The combat simulation video game Elite Dangerous: Horizons will hit the Xbox One consoles simultaneous with the launch of the Elite Dangerous: Horizons, the game’s latest season.
The exciting part for the fans is the fact that they no longer need to wait that long for the Xbox release, because it will be launched around June.
Game developer Frontier Development announced that Horizons will have 2.0 Planetary Landings and 2.1 The Engineers as expansion packs for Horizon. 2.0 Planetary Landings is already available on the Elite Dangerous PC/Mac versions, while 2.1 The Engineers is set for a later release.
This venture for Elite Dangerous did not come as a surprise. It has been one of the most successful space-related gaming narrative in the market. Elite Dangerous: Horizon was previewed last year, and it just made it a lot more exciting.
Aside from the visuals and storyline, Elite Dangerous is just a very vast game to explore. With Horizons in place, players will have so many opportunities to travel the Elite Dangerous universe. To be specific, they can travel through the hundreds of billions of star systems—that’s as good as it can get.
The Need for ‘Horizons’ Expansion
It was because of the vastness of the Elite Dangerous universe that they launched Horizons. It started as a Kickstarter campaign back in 2014. The add-on was supposed to complete the Elite Dangerous space experience.
Their Kickstarter campaign received 25,681 backers, and they were able to gather £1,578,316.
What the Horizons does is it allows players to land on planets, fly onto surface settlements, trade, exchange roles from pirates to grand schemer, drive space vehicles, and many more.
Matt Dickinson, Elite Dangerous’ head of technical art, said that they were very particular in creating the massive experience.
“If you take all the 400 billion star systems, all with however-many planets orbiting around their associated suns and things, about 60-some percent are going to be landable in Horizons when we launch.”
Last year, the expansion got completed and they were able to get past the beta testing on Windows PC.
Xbox One CMDRs, we have great news! Horizons and The Engineers (2.1) lands Q2 of this year: https://t.co/VU8v9r8rHB
— Elite Dangerous (@EliteDangerous) April 29, 2016
To get all physical,” said Dickinson, “a lot of the stars near the core of a galaxy don’t have planets around them because they’d just be ripped apart by the gravity… Someone [at Frontier] did think of a number of planets in the expansion and it was terrifying.”
Because of this, nobody at Frontier Development even has an idea on the exactness of the scale of Horizons. They just wanted to grow together with the universe exploration.
eSports Venture
With many games venturing into eSports, Frontier Development also tested the waters out.
Last year, Frontier Development launched their very first eSports tournament for Elite Dangerous with a prize pool of $100,000.
“Elite Dangerous has been the first game to come through the Xbox Game Preview Program (GPP) and we’re truly delighted with the response we’ve seen from the community during that time.”
They launched the very first Elite Dangerous PvP arena mode for players on PC, Mac, and Xbox One. They were even generous enough to provide flights and accommodation for the finalists. The grand prize was $15,000.
It is not known whether they will be launching another one this year, especially with the announcement of Horizons’ launch.
Though there aren’t any announcements yet, the fans were delighted with the eSports event last year.
