It’s amazing that 10 years after launch, Elite Dangerous is still running (online only, but has solo mode) and still has an active community. We can argue about how shallow the gameplay is, but for some of us, it ticks the right boxes. It’s just like the point made in the article - sometimes you have to use your imagination. It’s not a story game, it’s just open and you do your own things, same as it always was. And the sound design, that’s the real treat.
But it could be so much more. People were so hyped for Horizons when we learned we’d finally be getting space legs but it just fell so flat on release.
FPS isn’t big for me so I just bop around looking for bio signatures. I feel the FPS portion parallels the flight portion the same way. It is flat, it is vast, it is a grind. That’s part of why I don’t do any FPS combat. I do wish it had better immersion, more features to FPS at least on some core planets and of course giving depth to the stations (since it’s copy and past) but I do also wonder if that’d really be worth it. The game takes long enough to travel as it is, so do I really want to also have reason to walk through a place for hours? My headcanon for not having any depth on planets is because the depth would all be located on terraformed planets. We’re barred from that so it works well enough for me (with suspension of belief). But they have such smooth transitions between instances that it doesn’t seem like an integration problem, just an effort problem for a waning game.
Not sure what brings back more nostalgia in that picture to be honest. The feeling of the vastness of a game that had no right to feel so big given it’s constraints, or the GLC’s lyric “I made love to a BBC Micro”.
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