I suppose jumping has alays been part of Elite (7LY is I remember right in the first version), so the broken game design has been there since the 80s, I guess that is the reason it is was it is.
I'd disagree that it was originally 'broken'. I'm excluding 1984's
Elite because that was basically just testing the water as to whether an open-ended space game would make any headway with the gamers of the time. Part of my issue with ED is that it takes too much of its mechanics from a game that fit into a few kilobytes on a ZX Spectrum.
But for me at least, the FE2/FFE model for interstellar travel was interesting and innovative: you have a ship of a certain mass, and a drive with a certain maximum jump range. To jump that maximum range always took seven days, because of physical laws of some kind. Shorter jumps took a proportionally smaller fraction of that seven-day maximum.
This meant that a certain amount of calculation was necessary, if you had a courier mission requiring you to arrive by a certain date and time, you had to factor in not only the jump time, in hours or days - maybe even weeks if you're doing multiple jumps - but also the real-time cost of accelerating and decelerating once you arrive in the target system: with sublight engines capable of developing several G of thrust, and even with no practical top speed (as there wouldn't be in space, yes I'm still bitter about it), it still took time to cross the massive distance to the planet or station you were looking for.
And that's before accounting for the mass of any cargo you're carrying, which will impact the jump time and range and fuel cost.
No, the FE2/FFE system wasn't broken. It meant having to manage your travels, rather than just point and click and arrive pretty much instantaneously.
What brought that about was, obviously, the addition (the crowbarred and uncalled-for addition, in my view) of multiplayer.
Elite games had previously never been multiplayer experiences, but I presume FDev wanted a slice of that tasty and moist Live Services™ cake - hence the early abandonment of the true offline mode and the need for us all to be permanently connected. But multiplayer meant that everyone had to be in time sync, and that meant there could be no 'Stardreamer' time acceleration as we passed hours or days in witch-space. So travel had to become instant - or at least as instant as the loading process could handle. So Supercruise now gets us across systems in a matter of real-time minutes; and the 'Frame-Shift Drive' was invented which, in lore, magically bypasses the constraints of the old witch-drives and meant that the Galaxy became functionally tiny. Hence the original First Great Expedition being a bit of a damp squib since Sagittarius A* is a lot easier to get to than was originally assumed (disclaimer: I've never been myself but that's largely down to being bored witless by the prospect).
But to have gone to Sag A* in
Frontier or
First Encounters? Did anyone actually
do that? Even using the early triangulation jump-range bug? How long did
that take?
The Galaxy was
so much bigger then.
It's a subjective thing, as these things often are. But for my money, travel in the
Elite franchise wasn't broken until multiplayer came along and broke it.
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PS: Just for the record, I think 'frame-shift drive' is an awesome name for the system. Whoever came up with that deserves a bun at least. It's the
mechanic I think has negatively impacted the game, not the name.
) (Explorer's Anchorage, while having a lot of ganking in recent history, was imho an outlier, which could see an increase again for example)
