18 months into a massive war, MMO devs give the Elite Dangerous community all the tools they need to win - but no instruction manual

The Thargoids have been "quite the thorn" in the side of the Elite Dangerous community for a long time. So says lead game designer Luke Betterton, who spoke to GamesRadar+ amid the latest development in a conflict that's been raging for 18 months. Now, developer Frontier is giving players everything they need to turn the Thargoid threat back into space - except the instructions on exactly how to use their new tools.

In 2022, Betterton says that a fleet of Thargoid warships known as Titans raced towards human-occupied space, parked up, "and unleashed eight unstoppable hordes of Thargoid vessels - methodically destroying everything human in their way." For the past year and a half, players have been focused on trying to hold this alien threat back, both with "humanitarian efforts" aimed at helping civilians, and with direct action aimed at the Thargoids themselves.

Eventually, one of the Titans was destroyed, but several others are still "dominating" large swathes of Elite Dangerous' galaxy. But the war has swung back and forth plenty of times over the past year and a half. "You must remember that the players in this war have been fighting these battles non-stop now for well over a year," Betterton tells me. "And it's not like they've always been on the back foot. Depending on how the players coordinate we really don't know how long it might be before there is a true end to the Thargoid War."

That's because while players have what they need to win, they don't necessarily know how to use their new toys. That's completely intentional, as Betterton says that "how we set players off down a path in Elite Dangerous has varied over time - sometimes we share little hints, or we can hide small narrative details in large updates." Other times, as with the tools that led to the destruction of that first ship, "we want to be really bold and clear with our information so everyone can get involved."

That's not normally what happens, but Frontier says that with players having spent 18 months discussing tactics in Discord servers and Reddit comments, it wants to make sure that everyone else can get involved, no matter how and where they choose to engage with the game. "This is a monumental part of Elite's history, and we'd like everyone to get a chance to be part of it."

That history isn't something to be sniffed at. Elite Dangerous has been around for a long time, and that's to say nothing of the original game, which is coming up on its 40th anniversary this year. Betterton says that poses a challenge, as "there can often be very few ways to accurately depict something without misleading or sending the players off on a wild good chase," but there's "this huge back catalogue of information that we can call on whenever we're setting up a new narrative or mystery in the game." The process of offering up new information is being constantly iterated on, and it doesn't work as smoothly as the devs would like.

Ahead of the Thargoid War, at the finale of a different narrative saga in the game, Betterton recalls a silent drop "that took players a little longer to find than usual." Several days passed and there was "not a peep" among the community, until one of the older player groups finally started to bite. "The whole time we're just sat on the sidelines," Betterton says, "a little giddy with excitement, watching the players go down this rabbit hole that we made for them."

That type of experience certainly seems to be the highlight of Betterton's puzzle-based work on Elite Dangerous. Asked what his personal favorite part of the process is, he says "it's the moment when the puzzle is discovered. Seeing the first hints of what might have happened and then seeing the players tug at a thread to see if it goes somewhere is just the coolest feeling." He teases that there's likely plenty of that to come over the next few months. The true fight back against the Thargoids has only just started, and it's up to the community to see how long it takes for the War to draw to a close: "We're going to leave it up to the players to coordinate and see how it goes; we might well be having this discussion again in another year!"

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