Frontier Reveal More New Changes Coming To Elite Dangerous: Horizons

Frontier are continuing to reveal stuff that is coming with the next update for Elite Dangerous: Horizons. Titled Patch 2.2: The Guardians we've already seen them reveal Passenger Missions, Tourist Locations and Ship-Launched Fighters over the past couple of days but today they focused on some of the smaller, but still significant, things you see and use moment to moment whilst playing.

They announced that a lot of the building assets currently used by the CQC Tournament in the game's Arena mode will now be seen in the main game, they've modularised parts of those stations so you will see new variations and they are also affected by the background simulation so you'll see ships, of both clean and criminal persuasions, utilising these new platforms.

To go along with those additions they are also adding a new capital ship construction shipyard as a visible asset to help add more variety. These additions go hand in hand with the new station and hangar interiors they've mentioned to add a lot more visual interest to the game.

Some stars are also getting a revisit visually and interestingly it can impact gameplay. Neutron stars and white dwarfs are getting some attention with the magnetic properties of the stars being adjusted, this effects the realism for the plumes of material these spew into space, the plumes now affect your ship with the forces buffeting you around however they said you could also use this energy to boost your jump range.

They've also improved the planetary view on the system map, instead of the grid-covered sphere it has currently it will now show a proper 3D representation of the planet aiding with recognising landmarks for approaches as well as looking a lot nicer.

There have been general improvements to have the NPC avatars look as well as a complete redesign of the station services UI that you see whenever you are docked. It now has ship services (like the Shipyard, Quick Repair and Maintenance areas) and general services (like the Commodities Market, Contacts and new Passenger and Crew Lounges) seperated on either side with new station information and the Galnet feed located in the centre.

This looks a lot more unified and matches well with the alterations they brought in with The Engineers update. Similar UI changes have been made to other areas to keep everything looking nice.

It wasn't all cosmetic changes though, there are some minor but significant new features coming to the game: starting with the ability to pay fines and claim bounties remotely from a new NPC, currently called the 'Shady Broker', available in low security systems for a fee that is still to be nailed down.

In a similarly convenient feature they've finally added both Ship Transfers and Module Storage, both oft-requested features since the launch of the game. From the shipyard you can now request transfer of any of your ships to your current location instantly with a fee based on how far away the ship is. Using this interface you can also sell your ships remotely too saving you a trip.

Module Storage works in basically the same way allowing you to store anc recall modules for a fee, finally allowing you to save those Engineer creations that you can't use right now but want to use elsewhere.

Frontier also spoke about new paint jobs for the new fighters as well as wireframe themed ones for the Asp Explorer, Anaconda, Fer-de-Lance, Viper Mk III and the Python. They are also bringing paint jobs to SRVs as well as new shipkits for the Viper MkIII, Python, Vulture and Asp Explorer. They didn't state a date for these new paint jobs or ship kits however.

Patch 2.2: The Guardians is expected to go live in mid-October with it entering Beta sometime before then.