First Encounters

Frontier: First Encounters

Frontier: First Encounters (most commonly abbreviated FFE) is the third game in the Elite Series by Frontier Developments. It builds substantially on it's immediate predecessor Frontier and is currently the last word in canonical Elite.

The game was originally released early, under pressure from the publishers Gametek, which led to an extremely buggy game. These problems were later fixed, and a fully patched version of this game (though still with some "broken" features) is available from the Elite Club website.

Features include:

• Newtonian modelling for both ships and interstellar bodies.
• Fully modelled Stars and Planets (although certain systems can still crash the game)
• Ships from both its predecesors, as well as some new ships.
• A set of journals representing the news as seen by each of the major powers. Many clues to the hard-coded missions can be found within these journals.
• An overall plotline, which can be affected by the player completing the hard-coded missions. Not being mandatory, this can be ignored by players who prefer the freeform nature of the game, or can be completed for fame, notoriety and substantial material rewards.

The overall popularity of First Encounters was greatly increased by the release of John Jordan's JJFFE, which allows First Encounters to be run natively in windows.