Elite Dangerous: Horizons - The Guardians Preview

It's been five months since the previous large update, The Engineers, landed for Elite Dangerous: Horizons. That update brought with it a new mission system and the titular Engineers who acted as a way to customise your fleet of spaceships, enhancing firepower, shields and jump ranges.

Patch 2.2’s major additions are… well… The Guardians, hireable crew you can hire that can fly another big headline feature, ship-launched fighters. Currently these are limited to seven of the larger ships, the Keelback, Type-9, Anaconda, Federal Gunship, Federal Corvette, Imperial Cutter and the new Beluga Liner can be fit with Fighter Bays.

These bays allow you to launch one of three fighter types, the Imperial GU97 Fighter, the Federal F63 Condor and the Independent Taipan Fighter. The GU97 and F63 are migrating over to the main game from the CQC/Arena mode and the Taipan is an all-new ship. When launched you can choose to pilot the fighter yourself or let one of your newly hired NPC crew mates help out, they have to earn their fee of course.

This brings a new dynamic to combat, having a computer-controlled wingman that can draw fire or letting them fly the main ship whilst you take out the trash in the nimble fighter brings more options when it comes to how you loadout. It also allows you to take on enemies you’d otherwise run from, especially as your crew can rank up as they gain kills; improving their combat prowess in the process.

You can issue basic commands to your fellow crewman like stay in a defensive or aggressive stance, attack the current target and so on. Even if you are using fighters yourself and don’t have a crew you can order your main ship to follow you or stay back, the onboard computer obeying without question. It all helps to flesh out the combat experience nicely, the only obvious negative is that you can’t see your crew on the bridge of your ship.

Enough about ship-launched fighters then, what else does The Guardians bring? More mission variety thanks to the inclusion of the long-awaited passenger missions. Replace a few cargo racks with some passenger cabins and you can visit the new Passenger Lounge to accept ferrying tasks for tourists, soldiers and medical personnel amongst others.

Whilst in some ways these feel like glorified delivery missions, they do have their own feel and like other mission types in the game have a variety of unique ‘wrinkles’ or random occurrences that change up how they play out mid-mission.

If ferrying the riff-raff about isn’t your cup of tea then you can choose to take VIPs who are a little more demanding in their requirements, perhaps wanting to see combat or a specific planet. Being VIPs they’ll often change requests or demand you buy them things during a flight. Some VIPs aren’t happy even with first class cabins and require luxury cabins, you can only fit Luxury cabins to the Orca and the new Beluga Liner, giving the game its first real situation where to do something specific, you need a specific ship. Adding specialty roles is interesting and I hope it’s something we’ll see more of going forward.

As well as new passenger missions, ship-launched fighters and hireable NPC crew, there are a whole suitcase full of visual improvements and quality of life tweaks. First up, there are new station interiors based upon the economy of the area. Refinery stations can look very different with their red hues and industrial soundscapes compared to, for example, Tourism focused ones with their clean lines and white clinical aesthetic.

There are lots of smaller visual upgrades too such as a new hyperspace tunnel effect with the star of the system you are heading to being visible as it gets closer. There are ground texture/shader and performance improvements on planets and general improvements to various star visuals with massive changes to how white dwarfs and neutron stars look round out the general tweaks.

As for quality of life changes, the starport services menu has been re-jigged to account for the new crew and passenger lounges and looks a lot more in line with the interface across the rest of the game now. A notification of your jump target’s system state now pops up when initiating a jump, so you can perhaps rethink the jump going through that anarchy system where you are wanted and everyone hates you!

You can now finally request your ships to be moved to your current location for a fee and after waiting for a certain amount of time which ties in nicely to the idea that you should be aiming for different ships for different roles. You can also pay off all fines and collect all bounties for a fee at some of the universes dodgier establishments which great as I can finally be free of those fines I have no idea where I got them!

The route planner can now adjust your route based on filters you can apply, finally allowing you to specifically visit systems with scoopable stars for example. There are lots of other little additions across the update, like tourist information beacons that provide lore and other system information as well as finally bringing assets used in the CQC/Arena mode over into the main game as places of interest in various systems.

All in all there are a lot of changes in Patch 2.2. The Guardians touches many areas of the game and whilst it doesn’t add a fundamentally new system like The Engineers did; it also feels more noticeable in general play thanks to its more broad approach. It offers a tantalising glimpse of the potential we could see from additions like the upcoming Multi-Crew feature and it all adds up keeping the game feeling fresh.

Elite Dangerous: Horizons - The Guardians is currently in beta and is aiming for release during early October on both PC and Xbox One. Elite Dangerous: Horizons is available via Steam or the Frontier Store for PC and the Xbox Store for Xbox One for £19.99/$29.99/€24.99.