A few of my guildies have been deep into Elite Dangerous lately, and one of them recently pointed me to some of the rumors swirling around the major update we know is coming later this year. Apparently, last year there was a supposed leak of an internal Frontier roadmap that has at least so far been proven accurate. And on that roadmap? Well, there’s a bunch of big things, but the one that has everyone talking and arguing is spacelegs.
Spacelegs, of course, is a blanket term for letting a character to properly walk around outside of her ship, and all the different types of gameplay that entails, from combat and shopping to more intricate sandboxy systems, like player housing and planetary surface bases. It’s always been sort of a bugaboo in the space MMO subgenre; surely you remember EVE Online’s now-abandoned plans for “walking in stations.” And yet other space-faring MMORPGs, from Star Wars Galaxies and SWTOR to Star Trek Online and Star Citizen, have embraced that type of “not just a flight sim” content, thereby widening their potential audience to folks who really just want to be more than a spaceship.
