Elite: Dangerous has been officially released

19 years on from the release of the last game in the series, Elite: Dangerous has been officially released.

Talk of a fourth entry in the much cherished series, which dates all the way back to 1984, began in 2011 with a Kickstarter drive to back the game concluding in January 2013 having raised a whopping 1.58m, in excess of creator David Braben’s 1.25m goal.

Despite missing its scheduled release date of March 2014, the game has been available in various states of pre-release development for a year now, with the alpha version that was released to Kickstarter backers having been followed by an assortment of often not at all cheap early access releases.

As of today a ‘full’ version of the game is available for 39.99.

It hasn’t been all plain sailing, however, with Frontier coming in for fierce criticism just last month when it revealed that that game would not in fact offer an online mode, meaning players would need a permanent online connection to play.

This is a fact that’s sure to mentioned a lot in the coming days, as the release today has been greeted with what appears to be server congestion that is stopping buyers from playing it.

Speculation will surely soon return to a possible console release, with Braben having previously admitted that it would be stupid” not to bring the game to PS4 and Xbox One.