This week in 2014, Elite: Dangerous officially released on PC, and despite its ups and downs, the game is closing out 2024 in an arguably strong position just in time for its 10th anniversary, and that’s more than reason to mark the milestone in a new video.
The retrospective brings in several developers and community influencers for the sandbox to talk about the game’s early beginnings, its technical hurdles, and the in-game events that have been shaped by its players across the last decade, with nods to players doing remarkable things like establishing helpful groups or triangulating the location of a relic by charting the in-game stars.
It unsurprisingly accentuates the positive, so it basically ignores the “disappointment” that was Odyssey’s launch, but it also rightly calls attention to major improvements made recently, including improvements to engineering that we argued saved the game, updates to powerplay, and players’ investment in the Thargoid War.
The video then closes with a nod to what’s next, which obviously zeroes in on the game’s in-development colonization feature, along with invitations for new players to get in, join a faction, and find groups of others to play with. And while the video obviously butters players up and elides some of the harsher realities, tenth anniversaries don’t happen in MMOs every day, so the look back is still worthy viewing, especially for fans.
