Maybe it's time that Fdev remembers that Elite is not supposed to be a "space COMBAT simulator", but a "life in space" simulator!
But it's not, though, is it? It arguably should've been. I certainly expected it to be, but maybe that was me not paying enough attention.
I generally see it this way: what I'd hoped
Elite IV would be was a development on, and advancement from,
Frontier and
First Encounters. Realistic (if non-relativistic) flight mechanics. Detailed procedural planetary surfaces with mountains, forests, deserts, oceans and sprawling cities, as well as little remote settlements; atmospheric landings, traffic control, autopilot, proper instrumentation and HUD symbology; ship maintenance and repair mechanics; minigames for mining, scanning, hacking; detailed and varied missions and NPC interactions based on multiple procedural algorithms/random multi-characteristic lookup tables/whatever. The ability to fully customise your ship and make your own engineering modifications... A full trading market on every world and at every station; the ability to hire pilots and set them up making trade runs or mining expeditions in your other ships while you fly yours. To have a home station with customisable interiors and item storage. A personal inventory and the ability to leave your ship and walk around; to go to fancy offices, posh hotels and seedy bars to meet NPCs and chase deals; to be able to set up mining machines to gather materials so you can come back later to collect them.
Oh, and of course, it'd be single-player offline, to allow for modding. Maybe have what Maxis called "massively single-player" when they maintained a central server for
Spore: a repository for missions and ship designs and other player-created content that could be shared across the player base, but without forcing them all into a single not-quite-MMO universe, with all the sacrifices that entailed.
I can imagine a game like that, with a bit of imagination behind it, kicking the likes of
No Man's Sky into a cocked hat.
It all sounds like a lot of stuff. It
is a lot of stuff. Just another over-entitled gamer expecting stuff she was never promised and probably wouldn't want to pay for(*). But really, there's none of this stuff that isn't featured in other games already. I'd rather have seen these things added imperfectly and had an incremental improvement on
First Encounters than what
Elite IV turned out to be - namely
Elite 1.5: an admittedly very pretty, but very limited, remake of the original
Elite.
(* I would. I really would.)