There’s artistry involved in a great Kickstarter pitch, and though David Braben is an artist of sorts none of that was evident in his push for a new Elite four days ago. Thankfully, Frontier have now provided us with the bare bones of inspiration – a pitch video and a smattering of concept art – the latter of which I’ve taken the liberty of pasting down below.
“With Elite Dangerous, I think there is an opportunity to go further with procedural generation, further with what we can do with the gameplay,” says Braben in the new video.
He also elaborates a little on the “fantastic new opportunities” multiplayer will bring to the game:“Imagine, for example, escorting your friend because he’s carrying a really precious cargo and he’s terrified of it. Those sort of things I think are fantastic, and I think there are a lot of things that will arise out of the gameplay, like doing missions together, that we perhaps haven’t foreseen.”
Later, Braben talks specifics on shared trading and escort missions.
“You can try reading the markets, whether it’s working with your friends to do it or it’s alone. Trading goods from one place, maybe taking food from an agricultural world to an industrial world where it’s a lot more expensive, doing that together with friends. Maybe one ship is the one that has all the cargo in it, maybe the other is armed to the teeth to protect it because you’re playing the game with your mates.
However,he admits that all of this remains to-be-discussed, let alone developed.
“I think in terms of how the world works that’s something we have to work carefully on, to make sure that players can meet each other, keeping people in the same places. But all of these things are things that we will work out through the period of development with this game.”
Much of the chat echoes our interview with Braben earlier this week – in that it’s all (appropriately) nebulous at this stage. Nevertheless, his enthusiasm for procedural generation and the emergent possibilities that multiplayer might bring to Elite is intriguing, if not entirely infectious.
Here are seven things we’d like to see in Elite: Dangerous. Oh, andthat concept art. Convinced yet?
