There were announcements aplenty at the Frontier Expo on the weekend with a lot of news about games from the Frontier Developments stable including a few choice reveals for Elite Dangerous players.

As well as improvements to trading and mining, planet generation tech (yes for more colour!) and giving law enforcement vessels sharper teeth there’ll also be neat additions like GalNet News Audio which brings the current news feed to the fore by having it read to you as you play. For an update with a greater focus on narrative this is bound to help convince more players to get involved in the big picture events.

New content will continue to trickle out for the 2.4 update during the next year including additional ships both new and returning which will culminate in a neat new feature released at the end of next year called squadrons. Sounding like the game taking a step into MMO guild territory, it will allow the creation of player owned and run mobile bases called fleet carriers. It also makes me wonder if this will open the Elite galaxy up to some EVE Online style antics between squadrons but I guess that Frontier will maintain a degree of control to keep it player friendly.

The full livestream for the event is at the end of this post and clocks in at just under 5 hours but if you want to jump ahead to the content reveals for Jurassic World Evolution, Planet Coaster and Elite Dangerous move ahead to the 1:56:40 mark with the ED announcements starting a little later at 3:03:20.

Elite Dangerous is out now on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. We rather like it a lot as you’ve probably figured out at this point. 😉