Crime has always been part of Elite Dangerous. You can pirate traders, smuggle illegal goods (remember the slaves?), hit settlements, rack up bounties and become that naughty commander about town. You can even hide out in the less lawful systems, but you’re there with your own kind, and there aren’t many of them.
For all that, crime has never felt like a complete profession the way mining, trading or exploration do. Frontier looks set to change that with Law & Disorder.
What is Law & Disorder?
It’s a free major update, currently pencilled in for December (dates may change). Free is a nice word in this economic climate.
Frontier is pitching it as a fresh look at the existing crime and punishment systems. They’re talking specifically about:
- Piracy and smuggling
- Bounty hunting
- Criminal visibility, down to your ship carrying a bit of notoriety
- Authority response
- PvP jurisdiction
- Anarchy systems
The key point is that Frontier doesn’t just want crime punished better. It wants crime to be worth doing.
How we got here
In the early years the system was simple. Break the law and you got fined. Commit something more serious and you got a bounty. Get scanned while smuggling and the station shot at you. It worked up to a point, but it was a system of consequences, not a system of gameplay, and it didn’t cope well with serious ganking and PvP.
Then in 2018, Beyond Chapter 1 brought one of the biggest crime overhauls the game has had:
- Hot ships: a ship used for crime gets marked
- Notoriety: a longer-lasting criminal status for repeat serious offenders
- Advanced Tactical Response
- Detention centres
- Restricted station services
Love it or hate it, it was a pain in the derrière, and that was the point. It pushed people to toe the line. Elite got very good at telling you what happened after a crime. What it never did was make the crime itself feel like a career.
Then Odyssey added on-foot gameplay, and the framework had to stretch over a much wider range of behaviour. Too often crime in Elite feels like an admin state you fall into: fine, bounty, restricted services, off to the Interstellar Factors or the detention centre. You don’t feel like a criminal mastermind. You feel like you’re doing paperwork.
Crime as a career
Frontier has said outright that it wants crime to be a valid way to earn credits. I’m in for that, but the rewards have to match the risk. Four or five million won’t cut it. If your reputation is on the line, you need 20 or 30 million.
Most of the ingredients are already in the game:
- Black markets
- Security scans
- Silent running and heat management
- Fast docking
- Builds designed around speed and low heat
Frontier seems to be making those ingredients matter more. There’s still stuff to fix, though. How can you get scanned after you’ve used the supercruise overcharge to boost out of range?
There are already ships for the job. The Corsair practically has piracy in the name, the Kestrel works too, and the Anaconda has always been a bad guy’s ship. With the Mk II on the way, that gets interesting. I’ve covered it in Everything We Know About the Anaconda Mk II and asked whether it’s Frontier’s big mistake.
If you want a feel for how smuggling and bounty hunting could play out, have a look at my Elite Dangerous Star Wars Experience.
Schrödinger’s crime
This is the bit I like most. Say you take out the last occupant of a settlement and no alarm is raised. Nobody saw you. Why are you getting penalised?
Until someone finds out, the crime has both happened and not happened. If no alarms went off and you got away clean, the galaxy doesn’t need to know. That’s one of the examples Frontier gave, and I’m there with it.
The game is moving towards a loop where crime creates exposure, exposure creates pressure and pressure forces decisions. Do you keep flying the same ship? Swap it? Change the paint job? Lie low for a while? Evasion could become a big part of Elite.
Criminal tiers and syndicates
Frontier also says Law & Disorder will make your crime level clearer, so you’ll know where you’re considered a criminal.
Now picture this. Powerplay has its factions, so why not criminal gangs? Rise through a crime syndicate from captain to lieutenant to general, and unlock tuned weapons and kit built for stealth or for taking people out. That’s my speculation, not anything Frontier has confirmed, but it would be good.
Final thoughts
A lot of this is still supposition, and we’ll know more once Frontier shares details. Still, I’m looking forward to Law & Disorder. It could open the game up a lot.
What do you think? Would you go full outlaw? Tell me in the comments on the video.
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