The articlegameplay, story, development, reception
Gameplay
Elite Dangerous combines features from space simulator, first person shooter and massively multiplayer genres with a persistent-galaxy based on the Milky Way. There are 3 game modes: Solo (single player), Private Group (friends and invites), and Open Play (play with everyone).
Upon its release in 2014, Elite Dangerous (ED) began in the year 3300 and has been in sync with UTC albeit 1,286 years in the future. The game is set around 45 years after Frontier: First Encounters. Elite Dangerous retains the basic premise of its predecessors: players start with a spaceship and a small amount of money in a 1:1 scale, open galaxy and roleplay in various activities to acquire more money (credits) and merit. A key difference is the addition of on-foot, first-person gameplay which was added with the Odyssey expansion on 19 May 2021.
Story
Elite Dangerous is set in the 34th century, 50 years after the events of Frontier: First Encounters, starting in the year 3300 (equals 2014). Humanity is expanding from the Core Systems (aka Bubble) into the unpopulated regions of the Milky Way. The Frameshift Drive was introduced by Sirius Corporation in 3297. FSD equipped ships go up to (or exceeding) 2,000 times FTL in a star system (the maximum supercruise speed is negatively impacted by nearby planetary or stellar gravitational wells).
Hyperspace is used for interstellar travel in a few seconds. Ships are as affordable to the middle-class as cars in the 20th century. Owning a ship expands career possibilities like mining, trading, and bounty hunting. However, little has changed for the underclass.
Development
At the 2011 Game Developers Conference, following a presentation on the development of the original Elite, Braben was asked in a Q&A session at the 2011 Game Developers Conference if Elite 4 was still on the drawing board. He replied "yes, it would be a tragedy for it not to be". The project had difficulty in attracting sufficient funding, which Braben had attributed to the traditional publishing model, which he saw as being biased against games with no recent comparable predecessors. Space sims were unpopular at the time which made it difficult to secure a publisher.
When Frontier Developments greenlit the project there were no other major space games since Freelancer (2003). Braben also found it unacceptable to have a publisher steer development in a particular direction.
Reception
Elite Dangerous received an aggregated score of 80/100 on Metacritic based on 55 critics, indicating that the game received "generally favorable reviews" (84% positive) from critics.
Chris Thursten of PC Gamer rated the game 86/100, considering it to be "potentially a classic", depending on Frontier's ability to build on the "broad but somewhat shallow foundations" of the released version. Thursten described the gameplay experience as "exhilarating excitement, matched by nothing else this year, contrasted with moments of emptiness, frustration, and boredom". Dan Whitehead of Eurogamer gave the game 8/10 and considered it to be "probably the most immersive and compelling recreation of deep space ever seen in gaming", while finding some of the gameplay repetitive. Andy Kelly of GamesRadar gave the game 4/5, calling it a "compelling space sandbox" and a "welcome return" of the Elite franchise, but felt that the game at launch was "missing a lot of important features, especially when it comes to multiplayer".
