Well, FDev opened that particular can of worms themselves when they bolted a medicore FPS shooter to their game about spaceships. Elite and Starfield are certainly not the same "genre", but even steam lists Elite under "similar to games you play" when I click on Starfield. Considering that Elite consists of two, largely separate, games now (Odyssey and "Space" Elite), I think it's fair to compare the Odyssey FPS to other First-Person games with similar topics/mechanics (e.g. you can compare the "crafting" system in Odyssey to the, imo superior, crafting system in Cyberpunk or Fallout 4). That's also the part of Elite that Starfield is going to cover.
If all you do is space trucking, than Elite might still be a better choice than Starfield. Although I would probably rate the space economies of X4 (singleplaye) and, with some severe PvP caveats, EVE Online (multiplayer) vastly superior to Elite and much more fun.
Now that I write this and think about it, I believe that Elite was probably a very good game when it was released, but it hasn't aged that well. Elite tried to cover a lot of ground and game loops at the same time (Blaze your own trial), but for each individual game loop there's now a dedicated game that does it better than Elite. The Odyssey/Horizons split has certainly aggravated that issue even more. Depending how much you prefer a certain activity over the "entire package", there are now better options than Elite available. When I compare Starfield to Odyssey, I certainly know which experience I prefer.
I totally agree with you.
I was incredibly hyped when I learned about Elite's development and release, I gave up pc gaming a long time ago but bought the Xbox One, the latest back then, purely for Elite and got every newer Xbox after that, I now have the Series X and I like it a lot.
I wasn't disappointed in Elite Dangerous for a bit and loved the game, for 4000+ hours.
Then Frontier started to bolt on features to the game that never got the follow up it needed and became half baked.
When Odyssey was announced I started to get a little more hope again until they stomped that to the ground by tossing further console development out the window, I was gutted to say the least.
Now, after a great while since Odyssey's release, I'm not that disappointed anymore because Odyssey doesn't look all that great after all.
There were quite some features I would've liked to being added to Elite, interactive ship interiors for one and visible crewmembers too.
Now Starfield is coming around answering numerous features I would've loved being implemented into Elite, the above mentioned features but also things like boarding other ships and capturing them.
Starfield is a complete different game and I'm well aware not to expect a flight model the likes of Elite's for example, or full planets you can roam on seamlessly but as it seems now Starfield will provide me the features I would've loved in Elite.
Besides all that, I love a good rpg and Starfield's setting is ticking a lot of boxes for me, if it's as good as it seems at the moment.
