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Elite: Dangerous may release on Consoles

Elite: Dangerous may release on Consoles

In an interview with Eurogamer on Monday, July 14, the founder of Frontier Developments (the developer behind the sequel to the original Elite game, Elite: Dangerous ), David Braben, teased that the open universe space trading and combat simulator may release on the consoles.

During this year’s Develop Conference, Braben indicated that Elite: Dangerous may one day release on Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One.

I’ve just got to watch out, ” Braben told Eurogamer during the Develop Conference. ” I don’t want to do something that constitutes an announcement, but we would be stupid not to support other platforms, including console.

Interestingly, Elite Dangerous , according to Eurogamer, is being developed using the same engine Frontier Developments used to build the Xbox One launch title Zoo Tycoon .

We’ve done lots and lots of games over time, ” Braben continued. ” We’ve done first-party Sony games. We’ve done first party Microsoft games. On console. So yes, we’d be stupid not to think about it.

But the point is, we’re very focused on delivering a great PC game. We will then do the game on Mac and during that time we will be looking at other platforms as well.

We’re a public company and announcements have to be properly made. But it’s obviously something we’re bearing in mind.

According to Eurogamer, Braben is also convinced that both the the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are capable of realizing the developer’s vision for Elite: Dangerous , which is said to have be been designed to run on a wide variety of PCs.

The PC is a funny platform. It’s not really a platform. It’s a whole range of platforms flying in loose formation, ” Braben noted.

You compare a laptop with an uber dev PC, with someone’s PC which has had such a lot of rubbish installed on it that it’s got all sorts of broken drivers, and the game is expected to run on each of those. There is so much variation. So it’s really hard to put on the outside of a box what the minimum spec is.

We’re putting a lot of effort in to put in a lot of controls so the player has control over what’s coming out. We’re going through some wonderful effects internally that look truly beautiful, and we’re saying, that slows the frame rate a bit, doesn’t it? And we say yes, but we don’t mind, because it looks so beautiful, ” he continued. “ But what we’re going to do is attach it to this part of the detail slider. Or we’ll call it out as a tick box.

One of the beauties with console is we can then hand tune it to be just right. This is why we put all these options in, ” he added.

We established that Elite: Dangerous entered its fourth Alpha phase back in May, which featured 400 billion star systems and 200 cubic light-years of space to travel around in.

Elite: Dangerous is slated to release worldwide on PC at the end of 2014, with a Mac release following three months later. We’ll bring you more on Elite: Dangerous’ development should further information reach our ears.

[ Eurogamer ]

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