Elite: Dangerous drops offline mode

Upcoming sprawling space-sim Elite: Dangerous will ship without an offline mode with developers claiming the game would not have enough features unless it is played online.

The announcement comes a month before the game is due for its official release on December 16 and is likely to upset some fans as an offline mode was originally promised in the game’s initial Kickstarter pitch.

’A fully offline experience would be unacceptably limited and static compared to the dynamic, ever unfolding experience we are delivering,’ said Frontier Developments chief executive David Braben.

This does not mean that the game can not be played solo, it is just that a large proportion of Elite: Dangerous exists on the server side, with a lot of the way the galaxy works being handled by Frontier Developments' servers as opposed to the players machines.

The game's executive producer Michael Brookes responded to complaints on the forums by explaining that due to the size of the data sets and processes, these would not translate well to an offline mode without a significant compromise to gameplay.

Elite: Dangerous has been in its beta phase since December 2013 and the developers announced its official launch date earlier this month.

The game boasts a 1:1 scale open world galaxy based around the Milky Way and developers have touted the fact that if you’re in your spaceship and you can see a distant star, that is not just part of a sky box and it is possible to navigate to that individual star specifically.