Apparently Elite: Dangerous Has a Story

Recently the space simulator Elite: Dangerous had a narrative update, Frontier Developments made a big deal of it and if you’re familiar with the game you’ll have had trouble missing it. But for casual players and newcomers who log in and are greeted by a cutscene showing a ship presumably called Salvation detonating a device on a planet, you’ll be forgiven for having no idea what is going on.

So let me sum it up before you load up the game and take a look at the pretty decent cutscene in question. On 9th of August 2022, there was an in-game event where a bunch of ships flew to HIP 22460 with a Guardian weapon to… hmm? What’s a Guardian? No, you didn’t miss the memo, they’re a now-dead ancient race, killed by their own creations. There are ruins on various planets that give bits and pieces of information if you know where to look. No, I do not know where to look.

So this Guardian weapon had been created by a company called Azimuth Biotech, and deployed onto a planet as part of an expeditionary force led by a man named Salvation (AKA Caleb Wycherley). The device would create a “Proteus Wave” to end the Thargoid threat which… hmm? What’s a Thargoid? Well, they’re a hostile alien species with living ships that returned to the Milky Way galaxy in a game update in 2017. They’re basically invulnerable to conventional weapons so you need to get Guardian weapons if you want to fight them. While there have been systems with higher Thargoid encounter rates, it’s almost always a random chance whether one will come after you or not, so chances are high that you’ve never encountered one. I haven’t.

Look, the short version is a guy tried to kill aliens and they didn’t react well. Now in the game you can go to HIP 22460 to see the aftermath of what happened in the cutscene. That’s the latest update and I don’t think it’s great for players.

Frontier Developments has been working on Elite: Dangerous and its expansions since 2014. It’s always been touted as a space simulator, a return to the old Elite games where you just flew around being a space trucker, or miner, or bounty hunter… But they went that extra step and began introducing a narrative to spice things up. The Thargoids were back! What were their plans? What did this mean for players? Well, five years on we still don’t know anything — I don’t just mean me because I haven’t read everything, I mean the fan wiki doesn’t even know. Nobody even knows what the aliens look like!

You may have noticed that I said I haven’t read everything. That’s because the narrative barely happens in the game. The in-game news network GalNet gets a couple of updates a week (minus hiatuses) talking about new community goals, in-universe factions splitting or joining, elections, new areas that you’re not allowed to visit… You can even have audio versions playing while you’re flying your ship. It’s mainly for filling out the wider galaxy, barely any of it affects players other than the community goals, and then it’s just “So-and-so needs you to deliver this or kill that”.

Sometimes you’ll encounter what your ship identifies as a Compromised Carrier Signal — a GalNet report that your ship can’t decode. It will be in Morse Code or require you to work out what the cipher is and then decode it using that. It’s all a manual process, nothing in the game will help you to do it. And even then it might not even be an important message.

But going back to Salvation and his plan, not all of that was in the GalNet feed. For that you will have had to keep an eye on the @EliteDangerous Twitter feed and decoded the number cypher hidden in a few frames of a four second video, or decoded a number & letter cypher splintered across a 10 second video.

And of course you’ll have been keeping a close eye on GalNet where it mentioned Azimuth Biotech in relation to destroying Thargoids, right? And you’ll be aware that Salvation is the person in charge of Azimuth Biotech, formerly known as Taurus Mining Ventures, after its restructuring from Azimuth Biochemicals. It had only been well over a year, how were you not following along?!

As I’ve been writing this, I’ve grown even more frustrated by it all. A newcomer is going to have absolutely no idea why that person is blowing up that planet, or what those flower-shaped ships are, and honestly they may never find out! I’ve got a pretty decent ship, but even for me a trip to the aftermath at HIP 22460 is going to take me over 30 minutes from my current position in the galaxy. A new player in their free Sidewinder jumping barely 8ly per time for over 350ly isn’t going to get anywhere near there in decent time, and they’ll have forgotten all about that cutscene by then.

I suppose after all of this, I just don’t see the point in having a narrative? You need to be spread over multiple platforms, know that you have to decode what appears to be gibberish, read official novels, be able to play at the correct time on the right days to participate in the occasional bit of narrative that actually involves players… I’m fine with having optional story stuff in a multiplayer game, but this is all optional in a way that you have to go out of your way to find it so you can experience it! Best be subscribed to the /r/EliteDangerous subreddit or you might miss a tweet reply that somehow furthers the narrative! Couldn’t play for two weeks because you were out of the country? Too bad, you missed out.

Oh, I almost forgot the craziest part. Not only does this cutscene play for old and new players alike, but it also plays on the console versions. As of this update, the console versions are no longer getting content updates. They can’t even visit HIP 22460 to see the aftermath of the “Proteus Wave”, only PC players can! While I’m sure it makes sense for Frontier’s upcoming features to stop supporting consoles, now they’re making the narrative even more exclusive than it already was. Console players can (currently) transfer their commanders to PC so that they can buy the Odyssey expansion and experience HIP 22460, but there’s probably a reason people are playing on consoles.

This is a lot of words to say that Frontier really needs to pick a lane. Either give an in-game narrative that people can follow without ancillary sources, or don’t give a narrative. The Kickstarter was sold on Elite: Dangerous being a game just like classic Elite, but with multiplayer, so if they had no narrative at all that would have been completely within the scope of what they set out to do. Now they’ve got a cutscene confusing players who just loaded up the game to do a couple of cargo runs.