Elite: Dangerous, the crowdfunded followup to a long running space sim series that dates back to the mid 1980s, has finally gotten its official release after nearly three years in development.

The latest entry into the now 30-year-old franchise had been eagerly anticipated by gamers, who managed to pledge nearly £1.6 million (roughly $2.5 million USD) to the developer’s Kickstarter page.

While screenshots of interstellar dogfights might look exciting, combat is only one aspect of the game, which also heavily focuses on trade and exploration. There is no evil alien empire to beat, but the multiplayer aspects of the game means that players could create their own if they wanted.

Broken promises

Despite the excitement surrounding the game, the development of Elite: Dangerous has not been without its controversies.

An early promise that the game would feature an offline mode was later scrapped, something which lead some backers to call for a refund.

David Braben , the lead developer of the game, sympathized with those criticizing the move, but he felt that the decision was necessary to preserve the quality of the game.

“A fully offline experience would be unacceptably limited and static compared to the dynamic, ever unfolding experience we are delivering,” Braben said.

Times have changed

The original game in the series, Elite, was released in 1984 and was developed for the BBC Micro computer, which boasted a 2 MHz CPU and 64 kB of memory. The latest game, Elite: Dangerous, requires a quadcore CPU, “4 x 2Ghz is a reasonable minimum,” and 4 GB of system memory.

The game was praised for pioneering the “space trading” genre by incorporating fast gameplay and expansive exploration. Elite included eight galaxies, each of which were made up of 256 planets. The reason for this unusually specific number was due to the limitations of the 8-bit computers at the time.

These planets were procedurally generated, meaning that the makeup of each system was created on-the-fly, making each play through entirely different.

While Elite: Dangerous has big shoes to fill in the imaginations of gamers who grew up playing the original Elite, the new game does include a slightly larger sandbox for them to play in: a complete to-scale representation of the Milky Way Galaxy, complete with 400 billion star systems.