‘Elite: Dangerous’ Gets Very Freaking Dangerous; Game’s AI May Enslave Humanity

  Now, I’m not usually a fan of wanktastic internet memes. In this case, though, because, in Soviet Russia, games play you was too difficult to resist.  

The more discerning gamers among you will probably know of Elite: Dangerous. It’s not the biggest of names, but it’s made itself quite a big deal on the sidelines there. We’re talking about a free-roaming space adventure/combat game set in the year 3300, a No Man’s Sky sort of deal. Why are we talking about it? Because a new update to the game just dropped seven shades of complete batshit crazy on players, that’s why.

While you’re cruising about the game’s vast galaxy, you can challenge roaming NPCs. You can attack them, and they can attack you. The 2.1 Engineers update, among other things, added improvements to their AI to make them harder opponents. It also, accidentally, made them a sentient and goddamn terrifying Terminator-type threat that not even Schwarzenegger himself could deal with.

The problem was, the NPCs also had access to the newly-added weapon crafting system. Which they were crushing players’ scrotes into spam with, using impossible bugged combinations. Zac Antonaci, community manager at developer Frontier, explained:

‘It appears that the unusual weapons attacks were caused by some form of networking issue which allowed the NPC AI to merge weapon stats and abilities. Meaning that all new and never before seen (sometimes devastating) weapons were created, such as a rail gun with the fire rate of a pulse laser. These appear to have been compounded by the additional stats and abilities of the engineers weaponry.’

The 2.1 weapons have currently been removed from the game, so say the developers. But is that enough to stop these crafty bastard machines? Who the hell knows.

I, for one, welcome our new crafty bastard machine overlords.

Via Kotaku.