Dead Men Walking

On Friday Frontier, for the first time it should be noted,  laid out a general plan for most of the coming season of expansions to  Elite: Dangerous Horizons. Giving us an outline for what content was  coming and when. So what are we getting? Well the first instalment is  soon, probably next month, and is titled “The Engineers”

2.1 â€" The Engineers - Coming Spring 2016

Quote"Everything changes. Introducing an expanded mission system  and game-changing loot. Craft exotic weapons and modules for your  spacecraft and build a ship unlike any other."

It is confirmed that we’ll have around 30 persistent NPC characters  to interact with. These characters will process loot into crafted  weapons and modules for you from blueprints. The toys on offer will  depend on your pilot and federation, or empire, rank. Using the  character creator, Frontier will give these engineers a face to see.

We can speculate that these characters, called Engineers, will abide on the surface of planets at certain locations, which makes them by default,  a Horizons-specific feature. Since they require loot to work, you will  have to bring them materials(?) to work with in order to make your green  beam laser (or more useful), a longer range FSD drive. They also  require blueprints. How will these be acquired? Stolen? Found? Clearly a  new avenue to explore. You can’t just grind 30T of hand-wavium and have  the best ship in the galaxy; you are going to have to find, steal,  trade or buy the means to make these upgrades. Over the last year Frontier had expanded the bulletin-board missions,  but as they’ve done so, the basic framework has started to creak under  the load. In 2.1 we’re getting a total replacement of the mission  system, incorporating these talking head NPC characters which will also  be persistent, depending on your pilot rank, faction rank and possibly  location.  I would love to speculate that these characters will speak  (audio? Text to speech?), but in all likelihood they will simply be the  face of your mission-brief text, much the same as the characters were in  Elite Frontier. The good news for players without the  Horizons expansion is that this element of the game is generic to all,  so it is highly likely that the new NPCs will be seen by players of the  core game as well as Horizons players.

The second announced expansion to Elite: Dangerous in Horizons is titled “Guardians”.

2.2 â€" Guardians - Coming Summer 2016

Quote“Take what comes and strike back with double. Bring a second  ship to every combat encounter with Ship-Launched Fighters and defend  your passengers against the deadliest threats in the galaxy.”

Picking the text apart for the language used, reveals more detail.
What is said is “a second ship”.

One.

Not ship-launcher fighter(s) plural, but instead a single deployable fighter or drone, depending on if you or the A.I. are flying it.  

So  my hopes for a “Type-9 Galactica” with half-a-dozen hangar bays are  dashed! And I had a "launch fighters" voice-attack command all ready to  go!

Have the fighters been limited to one-per-commander due to  constraints of A.I.? The Mistress of Minions would probably disagree  that her children of chaos are in ANY way limited, so I suspect that the  limitation is to prevent richer commanders becoming one-man-armies of  unstoppable A.I. fleets.

On the one hand, having three or four  deployable Condors would not make me unbeatable, but having been on the  wrong end of a Python with two Eagles attacking my rear, I can  appreciate why it might be overkill. Still, a Wing of four pilots with  deployable fighters becomes a Wing of eight. Ouch.  

Something  else mentioned, is the phrase “defend your passengers”. A similar  wording slipped out of Ed during the recent live-stream from PAX and was  thought to be the result of jet-lag, but the clear mention of  passengers here would imply we are going to get the long-awaited passenger missions.  This opens up more career paths to players and makes the likelihood of  the Dolphin passenger vessel and the Beluga Liner making an appearance  in Elite at long last a distinct possibility. No more sad little Orca.  Friends at last! And hopefully a career path that warrants a 44M credit  price-tag.

2.3 â€" The Commanders - Coming Fall 2016

Quote“Team up and stand together. Forge your own identity with the new Commander Creator, then share your bridge with Multi-Crew and fly with friends.”

We’ll be able to fly with up to three other human commanders aboard our ship, operating different stations. It has been said that a single ship with multiple crew-members would be “as formidable” as a similar number of ships in a wing. How that will manifest will be interesting to see!
This update will bring us the commander editor, allowing us to make our own avatars and with multi-crew, we’ll be able to show them off to our wing-mates.
At this point we cannot even guess how things like ship rebuy, or trade profits are handled when playing with multiple commanders on a single ship. How will the “guest” commanders get on board? Will we see that or will they just “pop” into existence?
 
2.4 â€" ????

Quote“A secret to be revealed in Elite Dangerous: Horizons’ final expansion!”

So, no idea on what the end-of-year update will bring. Mega-ships? Sandro shirts for your Avatars? A bobble-head of your ship? Tractor beams? Weather on planets? Ships cat? Zero-G cat litter. Maybe not.

I saw this in the news letter. 2.1 is important for me, about time some interesting creation based elements came to Elite, also missions with more substance. Let's hope they live up to my not to heady expectations!