 What is Elite Dangerous? It's a question I'm often asked and I'm honestly usually stuck for a concise response. Elite is such a colossal game and the question what do people do in the game is different for almost everyone that plays. So if you're one of those people that is considering Elite Dangerous or are curious as to what people do in Elite Dangerous, I'm gonna try and answer some of those questions here. Simply put, Elite Dangerous is a space trading combat and exploration game set in an open fully Explorable one-to-one scale version of the Milky Way Galaxy. You can play it in single player or in an online open version of the galaxy where you can see and meet other players or You can play it in a private group with just select people. In each case, The colonised parts of the galaxy are also populated with a huge quantity of NPCs and NPC traffic. This is the Elite Dangerous in-game map. Every point you see now is a star system. Most of these stars have planets and moons and where appropriate you can land on those planets and moons and They themselves are represented in the same one-to-one scale. There are something like 400 billion stars in the Elite Dangerous Galaxy. Yes, really 400 billion and if you are so inclined and immortal you could in theory visit every single one of them. The galaxy is inhabited in a few areas. It's by no means teaming with life. This isn't Star Trek, but humanity has colonised an area around Seoul referred to as the bubble that is around 500 light years across. To put that into perspective, the galaxy itself is around a hundred thousand light years across. So the bubble really isn't all that big in the grand scheme of things. You can actually visit real destinations in the Milky Way Galaxy. As well as Earth, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, etc. in our own solar system where star catalog data is available, the developers have modeled known stars, nebula, black holes and pulsars, etc. and then generated appropriate conjectural planets and moons around them. The game presents an opportunity to visit places you can only dream of going like Alpha Centauri, Beetlejuice, Barnard star, the Belt of Orion and Sirius to name but a few. Outside of that there's a couple of pockets of colonised space, but that's about it. The rest of the Elite Dangerous Galaxy is just a colossal expanse of planets, various different flavours of star, nebulae and stellar phenomena. So there's a huge galaxy, but what can you do in it? The simplest answer is pretty much whatever you darn well please. There are some guidelines. You start the game with a small ship and almost no money in the bank. From there you can pick any of a number of professions or activities and accumulate more money. With that money, you can buy better ships and equipment, letting you indulge in those professions and activities more or better. The activities open to you range from trader, explorer, miner and smuggler through to a combat pilot fighting for a faction within the game to a pirate or a general no good type. Some players spend their entire time combating an aggressive alien species known as the Thargoid. But unlike a lot of other games, generally speaking, if you don't bother the Thargoids, they don't bother you. As well as earning you in-game credits, any of these activities can also affect a system called the Background Simulation or BGS. The BGS is an unseen numbers game that governs the ebb and flow of power and politics in the Elite Dangerous Galaxy. As you earn money and reputation in the game, you can upgrade your ship and equipment and the individual pieces of equipment on the ship such as weapons, engines, shields etc. can themselves be engineered to a higher degree than standard making your ships even more powerful or efficient in any of the chosen professions or activities. There are individual players in the Elite Galaxy however who indulge in none of the prescribed and designed activities within the game and instead just do their own thing. Some people travel the colossal distances between the stars entirely alone using third party applications to track their progress with the specific intention of sketching a design on the face of the galaxy. Other players deploy small rovers called SRVs to circumnavigate entire planets taking days of in-game time just to be the first person to drive around any one of the billions of landable bodies currently in the game. There are whole communities of players in Elite who's sole gameplay loop circles around rescuing other players of the game when they run out of fuel or damage the hull of their ship in some unhappy accident billions of miles from the nearest space station. You'll find communities in the game whose entire focus is competitive racing or just flying as low and as fast as they can down a given planets canyon system. And there are those individuals whose sole purpose in the game is to shoot footage and capture screenshots of the game and then show it to other people. With all of its many facets Elite constantly strives to become all things to all people but that doesn't make it the perfect game. The deliberate lack of guidance and direction built into the game doesn't suit everyone and as things stand right now if you're looking for a more path and story driven narrative experience in the game you won't find it within Elite. And that sometimes doesn't sit well with players who prefer or are more used to being guided through a game and tasked with specific objectives to achieve. Elite gives almost no guidance whatsoever in any regard apart from a brief initial tutorial that however is where the community around Elite comes in. One of Elite's strongest selling points is undoubtedly the online and in-game communities that have formed around it and in that regard it can serve all players. There's PvP focused groups whose sole game centres around bettering the piloting and combat skills of those around them. The exploring guilds who focus on seeing what no one else has yet seen in the game. The trading companies that amass huge wealth-faring goods around the bubble and beyond, well you get the idea. If there's an activity in Elite then there's a community usually with an associated Discord server that will support, guide and welcome those that wish to explore that activity. So, in a nutshell it's a space trading, combat mining, automobile association, explore them up flight simulator that also lets you drive around planets whilst indulging in interstellar politics. All the while filming it all if you so wish. That's clear that up then. Whilst that's basically where Elite sits right now, going forward it's safe to say that's nowhere near where Frontier developers of Elite want it to stay. Elite, as is, feels like the foundations of the game but it's definitely not the end of the story. At the time of recording for example you can't walk around inside your ship in a space station or on a planet surface also if a planet has an atmosphere of any type you can't currently land on it. When the game first launched you couldn't land on any planets or engineer your ship's modules or affect the geopolitical background or run passenger missions or rescue people from burning space stations or fight the Thargoids or blow up asteroids to get at what lies inside. Elite is always being added to, sometimes a little slower than many would like but it is evolving. Around the middle of 2020 the current plan is to introduce player owned capital ships to the game called fleet carriers and at the end of 2020 there's a paid expansion releasing to the game. No one outside of Frontier knows yet what that expansion contains but Frontier themselves have referred to it as quote a defining moment in the history of the game unquote and their quote biggest update yet unquote. So Elite like any game isn't for everybody but if you like your sci-fi space operas to sit somewhere between Babylon 5, Firefly, Star Trek and 2001 a space odyssey and you enjoy forging your own path then Elite Dangerous really is the most amazing game unlike almost anything else. So there you have it, if you're new to Elite hopefully that's given you an overview of what the game is, if you have any questions comment below and if you enjoyed this video consider subscribing to the channel. We create weekly news updates and bulletins for Elite as well as all sorts of other fun stuff. You can also join our Discord community from the link in the description below, we'd love to welcome you aboard. Thanks very much for watching and we very much look forward to seeing you next time.