Elite Dangerous to get fleet carriers and new premium currency
Mobile bases owned by players
Warframe wasn't the only game to have a fan event this weekend. July 5th-7th was also Lavecon, Elite Dangerous's smaller fan gathering. To coincide, Frontier revealed details of their coming September and December updates. The former is introducing a new premium currency and a revised start for new players, while a trailer showed the latter's fleet carrier ships for the first time.
Let's do fleet carriers first, because the trailer is really just a brief fly-by teaser showing one of them:
Fleet carriers are intended to be mobile bases that can be purchased and docked upon by groups of players, and used for re-stocking themselves with fuel and space guns. They can jump between sectors at lightspeed like any other ship, but there will be a larger than normal resource cost for doing so owing to their size.
While that's all that was shown of December's update, there was more detail about what's to come in September. The revised start for new players is designed to teach people how to do all the basics, including piloting ships, navigating, and engaging in combat. I have played Elite Dangerous for about 20 hours but it was long enough ago that I don't remember much about what its very first hour was like.
The same update will also introduce a new currency to the PC version of the game, called Arx. The virtual currency is already present in the console versions, where it was previously called Frontier Points. The currency can be earned in-game or bought with real money, and it's used to buy paint jobs for your ships, ship kits which modify elements of your craft's design, and bobbleheads. Frontier have also put out an Arx FAQ, which answers a handful of questions including the most obvious: "No, we currently have no plans to change Elite Dangerous over to a free-to-play model."
There are more details of these and other elements of the September update, including more screenshots, at the Elite Dangerous forum.