Elite: Dangerous Horizons beta available now, includes planetary landings
Elite: Dangerous has had its Horizons 'season of expansions' in development for a while and the first part of that, planetery landings, has launched into beta for those who have paid a little extra. It'll be released for general sale everyone else towards the end of the year. The planets and means to land and explore them come with their own sets of missions, materials to gather and NPCs.
The best space games on the market. Elite's in there.
There's no official in-game trailer, but David Braben's been posting sneak-peeks for a few months of different bits of driving around. Here's the latest from earlier today.
And a full landing pattern onto Jupiter's moon Europa:
Pretty stuff, and a huge extra dimension for the game. You can see the full list of changes on the official forums, including a new 64-bit client and other quality of life changes on top of the massive Horizons additions. You can get access now with the beta pass from the Frontier store, or pre-order Horizons without beta access on its own for a bit cheaper.
Seriously guys, you need to enable Google, Facebook, etc. log in. 99% of the time I don't comment because of the pita log in crap.
On topic, Braben has masterfully lied through his teeth and milked every shilling he can from this in true greedy corporate style. EA is so proud of him.