Frontier Developments continues to work on more updates for the Horizons expansion of Elite: Dangerous. Last month, the developers said that the first big update, titled “The Engineers,” would come out sometime this spring. However, it seems that fans will have to wait a bit longer, as the release date was delayed.
According to the developers, the extra time would allow them to improve the contents' overall quality. A beta session of The Engineers is now set for May, so we might not see its new features until the summer.
However, the delay announcement didn’t stop the developers from revealing more features coming with the update. Players will be able to create bookmarks for any solar system, planet, asteroid belts or bases. This could be useful to mark areas such as trading hubs, dangerous systems or crucial discoveries in the galaxy.
There will also be changes in the rewards system for missions. At the moment, you are awarded credits for completing various missions. But when The Engineers update comes out (which will introduce crafting mechanics to the game), mission rewards could also come in the form of crafting materials. In fact, some materials will be available only by taking on certain tasks. We still don’t know specific details about the crafting system, but mission-exclusive materials could be used to create more powerful modules for your ship.
The announcement didn’t include any mention of the other three major updates in Horizons. “The Guardians” will arrive in the summer, and “The Commanders” update is out in the fall. We still don’t know when the final update (which doesn’t have a name yet, and closes out the expansion) arrives. The delay of The Engineers will obviously have a scheduling impact on future updates, but in the meantime, Frontier Developments will continue to release smaller patches in the weeks leading up to the release of Horizons’ first major update.
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