Frontier Developments has announced that Elite Dangerous: Horizons – the expansion and series of content that released from 2016 to 2017 – will be free to all owners of the game from October 27th. The Horizons season of content allowed players to land on planets, multi-crew co-op, weapon crafting, and ship launched fighters. Players are also able to drive the SRV Scarab ground vehicle to explore points of interest and check in at space ports on the planet surfaces.
Elite Dangerous Horizons will still be available for purchase up until October 26th so players can get exclusive rewards. Players who have already bought Horizons will receive an exclusive Azure paint job that is compatible with all 41 ships currently in game.
Of course, the game has continued to evolve and grow significantly since Horizons’ release and Frontier have discussed what the next step for the long-running game will be. Coming in 2021, Elite Dangerous: Odyssey will be a paid expansion that allows you to actually step out of your vehicles for the first time and set foot on the landscapes of the millions of planets in the game’s recreation of the Milky Way.
Odyssey will bring with it newly enhanced rock and ice planets. Rocky planets will now be covered in more realistic canyons, ridges and barren seas, while ice planets bring with them the risk of cryovulcanism. However, across the board, your interactions with planets will be transformed.
Planets will be able to have light atmospheres, tapping into data that Frontier already had for each planet and now presenting it to players. They will also be able to play host to buildings and settlements that are on a “human scale” compared to the scope and size of the planetary bodies that they’re built upon.
There will be new flora, which has all been designed to be a blend of recognisable to us as plants, and seem plausible while remaining alien. A new sampling tool will let you extract genetic data that can then be traded for rewards at starports. Sounds just a little bit No Man’s Sky, in my opinion, but these days that’s no bad thing!
Elite Dangerous was released way back in 2015. When it was released then Dom reviewed it, and he wrote:
Elite: Dangerous is a phenomenal piece of simulation software, masquerading as a game. I felt like Mal Reynolds, Captain Picard and Luke Skywalker at various points, while at others I felt like a delivery man who was able to make a cup of tea whilst travelling to the next drop off. The emptiness of space can be overwhelming, and Elite: Dangerous revels in that a little too much, but for the brave, or foolhardy, it offers an experience that is unlike anything else on Xbox One.
You can read the original Elite Dangerous review here.
Source: Press Release
TSBonyman
Cool, i might jump in again when that happens. I bought the vanilla game and knew you couldn’t land on planets with that but i thought when you landed on space stations you could get out and stretch your legs/explore. Was gutted when i realised that all that landing on a space station gave you was access to a trading menu and i lost the will to keep playing.