>2018
>still playing Elite: Dangerous
2018 is upon us, and along with it comes a new season of updates for Elite, titled "Beyond". This season will consist of two major updates: one this quarter (open beta has concluded, live release is expected within a few weeks), and another in Q4. There will be two smaller updates in Q2 and Q3, which will add more missions, ships, and general QoL improvements. You can read a more detailed roadmap
here, but I'll offer a quick rundown of the major updates.
Q1 Update - Improved planetary textures
- New ship: The Chieftain
- Overhauled trading tools
- Overhauled engineering system to reduce RNG and tedium
- Overhauled crime and punishment system
- Challenging wing missions that can be properly shared with other players
- The ability to pirate megaships
- Little weenie aliens for new players to fight (and probably other alien stuff)
- A whole slew of other little changes and additions, ship buffs, new ship voices, Galnet Audio, and so on.
Q4 Update (this is the big one)- Complete re-work of exploration tools and mechanics
- New celestial phenomena to find whilst using those tools and mechanics
- Complete re-work of mining mechanics
- "The Codex", a sort of in-game lore repository as well as a personal log of discoveries
- New in-game player groups called "squadrons", these will fill the role of traditional MMO guilds, and will be able to purchase mobile fleet carriers
- Further improvements to planetary surface generation, overhauled "scatter-rock" system and better fog and vapor effects (this is their concept goal)
- A new and improved lighting model
Overall, pretty good stuff. All free, too. I played the open beta for the upcoming Q1 update, and it's great. Trading no longer requires the use of third party tools to be effective, and the new planetary textures are wonderful. A lot of these are core improvements that the playerbase have been requesting for a long time, having become tired of Frontier simply bolting on new headline features to an incomplete base game. Essentially, Frontier want to make sure they have a very solid foundation of core gameplay mechanics before moving on to the next paid release, which I am 90% sure will be atmospheric landings and will either arrive at the end of 2018 or sometime in 2019.
Oh, also, Thargoids are currently burning a path of destruction straight toward Earth.