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Welcome everyone to Galactic Outfitting Weekly! Each week we’ll be taking you through the newest and coolest stuff Frontier puts on the Elite Dangerous store. With the launch of Horizons and Christmas just around the corner, Frontier has tons of new items up on the store, so lets dive right in.
First up,bobble heads. Those who were in the early betas for Elite might remember the cute little bobble head that rode on your dashboard. If, like me, you were dismayed when they were removed in the full release, you can now do a little happy dance. Bobble heads can now be purchased and used to decorate that boring old ship dashboard. But who wants boring pilot obbleheads when you can have a Christmas tree! Or, a collection of letters numbers and symbols you can use to spell whatever you want right on your ship’s dash. You can place up to ten bobble heads on the dashboards of most ships, allowing plenty of creative freedom in placing them, as well as cluttering up your otherwise pristine flight deck. The Christmas tree will set you back a modest three pounds, while the mix and match letters, of which there are a total of 71 alphanumeric symbols comes in at a slightly heftier ten pounds. Still, that’s not to much to pay for the ability to spell hashtag bad lone on my ships dash on stream!
If you’re feeling particularly festive and the tree bobble just isn’t enough for you, don’t worry. Frontier has dropped three sets of festive paint packs on us. The Asp, Cobra, and Sidewinder all get a little love with swirls, snowflakes and stars replacing the normal two toned paint schemes. Best of all, each paint pack contains six different variants, meaning there’s sure to be one that you love. In testing them out, we found that adding additional decals tends to mar the look of the paintjob, so you may want to remove all those onionhead stickers for these.
Lastly, the Cobra Mk IV gets sweet skins as it blasts into the HOrizons expansion pack. The pack contains three variants, approved by Faulcon De Lacey themselves and sporting a nice military digital camo pattern. The Cobra Mk IV has unique lines compared to the other version of the ship, so it’s fitting that it gets it’s own nifty paint jobs as well. As if the ship wasn’t awesome enough, right?
Thats it for this first installment of Galactic Outfitting Weekly, but don’t worry. We’ll be back as long as Frontier keeps making awesome stuff for Elite.
Frontier Developments is set to launch the Horizons expansion to their galaxy sand box space sim, Elite: Dangerous today. Horizons is the start of the “Season 2” content for the game and will initially bring with it planetary landings, the ability to explore planetary surfaces in SRV space buggies and some basic crafting. Further content is planned for Season 2 including the ability to crew a single ship with multiple players.
Frontier has also whipped up a nice trailer to go with the launch, which you can check out below.
Recently there seems to have been a lot of release date delays owing to the need for further polish. You know I’m all for it though if it results in a game that’s not full of game-breaking bugs, and so my reaction to hearing that Fable Legends is the latest to fall prey to schedule slippage my first thought is “Okay good.”
Fable Legends is going to take the franchise’s RPG format and attempt to fit it into a RTS hybrid for five players, where four of them compete against one by working together through the waves of monsters, and that one player overlords it over the other four and has tremendous fun being the bad guy. Obviously it’s a big idea and despite having originally been set to come out sometime this year, the Open Beta has now been pushed back to Spring of 2016 to let it mature.
Although the game is in Closed Beta and will soon be letting in another 100,000 players, the post on the official blog says that they aren’t ready to go to Open yet because there is an understanding that Open Beta means “mostly finished” and right now the team at Lionhead feel there is a still a lot more feature-wise to be added before they can consider the game to be at that stage.
Of course, Spring 2016 is also seeing the stage set for many other games, with Mirror’s Edge’s sequel, XCOM 2 and Far Cry all having release dates set in the same time period. Looks as if we’re in for a busy Spring 2016…
I remember playing the first Magicka a little while ago. As well as being very funny as a game itself, the game’s biggest draw was that friendly fire was most certainly not off. The number of times I remember being blown up by a friend…
Anyway, the game appealed to enough to get a sequel game and now a tweet from the game’s official Twitter has informed us that we can expect some new content to be coming to the game:
Exactly what will be offered as free content and what will become paid DLC is not yet clear, but that rock based move looks suitably Magicka. A big AoE spell that probably has as much chance of catching your allies as your enemies. Brilliant. Some of the paid DLC might be new questlines for the game though, as is standard for games such as this one.
Keep your eyes peeled for more news as it becomes available.
It’s time for your weekly little update on the world of gaming Kickstarters, and we’ll start as always by summing up briefly the news with previously covered projects.
We’ll get the bad news out of the way first. Both Tunnels & Traps and Apocalypse Hotel finished their campaigns short of their target goals this week. The people behind Tunnels are alright with the failure saying that the point of the campaign was “never about funding the creation of the game” and they still plan to have the game released in Q2 of 2016. Apocalypse Hotel has had no update as to further plans.
As well The Odds Game, Bellus Mortem, Poltergus and Game Over Remix are all still short of their targets with less than 10 days to go, although the gap varies between projects. If you want to help get a game funded, do go give these ones another check.
In better news though, one of the games I covered last week, Smiling Bear: Attack has met its goal. It was a game co-designed by the dev’s children so it’s nice to see that their game will become a bigger thing, it’s a lovely thought. Blacksea Odyssey has also finished its campaign this week, having reached its target. Casting Call is not yet at its goal, but with plenty of time left its not far off either. Expect to see it finish with a met goal.
We’ll start this week with the weekly card/board/tabletop game, and this time it’s a 3-5 player bluffing game that’s designed to be family friendly. It’s actually already met target but I thought it interesting enough to still include.
Dungeon Busters sees the use of cards and gems and all players are playing cards face down in an attempt to fight off monster cards with a certain total. The sum of all the played cards must beat the monster, and any cards that are duplicates get ignored. If the players get defeated, then the player who contributed the lowest value card loses all their gems of a certain colour; but if the monster if defeated then the lowest cost contributor will be the best rewarded in the encounter.
Dungeon Busters has 19 days to go and has a target of $5,000 which it has already reached.
Next up is an open-world survivor with a low target and pixel graphics.
Set in a world where an illness has wiped out 87% of life, you play as a human trying to survive in a world that could throw anything at you. The game itself is not linear and asks one question – what would you do to survive?
With a target of $1,000 INDEF has made $149 and has 24 days to go.
This is a zombie game with a difference – you are the zombie and have to work to grow bigger.
Starting as a newly ‘born’ zombie, you have to feed on other smaller zombies and humans to grow larger. Humans are faster but are worth more, and as you grow you will develop abilities to help you. Of course, other zombies will also be trying to eat you and some humans will be able to fight back against you. The developer is also looking to the community of backers to get feedback on what abilities they’d like to see in game.
Zombie Fest has made nothing of its $50,000 goal yet, but has 27 days to go.
Lastly we have a 10 player online multiplayer game with cute little pixel graphics and a retro feel to it.
Super Micro Heroes challenges you to be the player at the end of the round with the most coins, however it won’t be easy with levels, traps and the other 9 players all trying to stop you. It sounds a bit like the Mario Kart balloon stages and little madcap games with simple goals like that in mind are always popular if well made.
Super Micro Heroes has 24 days to go and has made €1,170 of its €7,000 goal.
