Games
Frontier Developments explain how they brought the space sim to console.
There comes a point in every Elite: Dangerous player’s life where a key decision must be made; do you stay within the law to make money, or is a life of piracy and smuggling the more attractive deal? Going outside of the law certainly brings more risk, but potentially much greater rewards, and seems like the more entertaining option for most.
For others the joy of Elite: Dangerous isn’t in fast-paced dogfights or trying to sneak a bunch of slaves into a station, but is in space-trucking, effectively becoming galactic couriers. Pottering around space, delivering perfectly legal cargo and staying out of the way of those pesky pirates is a perfect way to make a few credits and see the sights, all without the stress of law-breaking.
Having this freedom to choose how you play is something that's rarely seen on consoles, a place where narrative-driven titles have traditionally flourished. One of Elite’s main competitors, Star Citizen, is trying to overcome this by crafting a fully-fledged single player campaign to go along with their space exploration title, but Frontier Developments had faith that their core gameplay and massive amount of choice would work for them when bringing their sim to Xbox One.
Regardless of your choice of playstyle, one thing will be evident to all Elite: Dangerous players: having the universe at the tip of your fingers is incredibly exciting, and being able to freely explore creates some of the most incredible non-scripted moments in gaming. Popping into an unexplored star system to be greeted by two massive suns burning away in front of you never fails to be jaw-dropping.
“The galaxy in Elite does provide a lot of scope for players to build their own story, especially for groups of players,” Michael Brookes, the executive producer on Elite: Dangerous, tells Red Bull Games. “We curate several storylines for players to get involved in, but the structure is more open than traditional storytelling games. There’s no ‘save the princess, be the hero’ mission structure, because it’s about your story and how your story impacts the wider galaxy and other players.”
Now those amazing moments aren't just exclusive to PC players, as Elite: Dangerous has also settled on Xbox One. But Elite isn’t the only space exploration title landing on consoles; the likes of Eve: Valkyrie, No Man's Sky and Drifter are all heading to consoles within the coming months, signalling a significant resurgence in space sims that seems to have appeared out of nowhere.
“Space is cool again,” exclaims Brookes, when asked about this resurgence. “Movies like Gravity and The Martian are taking a hard-science approach to sci-fi, and barely a day goes by without some space-related story on the news, from rocketry to developments aboard the ISS. We said when we started that we’re looking to revive the genre, and we’re happy to see more games like Elite. It’s definitely a good time to be making space games.”
With space once again becoming cool, Frontier launched the crowdfunding campaign for Elite: Dangerous in 2012, 17 years after the last entry into the series. The campaign was met with great fan reception, bringing in more than £1.5m [€1.9m/US$2.1m), well over their target amount. Clearly people were hungry to once again jump into space exploration, but that wasn't the only reason for the return, as technology had finally advanced to a point where a realistic and truly massive recreation of space could be made. If Frontier had tried to make the game five years prior, it probably would have been very different, as the technology used in the final version either didn't exist or was nowhere near the quality required. So just how different would things have been if Elite: Dangerous launched on the Xbox 360 and not the Xbox One?
“The most obvious difference would have been graphical fidelity, and not just in shader richness or detail, but in aspects like the galactic map,” explains Brookes. “We’re simulating the whole of the Milky Way at 1:1 scale, so the core of the galaxy contains millions of stars and requires a lot of processing power. We’d have to accept much, much lower graphical fidelity and fewer spacecraft flying around each system, and further developments such as Planetary Landings in Horizons would have been difficult on older architecture.”
From a technical standpoint all the tools were available to make Elite: Dangerous to the scale that the team envisioned on Xbox One, but some wondered how well the design of the game would transition, thanks to the relatively complex control system and the strategy gameplay traditionally favoured by the PC audience. In a lot of places Elite is a fairly passive game, with long stretches of time where players can find themselves doing very little in terms of interaction – when approaching a station in one of the slower ships, for instance – and can it be incredibly daunting to learn if you aren’t entirely sure what the game is supposed to be. This led some to think that console gamers, especially the more casual ones, would bounce off Elite very quickly.
“A question we faced a lot when we announced Elite: Dangerous for Xbox One at last year’s E3 was, ‘Are you sure console gamers can handle Elite: Dangerous?’ But it was never a question for us,” recalls Brookes. “Our own development team play games across PC, console and mobile, and we always had faith that the console audience aren’t so different from the PC crowd. Everyone likes great games that offer something new.”
Another of the concerning issues during the early stages of Elite's Xbox One life was that the notoriously difficult first few hours of the game would turn away many console gamers. A significant lack of tutorials means that even the simplest of tasks such as docking in a station can become quite the challenge, even the menus in the cockpit proved to near impossible to navigate without a quick trip to the wiki. But Brookes assures us that this piece of intentional design has transitioned onto the Xbox One relatively well, with few complaints.
“Early reactions indicated that console players expected a little more guidance than PC players, but there’s not really a great deal of difference once players start exploring the depth of the galaxy. For me and for a lot of players, the lack of handholding is one of the game’s strengths. Elite: Dangerous shows a lot of faith in players and the experience is often more engaging because of it.”
Elite: Dangerous was one of the first titles to launch on the Xbox One Game Preview programme back in June 2015. The programme is a service much like Steam Early Access that allows games to be made available to the public while still in development, something that had almost never been seen on consoles before Elite’s launch. This offers players the chance to provide feedback throughout multiple stages of development and ultimately help shape the final game. Of course, graduating out of the preview programme, as Elite: Dangerous did at the back end of last year, doesn't mean that all feedback on the game stops; in many cases it increases due to the volume of new players. So with months' worth of feedback on the Xbox One version and years' worth on PC, what are the community points of contention in 2016?
“The scale of the game is something that is commented on a lot – you have the entire galaxy to play in and that’s a major achievement for any platform,” says Brookes. “There’s a lot of depth out there, not just width, and we’ve found Xbox One players are as invested in digging deep as players on PC and Mac. We also find that we hear the same feedback and feature requests from PC and Xbox One players, regardless of where they play.”
Sitting firmly at the forefront of the space game revival, Elite: Dangerous has to be considered a success whatever way you look at it. Launching a game of this size on two platforms is no easy task, especially when you consider that Elite was essentially one of a handful of games that tested out the Xbox One Game Preview programme. As a result it would have been a significant risk for the independent Frontier Developments, but how concerned was the studio about throwing their time and money into the venture?
“For our part, we always had faith in games like Elite: Dangerous, but publishers didn’t,” remarks Brookes. “The genre has always had the potential to regain its former glories, although there are significant technical and design challenges to space games – especially large ones like Elite: Dangerous. It also helps that today, for the first time in a long time, independent publishing is truly viable. We’ve sold 1.4m copies of Elite: Dangerous so far, which for us is a huge vote of confidence from the gaming community.”
Brookes was intentionally vague when asked about what comes next in the Elite series, but he did say that, in terms of platform availability, the studio always tries to make the game available wherever the community want it. With a massive player base on both Xbox One and PC, along with multiple planned updates and exciting new features such as VR implementation on PC, Elite looks like it has a long life ahead of it, as does the space exploration genre that it helped revitalise.
For more gaming coverage, follow @RedBullGames on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
