Elite: Dangerous has made its Horizons expansion free for all players

As Frontier Developments wind up to launch the next Elite Dangerous expansion, today they rolled the first one into the base game for all to enjoy for free. The new content and features from Horizons are now available to all players, things like creating your own spaceman and landing on planets to drive spacecars. To folks who had already bought Horizons, Frontier are giving exclusive ship skins as a thank you.

Horizons brought owners almost five years of new features: landing on planets; driving cars on planets; a character creator to make your spaceman; the ability to fly ships cooperatively with your spacepals; wee fighters you can launch from big ships; a new type of crafting. Space stuff. It's a good spread of features that are good to see rolled into the base game, making Elite's core a lot livelier and varied. It'll also make the game a lot friendlier to newcomers, not nudging them to spend another £20 - especially with a second expansion coming.

If you did buy Horizons, ah you've had years with all this. But to say ta, Frontier are giving existing owners the 'Azure' paint job, which works on all 41 of the current ships. It's a purple-y cyan-ish sorta shimmery thing.

Now everyone's caught up on Horizons, Elite Dangerous: Odyssey is coming in "early 2021". New features include social hubs and exploring planets on foot with first-person shooty combat.