Elite has always been about flying spaceships. You can throw about whatever examples and videos you like of even DBOBE himself expressing aspirations about walking around and dinosaur hunting. The Elite games we have now and that have been released up to now are all cockpit based spaceflight games in the same way that, say Gran Tourismo is about driving cars.
You're absolutely right in terms of the games' history, but I think it's a little dismissive to ignore David Braben's input here especially for those few remaining folk who were around for the Kickstarter. Certainly much of what he spoke about remains as pie-in-the-sky as it was in 2012, but you have to remember that for a while the only place
ED existed in any form at all was in Braben's headcanon and a handful of cool but primitive technical demonstration videos. It may have been naive to believe we would eventually see everything he envisioned for his game, but as a general map to a potential future it was sound enough. And while I'm sure there were people even back then wondering why there were non-spaceship things being planned for a spaceship game, they would not have been many in number. On the whole the new ideas were seen as a positive vision, and they certainly drove pledges at the time.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge in the meantime, certainly, and there is definitely an argument to be had for
ED sticking to what it does better than any similar game, rather than trying to emulate aspects of different genres. It's not an argument that I can embrace, because despite not actually liking much of what's been added over the years (I never do PowerPlay or AX, for instance) I do appreciate when the developers try to expand the canvas, even if not everything lands.
To me, where
ED finds itself now is similar -- albeit on a much smaller scale -- to where the
Star Trek franchise has ended up. So many new things have been added over the decades, some subtle, some radical, some almost inevitably in contradiction with what came before, that it's no longer possible for everyone to get on board with everything that flies under the
Star Trek banner. And while some fans do enjoy all elements new and old, and others are happy to cherry-pick or ignore various aspects, still others get to a point where they feel that their past relationship with the franchise has been retrospectively ruined forever. There's nothing anyone on the creative side can really do about that; it just becomes impossible to please everyone.
No game of this size and scope is going to have all the individual parts as the same quality as other games (that do only those individual parts). People can rightly highlight the game's flaws, but if you want a space game with this level of depth, scope and options then ED is the only game in town, and until someone comes along and spends a long time making a better alternative, it will continue to be so.
Precisely. Like
Star Trek,
ED is less a genre of its own and more an expandable framework on which to hang material from other genres. Back in my dim and distant role-playing days we often used
Traveller as our framework, because even though it had its own rich lore it also allowed influences from the high-concept politics of
Dune to the uberviolent cityscapes of
RoboCop to influence the content of campaigns. It's a lot harder to do that with a videogame than with a pen-and-paper RPG, so kudos must go to the developers of
ED for giving it a shot.
Sure,
Odyssey is unlikely to provide the
best FPS experience any more than PowerPlay offers the best strategy game or the SRV gives the most realistic driving simulation. But the fact that we can do any, all, or none of those things from within an already tremendous spaceships game is something quite special.
As I've said elsewhere, I'm not expecting to get much at all out of the run-and-gun elements of
Odyssey because they just don't appeal to me in this setting, although it would be nice if they do draw me in more than I'm expecting. But the overall expansion of the framework can only really be a good thing, even if what I personally gain from this iteration is minimal and mostly aesthetic.
Aside: as I was reminiscing about the SF influences on my
Traveller games back in the day, a thought occurred as to one reason I may have been disappointed by the
Odyssey mission demo. It's possible it's just too
bright. I understand why FD will have done this, to highlight the atmospheric effects on the new planets, but it made the rendered colony look like one of the desert maps from
Counterstrike. Or, if I'm being more generous, maybe Freetown from
The Mandalorian. Now I'm wondering how much better it would look in twilight, or darkness. And if the new landable planets can also have the ground-level "fog" effects we sometimes see on non-atmospheric moons, the aesthetic you could have there is essentially Hadley's Hope from
Aliens.
And
now I'm intrigued.