Pilots in Elite Dangerous [official site] have discovered a hidden map in an alien probe after scanning the probe and applying a spectral analysis to the sound it produced. Probes like this have been around for a while but it wasn’t until last week that a player, Cmdr Rizal, “honked” at one (commander slang for using your Discovery Scanner) and documented the “reply”. Worryingly, the probe first sent out an EMP blast, temporarily cutting off the ship’s power. But after that, it spoke.
We always knew they would come back some day. The race of aliens known as the Thargoids have been slotted to appear in Elite Dangerous [official site] for a while, according to the developer’s plans. And David Braben has said in interviews that he wants them to be just as scary as encounters in the previous games. But we’ve seen little in the way of actual evidence so far. While players have discovered alien life in the form of “space barnacles” and often come across ancient artifacts floating around, nothing that suggested a hostile race from beyond the stars had ever been found. Until now.
At this year’s Develop conference in Brighton, I grabbed an hour with keynote speaker Luke Crane, Head of Games at Kickstarter, to talk about the state of play of videogames on the crowdfunding platform in 2016. Discussed: what makes a good project now, the odds of making it, ‘Kickstarter fatigue’ and the question of glory days, Kickstarter’s reaction to funded projects that are not then released, the importance of community, how the press can be unhelpful and whether or not famous names are dominating the ecosystem at the expense of smaller developers. … [visit site to read more]
Elite Dangerous: Arena [official site], the spin-off standalone of Elite’s combat arena mode, is free to try this weekend. More than that, if you get it now it’s yours forever.