Yes they sure have. On paper, in a lawyerly way, they have managed to deliver exactly what they need to deliver in order to have technically sort of kind of mostly kept the promises they made when they were pitching and hyping up and pre-selling Horizons. Nobody can say that they didn't more or less, pretty much, mostly do the things that they said they would do. Nobody can claim that we didn't get something kind of vaguely resembling a looting and crafting system in 2.1. It's verifiably true that 2.2 provided the ability to launch a single remote-controlled drone out of certain ships. That's "ship-launched fighters" and no-one can say that it's not. And 2.3 definitely for sure 100% adds multicrew, because if you can look to your right and see another person sitting in the chair next to you, and if that person has the ability to control even one single thing on your ship, then it's multicrew and there's nothing else to discuss. Frontier did nothing wrong. They didn't lie. They didn't break any promises, none that mattered anyway.
But that's the best thing I can say about how Horizons has shaped up. And again - Frontier didn't do anything wrong. *I* was the stupid one for getting excited and imagining a game where we launch sidewinders out of our Anacondas, where 4 people can really get on the same ship and participate in dynamic, important, and well developed crew duties which when done correctly multiply the capability of the ship. It's my own dumb fault for hearing words like "salvage" or "looting and crafting," and then imagining a scenario where we pull apart wrecked ships, and have some kind of workshop system or an added layer of outfitting depth akin to what we see for ships, but this time at the scale of the modules themselves. It's all my falult for listening to vague promises and looking at concept art and then imagining, speculating, and hoping for the best version of what those ideas could be like. It was super-naive of me to hope and believe that Frontier, as visionaries and professional games devlopers, might even come up with something *better* than what I could imagine. All my fault. I was dumb.
I'm not as dumb anymore, though, because i've seen how things turned out. So when Frontier or David Braben or whoever makes a vague allusion to how cool something at some point in the future might be, I don't care. It doesn't register. It's as though they had said nothing at all. And when Frontier makes a promise or says that they're working on feature X or tries to sell something that they haven't actually made yet, I don't get excited for it. I don't imagine or speculate or wonder or hope. I anticipate. And what i anticipate is the most barebones, minimal implementation of the idea that they can possibly get away with. I don't imagine the best version of the idea or hope for an implementation that surprises me by exceeding my hopes. I imagine something that would in some way technically mostly kind of fulfill a majority of the concrete obligations that they said they would fulfill, and absolutely nothing more. And maybe even a little less if they think they can get away with it.
And they still manage to surprise me. Even in my lowest imagination, I could never have predicted that 2.3 would rely on *holograms*, or that it would launch without SRV functionality. But that's the thing. I'm not a game designer. A devoted team of game designers can create something which confounds my highest *or* lowest expectations.
Frontier have done nothing wrong. What they have done is reveal themselves to be the kind of company you shouldn't get excited about. And when people express skepticism or disintrerest about something like this PAX article, It's not cynical or snarky it's exactly what they should be doing.
I'm still onboard with Frontier and with Elite. I'm all theirs if they want me. But I'm not going to praise them for things they haven't done, and I'm not going to convince myself that something I don't like is good, based on the premise that it lays the groundwork for something better, or is a "first step" towards something I really want, or any other speculative nonsense. They get my applause and my money when they make things that I actually like. I don't think that's snarky or cynical I think it's fair.
