playable in a beta form in Q3 of 2020 which, obviously, did not happen. The latest update from Chris Roberts is that Squadron 42 beta is delayed and it "will be done when it's done".
Elite Dangerous went a similar route in terms of funding, with a successful Kickstarter campaign in late 2012. A pre-release version of the game was available to play for backers in December of 2013, and the full game was released on PC in 2014. Since then, it's released on Xbox One and Playstation 4, with it being backward-compatible on the PS5 and Xbox Series X, as well.
The first big expansion for Elite was its Horizons expansion, which is now free to all players, with the main focus of that expansion originally being the ability to land on planets and explore them with the new SRV, a land-rover vehicle. The expansion ended up including five hefty updates between the original release on PC in December of 2015 and it's final update in September of 2017. Over the course of Horizons, the update added encounterable alien races, called Thargoids, which started attacking people.
Next was the Beyond series of updates, which made many quality-of-life changes and improvements to the core gameplay, touching just about every single system in the game. This was released in four chapters, with the final update releasing in December of 2018.
The newest expansion for Elite Dangerous, Odyssey, was originally planned for release in December of this year, but has been pushed to Q1 of 2021.
Both have ambitious scales, and both of them have delivered impressive content throughout the years. Star Citizen is attempting to create a grounded take on a space simulator where players are a person in the universe, able to traverse the stars and everywhere in between, getting to be whoever they see fit. Elite Dangerous didn't quite start like that, with players limited entirely to spaceships for a large portion of the game's lifetime. Even when players did get out of that spaceship, they were limited then to Elite's lunar vehicle roving around on planets.
But with Odyssey, the two are closer together. Elite Dangerous is attempting to make that leap into a game with three dimensions of gameplay, where players are a person in the Milky Way, free to traverse it as they see fit. The scale and intricacies of Elite are still a little less ambitious than those of Star Citizen, which is looking to create a new game genre, but that feature creep is why Star Citizen seems utterly incapable of releasing on any reasonable timeframe. While Star Citizen seems to be shooting for the stars, Elite Dangerous is still getting to those stars, and it's doing it in a way that players can experience now.
Maybe Star Citizen and Squadron 42 will fully release someday, with all of the promises made about them intact. But even if it does, it's not exactly going to be the first of its kind, anymore. While these two games are certainly not carbon copies of each other, Elite is getting closer to achieving the scale that Star Citizen boasts it'll be capable of someday. The evolution of Elite Dangerous might be what pushes Star Citizen to achieve some of what it's promised for nearly a decade now, but that's not all that important, in the grand scheme of things. Elite is doing what it needs to do to stay relevant and keep players interested and invested, making itself into a game that is constantly getting better, and one of the best space simulators to ever release.
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