A few days ago, a player on Xbox One made first contact with a (newly enabled) alien scout craft. This is a big deal because players have been searching for and speculating about the existence of the Thargoids in E:D since shortly after the launch. The devs have been teasing out hints and little details in-game over the last year and a half in an almost ARG-like fashion. The first video evidence was three Xbox dvr clips of different encounters. The other normal ship in clip 2 is an bot, not a human. Anyway, here's the video:

And a link to the Reddit megathread: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/5m9t09/thargoids_first_contact_videos_theories/

Such a great moment. All the Thargoid stuff has been really well handled by Frontier so far, and I'm excited to see how it shakes up the game over the next few months. Elite has quietly become one of my favourite games to come back to, even if it still has a long way to go in terms of variety, and I'm hopeful that this'll help to meaningfully flesh out some of the core gameplay.

That was pretty dope, but what will they add to the game? I have this on pc but haven't played much and dont have the dlc stuff either.

I bought Elite Dangerous ages ago and never really played it. Holy crap this stuff makes me want to finally get into that game.

@oursin_360: By themselves, nothing really other than what you see in the video clips. I'm someone with nearly 700 hours in the game, but I've not played regularly in almost 6 months. I think for most people, Elite Dangerous is going to be like Eve Online, fun to read about, but boring as hell to actually play.

I'd guess most of the Thargoid stuff isn't in the game yet, as stated in the OP they've been adding oddities along with ARG things for the last year or so, last summer people started encountering immobile drones in the game, after a few weeks they started reacting to being scanned and broadcast a star map as a audio spectrogram. I think people figured out which planet it pointed to pretty quickly but it took a while before interesting things started happening there.

I'd wager that in time they'll add witchspace to the game, which was an alternate dimension in Elite 1 and 2 inhabited by the Thargoids, and in the latter half of those games they would start pulling you into it when you were hyperspacing between star systems and later openly operating in normal space and attacking stations and ships.

The end goal in Elite: Dangerous is probably something similar.

I bought this game a while back and have yet to get into it beyond an hour of playing and the tutorials. I really think I would like it! What platform is everyone on?

@fisk0: That sounds kinda great honestly, I may jump back in one day when everything is added. Took way to long to get used to flying though, so I will probably be terrible lol. Honestly, i wish they had an auto land option for noobs like me :-)

What an awesome encounter. Almost makes me wanna jump back in.

Can they help me with my space trucking? No? Then I have no time for these Thargoids.

It's such a neat little encounter, and Frontier's audio team are amazing as always.

Probably my favourite thing about it though is when the alien ship rips me out of hyperspace and powers down my ship, the lights on my Christmas tree bobblehead go out as well.

Don't worry, there is a docking computer you can fit to your ship. I only learned about it after I got used to flying and landing, though I'm glad I did because flying well in ED feels real good.

Here it is in action:

Its boring if you go into it with the mmo-themepark mentality or play solo. Join a newbie friendly pvp corporation and you will have constant action 23/7

Patrick Klepek did a neat little article on the encounter last Friday. They talked about it on their podcast, too. Patrick mentioned that he's got an upcoming interview with the FDev coming up, so keep your eyes out for that, if you're interested.

That's kinda cool. Is the space trucking still shit though? I used to play with http://www.elitetradingtool.co.uk/ but the community stopped caring and started filling it up with junk data.

I really wish they would implement a system like Rebel Galaxy's where your ship saves all the market data from previously visited space stations.

I've always been curious about Elite but never actually took the dive. This may be what pushes me over the edge, though. That was amazing to watch and I can't imagine being the play to stumble into it. This is the kind of thing that reminds me why I still love video games.

@andrack said:

I use EDDB and that's usually accurate enough.

@conmulligan: Thanks, maybe I'll get back into it some time.