A Match Made in Heaven?
We are putting a lot of effort into creating engaging and fun multiplayer game-play. Elite: Dangerous is all about freedom, and you will of course have choices. Beta 1 will have the first stage of our functionality for matchmaking.
We hope and expect most people will choose to play with the full online community, but from Beta 1 you will have other options too. You will be able to create friend lists, and just play with a group you create from that list. Another new option is single player. From Beta 1 you will now be able to play on your own if you like. You will still encounter other ships in the game, but they will always be AIs.
Open Hailing Frequencies...
As we teased last week in our Peek of the Week, a big new feature in Beta 1 is player to player hailing (communications). We expect this to be a very popular addition.
Again there are a couple of options here, text and voice, and of course you will have the choice whether to accept, cut short or simply ignore any hail, and report what you consider to be any abuse. All hails, voice and text, may be affected by the state of your ship - for example if your systems start to overheat in battle, you?ll notice a degradation in audio quality of voice hails as a consequence.
In Beta 1, hailing is restricted to single ship to single ship. Voice communication is only available between ships in the same system. Text communication is available between ships regardless of the system each is in.
As the Beta progresses, we will extend voice hailing to include open-channel voice comms between friends in a ?wing?, and we plan to introduce a standard set of text hails to facilitate communication between ships whose pilots speak different languages.
Mostly Harmless Questions
Gimi: We already know that there will be area of the galaxy cut off for later use and no planetary landings at launch. Will these sort of limitations be incorporated into current Elite lore and fiction, and given plausible in game explanations?
Yes, to an extent. For the areas cut off, you will be prevented from going there ? the drive will simply not lock on. We may add a message if we feel we need it like ?Unable to lock on? or similar. For planetary landings, there may be a piece of equipment you will need to purchase, that will only become available later.
Nomadski: Will there be missions that ask questions of a pilot's flying skills that dont necessarily revolve around combat?
There will be missions that require quick transits. I like the idea of ones that amount to races between players not unlike the old Tea Clipper races from China back to Imperial Britain in the 19th century. In Elite Dangerous, it might be the first to get the latest harvest of Lavian Tree Grubs back to Earth (this way all players would start at the same time) ? but I think there will be tricky issues with this sort of thing ? people playing in different countries meaning the start time is at an awkward time of day.
SzarWilk: Will different types of ammunition be available for different weapons?
Yes. Many weapons like lasers don?t use ammunition, but we have already planned a wide range of missile types. It should also be possible to get ammo for other projectile weapons that is a little better, for significant extra cost.
Ben Ryder: Will we be able to buy books like the Art work of Elite and sketch books?
Yes, that would be a great thing to do, though such a book is not yet planned.
Rog: Will auto-generated missions involve interaction with, or even the destruction of actual *human* players?
Generally no, but there are some special cases. For example if a player defaults on a deal with a particularly dangerous NPC, he or she may put a contract on that player?s head. There is no reason that contract might not be taken by a player?
