Elite: Dangerous Newsletter #65

Greetings, Commander,

Welcome to Elite Dangerous Newsletter #65.

This week, Elite: Dangerous is on its way to Xbox One. On Tuesday, Xbox boss Phil Spencer took to Microsoft's stage at the Game Developers Conference and announced our plans to deliver Elite: Dangerous to Xbox One before the end of the year.

We have more on our announcement below, but there’s still room to look forward to our third free major content update, Powerplay, and look back at our week in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference where we showed Elite: Dangerous running on Mac for the first time.

As always, hit our Forums, Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates from Elite: Dangerous’ galaxy, and stick with us for what’s new this week.

• Elite Dangerous For Xbox One Peek Of The Week New Yembo, New Starport Game Developers Conference Comms Chatter GalNet

Yes, Elite: Dangerous is coming to Xbox One, and you'll be playing it before 2015 is over.

After two years promising we'd be "mad" not to consider bringing Elite: Dangerous to consoles, we're excited to announce Elite: Dangerous for Xbox One. The foundations for our upcoming Xbox One version of Elite: Dangerous have been in from the earliest days of the project, with Xbox controller support in some of the earliest builds, and the entire game built on our homegrown Cobra engine.

Cobra has powered games like Kinectimals and Kinect Disneyland Adventures for Xbox 360, and Zoo Tycoon and ScreamRide for Xbox One. Xbox players have been long-time supporters of Frontier, so it made sense to bring Elite: Dangerous first to Xbox One.

Elite: Dangerous for Xbox One will be the complete and authentic Elite: Dangerous experience, incorporating content updates like February's Community Goals and this week's Wings update at launch. Players on Xbox One, PC and Mac will all share the same evolving narrative and galaxy state, so Community Goals and galactic exploration are about to get a major assist from players on Xbox One.

Elite: Dangerous on Xbox One and Mac means more players, and more players means more development on all platforms. Elite: Dangerous will keep growing, evolving and getting even better so long as you want to play it, whether you play on PC, Mac or Xbox One

You'll hear more about Elite: Dangerous for Xbox One in the near future. And you'll get to hear about our next major free update for PC - PowerPlay - in the very near future. Hold tight until then; you won't want to miss it.

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Take a seat beneath the huge, open canopy of the Imperial Courier. Soon.

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The Name A Starport competition has closed, and we've chosen a name from the thousands of entries we received.

In the latter days of the competition, "Leonard Nimoy Station" saw a surge in support following the sad news of Leonard Nimoy's passing on February 27, but it seemed more fitting to the team at Frontier to give that name to the starport orbiting Vulcan in the LHS-3006 system. The community's overwhelming desire to pay tribute to Leonard Nimoy sealed the deal.

So we're pleased to announce that New Yembo's new starport - and the first ever community-built starport in Elite: Dangerous - will be named "Unity."

Unity was a popular choice by the community and it felt appropriate for our galaxy's first community-funded construction. Thanks to all of you for your entries; we loved reading through the many suggestions; even the ones from the community's comedians.

You know who you are.

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On Wednesday night, just eight hours after the Xbox One announcement, Frontier CEO and Elite co-creator David Braben took to the stage at the GDC Awards where he was honoured to collect the 2015 Pioneer Award for contributions to gaming. Our team at the awards were surprised and delighted to collect the Game Developers ‘Audience Choice’ award for best game for Elite: Dangerous. You can see a feed of the whole show on Gamespot.

GDC was another major show for Frontier and for Elite: Dangerous. Press and developers in attendance were able to stop by our booth to discuss Elite: Dangerous on Xbox One, play the game with Oculus Rift and 4K monitors, and for the first time play Elite: Dangerous running natively on Mac OSX in our Alpha build.

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Elite: Dangerous' Executive Producer last week gave an exclusive interview to fan podcast Lave Radio at Frontier's Cambridge studio. Michael and Lave's Lisa discuss his Elite: Legacy novel and Michael announces the winner of Lave Radio's Elite: Legacy Drabble writing competition. It's a great interview, even after a forced do-over when a car drove by the studio blasting the BBC's Test Match Cricket theme at deafening volume.

You just never know what will happen in an English heritage city.

And while you're downloading Lave Radio's podcast, take a look at our new PC, Mac and Xbox One trailer for GDC 2015.

This cool gif shows the Elite Racers group coordinating flight as they leave Solo Orbiter in the Altair system, and this image from CMDR Dubardo is a great visual guide to exploration, and the kind of credits you can receive from scanning different planets.

Finally, we launched an all-new bug reporting system this week. The support of the community is vital for any game as large and as sprawling as Elite: Dangerous, and from the project's earliest stages players have helped us keep on top of bugs and glitches that are only detectable out in the wild.

The ticketing system is still a place to report problems, but we wanted a more open line of communication for bug reporting, so we're bringing it home to our forums.

There you'll find stickied threads for known topics and guidelines for reporting new issues. Dedicated staff are monitoring the forum all the time, so you can be assured if a bug is reported, it will have been seen by Frontier's team, and we'll work hard to address critical problems as and when the're detected.

We want Elite: Dangerous to be as good as it can be, and we're always grateful for your help doing it.

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Imperial forces decimated the majority of the Falisci Purple Gang’s fleet, just five days after the Citizens Of Tradition declared war against the dreaded pirate crew and their allies. Now only a handful of the Purple Gang’s most stalwart members remain to defend their territory against the Citizens of Tradition.

The Big G Corporation, in association with the Alliance of Independent Systems, announced that a dozen planets involved in the Alliance terraforming program are ready to undergo their final stage of biochemical transformation. The first set of planets includes:

Djaujas A 1 in Djaujas
Khona 3 in Khona
Dohkwithi A 1 in Dohkwithi
Hip 54692 3 in Hip 54692
Milelbis 4 in Milelbis

A conflict has broken out between the Defence Force of Tanmark and a local criminal gang known as the Tanmark Posse. The Tanmark Posse are reportedly the main driving force behind the recent cultivation of Lucan Onionhead in hidden facilities throughout Luca.

The Sirius Corporation announced that the reconnaissance portion of its latest colonisation project has now drawn to a close. The implications are presently unknown.

Lugh Ambassador Éamonn Uí Laoghire, the leading spokesman for the Crimson State Group, held his third and final rally on Alioth and accused the Federal party of foul play.

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That’s it for Newsletter #65. As always, if there's anything in particular that you’d like to hear more about, or if you'd like to ask a question, then please contact us at elite-newsletter@frontier.co.uk.

Click for the latest Game Manual, Quickstart Guide and Pilot Training Videos. Visit our Support team here and read all our previous newsletters here.

Until next time, fly safe and Right On, Commander.

The Frontier Team