Elite: Dangerous – The End for Apple Mac

On the 26th April 2018 Frontier announced that with the release of the Quarter 4 update of the free Beyond series Elite: Dangerous will no longer be playable to anyone on an Apple Mac. The full text is below and here.

“Hello Commanders,

“It is with great sadness that we must announce the upcoming end of Elite Dangerous on Mac.

“Firstly, we want to reassure you that this decision did not come lightly and is something that we have been investigating for some time. As many of you will know, despite our best efforts, we have been unable to bring Elite Dangerous Horizons to Mac since launch due to technical barriers. With the planned improvements coming in our Chapter Four update of the Beyond season we have felt it necessary to make this difficult decision in order to allow us to bring in content and features in the way that we felt was best for the overall Elite Dangerous experience. It is for this reason that we wanted to give you as much notice as possible. With the release of the Q4 update, coming towards the end of the year, you will no longer be able to play Elite Dangerous on Mac. As soon as we have a date of the update to share, we will do so here.

“At the point of the Q4 update, you will no longer be able to access Elite Dangerous products through the Mac OS. However, you will still be able to log into your account on PC (or via Bootcamp.)

“We hope you will understand why we have taken this course of action and would encourage those of you who have questions or concerns, to please contact our Support Team HERE who are on hand and ready to help!

“Thanks again,

Ed and the Elite Dangerous team”

Crime Update

On the 20th April 2018 Sandro Sammarco made a brief post about the ever evolving Crime and Punishment situation in the game:

“A quick update.

“We’re still investigating the option to hand yourself in at starports where you are wanted as an alternative to locating an Interstellar Factors contact, which feels like a decent way to address the issue of folk being caught short in a ship that is unable to leave the system.

“Looking at your feedback, we’re also taking another look at friendly fire, as this seems to be one of the major root causes of displeasure with the legal system.

“We’re considering increasing the tolerance for damage against NPC ships further, including adding the tolerance for unshielded vessels (currently any stray shot that deals damage to a hull triggers the assault crime). We’ve also discovered a potential bug where damage could potentially be counted as targeted even when it isn’t. We’ll keep you updated as we go with this one.

“In addition, we’re also investigating some issues with Notoriety that prevents it from dropping or refreshing correctly. Hopefully we’ll have some good news in the near future.

“Finally, thank you again for all your feedback, it is a tremendous help.”

Creating Elite: Dangerous – Videos

There’s a new page on the blog focusing on some of the videos showing the making of the game. It features videos on procedural generation, how the in-game servers work, the creation of the sounds in the game and more. It can be found via this link, or by clicking on the link near the bottom of the main menu.

Radio Lave: Mission Q&A

On the 27th March 2018 Radio Lave did an interview with Adam Bourke-Waite of Frontier on the way missions work in the game, what they involve and how they have evolved.  One interesting piece of information is that as of the weekend of 24th March there have been 1,673,246 completed missions. You can find the interview here starting at 18 mins 20 seconds.