What just happened? Weeks after canceling future development on the console versions of Elite Dangerous, Frontier Developments has revealed how console players can move most of their progress to PC. The company also laid out some of its plans for the sandbox space simulator.
This week, Frontier confirmed that those who own Elite Dangerous for PlayStation 4 or Xbox One could receive a free PC copy. It hasn't revealed how or when this will happen other than it will be a limited-time offer.
Last week, the developer explained which items players can transfer to PC. Players will retain all their ships, land vehicles, avatars, inventories, reputation, ranks, permits, codex discoveries, engineering progress, guardian tech broker progress, crew progress, and cosmetics. Unfortunately, their squad memberships, friends lists, and mission progress will reset. Players also will have to rename their characters after the transfer.
Notably, fleet carriers won't survive the transfer. Frontier suggests that players decommission the transports before the transfer and then use their refunds to re-buy them on PC. This method can take two weeks and involves transferring billions of in-game credits per player. The game's premium currency, called ARX, also can't move from console to PC.
Frontier canceled future console updates for Elite Dangerous in March after spending months trying to improve the performance of its latest expansion --- Odyssey --- which only launched on PC. Many players will likely take advantage of Frontier's free console-to-PC transfer offer, but many others probably don't have rigs capable of running Elite. Without Odyssey, Elite's system requirements are incredibly light by today's standards, but the game has been Windows-only for years.
Frontier also recently revealed a roadmap with three more updates planned for this year. The developer promises to keep optimizing Odyssey while developing Elite Dangerous's storyline. A "key feature overhaul" is coming in early 2023, but the devs didn't have much to say about it.