Elite Dangerous

Did you spend rather too much of your time crashing while trying to dock at Lave?

Did you curse the Newtonian physics as you once more failed to slow down in time and ended up deeply embedded in a planet?

Do you have spare cash?

Then you may be interested in Elite Dangerous on Kickstater.

I saw this yesterday and was debating about whether to back.. decided to wait for a release (so I can read reviews, etc). However, it looks like it needs a bit of a shove, so I've backed it now.

There's now a development diary video available.

i'd love to see this new Elite become reality !

I've backed it too!

I've really crossing my fingers that this will get funded on Kickstarter. Frontier & Frontier 2 were great (with a few caveats like the flakey autopilot), but it would be great to see them making use of modern PC hardware + multiplayer.

I am baffled why no-one else tried to do a similar game in the *19* years since Frontier was released. (Games like Wing Commander/Freelancer/etc just don't cut it.)

Elite Dangerous has passed the 50% funding mark with 35 days of the KickStarter to go.

A development diary video has been released on 'The Galaxy and How it Evolves over Time'.

A development diary video has been released showing a convoy escort battle.

i guess it's time to start upgrading the kids PC to make sure it's ready for the new Elite

And pledging at Elite Dangerous on Kickstarter or it may not happen at all.

@amigacooke
According to KickTraq's *projection* (not the misleading "trend"), it may get as little as £0.9 million by the deadline, which is far below the necesary £1.2 million. That means it would need a huge last minute "surge" to make-up the shortfall

David Braben needs to do a lot better sales job IMHO. Especially for Elite newbies, tell us all the cool feature planned. e.g. I assume it will have seamless planet landings, but it's not said ANYWHERE.

What happens if not enough money are raised on time?

If they don't reach the goal, they don't get any money = no game.

Well, 23 days is still a lot to go, and Kickstarter projects gather most of their cash at the beginning and at the very end.

And I agree with Chris, info on the game itself seems really scarce(come on, videos with ships flying around in space aren't really telling anything new) and the whole thing isn't being marketed loud enough :d

Quote:

There's a FAQ. Ask a question. Post a comment. More than likely it'll get answered.

Frontier Development are being very coy for some reason about the seamless planetary landing question. A further update is expected on Friday, they normally appear in the late afternoon.

Quote:

I recently pledged on my first crowd funding project, Star Citizen by Chris Roberts. For a long time it looked like their 2 million dollar goal would be impossible to reach, and they ended up with almost 7 million on their final day of funding. Traditionally, a lot of people wait until the very end to invest.

I am pretty sure Elite will make it.

@Rogue
I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment (although it may be a bit optimistic), but just nit-picking with your Kickstarter facts:

As far as Kickstarter goes, they were asking for $0.5 million, and got $2.1 million in the end. Going by KickTraq's historical graph, I expect they would have been projecting $1.5 million:
http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/cig/star-citizen/

So a last minute surge of 33% is not impossible (but not guaranteed either). If that happened for Elite: Dangerous, then $0.9 mil would become $1.2 ... which is only JUST want they need. In short, even using Star Citizen's wild success as a model, Elite is very borderline.


P.S. I wondered if Kickstarter's legal agreement contains any loopholes. For example, if it looks like Elite would only get $1.1 mil, is there anything to stop David Braben's company from briefly borrowing $0.1 million, and using that to boost the Kickstarter to it's goal. After they got the $1.2 million, they could pay back the $0.1 mil... thus effectively using the Kickstarter to pay for itself. Am I evil or what?

@ChrisH

I hadn't heard of KickTrack before. Interesting website.

However, I had a look at several projects on the KickTraq website, and their trending projection appears to be based on a straight line starting at the origin and going through the last recorded data point. That's a pretty unsophisticated prediction method.

Hans

@Hans Quote:
That is why I said *Projection* not *Trend*. They have an 'experimental' Projection method (click on it's tab), which tries to be more reasonable; it's lower limit seems to be a linear(ish) extrapolation of the recent slope, while the upper limit seems to try to simulate the typical surge you often get.

The latest update is the Development Plan.