Frontier Developments has done a couple of livestreams showing off Horizons, the upcoming expansion for Elite: Dangerous. Horizons will kick off Season Two of Elite: Dangerous content, and comes with landing on airless worlds and exploring them in a surface recon vehicle (SRV). They've mentioned several possible things to do once you've landed on the planet: exploring wrecked ships for loot, assaulting bases both in the SRV and in your ship, and I'm sure there will be plenty of bulletin board missions and trade routes that take you to the surface of one planet or another.

The first livestream was called How to Make a Real World. In it they discussed how their Stellar Forge (the voodoo that creates all of the stellar bodies in the galaxy) goes about forming a planet and how the surface features of that planet come to be. I've pulled a couple of quotes from the video to give you a taste of what they talk about.

"What we’ve got here is we’ve got a nice little screenshot of an element of a planet and you can see we’ve got a tectonic plate so we’re modeling the tectonic plates on the planet. And what that’s doing is describing where the two edges butt up against each other. So you can see in this you’ve got these sort of canyon areas at the bottom where the crust has been weakened and then you’ve got the mountains being pushed up on the other side of the plate. So this is something that all of the planets that we’ve got use to some extent or another. But again the amount of tectonics and the plate activity is all driven from our science data that the game feeds us."

"So what we’ve got here is two craters sat on top of each other. What’s really cool about this is this is a way of sort of describing what happens in real life. Rather than craters just being a texture that we stamp around you can actually see that you’ve got one dominant crater here where an impact has occurred on another crater and it’s eradicated the previous crater.

Well the thing is for this it really gives the planet a sense of history because the Stellar Forge stuff is actually going right the way back to working out exactly what elements and what makes up this particular part of the galaxy and it knows where it is and it puts the right planets in the right place and the right material type. So then when we get to the actual planet surface generation what we really wanted to do is to make if feel like each planet and surface had a history of its own. Things like craters needed to not just be additive all the time, they needed to be so that they actually kind of built on top of each other. You can actually see that one crater has actually destroyed the wall of the other crater and that’s the level of detail that we’ve really been trying to push into all of the planet generation stuff because we want to make sure that everybody can feel like these are very naturalistic worlds and what you’d actually be hoping to see if you were actually down on a real planet."

The second livestream was called Inside the SRV. This was our first chance to see some actual gameplay of the SRV, and it looks really cool. They showed how you could dismiss and recall your ship which allows you to land in one location, go exploring, and get back into your ship without having to drive back to your original landing spot. They explained how the varying gravitational pulls and compositions (rocky, icy, metallic) of the planets will have an effect on the driving characteristics of the SRV (and on the flight model of your ship, btw). And of course there was a lot of driving around, climbing rough terrain, jumping craters, that sort of thing.

I took a few screenshots of this video as well:

Here are the videos if you want to give them a watch.

Very impressive. The scale is insane. I'm hoping to see more variety in planets, including different atmospheres, weather etc, but it's looking good so far.

It looks amazing and I'm sure the sense of scale (especially with trackir or vr) will be great. I just can't see what they can do to make surface gameplay interesting. If a crater is a 20 minute drive across and there is an objective in the middle of it, why wouldn't I just land right on it?

I guess it comes down to a balance of giving you enough to do out of your ship and making sure that every crater doesn't look like an Assassins' Creed map with objective markers.

@sanj The scale is indeed insane. In the Real Worlds video I think they said 60% of the billions of planets and moons in the game are the solid, airless type that we'll be able to land on right away. And all of them are 1:1 scale. They have long term plans to add planets with atmospheres as well, but that is quite a ways off I think.

@pete0r You could just land right on it. The transition from space flight to flying within the planet's gravity well is seamless. In theory you could scout the planet from space, pick an interesting looking area, and then fly down as close to the surface as you want to take a closer look. Or if you've been given an exact location for a mission I'm sure you could land as close as you can given the terrain and the danger planetary residents may represent.

Speaking of residents, Frontier has released some art and some screenshots in the past few newsletters that shows what they're calling Settlements. Who knows what you'll be able to do at these Settlements. I don't think they've given a whole lot of details about them at this point. One thing they have said is not all of them will be friendly. Those that aren't will be protected by Skimmers (remote controlled security drones) among other things I'm sure.

It's starting to look better, but I'm still nowhere even close to being sold on this expansion.

That looks cool and all, but they really need to flesh out the core experience. If all there is to do on planets is the same kind of shit as in space, then what's the point?

@conmulligan: Which is exactly why I'm waiting. Plus, they are being so cagey with information about what there will be to actually do in the expansion, I'm already fearing the worst. Elite is still fun even though most of it is a "create your own fun" type of game, but I'm kind of done with it unless there is some really compelling content coming up.

@conmulligan Truth. Last Friday was the first time I had played the game in about two months. My cousin and I jumped on, winged up, and had a great time. The following Sunday we jumped on again, played for about an hour, and called it. The excitement from playing again after taking those two months off had already evaporated. We both want to play more, but we need more toys to play with in the Elite sandbox. We're both hoping Horizons will give us those toys.

Keep in mind planetary landings is only one feature of Horizons. There will be more updates released throughout the year that include multi-crew (flying in the same ship as your friend with each person having control over different parts of the ship), ship-launched fighters (both AI and friend controlled), the Commander Creator (create your own character), new mission types, and a new loot/crafting system. So it sounds like there are plenty of new toys on the way.

Maybe I'm just hopelessly optimistic, or an Elite: Dangerous fanboy, but I think what they've shown of Horizons so far looks too damn cool.

@mike: Yeah. Elite looks and sounds great and the combat is outstanding, but there just isn't enough variety, which is why it's really strange to see them double down on making the universe even bigger without really fleshing out all the bits and pieces in between. I had a great 30 hours with the base game, but as soon as I got a Cobra Mk IV. and realised I'd have to grind for dozens of hours to see a new ship, I completely lost all interest. There's only so many times you can scan the same kind of planet, visit the same looking space station and turn in the same bounty before it becomes rote.

@bane said:

That all sound good! I'm still a bit concerned at how much energy they seem to be spending on making the game broader at the expense of depth, though. Maybe they just aren't ready to show it off yet, but proper loot and crafting systems is infinitely more interesting to me than being able to land on barren planets.