"Aged a lot". Game got 2 large overhauls. First with Horizons, then with Odyssey. Frontier themselves call the current Odyssey 4.0, which means they consider some other large overhaul in the middle of the way. Do you even remember what the game was like on launch? Do you even remember how the game was on Horizons? Do you even know how the engine dealt with light and shadows fidelity over the course of each large milestone?
ED has come a long way indeed. It is a lot better than it used to be at launch. However, after all those overhauls it continues to trail behind the success of other leading space games. The disastrous launch of Odyssey, the overall negative reviews and disappointing sales say enough.
Do you REALLY think the game got stuck into what it was 10 years ago on launch?
No, I never said it got stuck 10 years ago. When ED launched it was one of the few big space games on the market. ED and Star Citizen reignited interest in the overlooked genre. The relatively little competition made it easier for ED to thrive. Horizons, the Beyond updates, Odyssey improved and expanded various core gameplay features. ED has unique features such as the Stellar Forge and the Milky Way scale, but there are alternative good space games worth playing nowadays. The game design choices made during Odyssey and Horizons sealed ED"s fate of a low active player base with a gradual decline. After 10 years, various features need to be reworked.
Not only that, going through such overhaul ended up cutting a part of the playerbase behind (console players) because Frontier couldn't keep 4.0 up to the standards that consoles could run. Engine upgrade is complicated, and Frontier expected things to run smoother than they did. Ody launch was so rough that the playerbase hasn't even bothered to update their reviews on Steam, or are still complaining about ship interiors that Frontier never promised.
Yes, there are still unfulfilled Kickstarter promises. The current version of the Cobra Engine that powers ED delivers last-gen graphics. Most of the player base migrated to other space games.
Please, tell me if these other "current gen space sims and space themed games" are in the room with us. Because the only other game like Elite, where spaceship based travel, fighting and exploration on a massive MMO-like scale with on-foot features exist, is Star Citizen, and that one is pulling a Fallout 76 by being developed on an engine not made for multiplayer and is still stumbling on how to make the whole thing more acceptable for players.
Star Citizen continues to be an unfinished alpha tech demo. However, SC's financial performance and popularity has been a lot better than ED ever did. CIG (devs of SC) feel the competition of the newcomer Starfield. SF is singleplayer only, but it ticks many of the boxes that space game aficionados always wanted. Modders will add space sim features like EVA, ship travel inside star systems and manually land on planets for free with the Creation Kit. There are hundreds of free mods that improve the vanilla graphics and gameplay as well. It's only a matter of time until Bethesda releases a Starfield MMO. A SF MMO launch should be better if they learned from the mistakes of Fallout 76.
Frontier maintains Elite via using a peer-based system on a proprietary engine in order to not be so burdened on their server side, which allows Elite to not have subscription (that Eve has) or some aggressive kind of microtransactions. The only microtransaction we got is cosmetics, ARX yields no gameplay advantage whatsoever. Development ain't easy, cheap and trivial as you might think.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) is lower cost, and it works with a small amount of players in the same instance. It doesn't reach a true MMO scale with hundreds or thousands of players in the same instance though. EVE can be played for free without a subscription too. EVE is a different type of space game, but EVE generates much more revenue than ED per year. A (much) bigger budget means they can afford more dedicated developers to frequently update the gameplay, graphics and features. EVE is one of the few space games that offers a deep sandbox, territory control, macro-scale building and destruction, diverse factions, and a player driven economy with big corporations (guilds). That's why its still doing well 2 decades after Eve launched in 2003.
Just remember how great the design of the cockpit is, with its UI embeded in it, and how great the ship models themselves are (Frontier is indeed dropping the ball on not creating damage models for the other large ships, only Anaconda has got this love).
ED's ships still look decent, yet they've all noticeably aged. It's a far cry from current gen graphics standards. The digital UI works, but its only orange (except with mods) and every ship has the same UI (boring imo). Only the Anaconda has a damage model which hasn't been updated in years. By comparison the devs of Eve Online updated every ship model multiple times with improved details and they added a bunch of new ships.
And try the VR if you haven't, that may help you remember how great things are when you see them from a new perspective (but not on foot, that VR is gonna take a while).
VR is a key feature that made ED appealing to players. ED was a leader in the VR gaming market. Somehow Fdev didn't bother to implement VR for Odyssey's first person gameplay. I suspect they ran out of money and cut VR for the undercooked and buggy launch.
"Learn." You haven't learned anything with Elite, be its design, its history, its development, and you want to tell FRONTIER, who developed and nurtured a game OVER A DECADE, how to learn.
You haven't explained anything new. I've been supporting and playing ED since the game launched. Arrogance is thinking Fdev can't learn anything from other space themed games which are far more successful. I'm a fan of Elite and want the best for this franchise. If I didn't care then I wouldn't be here. I still believe Fdev can make a great sequel that is a premier space game worthy of the Elite brand.
You treat Elite as a one-and-done game, and not as the continuos development game that it is (and one of the few that are still going strong after A DECADE), but it's FRONTIER who has to "learn".
Fdev seems to be unwilling to revitalize ED like Hello Games did with No Man's Sky. Odyssey failed in that regard. ED has a relatively small active player base, small revenue to sustain it, a small dev team, outdated graphics, unappealing grindy and steep gameplay. Maybe you love all those things, but other space games do it better hence more players play those games instead. I don't believe in fairy tales of a miracle update, because many aspects require refurbishment.
On this level it ain't ignorance or shallow observation skills, it's just childish, disigineous, petty complaint.
Your observation of ED needs just a few more updates is shallow and lacks foresight. ED had its best years long ago in terms of active player base, popularity, financial performance. ED had a good run. I have more faith in Fdev making a great sequel than trying to keep a zombie alive with additional half-baked expansions that fall short of expectations.