Open a bottle of space champagne, the aliens have been destroyed. At least that’s what the interstellar pilots of Elite Dangerous are celebrating in the galaxy-sized multiplayer space simulator. Earlier this month, the Thargoid threat finally emerged landed in the solar systemputting Earth itself at risk for the first time, not to mention other human planets and colonies. This meant that players were invited to drop everything and head home to fight one last great stand against the ultimate, desperate and unsafe alien attacker: the Thargoid Titan known as “Cocijo”. Don’t worry, they caught him.
“The war is over,” says Frontier. “We have defeated the enemy at our door and now it is time to rebuild.” Here footage of the Titan finally being torn to piecescourtesy of player Ricardo, who recorded the latest event while sitting on his ship and watching ET’s final moments. The Titans are the largest alien ship in the game, huge capital ships that are certainly capable of eating a planet or two. When first discovered hiding in vortex clouds after a game update, they turned out to be terrifying and raucous. “Like an orchestra of alien tubes rinsing mouthwash,” Katharine said.
Asplosion occurs just two weeks after the ships appeared in SolDecember 5. The Titans are fought by bombarding them until the kingdom comes. This means that the Earth defenders had to load their ships with some chic sci-fi equipment. They needed “corrosive absorbers” to negate the effects of the fuselage being devoured by the cloud of nasty space gas given off by the alien. They had to install an “impulse neutralizer” to annihilate the furious waves of painful gravity pumped out by the aliens. And they needed a series of rockets to rain down on the monster when they finally managed to get close, aiming (like all good trench runs) at the thermal vents in the alien’s hull. All this while dodging Thargoid interceptor ships, dodging mines in a hideous, corrosive cloud, and escaping the blast of blue energy the Titan unleashes when he feels most vulnerable.
Tell me what you like about dehydrated space transport simulator, it is perfect sci-fi fantasy. Few video games can result in video guides like satisfyingly dambusters like this. Veterans may also notice in this video that the pilot is sitting there with his engine idling and slightly toasty. That’s because Commanders advised to keep the temperature low if they wanted to watch the fireworks – so they wouldn’t be spotted by any of Titan’s last security fighters. The successful bombing netted players millions of credits in exchange for a well-beaten alien. And now, with the Titan in pieces, even combat-averse pilots can go out and search the wreckage for several hundred thousand credits worth of Thargoid components.
Frontier developers also celebrated the victory Steam postcalling it the “epilogue” of the Thargoid Saga. But they didn’t say what would happen next with the aliens. Does this mean we won’t see any more Titans in the galaxy? Or does this simply mean that the threat to Earth is over? It appears that the smaller Thargoid ships are still around, and we haven’t been told yet whether they plan to remove them or leave them.
The Thargoids had a fun history in the game when you put it all together. The possibility of alien life beyond bacteria first emerged in early 2016, when players found strange barnacles on the surface of planets. Players soon began to discover ghostly distress signals, pointing to further dangers beyond the known cosmos. “Oh gods, this is impossible,” read one unfortunate message. “These things are a myth… This noise…” Soon, the players found the shattered remains of extraterrestrials. The pilots then began to be pulled out of warp by massive Thargoid scout ships, which disabled their ships, scanned them with sinister intent, and fled.
Eventually the aliens attacked. Nearly two years after the first signs of aggressive alien life appeared, an update introduced combat encounters with Thargoids to the simulator. They have been present in one form or another since then, significantly increasing their attacks on human space in 2022. Now this seems to put an end to aliens as a great evil.
Elite Dangerous itself is ten years venerable this year, which really makes me curious to see what comes next in the show. Perhaps other games have already had sequels, but I’m not sure what a sequel could accomplish that more expansions and ongoing support couldn’t do. I guess we’ll see!
