But the moving to the new premises, the floating on the stock exchange and the millions of copies of their games sold all seem to point to the fact that Frontier are not a small company after all!
They're medium-sized. There used to be a lot more of those around, I think, between the giants and the "two devs in a basement". A lot of my favourite 90s games were from medium-sized companies...
Are people expecting too much or are Frontier simply not delivering to an expected standard?
I don't think there's a simple answer to that.
A brief of "multiplayer Elite" is an incredibly ambitious challenge. There are good reasons why none of the big players are trying anything close to this.
- open-world space games are *really* tricky to get the gameplay right for. Even basic issues like "how do I get from A to B" require major compromises to work at all.
- making it multiplayer means a lot of things that were handwaved in the original Elites are unsatisfactory now. But changing them enough would mean that it wasn't recognisably an Elite sequel at all.
- there are a lot of areas of gameplay with somewhat contradictory requirements
- the potential scope is huge (and as we've seen with "space legs", "atmospheric landings", etc. people will demand all of it, because it's a genre where invisible walls really don't feel right)
- it's a complex game with a lot of interactions between bits and a lot of ways to do things. People complain about the bugs a lot - and some severe stuff does get through - but equally it's far too big a game to properly test everything every release.
It's also the case that back when Frontier were releasing 1.0
- they had no experience of running MMOs
- they were a smaller company with limited resources
- they therefore made some less-than-ideal decisions which are by now very challenging to unpick (and most probably won't ever be)
- they also didn't necessarily prioritise the things they should have for early development. (e.g. Squadrons should have been 1.3 not 3.3 - while Powerplay should have been in 3.3 once they'd got the hang of MMOs a bit)
Personally I think Frontier and Elite Dangerous have improved considerably since 1.0 - back then if you asked me "is Elite Dangerous a good game?" I wouldn't have been able to give a short answer ... and I wouldn't have recommended it to anyone who wasn't already a fan of the previous games. Nowadays, I'd just say "yes" (but add a couple of caveats if I didn't think the person who was asking was a sandbox fan)
So I think a lot of people do have unreasonable expectations of what a space game should be (which doesn't just affect Elite Dangerous - the same cycle of massive pre-release hype and unrealistic expectations ... followed by massive disappointment as it turned out to be a computer game after all ... happened to No Man's Sky and X4, and will happen to Star Citizen as well), how long it takes to make one, and how interactions between components can make things much harder than they seem [1]. But that doesn't mean that Frontier didn't make avoidable mistakes in design or prioritisation, that could perhaps have been avoided by bringing in more people with MMO design experience early on, that we're still seeing the effects of now. (Beyond did clean up some of it, but it's a bigger job than that)
[1] Space legs being a good example. We've had FPSes since the 80s (or 90s, if you require a decent frame rate). The actual walking around in a first-person perspective is *not* the tricky bit with combining that with a space-flight game.
