 Hello, this is Buona from Buona.tv, and today I want to discuss the future of Elite Dangerous. While discussing this matter, you get to laugh at my flight assist off docking practice in my Federal Corvette. Recently Frontier Developments published a forum post detailing the plans for the upcoming updates in the game. As with most things in Elite Dangerous, there is wild speculation on what it could mean. Let's take a look at what was written. Community Manager Will Flanagan first acknowledged the community's outcry for more information on the upcoming updates and promised more news and updates over the coming months. As we all knew, the Beyond Chapter 4 update was considered a success by both the community and Frontier, and this was acknowledged in the post. I4-1 was highly impressed with the update and it gave me great faith in the future updates as well. As anticipated, this post is a follow up to the August 2018 post from Frontier letting us know that a sizeable development team is working on a next major era of Elite Dangerous. Will lets us know that Frontier anticipates this effort will be completed in the latter half of 2020. This update will be free for lifetime pass owners and a paid update for the rest of the community. Now immediately Frontier acknowledged that this was a long wait for a major update to the game but promised the game will not be neglected. Here's what they detailed. A smaller team will be working on bug fixes, quality of life updates and new player onboarding independent of the major team that's working on the update. These updates should arrive every 3 to 4 months. Frontier will focus on developer driven events which will spearhead a rework of our community goals. A point was made to note that these updates leading to the 2020 release will not take the same level of content or size that we've seen in previous updates of Beyond or Horizons. So what do I think about all this? Well number one, any long period without a substantial content update is not good for any live service game. While Frontier has promised to maintain the game and attempt to keep it fresh, I can't ignore that this is a content drought at the end of the day. Frontier has stated that these updates will be smaller than Horizon or Beyond updates in both size and scope. So in my mind I call this maintenance mode. While some community members may be optimistic about the timeline, my realistic expectations put this update release at about December 2020 or possibly January 2021. That's a possible 21 months of no major updates to Elite Dangerous. Number two, I think it's great that Frontier will put some focus on a new user experience and it really really needs it. This game has been compared to others like Eve Online which is well known for their learning plus. So this is a good thing. Number three, speculation is running rampant on two fronts. The first front is what will these smaller updates entail leading up to the update, the major update? And what will be the quality of life updates that they do? How big will the developer events be? And how much of the community goals will be reworked? The second front is the major update itself which is coming in 2020. Is it Space Legs? Will we get atmospheric planets? Will Frontier rewrite their engine to address issues with insensing and multiplayer? It's hard to argue or debate any of these because they're giant unknowns which can be very frustrating as an Elite Dangerous player. The good news is that Frontier has went on record to state that more information is coming and I believe the more we know the less we speculate. Overall, I'm concerned about this long wait and I truly don't believe these minor updates will be enough to hold most players. I do hope I'm proven wrong though. I don't have any plans to abandon the game because of this, but I can safely say that it will reduce my motivation to play the longer time goes on. I love Elite Dangerous and I want to see it succeed so my hope is that the 2020 update will be worth the wait. This is born from Warner.tv and my thoughts on the future of Elite Dangerous. I'd like to thank all of my Patrons for their support and I encourage you all to visit my Patreon at patreon.com. Also, if you do enjoy my content, click that subscribe button and ring the bell for updates. I'll see you next time.