Elite Dangerous: Horizons is slated for a holiday release with exciting additions like surface landing and exploration among other new feautures.
According to the official Horizons page, players will be able to land the "Scarab" to scan planets for life and even crashes. "Players will explore new worlds, coasting over mountaintops, diving into canyons, landing on the surface and rolling out onto the surface in your SRV, all without loading times or breaks in gameplay."
In a Polygon interview, technical art lead Matt Dickinson said that the surface area they are trying to create in the game is massive. "If you take all the 400 billion star systems, all with however-many planets orbiting around their associated suns and things, about 60-some percent are going to be landable in Horizons when we launch."
Horizons is a significant expansion for the Elite: Dangerous game. The official Frontier store revealed that Horizons will continue to introduce new features and gameplay up to next year.
PC gamers will need the 64-bit version of Windows 7/8/10. Minimum hardware requirements for Horizons is at least a Quad Core CPU, 6 GB RAM, a fairly new-ish Nvidia or ATI graphics card with DirectX 11 support.
The original Elite was released in 1984 for the very popular BBC Micro. The game was one of the first space trading games with actual combat. The game is seminal in many ways in using the open world style and pioneering 3D graphics using wire-framing.
Elite Dangerous is the modern incarnation of the classic Elite game. Elite developer Frontier Developments never got to seal the deal with big publishers to back Elite Dangerous. The development studio did the only sensible thing and brought the project to Kickstarter.
Horizons is ready for pre-order at about $40 for the PC only this holiday. Elite Dangerous owners will receive a £10 loyalty discount off Horizons. Horizons will be available for the Xbox One and it will also support Oculus.
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