Elite Dangerous: Horizons

The final Frontier finally readies for launch on PlayStation

Throughout the years we’ve scaled the furry backs of giants in Shadow Of The Colossus, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with over a hundred fellow soldiers in Massive Action Game, slowly picked our way across the snowy, mammoth-filled expanses of Skyrim and even faced up to the towering horrors of the adult world at nighttime as a shin-high toddler in Among The Sleep. But nothing, and we really do mean nothing, makes us feel as small as our introduction to the world of Elite Dangerous: Horizons.

We’re being piloted through space in a nippy little Cobra craft, admiring the pinpricks of light that represent far-away star systems that puncture the black currently painted across the screen, when PlayStation 4 producer Gary Richards casually remarks that the background detail is actually all part of the gameworld. “The star map – all those nebulae – isn’t just a picture. It’s generated [according to] where you are in the galaxy, and every single dot is somewhere you can visit.”

400 billion star systems strong, space sim Elite Dangerous: Horizons offers an “if you can see it, you can fly there” galaxy almost too big to comprehend. What makes that size even harder to absorb is that it’s realistic. The coders over at Frontier Developments have plugged NASA data and some complex mathematics into its galaxy-building Stellar Forge engine to simulate the Milky Way as accurately as possible. The result is a mix of known, verifiable solar systems along with ones procedurally generated according to scientific models, and come the second quarter of 2017 Frontier is finally throwing open the cargo bay doors for us PlayStation players to begin exploring.

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