For 11 years, players have had the opportunity to explore the universe in Elite Dangerous. Now the developers have revealed how much players have seen, and the number is shockingly low.
What game are we talking about? The space MMO Elite Dangerous has been around since 2014 and mixes the genres of simulation with MMO and FPS aspects. Our Milky Way serves as the game world, which can be explored in a version specifically simulated for the game as a persistent world.
Players have been doing this for over a decade now and still have to settle for a sobering statistic.
Nearly 11 years and hardly any progress
How is exploration going? The developers of Elite Dangerous have released new statistics. In them, they reveal how little players have explored in the nearly 11 years since the release.
Players have been to 261,063,785 star systems, which is only about 0.0653% of the entire game world, considering the vast universe, as the developers explain on Facebook. The game world is simply absurdly large, which is why a rise to 0.1% is also not in sight anytime soon.
At the end of 2024, the developers provided a similar update on exploring their game world. At that time, some of our readers complained that while the world is large, there isn’t much exciting to discover. This criticism is also reflected now in the comments on Facebook. Fans complain about ice and rock planets that are good for nothing but resources.
What’s currently happening in the space MMO? The developers of Elite Dangerous released a roadmap in February 2025 outlining plans for the year on EliteDangerous.com. While in 2024 they tried to bring new content into the game with Powerplay 2.0, 2025 is focused more on spaceships.
Here there were several new examples for players to fly through space and explore new systems. New gameplay features were also on the agenda for 2025. With the “Vanguards” feature, the developers aimed to enhance group gameplay and make it easier for new players to join.
Elite Dangerous plans to continue delivering updates for several more years and improve the game further. In one of the major updates from 2025, players will be able to colonize their own planets and go from spaceship captain to space tyrant: This other sci-fi MMORPG besides Star Citizen brings a big update, enjoy your own planets, costs €6 on Steam
