18 months into a massive war, MMO devs give the Elite Dangerous community all the tools they need to win - but no instruction manual

29.03.2024 - 14:05 / gamesradar.com / Ali Jones

The Thargoids have been "quite the thorn" in the side of the Elite Dangerous community for a long time. So says lead game designer Luke Betterton, who spoke to GamesRadar+ amid the latest development in a conflict that's been raging for 18 months. Now, developer Frontier is giving players everything they need to turn the Thargoid threat back into space - except the instructions on exactly how to use their new tools.

In 2022, Betterton says that a fleet of Thargoid warships known as Titans raced towards human-occupied space, parked up, "and unleashed eight unstoppable hordes of Thargoid vessels - methodically destroying everything human in their way." For the past year and a half, players have been focused on trying to hold this alien threat back, both with "humanitarian efforts" aimed at helping civilians, and with direct action aimed at the Thargoids themselves.

Eventually, one of the Titans was destroyed, but several others are still "dominating" large swathes of Elite Dangerous' galaxy. But the war has swung back and forth plenty of times over the past year and a half. "You must remember that the players in this war have been fighting these battles non-stop now for well over a year," Betterton tells me. "And it's not like they've always been on the back foot. Depending on how the players coordinate we really don't know how long it might be before there is a true end to the Thargoid War."

That's because while players have what they need to win, they don't necessarily know how to use their new toys. That's completely intentional, as Betterton says that "how we set players off down a path in Elite Dangerous has varied over time - sometimes we share little hints, or we can hide small narrative details in large updates." Other times, as with the tools that led to the destruction of that first ship, "we want to be really bold and clear with our information so everyone can get involved."

That's not normally what happens, but Frontier says that with players having spent 18 months discussing tactics in Discord servers and Reddit comments, it wants to make sure that everyone else can get involved, no matter how and where they choose to engage with the game. "This is a monumental part of Elite's history, and we'd like everyone to get a chance to be part of it."

That history isn't something to be sniffed at. Elite Dangerous has been around for a long time, and that's to say nothing of the original game, which is coming up on its 40th anniversary this year. Betterton says that poses a challenge, as "there can often be very few ways to accurately depict something without misleading or sending the players off on a wild good chase," but there's "this huge back catalogue of information that we can call on whenever