The new big update of Elite: Dangerous called The Commanders is approaching, focused precisely on commanders, who will be able to join forces together in multi-crew ships.
As Frontier Developments confirmed last week, the beta for The Commanders will start on the 26th of this month, and we finally have concrete details of how the multi-crew ships will work. Up to 3 players will be able to fly together on the same ship, as there will be three roles available:
- Helm: the owner of the ship will be in charge of piloting the ship and handling the fixed armament of the same, in addition to controlling the NPC pilots and handling the power distribution of the ship, navigation and the manufacture of elements.
- Gunner– the gunner will be able to take control of turret-based weapons using a third-person view with a reticle that he will be able to move and whose arc all the turrets of the ship will follow. It will also have two “quick slot” buttons in addition to the normal firing groups that you can customize with modules, which will give you more options to activate weapons and scanners.
- Fighter: this commander will be able to pilot a small fighter ship to help the main ship, available for both 2 auxiliary ships, controlled by the AI and the other by a commander, although the gunner will also have the option of riding the second auxiliary craft, which would allow the 2 commanders extra to ride the auxiliary ships. This depends on whether the mothership has several fighters.
The owner of the ship will always be in charge of piloting and will assume the role of Helm, but the other two commanders will be able to change their role at any time. In addition to this, each crew member will have an energy point that he can assign dynamically that is added to the ship’s standard distributor, which will allow him to add an extra point to weapons, shields or the engine.
And what advantages do we have in completing missions? Well, all the rewards and combat coupons will be multiplied depending on the number of commanders, which is a great improvement over the traditional Wings of the game, since in that case the reward was divided equally among all the members of the wing. But be careful, the punishments are also shared, so if any member of the crew commits a criminal act, the bounty will be applied to everyone equally.
As it could not be otherwise, the commanders will be able to see each other in their corresponding seat, and for this Frontier prepares the Commander Creator, a tool that will allow us to configure the face of our avatar. Will we see the commanders move in their seats when shaking their heads with our Oculus Rift or HTC Vive? We doubt it a lot since in the current state of the game the avatar stays in place even if we move, but we will get out of doubts very soon.
And if you are wondering how the game will work when starting the game with several commanders on the same ship, Frontier has created a drop-in system with which the ship owner will be able to send invitations to the rest of the commanders. If they accept it, they will teleport to the main commander’s ship wherever they are, and at the end of the game or whenever they wish they can return to their ship. In addition to this, we can set a flag in our game to indicate that we offer our ship for other commanders to join us, or that we want to get on another commander’s ship, a kind of automatic “matchmaking” in the event that our friends are not available or we want to meet new people.
Elite: Dangerous continues to grow little by little, and the possibility of sharing our ship with other commanders was one of the most anticipated modifications by a large part of the players. Let’s hope that the beta goes smoothly and that soon we will all be able to enjoy the company of our friends in the cabin of our ship. With company it’s always more fun.
