Dr Wookie

This week's newsletter is pretty sparse, but they HAVE put out the beta and 3 updates this week! One thing that struck me is that people from 98 COUNTRIES are playing! That's nearly half of the countries in the World! They will be localizing in German, French, Russian, Polish, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and Simplified Chinese.

To me, these cosmetic microtransactions are the least evil way to continue to fund FD after sales. Way better than cash for credits/ pay2win . I splashed out $3 on some bling for my ship; that's less than the price of a coffee around these parts

Why must they toy with my heart so? Beyond Good & Evil was a great little game, and they've been on again off again with this sequel for years! I'll believe it when it's on my hard drive

Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen are both extremely ambitious in different ways. Star Citizen aims for the all killer no filler Hollywood style blockbuster set in 100 or so systems where all the players will come together, while Elite Dangerous is simulating a whole galaxy where players will be much more rarified. I am excited for both games, as well as Limit Theory and No Man's Sky. I think there's about 100 people working on the game, with the main studio in Cambridge, UK and the netcode team in Halifax, Canada. Last time I was able to get numbers, there was over $6 million raised from backers, and we don't know how much private investment there was. I think the studio sold off some stock for about $70 million, but of course not all of this is being ploughed into Elite. What's really impressive is that they started making Elite Dangerous in earnest after the Kickstarter ended in January 2013, a bit after Star Citizen. FD have managed to get a beta together, while RSI have coughed up some ships, commercials, a hangar and a teeny tiny dogfight module. I've backed Star Citizen, and hope it will be awesome in 18 months to 2 years' time, but right now I am really turned off by Arena Commander. I think one reason for this is that the many studios producing Star Citizen are making dog fighting, the single player campaign, first person shooter stuff, and planetary landings all at once in some sort of vertical slice. By contrast, Frontier Developments has put all of their efforts into making the in-cockpit experience the best it can be for the first release; then walking around and planetary landing stuff will come a year or two afterwards. Also, there is absolutely no story mode in Elite Dangerous, and the Squadron 42 story module for is the main reason I want to play Star Citizen.

Elite Dangerous can get screenies by pressing F10, or at 4x resolution by pressing Alt + F10; if you're already at 4k, you end up with a 16k picture! It would be interesting to compare your downsampling results with their tool

TRAILER PORN Hi Aaron, glad to see you're also enjoying it so far! I've been in since alpha in December, yet still wanted to skip work for the latest build ! I borrowed DK1 to try it with ED a few months ago, and it was very impressive, although not very practical. I managed to have a go with the HD prototype at E3, and it was just fabulous! Apparently DK2 is even better, being able to lean in and look around and stuff. I had DK2 on order, but I found out that the specs required to drive it are way higher than I have, so I cancelled it; I hope to get the CV some day though They've also started selling ship skins; each one is $3.50 or $5, can be used as many times as you like but only on one ship type. There's only a limited selection right now, but more will be added later. I think this is a pretty reasonable price point so long as you only want one skin per ship type (or maybe two at most); I certainly wouldn't recommend getting the lot!

Facebook kinda ruined this abit, but here is "An island of safety amid a sea of anarchy", shot through the roof of my spaceship in the newly released Elite Dangerous beta

So the standard beta is now up and running! There is a staggeringly huge change log here: http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=28314 The new play space is about 30,000 cubic lightyears, with 47 new star systems in the mix.. I spent ages in decision paralysis for where to go first! There has been a new audio and visual pass, making a vast improvement over the previous builds The first time I got in, the servers shat the bed a few minutes later because thousands of people were trying to get on all at once, but I tried again just now, after most of Europe has gone to bed A nice surprise (something that I was hoping for, but not yet announced for this beta) was the inclusion of the first go at a mission system, with bounty hunting, mercenary work, and courier missions so far; each has a time limit from a few hours to a day or so so far EVen though the preparations started at 2 pm UK time, the beta went live just after 10 pm; astonishingly, they've still been supporting as recently as 1 am; what legends! This is shaping up to be something truly special

I've put in about 36 hours now, around 20 of which were with my current dashing duo. Today I made a huge breakthrough in the case, highlighting an area that I'd previously missed... I was wondering why the level jumped up so suddenly ! One plus point is that my 4 level 8 guys trounced the (pretty large) level 6 welcoming committee! I came across another little quirk, being unable to complete a quest because someone else had the item... mostly I've been very impressed so far. I really appreciate the lack of breadcrumb trails and hand holding. In other games, the initial investigation would be a prelude to more wide ranging, probably world-ending peril and maybe take up the first few hours before we think about something else. This way I get to make my own connections, join my own dots while going off and doing seemingly independent activities

Heh, it only took me 27 hours to find the air/water and marksman sellers in town! Still no joy on the rogue stuff (but don't tell me). I'm on my third set of characters, and have got them up to level 6. I've got more of a handle on battles now too. Still really enjoying it!

The final newsletter before the release of Standard Beta is now out... and includes gratuitous 4k, 8k, and 16k shots to help demonstrate scalability and futureproofing... I won't link those shots here as the 16k (130 megapixel) shot froze my work computer for about 10 minutes ! The whole newsletter is here http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=dcbf6b86b4b0c7d1c21b73b1e&id=c5e7202cb7&e=9a500ef1b4 CURRENT RECOMMENDED SPECS After the Eurogamer article about future proofing, a number of other sites (cough gamespot couch) took the angle that ED won't run on most pcs, ignoring the whole scalabilty thing. There are lots of graphical options already, so that it will run well and look good on lower end machines (I spent the first week with my new pc running on integrated graphics by mistake, so I know it works). Here are the current recommended specs after the first round of optimization: DirectX11 2GHz Quadcore CPU 2 GB system RAM (more always better) DX10 hardware GPU with 1GB RAM NEW SHIP There was a new ship unveiled, a baby brother to the big-ass space cow hauler, called the Lakon Type 6 (maybe not final name) TRADE PORN (?!?) This new video shows a work-in-progress method for showing broad-strokes info on what goods to trade where, and it's pretty! PAINT JOB MICROTANSACTIONS New paint jobs will be available for the Sidewinder and Eagle ships, purchasable from the online store for real money; it is unclear whether these paint jobs will be available for in game currency. These apply to a specific ship type, but once you've unlocked them, you can apply them any time you visit a space station.

Can someone help me find my jaw? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODaiPJRyyxA This stunning video is the work of a whole bunch of premium beta commanders, shot through the roof of the a starter ship..

If you really wanted to, you could upgrade to the beta by paying the price difference; I think you would need to wait until it was released though. However, it won't be long now until the "gamma" phase where everyone who wants to can play early for retail price; there may still be some tweaks before retail release, but hopefully there will be no more progress wipes unless something huge and untoward happens. Given that the 30th anniversary of Elite is in September, I can see that as a very attractive date for releasing the gamma! Basically every star in the night sky is represented in game... some poor soul had to type in the parameters for ~150,000 real star systems into their proprietary "Stellar Forge" that reproduces these systems in game. The other star systems are procedurally generated using real astrophysical theories to try to reproduce the Milky Way as closely as possible. Back in 1993, Elite II managed to fit 500 million stars on a single floppy disk, with about 150 real star systems. As for the asthetic side of it, apparently there have been many iterations between the artists and the programmers to try and make the proceedurally generated stuff as interesting and pleasing as possible. David Braben gave a fantastic Tedx talk about procedural generation... he's pretty much the master of the technique

I bought this last week, and have put about 15 hours into it so far, in 3 sets of characters. I find the colourful world quite refereshing, and the combat is very unforgiving... I look forward to figuring out how to survive being outnumbered 10 to 4!

Only a week to go now until ED goes into the "Standard Beta" stage... which confusingly still isn't what I would call a beta, but does mean that the price drops to $75, and tens of thousands more people will be able to play in the online multiplayer mode. Currently those people with Standard Beta passes have access to the single player combat scenarios in order to get some practice in; apparently over 30,000 people are playing right now. STAR PORN Here's a video showing sped up flares and corona mass ejection in a star, from an internal build (maybe Standard Beta 1, not sure). SHIP PORN While here are a few tantalising glimpses of the cockpits of various ships outside of the captain's chair, all ready for the planned walking about expansion; this will only happen when walking about adds real gameplay, so will be some months, maybe even a year after first release MORE SYSTEMS, BUT MORE RESTRICTIONS There will be many more star systems opened up in SB1; we were given a sneak peek, and some people infered 50-60 new systems, whereas we now have 8. However, fuel will be a thing, meaning we can't just gad about wherever we want anymore

I just finished the last episode last night; I finished the whole lot in 9 hours according to Steam. I don't know if it particularly benefitted from episodic format; I look forward to making another run straight through in a few months' time. While I really love the style and atmosphere, it's definitely more of a choose your own adventure than a fully fledged game. Like a lot of people, I was hoping for more of a detective story, but I did enjoy what I got; I do think that the style carried it a long way.

Yeah, I think a lot of it is pretty tongue in cheek! Here is the latest in a series of cool videos by fellow backer Neon Raven; It was made in Premum Beta 2.02 with 3 other commanders; given that the only way to get such views is through the top of the canopy in a Sidewinder ship, I find Neon Raven's work very impressive

Time for another newsletter, detailing some of the improvements coming for Beta 1 (July 29th). http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=dcbf6b86b4b0c7d1c21b73b1e&id=ddf8da5f8b&e=9a500ef1b4This week's peek is of a bunch of decals for the Eagle Mk II... up until now they have all had the same paintjob, so it will be great to see some variety Personally, I love the wireframe look to go back to the game's roots (even though the eagle wasn't in the original game), and the cow pattern ! The big trader is nicknamed the Space Cow, so it would be fantastic to have one with a cow skin. A stars and stripes eagle might be too much freedom for me to cope with! While the current premium beta is blighted by griefers, it looks like that will no longer be the case in Beta 1. Firstly, the matchmaking will start, allowing us to mingle with the general population, set up friends lists and play in a private group, or even play single player if we're feeling antisocial. All of these are online, so each player has an effect on the evolving universe, and is affected by it, even if they only see NPCs. Secondly, there will be more robust responses to crimes. Reports of crimes will attract police (if appropriate for the type of sysem) in a new ship- the Viper Mk II. If they see crimes themselves they will attack, calling for backup if necessary. Stations can also have security forces swarm in too. Minor offences will result in a fine rather than a bounty, but if you accrue enough fines, or don't pay for a sufficiently long time, then they will be turned into bounties. Also, Beta 1 will finally allow communication between players ! Voice and text messaging will be possible, and FD are developing a series of standard messages to allow communication between players who speak different languages. It looks like we can ignore / cutoff hails too. It looks like Beta 1 will be rather more friendly to new players. I would never recommend the alpha or premium beta to casually interested people, but Beta 1 *might* get to the point where I could be comfortable recommending it. Having said that, Beta 1 is $75, 50% more than the retail version, so people who can wait would be better off holding off until retail launch (supposedly near the end of 2014)

If you just go to store.zaonce.net and sign in with your backer id, you should be able to get a discount at checkout... I'm not sure if standard beta is discounted yet, or whether you would have to wait until after July 29.

VERY exciting news in this week's newsletter, even if it was low on the pretties: Beta access drops to 50 GBP / $75 on July 29, as we go into "Standard beta". At this point, the option to buy free expansions for life will no longer be available. The exciting bit for me as an existing tester is this: "Over the next few weeks we will be outlining the fantastic new features and content that we will add to the Beta – it’s a huge release, so ‘watch this space’ for more information." @Griddlelol, yeah Star Citizen has a silly amount of ships for sale, but Elite Dangerous doesn't. There were a few Kickstarter options to start in either an Eagle or Cobra (fighter or jack-of-all-trades), but that's it. It's totally understandable to not want to buy these types of games on a whim... I think you would need to put a fair amount of time and effort in to get the most out of it; however, ED at least gives you the option of hosting your own offline universe (I think SC does too), meaning that progress can take as long as you like. Of course, since there are no levels even multiplayer should be accessible to players who dip their toe in every now and again. SC has a single play story mode, called Squadron 42, which is the main thing I am interested in, and that might be a better imuplse buy if they tighten up the ropey controls .

While the base games are pretty reasonable ($40 for Star Citizen, $50 for Elite Dangerous), you could end up spending quite a lot to get the most out of these games. I've been playing ED on a wired 360 gamepad for the last 6 months (I have alpha access), which works fine. However, I got my hands on a Saitek X52 at E3, which was much more immersive (and about $130). Then there's Oculus Rift, which is magnificent but fairly costly on its own, plus the newer versions need some pretty meaty cards to power them (DK2 needs a 780ti to get the "ideal" 75 fps, but the game is not very optimized yet). ED at least seems pretty scalable, so many people could probably have a good time with just the base set up, but people wanting the absolute best out of either ED or SC will probably need to fork over some serious cash. Having said that, I don't think that subscriptions are planned for either game, and I hope to play ED (and SC if the persistent universe is compelling) for years. ED should be out by the end of 2014, while the SC universe should be released by the end of 2016 (with other modules coming out beforehand). ED backers have been polled about possible microtransactions, but the consensus seems to be that these should be restricted to cosmetic items only. I don't know so much about SC. Colony was a great little shooter... thanks for reminding me, that would be fun!

For all those playing along at home, Premium Beta has now been released . There are 3 new star systems, one including a new type of space station, and a new type of space craft. There's also a whole bunch of little tweaks, but I can't find the change log anywhere. Here is a celebratory video (with obvious music choice )

Here is a live, off-screen gameplay demo from E3... a new space station is shown off from about 12 minutes in (17 minutes total) http://media.mtvnservices.com/embed/mgid:arc:video:gametrailers.com:d1c64bc6-1355-4f01-8d25-68ead06f5019

I am totally in love with Never Alone! I was smitten the first time I saw it, but forgot what it was called.

WOW! there's a whole bunch of news in this week's newsletter! --- Premium Beta 2 starts next Tuesday, with a new starter trader ship called the hauler As well as 3 new star systems, including a new type of space station that was previewed at E3 Orders for Premium Beta will close on July 15th. Judging by progress so far, this suggests that standard beta ($75) will start mid to late August! They've also started localization, with a German language version available from PB2 All exciting stuff. I tried posting images, but the site wouldn't let me: You can see them here: http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=dcbf6b86b4b0c7d1c21b73b1e&id=09a3391149&e=9a500ef1b4