If FD has been working hard on space legs, boarding actions and inhabited worlds this entire time, and have some significant progress to show us by late 2018/early 2019? Then I'm fine with that. I seriously doubt it's the case though, considering the low-quality and delays we've seen with Horizons content, the underwhelming Thargoid "content" and the quality of what we've gotten so far from Beyond. I really have trouble believing that with what we've seen from FD so far that Elite is being adequately developed.
I didn't say they were working
hard on these things this entire time. In fact, I said that it wasn't their
main focus.
Beyond is currently their main focus right now, but IMO there is sufficient evidence that they've had
some people working on the foundation technologies required to support these features once they're ready to go into full production. No matter how I may question certain aspects of the game's design, Frontier doesn't seem to be putting the cart before the horse.
As for why they haven't show what the current state of these features are? Given how every single word out of Frontier's proverbial mouth tends to get treated as a legal contract by some members of this community, I really can't blame them for keeping their cards close to their chest, rather than laying them on the table for all to see.
My issue goes far deeper than whether Elite has the proper architecture to support adequate player interactions, which is something that FD can't really "fix" at this stage. My issue here is that FD doesn't seem to properly understand their own game or rely on the community to provide useful feedback. They seem to "know" how they "want" the game to be played and this often has no relation to how the game is currently played or even how it has been designed to operate. The issue with the C&P rework wasn't just that it was misguided and ineffective, it was based on an understanding of the game that was fundamentally disconnected from the experiences described by players on these forums. Much like when FD arbitrarily decided to nerf gimbals, only to find that was utterly misguided due to the implications of the flight model and combat system the game has had since launch. FD quite honestly does not seem to understand their own game much of the time and that is a problem when trying to actually improve core gameplay features.
My take's a bit different from yours. Frontier has repeatedly said they're designing the game
they want to play, but I get the overall impression that the game
they want to play would be considered far too niche for a broad player base. So they dial things back after feedback. It certainly doesn't help that the project's lead was moved to another game a year ago. From my point of view, Sandro's priorities seem to be very different from Michael's, and this has given the game a bit of a split personality, IMO.
I would suggest here, as I have in other threads, that FD is certainly capable of producing good content for Elite when adequately supported with the resources they need, but these resources have not been provided during much of Elite's development due to FD's focus on other products. As a result I'm far more critical of the underlying reasons for why Elite isn't being properly developed than I am about FD's ability to make a good game, although admittedly I am not impressed by the way they have been using what limited resources they do have available, i.e., the Engineering rework and C&P rework in beyond were unnecessarily complicated and in many ways created more new problems than they "solved".
Again, my take is a bit different than yours. I've been working for two years, trying to put together an inventory team for my store that functions
well. Having the right
number of people is almost as important as having the
right people. As bizarre as it sounds, having a
larger team, even if they're all brilliant workers, doesn't always translate to getting more work done. Work gets done twice by accident, people either get in each others way or fail to support each other sufficiently, productivity inevitably drops, and of course little old me gets spread thinner. And this is retail work!
As I understand it, software and game development has this effect even worse. Simply throwing
money (and warm bodies) at a problem doesn't make things go faster, but instead slows things down and wastes money. No matter what we may think of how Frontier
uses the resources they have available, David Braben has certainly demonstrated that he heads up a successful game development and publishing company, which knows how to bring successful games to market. As such, I suspect that the development team for Elite: Dangerous is the size it needs to be, which gives the company the most bang for its buck.
