Last fall, Frontier announced that in response to player feedback, it was holding off on Elite Dangerous’ December fleet carriers update, bumping it to 2020 in favor of some hefty clean-up patches. The beta for the first of those has been running since Thanksgiving, and now it’s launching – slightly ahead of schedule, by our count, on January 14th.
“The first half of this year’s updates will be focused almost exclusively on Fleet Carriers and fixing as many high priority bugs and issues as possible, ensuring that the game runs as smooth as a freshly-purchased Cobra MkIII,” Frontier writes. “To be clear, this means that Interstellar Initiatives/Community Goals will be on hold while we focus on the subsequent series of updates and betas that will be coming over the following months. Much like the January Update, these updates will be accompanied by an open beta, allowing commanders to jump in and see the content before it’s released, as well as help us identify any major issues or bugs.” As we’ve previously noted, the patch includes a while bunch of bug-fix-centric updates to everything from the galaxy map to station repairs.
As for what’s coming after that? We know the studio’s working on something big:
“The team are hard at work on the next major milestone coming to Elite Dangerous at the latter end of this year and, as also mentioned in the previous post, we’ll be ready to start revealing more about this after the Fleet Carriers update.”
There’s one sad note, though: It’s still not clear when goals and initiatives are coming back. “Right now, both Community Goals and Interstellar Initiatives are on hold for the moment,” the team posted. “We don’t have a date on when they will return, but if there are any updates we’ll let the community know.”
Commanders, please take a look at our latest Community Update and get ready for the January Update releasing on… 14 January! https://t.co/BmJiG1ewvX pic.twitter.com/kAF1CJPbLJ
— Elite Dangerous (@EliteDangerous) January 7, 2020
