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2025 was huge for Elite Dangerous: Here’s what 2026 has to offer
C
Charlie Hall
In Elite, players take on the role of daring pilots traversing a realistic simulation of all 400 billion star systems in the Milky Way galaxy from the bridge of their personal starship. No, that’s not a typo. It’s a game so massively large that players have only ever seen a fraction of a fraction of all the locations that exist. The vanilla experience gives players lots of options, from bounty hunting and asteroid mining to political influence operations, mining, and deep space exploration. If that’s not your thing, you can always just vibe out as a trucker running laps for profit. Bolt on the paid Odyssey expansion, and Elite also offers on-foot action on par with your favorite first-person shooters.
Up until this year, the rich nougatty center of the game’s universe—a region of human-populated planets dubbed the Bubble—had remained largely unchanged, with roughly 20,000 dynamic star systems. According to executive producer Gauthier Verquerre, using Trailblazers’ System Colonization, players added another 80,000 populated systems in just a few months. That’s a massive amount of change for a game with 11 years of history behind it, and, in 2026, Gauthier says players should expect more of the same.
“One of the big pillars [of Trailblazers] was player agency,” Gauthier said. “We want to keep on pushing this aspect of the game. We want players to know that this galaxy is theirs to play with.”
A big way that Gauthier and his team are giving players more agency is with a brand new set of starships. The recently released Caspian, for instance, speeds up exploration considerably with a more capable hyperdrive, more powerful shielding, and advanced thrusters that make visiting new planets less time-consuming. Like the mining-focused Type-11 Prospector that was released just before it, the Caspian allows players who love just one aspect of the game—exploration—to do more of it. When the Caspian becomes available for in-game currency in early 2026, it has real potential to open up even more of Elite’s Milky Way. For the Shoulder of Orion Expedition, which kicked off in March 2025, a dedicated group of more than 400 highly-organized players set a blistering pace. Even as in-game navigational challenges made initial progress slow, they colonized nearly 250 new star systems in less than one month. A core group still occupies the area, pushing a fine tendril of newly occupied star systems far beyond the Horsehead Nebula.
Later next year, another free expansion titled Operations will add even more depth. According to Curtis Griffiths, Elite’s lead game designer, Operations’ landmark feature will be raid-like instanced events called—no surprise here—Operations. But instead of traveling for hours or weeks to reach the site of a Community Goal or other in-game event, he said players will be able to drop into an Operation with friends from virtually any inhabited location where they can dock their starship.
“One of the main goals we wanted for [Operations],” Griffiths said, “[was] we want you to be able to jump into this with friends quite easily and quite quickly. So if you've only got half an hour to play Elite, you can actually get something done. And not only get it done, but you can get it done with friends as well.”
Operations will come in multiple varieties and make use of the original Elite systems, as well as Odyssey’s on-foot enhancements. Players will need to make use of starships, but also wheeled SRVs and futuristic infantry weapons. While the team stressed that these systems are still in development, Frontier’s design goals stress player agency above all else, including the opportunity for creativity.
“[We want to] allow players to solve a problem in different ways,” Gauthier said, including by using the different in-game vehicles to take on a given Operation in dynamic ways. However, true combined arms gameplay—a style that blends starship and ground-based action in the same instance—is proving difficult so far.
The reason for that difficulty? Well, it’s a side effect of Elite’s enormous scale. While on-foot players are human-sized and wheeled SRVs are roughly the size of an SUV, some of the player-owned starships are simply massive. Take the popular Anaconda hull, for instance, which, at 155 meters in length, is just a bit shorter than the United States Navy’s Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyers.
“The scales are extremely difficult to connect in a meaningful way,” Gauthier said. “It's difficult to imagine that you've got a guy on foot with a little pistol and a huge 250-meter long war machine with giant railguns [hovering overhead]. But I think in terms of fun, there's really something that we want to… tap into.”
Rest assured, however, that the upcoming 2026 expansion will not lack for scale. Frontier tells us that the game’s story-rich megaships—kilometer-long NPC vessels that have been present in the game world for years now—will become key locations for Operations. Players will even be able to explore their interiors for the first time. As of December, the team is already testing Operations inside megaships, and the feedback has been exceptional.
“We wanted to create a new space that felt quintessentially like it's in space,” Griffiths said. “You feel that there's a difference between this combat and the combat on the ground. So, for example, there's no gravity on a megaship. So when you throw a grenade, it does not bounce. It just keeps going, as an example. Which is actually pretty cool.”
“Rewards are part of it [as well],” Gauthier added. “Hopefully [those rewards are] going to be connected to some pre-existing systems in the game. We don't just want some sort of separate thread there. It needs to work with the systems we already have in place in the game [and] we're going to want to look at specific things…that you can get through Operations that maybe you cannot get somewhere else.”
You can expect to see more information on Elite Dangerous’ Operations update as 2026 progresses. Until then, you can check out everything that Elite Dangerous has to offer on Epic Games Store today!