First Encounters
| Frontier: First Encounters | |
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Cover art for Frontier: First Encounters
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| Developer(s) | Frontier Developments |
| Publisher(s) | GameTek, Konami |
| Platform(s) | DOS, but with jjffe or FFED3D which also contains additional fixes, it can be played on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X |
| Release | April 1995 |
| Genre(s) | Space trading and combat simulator |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
Frontier: First Encounters, also referred to as FFE or Elite III, is a space trading and combat simulator video game developed by Frontier Developments and published by GameTek in 1995 for DOS. The player pilots a spaceship through a universe pursuing trading, combat and other missions.
Frontier: First Encounters had a number of firsts to its name. The detailed modelling of the geography of the planets was impressive given the relative lack of power of the PCs it would have been played on, typically Intel 386 machines. First Encounters was the first game to use procedural texturing to generate the vegetation, snow and other features on the planet surfaces. Mountain ranges, cliffs and alien landscapes and visual effects all contributed to the atmosphere of the game, and the coloured lighting from the redder stars gave some planets an eerie look.
This third game in the Elite series, it is the direct sequel to Frontier: Elite II and was followed by Elite: Dangerous in 2014.
First Encounters carried over the gameplay features from its immediate predecessor Frontier: Elite II, in that the game is a combination of trading, fighting, espionage, bombing and a variety of other military activities; the combat ratings were also carried over from the previous games. Like Elite II, First Encounters features realistic Newtonian physics, the ability to seamlessly land on 1:1 scale planets in authentic 1:1 scale star systems, and rival factions for which the player can perform missions, gaining or losing standing accordingly. The game's graphics were an improvement on the previous game, introducing Gouraud shading and more extensive use of texture mapping. As well as employing the same open-ended gameplay of its predecessors, First Encounters also features a storyline which takes the player through a series of events starting with the “Wiccan Ware Race” and missions concerning an alien race called the Thargoids. Some of these missions can only be completed under specific circumstances, or with specific combat ratings. The missions take place between 3250 (the start-date of the game) and approximately 3255.
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