Frontier Developments has announced that Elite: Dangerous Beta 2 is available to play right now and has also dated Beta 3 for October 28th.
Beta 2 brings with it new outposts, ships, and areas of the galaxy to discover. Other updates included are:
- Reputations per system and per faction that influence attitudes and prices offered to players.
- 570 star systems and 381,033 cubic light years to explore.
- Discovery, exploration and charting of new systems and the option to trade gathered data.
- Detailed system maps.
- New Outposts (small, exposed ‘roadside café’ stations in remote systems).
- New Ocellus starport.
- Further upgradeable Life Support modules, Engines, Hyperdrives, Power Distributors, Sensors, Shield Generators and Cargo Racks for all ships.
- New weapons, including mines and a Cargo Hatch Limpet built for non-lethal piracy.
- Visibility of other ships in supercruise, and the ability to track pilots through supercruise and hyperspace.
- In-game GalNet newsfeed, reporting story events from around the galaxy and each system. Gradual ‘wear and tear’ on ships.
- New Lakon Asp Explorer ship.
- All backers names from the appropriate crowd-funding reward tiers have been added to the NPC naming database.
Elite: Dangerous is set for release in Q4 2014 but you can buy access to the beta right now for $75/£50/€60, with backers receiving a discount on checkout.
For more on Elite: Dangerous, check out our beta preview.