14 DAY TRIAL // The Elite Dangerous space sim was released in December 2014, and its developers from Frontier Developments have announced that it sold 1.4 million units.
Elite Dangerous is a part of a new breed of space sims that have been announced or launched in recent times. After this genre of games almost went extinct in the past decade, we now see a resurgence of titles that are once more sending us to the stars.
The difference is that now we can do that with better graphics and in a galaxy that’s simply too big to explore in a single lifetime, and that’s not even an exaggeration. Elite Dangerous has about 400 billion star systems, and if all the players right now only focused on expirations, with a just a minute for each system, it would take them about a full year.
Elite Dangerous is expanding
Elite Dangerous is not the full experience. The gameplay will be expanded considerably in the coming years. Right now, there is a new expansion called Horizons in Early Access that will eventually allow people to land on planets, use rogers, have ships commanded by multiple players, and even have ships big enough to launch fighters.
“We have an amazing player community. The average play time among our 1.4 million players is 60 hours - that’s a massive 84 million player hours and counting. With the community’s feedback, we’re constantly making Elite Dangerous better than ever. We have incredible long-term ambition and we will continue to deliver on those ambitions. We will detail more exciting developments for Horizons very soon,” Frontier CEO David Braben said.
Future upgrade for Elite Dangerous will include a first-person mode, FPS gameplay, extended storyline, and much more. This game is trying its best to become the next space online experience, but it’s going to have fierce competition soon.