Years. Almost two decades. All those times, starting in the late nineties, when I would search on Altavista for interviews to David Braben, looking for any news related to Frontier, any speculation, any clue, no matter how flimsy, on a sequel to Frontier: First Encounters. All those years during which the very concept of an Elite IV was listed on Wikipedia as "vaporware", about as likely to ever manifest itself as the fabled "Thargoid ship in the center of the galaxy", and yet I kept hoping, I kept checking for updates and news, not every day mind you, and not every week either, perhaps not even every month, but that tiny glimmer of hope was always alive, and every now and then, when I found myself in a quiet moment sitting at the computer with nothing much to do (and oh, how few and far between did those precious moments become as I moved from Secondary School to University and eventually to a full time job and a wife), I would perform again that ancient ritual, going through fan sites, sieving through pages I'd already read at least a dozen times, only to find nothing and go back to playing FE2 or FFE, even in the years before DosBox, when you had to really get creative to work around that pesky "insufficient memory" problem.
Honestly, I didn't think anything in the world could make me reconsider on playing the next chapter of the gaming saga I fell in love with when I was barely nine years old, a game I had been anticipating for practically half of the time I've been alive, but you, dear Frontier Developments, have managed to do just that. This is part of the reason I no longer play games much: sure, wife and work take up most of my time, but even when I do manage to carve a two-hour niche for a little me-time, I usually end up doing other stuff. Why? Because the gaming industry has largely turned its back to people like me, people who like to *own* a game when they spend their hard earned cash for it, people who seek an immersive experience that at no point involves the presence of "ZazzyDawg98" and his friends, people who don't care about "achievements" or "collectibles", people who actually have fun breaking the game with cheats after they've beaten it (yeah, sue me), people who expect a game to stay the way it is the moment they bought it and not change over time because a group of players the existence of whom you will never ever be aware of (unless you spend about as much time arguing on the forums as you do playing) complained that "drop rate is too low/high!", "farming is too easy/hard!", "my class is too disadvantaged!", "weapon X is too overpowered!", while you liked everything just the way it was. People who enjoy gaming because it offers them the possibility to detach from the real world and all its troubles for a few hours, and who, therefore, strongly resent the real world intruding into their gaming experience.
Will I ask for a refund? I don't know yet. What I do know is that, had I not purchased the game yet, had I not been waiting for it for all those years, I would rather buy another copy of Skyrim (for the record, I already own four: PC, PS3, XBox, Anthology) than spend even a single cent over a game that forces me to be online, especially if this requirement had been divulged less than a month before its release, and after over a year in which we had been reassured that there would be an offline mode. I don't like to make decisions when I am angry. I will cool down, I will think things through, then I will decide. But honestly Mr Braben, I thought you were better than that. You let a lot of people down, hard.
