Hi everyone,
First, I want to thank everyone who helped make our game the number one bestseller on Steam, and to all our players who helped welcome new Commanders into the community. We’re working hard on the game, and it’s great for the team to see so much passion from players.
For those of you who already own Elite: Dangerous from our store and asked about getting the game in your Steam collection: we hear you and we’re looking into it. We can’t speak for other cases where the same question has come up, but turning EliteDangerous.com customers into Steam customers unfortunately isn't 100 percent our decision and isn’t free for us in the context of the game’s ongoing growth and development. It could take a few weeks to work through, but we hear your feedback and addressing it is a priority for all of us.
For the Mac beta we’ve been receiving some excellent feedback, so as always, thanks to you all for that. A new Mac beta client will be released early next week.
Looking further ahead we have the Powerplay update, the big announcement is still a couple of weeks away but I can reveal a bit more of what will form part of the wider update and that is a major overhaul for the missions system. This isn’t directly part of the new Powerplay feature, but does supplement it. We’ve been working on this since the game’s initial release to provide us with a mission system that will support the game as we keep adding new features and content and improve your experience with all missions.
We’ve focused on a few clear goals for this revamp. The first is being able to provide a wider range of missions and in a method we can easily add to and increase variation within the mission type. We’re also adding the ability to select mission locations and targets (where applicable) in the galaxy and system map. Greater use of the player inbox will be used to support mission branches, making them easier to manage.
One of the limitations of the current system is that missions tended to be a good option for starting players, but not so much for later on in the game. The overhaul will address this issue by making missions available for more experienced players as well as specific missions for higher ranks or status – such as being a Founder level member. The system will also expand the influence of reputation on missions to reward players who build a high reputation with minor factions.
As with any major update we will take the opportunity to add some incidental improvements to the game. One such improvement is that the maximum loan value for ship rebuys will scale according to your Pilots Federation ranking, allowing a greater safety net as you progress through the game. For ship customisation you will also be able to fit more than one fuel tank to your ship – although this obviously takes up space you could have used on other modules!
Thanks!
Michael
