Skip to main content

Watch the first contact with alien life in ‘Elite: Dangerous’

First Contact with Thargoids in Elite Dangerous
Over the past few years, the passionate fan-base of the space adventure and trading simulator Elite: Dangerous has searched for signs of alien life. The search may have come to an end yesterday, when an Xbox One player with the gamertag of DP Sayre uploaded what appears to be the first encounter with something other than mankind.
Recommended Videos

Originally captured as multiple videos via Xbox Clips, DP Sayre’s full discovery is now available as a collected clip on YouTube.

In the chilling video, DP Sayre rockets through hyperspace to a new star system, only to settle in an inconspicuous point in the darkness with all of his ships functions deactivated. You can see another ship oscillating across from him in the distance before the extraterrestrial mass — a large flower-shaped vessel — comes in overhead. The alien briefly hovers in front of Sayre’s ship, lets out an ominous grunting noise, and scans Sayre’s ship with a beam of flickering light before blasting back into hyperspace.

The period of contact lasted less than a minute, and while Sayre and other commanders were unable to successfully follow the strange creature, the encounter represents an important and exciting milestone for Elite: Dangerous players.

Frontier Developments has spent the past few years dropping hints as to the existence of a volatile species of aliens known as the Thargoids, sending players on a collective search through the massive replica of the Milky Way Galaxy. Clues have come in the form of “unknown artifacts” and “unknown probes,” both of which have caused disruption to player ships. Despite the fact that many of the “unknown” run-ins have been made in the Merope star-system, the game’s scale has made the pursuit of the Thargoids an arduous task to say the least. Designed with a 1:1 scale, roughly 150,000 of the game’s 400 billion star systems are modeled from real-astronomical maps — the rest are procedurally generated.

DP Sayre’s discovery has ended one chapter in the pursuit of alien life in Elite: Dangerous, but it’s unlikely that players will rest until they learn more about the Thargoids. This encounter only serves to fuel curious commanders across the Milky Way.

Frontier Developments continues to support the game, and players with the Elite: Dangerous Horizons pass can expect new features and content throughout 2017.

Steven Petite
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Steven is a writer from Northeast Ohio currently based in Louisiana. He writes about video games and books, and consumes…
Your PlayStation Portal is about to get a much-requested feature
PlayStation Portal bundle home screen while turned on.

Sony is about to introduce more ways to use your PlayStation Portal. The company announced that it's releasing a cloud streaming feature in beta that will let users stream certain games to the device without needing a console.

This is part of a larger PS Portal update that will also bring along audio fixes and be available starting Wednesday. PlayStation hasn't noted how long cloud streaming will be in testing for, but it's looking for user feedback and is expected to change features over time.

Read more
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 struggles to get off the ground after launch
A single propeller plane with Man O'War written on it. It's on a runway in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launched this week on Xbox, PC, and Xbox Game Pass, but players are reporting a lot of performance issues, including long queue times or not being able to play at all, with some players stuck at 97% when loading in. In a video posted Wednesday, Asobo Studios apologized for the launch, explaining that it "underestimated" the demand on its servers.

"We knew the excitement was high for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, but frankly, we completely underestimated how high, and it has really overwhelmed our infrastructure," series head Jorg Neumann said. "We're really sorry, we want to apologize."

Read more
How long is Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl?
Survivors around a camp fire in Stalker 2.

Welcome back to The Zone, Stalker. It's been a while. Xbox has been hyping up the third entry in the cult PC series that made a name for itself for being a hardcore simulation with dynamic AI and events that people loved so much they could overlook the many bugs. After many delays, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is pulling you back into the radiated and deadly Zone with new graphics, better AI, and even more deadly mutants to contend with. Despite the troubled development, Stalker 2 is a massive game with almost too much to do and see. But just how long can even the most hardcore Stalker expect to spend in The Zone this time around? Here's how long Stalker 2 is.
How long is Stalker 2?

Stalker 2 is an open-world game with a lot of immersive sim elements, side quests, and secrets. There's also the fact that it is very, very punishing and meant to be played at a slow and methodical pace. For that reason, even trying to mainline the story missions will still take around 40 hours, but could even be more depending on how skilled you are.

Read more