Some of the noises you can hear in Hyperspace can be unnerving, to say the least; especially when you take into account the fact that the Thargoids are definitely in the game.
A lot of the game's nightmare fuel revolves around the mysterious Unknown Artefact and its ilk.
Some military convoys you can find in Unidentified Signal Sources have unique NPC Chatter mentioning weird things occurring with their ships, such as power fluctuations or making their crews feel uneasy. And if you manage to get their cargo transports to drop their cargo, an Unknown Artefact pops out.
It was believed that they were responsible for the disease known as the CerberusPlague, since they tended to appear in systems where the plague had shown up. It's especially plausible if you know what happened to the Thargoids in Frontier: First Encounters: they nearly went extinct due to Humans infecting them with a nasty virus with a near-perfect fatality rate.
Carrying one in your cargo bay is dangerous since they tend to damage your ship's modules, including your Frame-Shift Drive and Life Support.
They're beginning to congregate around the Pleiades for unknown reasons, which has a lot of players worried since a Space Station is also going there.
And worst of all? While Unknown Artefacts are worth a good chunk of money on the Black Market, selling them causes power failures and system shorts on Space Stations eerily similar to those your ship probably went through getting them to human space.
It is heavily speculated that the Unknown Artefacts are partly to blame for the disappearances of the starships Starliner Antares and Spaceship One, the latter of the two being a Federal Battleship that was being used by the President of the Federation at the time - President Halsey.
Shortly after Horizons launched, a few players noted that the Unknown Artefacts were pointing towards the Merope system in the Pleiades. Investigation of the system proved fruitless until someone investigated the third moon of Merope's fifth planet. After some prowling about in an otherwise nondescript canyon in his SRV, he discovered an organic structure of most undeniably alien origin, now known as a Barnacle. While the alien Meta-Alloys it's provided have proven useful in restoring functionality to several Space Stations that had been affected by the Unknown Artefacts, it's unknown whether or not the Thargoids - or whomever put the Barnacle there - are going to react so kindly to humankind's exploitation of it. The Barnacle also scared The Federation enough that they actually put a Farragut-class Battleship above it and effectively blockaded it.
This is the Unknown Artefact's cousin, the Unknown Probe; another object of alien origin and of the same origin as the Unknown Artefact. The sounds it makes are even freakier than the Artefact's due to them sounding like something straight from Alien Hell, it points towards a system near Barnard's Loop and the Orion Molecular Cloud, and if you put it and an Unknown Artefact together, it releases an EMPthat seriously messes with your HUD. The sounds it's making have a significance similar to the sounds that Portal's radios make, in that there's hidden information stored in them. While Portal's radios contained images with plenty of Foreshadowing for later events in the second game, the Unknown Probe's sounds only contain one image,◊ which looks like some sort of navigational computer input for an unknown star system.
This interview with Lord Braben at Gamescom 2016 shows his usual energetic and fun-loving self, but then the feed glitchesand cuts to a tense camera pan over a desolate stellar battlefield that would not look out of place in an Alien film. Speaking of Alien, the very last seconds of the pan also give us our first glimpse of an actual Thargoid spaceship.
Frontier also released an ARG that could only be caught by pausing the alien feed at the right moment, just as it cut back to Lord Braben. It started with a binary code that, when translated, said, "To find us, look for a bounty hunter. To find more clues you'll need pre-logistics support in a system with one star, two belts, three rings and enough radiation to turn you green. The hunt begins the 28th [of August]." This wound up referring to one of the Pre-Logistics stations The Federation built between human space and the Pleiades nebula to support convoys headed to Obsidian Orbital in Maia; at the date the aforementioned Bounty Hunter, as well a Trader and an Explorer arrived at the station and gave players riddles and clues that eventually led to players coming face-to-face with the first Thargoid ship ever seen ingame. Even though it had been crashed at its location for a long time and had been abandoned for what seemed like years, it scared The Empire enough that they decided to station a Majestic-class Interdictor above the crash site.
Unidentified Signal Sources can sometimes lead to unpleasant surprises if you go in unprepared (no Thargoids, though). You never know if you'll come across the site of a battle or a group of Pirates in Anacondas waiting to jump you.
The launch trailer for Elite: Dangerous - Horizons has a moment where some poor schmuck in an SRV runs across a field of rocky outcroppings with objects emanating a Sickly Green Glow... then finding himself coming face-to-face with an alien structure - the now-famous Barnacle of Merope 5c.
There are some fan works that can be truly freaky in nature, such as this fan-made video wherein a player in an Adder runs across a distress signal while in Hyperspace before jumping into a system where some truly bizarre noise can be heard to give the impression that he ran across the Thargoids (while never actually encountering them!); or this◊ gif which features a rather pleasant surprise when you look back in your ship in the Oculus Rift.
In a non-alien related subject, the depiction of black holes and dwarf stars within Dangerous. When jumping in to most systems, you're greeted by the warmth and brightness of a star, while a system with one of these things is, in stark contrast, dark and uninviting. YMMV, naturally.
There are also Light Is Not Good moments when entering a system with a white dwarf or neutron star, which are very small and emit stark white light, but they still radiate a significant amount of heat in a radius much larger than their actual size, and unless you start pulling away immediately after you enter the system, you'll get yanked out of supercruise and have to endure a lot of heat damage escaping the gravity well.
The first contact for players with a Thargoid Interceptor is absolutely terrifying. You can be traveling along in a lonely section of space, then suddenly the hyperspace conduit becomes unstable as the ship drops out unexpectedly and a "FRAME SHIFT DRIVE MALFUNCTION" error flashes on the screen then ship power shuts off. Engines, weapons, stabilization...all dead. The only thing still functional is life support. So you drift along, powerless to do anything as a chilling musical note begins to play, putting you on edge. You then see it come into view from above your ship, passing right overhead. A strange petal shaped vessel, silently gliding along and unlike anything previously seen. It turns to face you, and it looks almost organic and haunting. It suddenly emits a loud almost mechanical sound and the petals shift outwards, increasing its size as a blinding yellow light shoots from it and envelops your ship. After a few tense seconds the light vanishes and the petals shift back to their original position. The unknown ship emits another lower sound and begins moving away as your ship power comes back online. You turn towards it as soon as you can and chase after it, wondering who or what this mysterious entity is but it quickly emits a pulse and opens a tear in spacetime, disappearing through it.
It got worse. Current reports from beta players have reported them investigating signal sources, only to find hulled squadrons of Federal Corvettes with glowing green damage scars on the remains. At which point they're briefly disabled, as the Thargoids (or Unknowns) pass by and escape.
It got even worse. On mid-December 3303, three large space stations have been attacked and nearly reduced to burning ruins. Worse yet, there are still survivors on board, but flying into the docking area will start overheating the player's ship nearly instantly. And all signs are pointing this is just the beginning...
And now, we're given an attacked Federal◊ Battleship◊, with a communications beacon transmitting a message in phonetics. Two words: Thargoid Return. The entire thing is unnerving.
At the start of 3304, the Thargoids started moving closer and closer to the Core Systems (aka the Bubble). With the release of Beyond in early March, they've entered it. For the moment, they've limited their attacks to AEGIS facilities, but that's little comfort. Many players are torn between fighting, trying to find a peaceful solution, or just abandoning the Bubble for Colonia or one of the other deep space outposts many thousands of lightyears from the Thargoids.
As of May 1st, 3304, anyone who turns on the Damaged or Repairing Stations icons in the Galaxy map will get a very stark representation of just how quickly the Thargoids are ramping up their war effort.
In the aftermath of the Battle of Paresa in January 3305, the Empire had captured the head of the rogue isolation group Nova Imperium, Imperator Kaeso Mordanticus was taken before Emperor Arissa Lavigny-Duval and the entire Senate. Instead of a show trial, the Emperor had decided on jumping straight to an execution, with Denton Patreus and the Imperial Guard casually executing not just Mordanticus, but also Senators who expressed sympathy for his movement, and then going so far as to start gunning down Imperial citizens with suspected sympathy for Nova Imperium. Tellingly, the Alliance and the Federation, usually the first to criticize the Empire's policies, didn't make any official statements on the situation. The one major player in the galaxy who did so was Aisling Duval, and only months later and after confirming that Mordanticus' protege, Hadrian Duval really was her long-lost bastard cousin via DNA testing.
This event which was only told through GalNet news got a number of Imperial-aligned players to question whether or not to continue supporting the Empire. This after nearly 5 years of Imperial players being a very loud voice in the community. For many it was a What You Are in the Dark moment, as most felt that Mordanticus was a sexist, racist jerk since he opposed Arissa for being a woman, and opposed working with the Federation and the Alliance against the Thargoids while they're invading the bubble, but that Arissa wasn't much better if she was so willing to not only go for summary executions on live broadcast, but also start gunning down citizens for not being 100% loyal. Everybody Has Standards, indeed.
The derelict Generation Ships, massive space arks launched from Earth hundreds of years ago with thousands of people aboard, now left adrift in deep space or in orbit of uninhabited planets, empty and lifeless. So far 16 have been found, and many of them have audio logs that can be accessed when you find the wrecks, detailing what happened to the ships' crews. The reasons for their abandonment range from the mundane (mechanical failure, the crews jumping ship to reach a habitable world, disease outbreaks, internal conflict among the crew) to stories straight out of a Cosmic Horror Story. A few examples stand out:
The Odysseus, which elected a ruling council to govern the ship. The council quickly became harsh and draconian, cancelling all future elections and becoming the sole authority aboard the ship. Then one day, the council decided the Odysseus' original mission to colonize a habitable planet was too risky, so no one was allowed to leave the ship, ever. Anyone caught trying, or even talking about leaving, was executed. Then, many years later, a disease spread among the crew. The infected, or anyone who was suspected of being infected, were rounded up and locked in quarantine in an isolated area of the ship. The council then ordered those decks opened to space, flushing all the sick crewmembers into the void. However, they apparently weren't thorough enough, because 20 years later the virus returned, more virulent and deadly than before. Afraid they'd be killed like the previous generation, the infected crew members mutinied against the council, triggering a civil war that killed most of the crew. Those that survived the uprising eventually succumbed to the virus, and the last log is from one of those survivors, advising any future space explorers to avoid the Odysseus, and above all to not board the ship under any circumstances, in case the deadly pathogen remains...
The Artemis logs start with a series of murders among the crew, where the bodies bore claw and bite marks. The blame fell on a dog that someone smuggled aboard before the ship left Earth, though the investigator notes the dog didn't seem violent or rabid when it was caught and euthanized. The rest of the logs are recorded by the real killer, a Serial Killer hiding among the crew. The man describes himself as a wolf among a flock of sheep, whose purpose is to cull the herd, while ranting about how Humans Are Bastards who don't deserve to spread themselves among the galaxy. He continues killing the crew off one by one, causing more and more paranoia as to who the real murderer is. Some of the crew even offer up their friends and neighbours as "sacrifices" to the mysterious murderer, hoping they'll be spared. The last log entry is recorded in the Artemis' engine room, where the killer has locked himself in as he smashes the reactor core with a wrench, determined to pull a Taking You with Me that apparently succeeded in killing everyone aboard.
The Demeter suffered a major malfunction, leaving it crippled in space with limited food supplies. Stranded, the crew fractured into four warring "tribes", each blaming the others for "sabotaging" the ship. As the years went on and the ship's systems continued to deteriorate, society aboard the Demeter regressed from rival gangs to Medieval cults, then finally cannibalistic savages calling themselves "the Last Eaters" who worshipped "The Engine" and "The Stars" as divine beings, before eventually succumbing to starvation.
The Phobos reached an apparently habitable world to settle, only to learn that they had landed on a Death World full of toxic plant life and hostile creatures. Their settlements were quickly overrun by the creatures, with only one group of survivors managing to escape the planet on a shuttle and return to the orbiting Phobos, only to learn too late that one of the hostile life forms had stowed away. The creature killed all the survivors as the ship took off into deep space.
The creepiest Ghost Ship by far is the Thetis. The audio logs are recorded by the ship's comms officer, who notes that members of the crew are suddenly turning violently insane and murdering each other en masse. She traces the source of the Space Madness to a mysterious transmission the ship picked up while passing an uninhabited planet. Anyone who hears it becomes a homicidal maniac...and she's listened to it. Her mental state quickly deteriorates, first she slits the throat of the other officer in the comms room, then she decides to go out into the corridors and "silence" the rest of the crew. The last audio log ends with the original transmission itself: radio static with a raspy whisper saying "kill them all..."
Dying in VR is a trip, to say the least. Watching your ship systems shut down one by one and helplessly hearing the creaking of metal and crunch of glass as the ship decompresses is bad enough, but the (still in first person VR) sudden zoom out to your exploding ship, an afterthought in normal gameplay, feels very much like your soul leaving your body and witnessing your own death. It’s disorienting and upsetting in equal parts.
Capital Ships arriving in a conflict zone on the opposing side is one of the most demoralizing sequences the game has to offer for midgame players. Your ships A.I. dryly comments “Warning: Capital Class signature detected” before space is suddenly torn apart with the sound of rumbling and rending metal. Out of the wound a kilometer long capital ship emerges trailing clouds and lightning as it drags a bit of Witchspace with it. An awe inspiring sight when it’s on your team, fear inducing when on the receiving end.
showcasing the Artefact in all its glory. It's obvious Foreshadowing for the Thargoids, and the sounds it makes are absolutely bizarre.
