We had a press walkthrough with Adam Woods (Producer at Frontier Developments) of Elite: Dangerous at this year's GDC where we were shown the basics of space combat and given a chance to experience the game through the Oculus Rift VR headsets. Trying out two combat simulations we got to grips with joystick controls as we were shown how to get the most out of your ship and the best strategy to take down your enemy. Check out our video to see what we found.
Showing us the general controls we were shown how to deploy and fire weapons and lock on targets.
"That gives you more information about your target. You also have sidewinders which are low aggression and not overly skilful and provide a nice introduction into combat. You also have a scanner which does a 3D scan of the area with us at the centre where our ship is and to allow us to see that the enemy is ahead and above of us. The objective here is to try and hunt this guy down."
Introducing us the Oculus Rift goggles we were told that "These can fit your glasses in, but we find a lot of people don't need to wear them as they're so close."
Then we began out battle!
"So try and hunt him down! Don't forget you need to deploy weapons before you fire them and then you don't need to do anymore. You can lock onto him and you'll notice on the left hand side you get a hologram of his ship, which shows he has no shields as he doesn't have a generator, and also his health percentage underneath showing 78%.
You can see your power mechanic so here we can pump some extra power into different systems, you have a finite amount which your ship can produce, and choose whether to focus this on your weapons, engines or shield depending on the situation."
Closing ground and taking a few shots we managed to get off a few hits and getting an unhealthy amount of fire pouring out of the back of the enemy ship.
"With the throttle you're doing the right thing, you never want to be going super-fast or too slow, you want to balance it so you have no problems turning. We have another flight model, right now you have flight assist on so the ship will counteract all your inputs to make it more stable and feel like atmosphere flight. When you turn it off it removes that, if you thrust and roll left then it will just keep rolling until you stop it and allows you to perform some more advanced tactics and maneuvers.
Right now you have two fixed pulse lasers on this ship, in the full game you have a whole range of weapons from various missiles, canons, turrets, rail guns, a whole suite you can fit out your ship with as well as all different equipment for other things. We're focusing on combat here, but in the main game you can focus on being a mercenary earning credits through combat, a trader who is more peaceful making credits trading commodities much like the stock market, or an explorer just heading out into the Milky Way, which we’ve created 1:1 and is a vast place to head out into."
A few more shots and we managed to take down our enemy and we went onto the next fight.
"Be careful, this next AI is a lot more aggressive and has shields, he'll also try and jump you straight away; you want to try and get behind him then keep in front of him chasing his tail so he doesn't get a chance to turn around and attack and keeping him on the back foot. You can see on the display that you’ve taken his shield out and he’s trying to generate the layers of shield again, but you're keeping him on the defensive.
In the main game we've just entered the latest big free updated called Wings, which allows you to group up with up to four players together and act as a single Wing. You can open up your navlock and all navlock onto the same person, so when they hyperspace jump away you will automatically follow them. When things start to get a little hard you can join up with a Wing and bring a little extra fire power, claim bounties together or link up with traders and escort them, claiming a little bit of their trade reward for yourself."
After a little while longer and a few big hits:
"You can see his vents heating up, there's a whole heat mechanic in the game that allows you to lock onto ships, so everything you do generates heat, particularly things like lasers, but other weapons don't generate any as the heat is expelled out into space. You can do a thing called Silent Running where you close all your vents down so you disappear off the radar so you can sneak about, but all that heat builds up in your ship and your modules start to overload and take damage, as well as your hull until you finally explode."
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