On May 21, Frontier Developments announced the release date of the next major update for Elite Dangerous. The expansion, titled The Engineers, will be made available to all season pass/Horizons players this Thursday, May 26.
Players of the Xbox One version will also have access to Horizons in the near future, and will be able to play The Engineers on June 3.
The Engineers will be free to all holders of the season pass (i.e. people who already have Horizons), and promises a laundry list of exciting changes in the coming update, chief of which is the ability to craft and create enhancements to your ship’s equipment with help from the eponymous engineers.
Going by this developer diary from January, engineers will be a small pool of around 30 NPCs with varying personalities and backstories that influence how likely they are to deal with you. One possibility offered by Frontier community manager Edward Lewis was an engineer close with the Federation Navy who is concerned with your Naval rank. Other possibilities mentioned involved minor factions, or your pilot’s lifetime statistics – even your criminal ones.
One example of an upgrade available in The Engineers
Engineers aren’t the only things being given the ‘characterization treatment’ in the upcoming update. Players will now interact with mission givers, whom they can build a relationship with, and learn why a mission is being offered in the first place. Mission givers, the agents of Elite Dangerous, will be available for players using the base game. Frontier has released a few more posts that explain this new feature further.
Loot will also be coming with The Engineers, presumably for customising your ship and its modules with an engineer’s help. Players of the base game still have a lot to look forward to, such as bookmarking locations, the aforementioned mission givers, and a number of other welcome changes.
If you would like to know more, check out the patch notes.
There might be more coming with The Engineers than the patch notes suggest, though. Between the strange alien artifacts blipping out wireframe ship models, the alien ‘barnacles’ in Horizons, and David Braben saying “winter is coming” when asked about aliens in Elite Dangerous, well…I can only hope that we can survive the onslaught of zombie starships.
The next major update will be titled Guardians, and promises to introduce ship-launched fighters as its major contribution to the game. After that, players will be able to create their characters in the Commanders update, which will allow multiple players to crew the same fit.
You can expect more coverage as details become available, and as The Engineers is released.
Elite Dangerous is currently available on Steam and the Frontier store for $30 US, or 20GBP. A package deal containing the base game, the season pass, and bonus cosmetics is available for 40GBP.
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Ryan Vincent.
