Frontier Developments have been cooking up a new expansion for big space MMO Elite Dangerous but hold up, it hasn’t been cleared to disembark just yet. Elite Dangerous: Odyssey had been planned for early in 2021 but that window is getting bumped back thanks to our constant companion Covid-19. Odyssey is now expected in late spring for PC players, Frontier say in a new announcement.

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Frontier’s gargantuan space sim Elite Dangerous will be given away for free on the Epic Games Store today. You’re getting a lot for nothing. It includes the base game, and 2015’s Horizons expansion pack that fills the 400 billion star systems with landable planets. The other game is a puzzle game with visual novel elements called The World Next Door.

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As Frontier Developments wind up to launch the next Elite Dangerous expansion, today they rolled the first one into the base game for all to enjoy for free. The new content and features from Horizons are now available to all players, things like creating your own spaceman and landing on planets to drive spacecars. To folks who had already bought Horizons, Frontier are giving exclusive ship skins as a thank you.

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Happy Star Wars: Squadrons day, internet. I have nothing to offer but the sneer of a veteran Elite Dangerous pilot. A disdainful scoff as you vroomify your engines in the docking bay, click-clacking your flight checks in the seat of some dusty Y-wing, some classless X-Wing, some bogus B-wing. Who do you think you are? Sitting there in the pilot’s seat of that garish tin can. Only an exponent of the foulest incorrectitudes would indulge a shipyard with all the basic-ass nomenclature of an episode of Sesame Street. Here, you fripperist, you child, gaze upon the true list of the 9 best spaceships in games.

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Elite Dangerous

has always been about ships. Flying ’em, fighting ’em, crashing ’em into asteroids because you forgot flight assist was turned off. Why would you ever want to get out and walk? With the Odyssey expansion promising just that, Frontier’s latest dev diary has outlined the trading, scavenging, gunslinging and mingling you’ll be getting up to should you choose to leave the comfort of the cockpit.

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Frontier Developments today announced that they’ll soon give the Elite Dangerous expansion Horizons free to all players, letting everyone roll around planets in spacecars before the next upcoming expansion invites us to walk on them with our own two spacefeet. The Horizons season pass has covered almost five years of new features, including character customisation, the ability to pilot ships cooperatively with a crew, and those spacecars. It has cost £20/€25/$30 (though sales often took it down to £5) so free is quite nice. People who have bought Horizons will get an exclusive paint job as thanks, mind.

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Ever since I squeezed my face into David Braben’s Rift hole (humblebrag), I’ve been a VR convert. I’ve moved house three times since then, and each time I’ve managed to tether up some sort of VR system, from the pokiest of rooms to my reasonably spacious home office. That last one is not a humblebrag, as I’m far too humble to do two in one paragraph. It’s just a brag.

I’ve been using VR for a long time, so I thought I’d ask myself what people might be worried about before committing to it themselves. What about those awkward tangibles, like wires, space, and PC power? Or troublesome intangibles, like what you look like when you watch a John Travolta movie in VR.

Here’s what I’ve learned in the past eight years.

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I was looking through my crate of ancient technology when I rediscovered my oldest possession: my Frontier: Elite II game box. It has been with me for 27 years. Jobs, houses, relationships, pets, and my waistline have all been left behind, but it has not. When I got rid of the system it was played on, my trusty Amiga CD32, I kept the game. Somehow, 22 years after harassing my mum to buy it for me, I got to show it to Frontier’s creator David Braben. We went through the lore books, the manual, and the small piece of paper on which 14-year-old me had scrawled a formula that allowed me to skip across the light-years as if they were stepping stones.

If I didn’t have that grey crate of Things I Must Keep, I’m not sure it would have survived. The vessel of wires, power supplies, four mostly dead gaming mice, and more, kept it safe. Let’s celebrate everyone’s crate of weird and forgotten things. So tell me, what have you kept?

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Death Stranding

, the walking simulator about the sad Deliveroo man, is finally out on PC, allowing thousands of keyboard clackers to decode the complex metaphors embedded within such characters as “Mama”, a woman with a baby, and “Heartman”, a man with a pacemaker, played here by an aging and tired Danny Wallace. Look beyond the sub-textual nuance of such masterful creations, however, and you will find a half-decent delivery ‘em up. But is reliable postboy Sam Porter Bridges (a transporter who builds bridges) one of the 7 best couriers in PC games? You can find out by reading closely between the lines of this list.

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Fleet carriers have been officially brought over to Elite Dangerous proper, following their two beta tests over the last few months.

Judging by the announcement they’ll work much as they did during the second beta, effectively giving players their own space station to dock up to 16 ships at. They can be moved around the galaxy (though not piloted) by burning expensive tritium fuel, potentially up to 500 light years at a time.

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