Elite: Dangerous has entered its 4th Alpha phase a couple days ago, adding the ability for players to travel between star systems in real time with no loading, and it's jaw-dropping. Just look at this:

It also has a fully modeled galaxy with 400 billion stars, "real" ring systems, and cool space stations for trading and upgrading your ship. No landing on planets until after the game is out though, which is a bummer. The beta phase starts on may 30th and I'm dangerously tempted (no pun intended) to drop the £100 to get access. I don't want to set my expectations too high but it's hard not to get unreasonably excited.

Official site here, if you want to know more about what the game actually is.

I am puzzled there is no hype around this game. I guess Star Citizen is absorbing it all, but I am an Elite veteran and I am looking forward to all this hard sci-fi glory. I am a Kickstarter backer, but only in the non-beta tiers.

Wow, that looks amazingly cool. Didn't know this existed.

Yeah, I'm baffled why people are so excited for Star Citizen, which at this point is basically a barebones space combat simulator, whereas this which looks so much more complete and interesting goes completely ignored.

I got super hyped for this after I saw the Gamespot stage demo of it. When the guy was flying around, protecting that capital ship with those glowing scorch marks on it...it looks great. That seamless travel looks awesome.

Isn't it loading during all of that drive charging and hyperspace stuff? Or do you mean no loading screens? Cause yeah, that's nice. But it just seems to me like they're simply hiding the loading well.

Tell ya what though, that HUD is slick as fuck. This game continues to look solid, and sadly I continue to forget about it.

Heck, screw No Man's Sky, this is the real deal right here!

@theht said:

That's exactly what's happening. Hyperspace itself is a glorified loading screen.

Thought that said Ellen Degeneres for a second and got really confused.

So it's more or less like eve online then?

nice

@mister_v: I could be wrong but I've heard that at any point people can jam your hyperdrive and drop you out of hyperspace, stranding you light years away from your destination. So I doubt it's a "glorified loading screen", that's like saying every open world game is hiding loading behind whatever you can currently see.

This is the 5th or 6th time I have read this thread title as "Ellen Degeneres Seamless Hyperspace Travel"

Hyperspace is a travel system, not just a loading screen.

I like the look of No Man's Sky myself but don't understand why people are going ape about that game (GB crew included) and yet utterly ignoring Elite: Dangerous.

That looks neat. I think part of the problem is that Elite: Dangerous is such a boring and generic name that if you aren't familiar with the series and you hear the name, you're not likely to be terribly inclined to care at all what the game is.

@bollard said:

The point is that you are still in the world and interacting with it while the loading is happening. In hyperspace, the universe disappears and is basically replaced by that old "stars" screensaver. If you can stop along the way, the only difference is that it has to load the assets traveling along a line instead of around a single point. Also, I expect they'll probably have some kind of lore reason for why the drive might take a little while to spin down instead of immediately dropping out of hyperspace if the assets aren't fully loaded yet. It's a clever trick, hiding the loading within traditional sci-fi tropes.

I feel like you could probably drive to the nearest star without going into hyperspace if you wanted to, but when it would take several years why in the hell would you? And saying it's just like EVE is a lazy comparison, because in EVE you have to go to fixed gates to travel, and you don't even have direct flight control. In this you can enter hyperspace whenever your engines are ready.

Just seems like a really silly thing to be nitpicky about when you would never want to drive there manually anyway.

This looks like what X Rebirth should've been. I'm definitely interested. But holy fuck, that early access price tag is ridonkadonk.

Those were basically my exact thoughts on it when I first saw it on the GS stage at E3. I'm sure I'd be fine buying it normal price when it launches but hot damn, those early access prices.

What would be more impressive, to me, would be if they made the game load some basic data about the entire travel path while the drive was spinning up and never cut away from the "real" universe. Once you're going, it would still be loading more detailed assets in the background along the flight path in the same way. The difference would be that, instead of fading back and forth from generic hyperspace, every object streaking by you would actually exist in the universe and at the right place. When you come to a stop, it then swaps the cheap approximations of the objects with the appropriate level of detail while you see all of the streaks stop where they really are.

It would be like the difference between cutting to a generic time-lapse clip of driving through a generic city when you get into a cab and doing the same effect in real-time along the path the driver would actually take. Functionally, it wouldn't really change the way the game plays, but it would add a lot to the presentation.

Very cool. I'll have to keep an eye on this one.

I wonder if you can still analyse a warp bubble to find out where that ship has gone too, would be cool if smaller ships had faster flight times than bigger ships always enjoyed tracking ships in frontier and attacking them as they came out of hyperspace.

Love the sound effects.

@bollard: You can fly from one system to another, currently though (since it's still early days) it doesn't work properly.

@justkamtoo Apparently you will be able to analyse warp bubbles.

The only thing that would be weird of this is that hyperspace is FTL travel. Do you really think you could enjoy the view while travelling FTL? Would be hard I reckon :P

I can't find my other post, it has seemingly disappeared, but here's a short article on what Hyperspace would really look like. http://www.space.com/19268-star-wars-hyperspace-physics-reality.html

I'm credibly bummed that this game isn't getting more attention from the enthusiast press. The press's darling of No Man's Sky seems to have stolen all of the attention. As much as I'm really looking forward to that game, the scope of this one just seems to be on a whole different level and seems to have a lot more depth to it. The prime difference between the two, though, is that people are actually playing this one and posting unscripted gameplay videos. If a staged video was enough to make the press go nuts, those beta videos for this game would flip their friggan wig.

I've always liked these freeform games in theory but I always get bored of them after 2 hours of messing around, I need the structure of objectives.

Yeah, as far as I know Elite: Dangerous were at E3, but I didn't see them mentioned in any game press. And while I'm very much looking forward to No Man's Sky, most of the stuff we've been told about it so far (thought that isn't a lot) was there in the Elite series, at least dating back to Elite II: Frontier in 1993 - the seamless travel from planets to space, the NPC ships and trade routes and the totally open universe which while it wasn't infinite (if No Man's Sky's universe really is), at least featured hundreds of thousands of star systems. Sure, you couldn't walk around on the planets beyond the space ports, and the local flora and fauna were pretty much limited to text descriptions in the trade interface.

I remember fighting enemies while in hyperspace in the original Elite. And you could get dropped out at weird places.

Honestly though space is empty so streaming the assets in probably isn't a real issue. It's not like an extremely detailed and asset-dense level of Uncharted. Some spheres, some rocks maybe, a nice skybox, some ships and maybe a base.

I would love this game to turn out well. I loved the first Elite and Frontier was alright too. But come on. $150 for Beta access, $295 for Alpha? No. Don't be silly. Also great job building a poor first impression.

I can't work out why anyone would object to not paying for alpha or beta access when they still have the option of just buying the game at release for some kind of normal price.

I have a rock-hard dick after watching some of the Elite footage. Holy shit.