While, of course, it's absolutely subjective if you like or not like this fake-light for flair in the game, the whole thing just doesn't fit the game. Fake colouration fits No Man's Sky, which is light hearted and colourful by default, and set in a fantasy space world.
If you ever played Frontier or First Encounters, you know those games have been pretty hardcore space sims and probably didn't play much at all or loved them to bits. I am the latter type. Elite, es a sequel is a bit more gamey but has, of course, better visuals. There are things that weren't even possible back then, which went into ED, and there were compromises for the sake of gameplay. Many of these compromises have been made for combat balance and to attract people who like cool dogfighting in space. Speed limits, range restrictions for weapons and so on. I still would love to point and melt down things with my Plasma accelerator like I did in First encounters... Didn't even need to aim.... But that's no fun for most people, thus: compromises.
Looking away from combat, the other compromises mostly concern multiplayer features. There's telepresence for example and that arcade gunner view and so on.
Now let's take a look at the stellar forge and the game world. Are there compromises? Yes. And the more you know about scientific space stuff, the more you will spot. Scott Manley for example mentioned that the hot spots in rings doesn't make sense because the ring doesn't orbit around the planet at a uniform speed and so on. It's a game. I get that. I guess so does everybody else (hopefully).
But Elite is THAT ONE space game taking pride in its realistic features. In my original post I listed a few of those. The Milky Way we see in the background is our game world. It's an image created by that absolutely awesome stellar forge that created our galaxy based on astronomic data. That's so high on the science nerd scale, it's unbeatable when it comes to gaming/science crossovers. And that's exactly why Elite is so special to many people. It's the last real space sim. A lot handwavium involved, but still...
Latest patch introduced sounds taken from astronomical data when targetting planets in the FSS and the devs mentioned that and were proud of it. Adam told that story three times I think, where a player recognized a gas giant just because of the sound.
I love it, other players might just shrug and don't care if it's a "peep peep crrrr" sound or something taken from astronomical data.
In the latest Discovery Scanner stream the devs mentioned that they always try to be as close to realism as possible. They actually tested their asteroid models in orbit because that way they could make a reality check because they know how things look in real Earth orbit... And so on...
The devs take pride in the realism of this game, and that's actually why I love Elite so much. I can't believe this tinting thing doesn't bother them.
