ONE GIANT LEAP

As someone who’s played space simulator Elite Dangerous for hundreds of hours, it’s a strange sensation seeing a blue sky in a game that is usually dominated by the inky, star-speckled blackness of space. Odyssey, a major expansion coming in 2021, introduces planets with thin atmospheres to the game’s colossal scale replica of the Milky Way. And better yet, you can touch down with your ship, leave the safety of your cockpit for the first time ever, and actually walk on these, and other, worlds.

This is something Elite Dangerous players have been dreaming about since the game first surfaced on Kickstarter in 2012. “Some elements of Odyssey, in terms of actually walking on planet surfaces, have probably been, at least conceptually, there since the very beginning of the game’s development,” says Piers Jackson, game director at developer Frontier. “However, as for the actual build-up to having a significant amount of developers working on it, the tail-end of 2019 is when we really started ramping it up.”

To prepare for players going walkabout on its planets, Frontier is overhauling the technology that generates them. “We’re doing some pretty significant updates to the planet technology,” says Jackson. “The planets are getting a big new refresh. With the new settlements, we’re also having to add a whole pile of new gameplay areas across the universe. Some of those will be