Cover art for Frontier: First Encounters

Screenshot from PC version of Frontier: First Encounters (Elite 3)

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First Encounters

First Encounters is a video game released in 1995. It was the sequel to Frontier (1993), which itself was a sequel to the seminal 1984 game Elite. The game was created by David Braben’s company, Frontier Developments. more...

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Many fans of the game refer to it by the shortened title of FFE.

Like Frontier, First Encounters features realistic Newtonian physics and the ability to land on planets. It has graphics that are an improvement over Frontier (the main difference being Gouraud shading) and, as well as employing the same open-ended gameplay of its predecessors, it also features a storyline concerning an alien race called the Thargoids.

Due to a conflict between Braben and the game’s publishers Gametek, the game was shipped early, and as a result was riddled with bugs, such as an auto pilot that crashed. Although it sold well many reviewers were quite contemptuous of the game, seeing it as only half-finished. A patch was eventually released that addressed the vast majority of the bugs, rendering the game at last fully playable and into a “finished”, and some would argue only-then-releaseable, form.

Its early release caused a lawsuit between Braben and Gametek, which was eventually settled out of court in 1999.

Like the other two Elite games, it has been re-released as shareware and can be freely downloaded from the Elite Club site.

Being a DOS game, First Encounters has difficulty running with Windows XP or Windows 2000 machines, although the official site does offer solutions to get the game running.A recreated game engine called JJFFE allows playing the game on Linux, Windows and DOS.

Gameplay

First Encounters plays much like its immediate predecessor Frontier: the game is a combination of trading, fighting and a variety of other activities—spying, bombing and a variety of other military activities; the combat ratings were also carried over from the previous games.

In addition to these now-established tenets of the Elite series, FFE added a new element—journals that report on happenings within the known universe. These were introduced to increase the player’s sense of immersion within the game-world, and to that end the player can even be mentioned within the journals under certain circumstances.

More important than the addition of journals is the introduction of hand-coded missions that added a storyline to further increase the player’s sense of immersion within the Elite universe. Unlike the various military missions which are randomly generated, these were specifically programmed by Frontier Developments and take the player through a linear (but nonetheless interesting) series of events that starts with the “Wiccan Ware Race” and culminates in “Thargoid Missions” trilogy. Some of these missions can only be completed under specific circumstances, or with specific combat ratings. These missions take place between 3250 (the start-date of the game) and approximately 3255.