Today sees the release of the hotly anticipated Elite Dangerous 2.4 Beta. For those of you who don't know, Elite Dangerous 2.4 'The Return' is mostly concerning the reappearance of those dreaded insectoid extraterrestrials, The Thargoids. While the Thargoids are the headline act of this update, I would not expect to see much of them in this beta. Considering past leaks from Commanders who managed to get to where they should not have, I'd expect Frontier to keep these cards hidden firmly up their sleeves. However, there are some of the long awaited changes to the crime and punishment system, intended to help crack down on some players' nefarious deeds and bring harsher consequences to their actions. This will require some vigorous and robust testing. Remember: what happens in Beta, stays in Beta so let out your inner space pirate/marauder. Your actions on the Beta server have no influence on the Live server, just make sure you are logged into the correct server before you do anything.
The 'Holo-Me' system, introduced in the last patch, will see the introduction of eye wear and twelve new hairstyles. Now us bespectacled folk can more accurately mold our commanders into our likeness. You could speculate that the eye wear could have future functionality, possibly used for an augmented reality HUD for when we take our commanders for a walk without our helmets on. If you ever wished the sleeves of one suit and the legs of another were with the torso of the one you were wearing, well now your wish can come true. You will be able to mix and match parts from any of the pilot suits that you have purchased. once you have chosen your look, you can now save it to the new save slot system, kind of like a wardrobe for your Commander. There are many quality of life changes too, expansion of the synthesis recipe system to include heat sinks, chaff, limpet drones and even topping up your emergency life support system. These coupled with the introduction of hull and canopy repair drone control modules, will greatly increase the self sufficiency and sustainability of explorers and combat pilots alike; so long as they have the materials. You will now have the option to remotely sell a stored ship should you find yourself short on cash at the rebuy screen. changes to the Galaxy map include improvements to route plotting, allowing faster plotting, and routes up to 20 000 light years, twenty times the distance of the previous version. There is also the option to route via neutron stars to take advantage of the jump distance bonus you can gain from fuel scooping from their particle blooms. The listing of 'Mysterious locations added that we're not going to tell you about', is about as obvious as a neon sign in saying there is much to this beta that is tucked away. Full patch notes are found on the Elite Dangerous forums here.
On Tuesday the 14th, Frontier's Senior Community Manager Ed Lewis presented some 'On The Horizon' livestreams to show some of the coming content in The Commanders 2.3 update. Ed was joined on Tuesday by Producer Eddie Symons to present a first look at the 'Commander Creator', the 'Camera Suite' and a couple other extras. Holo Me No, it's not a Dark Souls protagonist nor is it a type of space cheese; it's the name of the Commander Creator system coming in 2.3. This is accessed via the right hand panel, next to the Engineers button, and takes you to the rarely seen back end of your cockpit where it presents the holographic representation of yourself. This view is accompanied by a window with all of your options within the toolset category selected at the bar at the top of the screen. The options include an impressive array of preset 'space faces', all produced using the same tools you too can use should you not find a preset that floats your boat. The toolsets include Body, Complexion, Hair, Face, Head and Cosmetics. The Body tools allow for suit customisation with the choice of pattern and then colouration, but also lights,shoulder decals and helmets. For the helmets you can choose whether the face shield is clear or opaque, whether you normally wear the full helm or just the collar and backplate or no helmet at all. Of course in emergencies your character will don their full headgear, it's either that or hold their breath.
With Complexion you choose your commanders skin colour, condition and visible ageing. you can select skin details such as pockmarks, moles and freckles. Perhaps choose some drastic facial scars and even set some asymmetry to your pilots face. after all, we can't all be princess perfect.
For hair there is a variety of short to medium hairstyles since long loose hair is not a good idea in zero G. you also have a rainbow of colours to choose from and also whether or not the eyebrows should match the hair. For the fellas there is also a selection of facial hair available, again coloured to taste.
Both Face and Head come with a plethora of sliders to tweak and menus to select until you get your pilots visage the way you want it. Particular note goes the the eyes where not only can you have mismatched eyes if you fancy a 'Major Tom' look, but there are also cybernetic options available. Cosmetics didn't have much to show bar the usual make up but Eddie did mention that tattoos are going to be a thing that will be available. Once set, your avatar is instantly updated and used for both on your ship and your multicrew representation.
Camera Suite
As I said in my analysis of the teaser image, the Camera Suite has a bunch of preset positions dotted around the ship and is equipped with zoom, depth of field and blur functions. However not only will you be able to free fly the camera to over 2km away from your ship but also retain flight control of your ship. This is going to be incredible in the hands of the video making community.
Dolphin Announcement
After many reported sightings of this elusive beast, the majestic Dolphin class vessel has finally broken the surface for all to see. The luxury staryacht will be available in 2.3 but as for further details on it's capabilities, we will have to wait for now.
Mega Ships First seen in the PS4 announcement trailer, Mega Ships are non player owned giant mobile interactable vessels, some of which you will even be able to dock with. The first of which has been named 'Fisher's Rest', in honour of the late Carrie Fisher. Over time we will be seeing a bunch of Mega Ship variants, what they are or their purpose is being kept close to Frontiers collective chest.
this post will be updated as further details on 2.3 come to light
Shoot him already!
On the 27th of January, Frontier announced the update 2.3 beta would be coming some where between the 20th and the 26th of Febuary. While The announcement was rather light on the details of what we will be getting our teeth into, it did come with a lovely picture that I'll be look at in another post. Today (31st January) on the Elite forums, they published a new Dev Update that read like a taster menu for what Frontier have been cooking up for us over the past few months. While the update does cover a great deal, everything is subject to change from now until release so somethings that are mentioned may change between now and then. Currently Multicrew looks like one ship and its owner with up to two other players as crew members. This is achieved in two ways, first there is an 'LF Crew/LF Ship' kind of deal where if you activate it you are automatically matched as crew to an 'open' ship. The other way is to directly invite your mates onto your bridge until all your spare seats are filled. You'll be able to have two player crew members along with your single AI crew member, When joining another ship as crew, your ship is logged out wherever it is in the galaxy and you appear on the bridge of the ship you are joining. While there will be those who will probably complain, something about immersion, it is the more fun thing to do. You'll be able to leave when you choose, unless summarily booted out the airlock by the ships owner at the helm. Either way you return to your own vessel quick sharp. So far, three roles have been announced: Helm, Gunner and Fighter Pilot. The Helm apparently can only be occupied by the owner of the ship and I'm guessing perhaps their AI crew member while guest crew can skip between the latter two at will. I would like to be able to permit someone else to take the Con but have the option to override them as you saw fit. For instance a veteran pilot is riding shotgun with a rookie and they have just been interdicted, the greenhorn is way out of their depth so they pass the Helm over to their more experienced copilot who can get them out of trouble. The Helm will be flying the ship as per usual, with control of power management, fixed and gimballed weapons, navigation and synthesis. I presume they will also have control of utility modules such as heat sinks and chaff. The Fighter Pilot is exactly that, they pilot the fighters instead of or as well as your AI crew person. only now you can have two people controlling fighters at the same time. This will mean that those dual fighter bays now have a reason for existing as you'll be able to launch both fighters together for twice the fun. I would like to see this role extended to include driving the SRV on a planets surface while the mother ship is flying air support, should make some surface missions more manageable.
WWWWEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!
Last and by no means least, The Gunner has every turret weapon on the ship slaved to their control. they do so by a 360 degree third person camera with a targeting reticule and every turret that has line of sight to the target can be fired simultaneously. As well as the usual fire groups, the Gunner also has two 'quick slot' fire buttons that can be assigned to other modules like scanners or missile launchers. Unlike when they are controlled by a solo pilot, missile launchers and scanners have a 360 degree lock on and fire arc. This means the target does not need to be in front of the ship for the warrant/manifest scan or missiles to be able to do their business. there looks to be other benefits to Multicrew other than yelling instructions at one another. Frontier are toying with the idea of having discounted ship rebuy costs per crew member and having an extra power pip per crew member available in the power distributor, having up to eight instead of the standard six. all bounty or combat vouchers are to be duplicated for each member of the crew instead of split as it is in a wing of ships. However, all fines and bounties incurred are duplicated too. If a crew member is not willing to keep the fines and bounties in their name then they have the option to leave without them, but it means they leave their profits too.
It's amazing what you find on Google
Accompanying Multicrew in the 2.3 update is the Commander Creator where you will be able to put a face to your name. Those of us that were at the Birmingham Elite Meet last September got to see a demo of an early working version of it and also got to see Senior Community Manager Ed Lewis' likeness he'd created for his Commander. There is also facial hair and hairstyles other than buzz cut and polished dome. Not only will we be moulding face putty but also painting our space suits in colours other than black and stencilling decals onto our shoulder pads. We will be able to admire ourselves and our crew with a new 'fully fledged' camera system. Hopefully more of a camera mounted drone than the 'Selfie Stick' we currently have, if the in game shots from the recent trailers are anything to go by. Another tidbit that many people seem to have missed is that Frontier are working on implementing 'Ship Naming' as mentioned on a Dev Livestream before the Christmas period. I for one look forward to having 'RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION' stencilled next to the cockpit of my Fer De Lance.
13/02 Update Confirmation that the livestream on the 14th with heavily feature the Commander Creator, where you personalise your in game avatar for all to see, and the new and improved Vanity Camera. As a teaser to the livestream, Frontier released the following picture onto the forums.
It's a face and it fits!
On the surface, we can see a Commander with an actual face in the pilot seat of her Imperial Eagle. However, if we look closely, we can find there are loads of details to be teased out of it.
If you look to the bottom centre of the image you can see the label 'Ship Cockpit Front'. This suggests that not only is there more that one cockpit camera angle, but there may be internal cameras around other parts of the ship. Around the edge of the above image, you can see various camera effect controls such as zoom, depth of field and blur all with separate controls for adjustments. There is also a '0M' in the top right, possibly a distance reading for when the camera is in an external view and a 'hide UI' command to give you those clean shots. Finally there is the exit command set to 'Left CTRL + Left ALT + Space', the default command to enter the current external camera, suggesting this is a full replacement of that camera.
Now for a closer look at the pilot herself.
Excuse the pixelation, original image is 720.
First thing you notice about the pilot is she is not wearing a helmet. Seemingly a rather suicidal decision given the likelyhood of a canopy breach, however she is wearing a Remlok as labelled over her collarbones. A Remlok was first described in the novella 'The Dark Wheel' which came with the original Elite, as a bulky collar that is worn around the neck. On exposure to vacuum the collar deploys a hood and visor to allow the wearer to continue breathing for a short time using the built in oxygen tank and air scrubber. It works in a similar manner to this new bicycle helmet, but with an airtight visor:
As you can see, you'll be able to customise the suits colour and patterning, including the underlayer if the above trailer and images are anything to go by. The shoulder plates may be where you can place decals on your suit. Whether it'll be just your rank or other decals too, we will see. You can also see the probably customisable lights of the suits haptic interface and those on the torso and arms.
As well as the usual face-moulding slew of sliders, there seems to be quite a few details such as freckles, character ageing, natural variance to the skin tone, make up and fatiguing (dark eye circles). If you look at the hair, you can see individual strands standing slightly proud from the pilots hair do. You can also see variation in the colour tones of the hair, makes a change from the 'freshly dyed' block colour hair that you see in many games. Personally I look forward to seeing what a 'Max Slider' Character looks like before i settle down and replicate my own visage.
However, there are some of the long awaited changes to the crime and punishment system, intended to help crack down on some players' nefarious deeds and bring harsher consequences to their actions. This will require some vigorous and robust testing. Remember: what happens in Beta, stays in Beta so let out your inner space pirate/marauder. Your actions on the Beta server have no influence on the Live server, just make sure you are logged into the correct server before you do anything.
You will now have the option to remotely sell a stored ship should you find yourself short on cash at the rebuy screen. changes to the Galaxy map include improvements to route plotting, allowing faster plotting, and routes up to 20 000 light years, twenty times the distance of the previous version. There is also the option to route via neutron stars to take advantage of the jump distance bonus you can gain from fuel scooping from their particle blooms.
