In a surprising move that few could have anticipated when there is barely a month left until the final release of Elite Dangerous (although in the end it has little since the game will continue to grow), Frontier Developments has announced that the totally offline mode announced during the Kickstarter campaign will not be available in Elite Dangerous.
And it is not a decision that they have taken lightly, but apparently there are many technical difficulties to achieve it. The game’s executive producer, Michael Brookes, explained that the delay in communicating the news was due to the fact that they wanted to be really sure before announcing anything. The game has ended up being much more complex than they had originally planned, and all the mechanics of the galaxy reside on Frontier’s servers. The processes and the data to be processed are enormous and, according to Frontier, they would have had to make serious commitments and limit the game considerably to create an autonomous version, capable of working on users’ PCs.
The community has not willingly accepted this news, mainly because many people are wondering what will happen when the game ceases to be profitable and Frontier decides to “turn off” the servers. For many, the possibility of playing offline meant a huge peace of mind in the face of playing for years and years, and was one of the weighty arguments when it came to supporting the Kickstarter campaign. It seems that some users have decided to request a refund, and Frontier has made a returns page available to everyone in its online store.
To make it clear, this does not mean that the individual mode has disappeared, since if we wish we can play alone in a universe populated only by AI-controlled ships, without encountering other players, but we will have to be connected to the persistent universe. And now all eyes are on Star Citizen, which also promises from the very beginning an offline mode and even the possibility of creating our own servers on a local network. Will he follow in the footsteps of Elite?
