Elite Dangerous' final alpha phase landing May 15th, contains "over 400 billion star systems"

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I'm no expert on numbers, like the guy out of Numb-three-ers , but even I know that 400 billion is a really big number. Like, really big. In addition to being the number of The Beast's second cousin, Alan, 400bn is also the number of star systems that will feature in Elite Dangerous' final alpha phase. Alpha 4 "genuinely contains over 400 billion star systems,” Frontier Developments state in the most recent newsletter , star systems that will “[move] correctly; spinning, orbiting each other in an incredible astronomical ballet.” Alpha 4 will go live on May 15th, if Frontier can stop waxing poetic about the wonders of space in the meantime.

Alpha 4 "sets you free in a 200 cubic light year volume of space in the Milky Way galaxy, far from Earth". You won't be able to fly to Earth, incidentally, but as you presumably live there, you're probably not too cut up about that.

On May 30th, as previously mentioned here , Elite: Dangerous will enter the first phase of its Premium Beta, which will ship to all backers who stumped for the appropriate reward tiers. The rest of us will have to wait until the end of the year, when Elite is set to be loosed upon the universe for real.

Thanks, Joystiq .

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.