Telepresence and digital menus do indeed remove the requirement for all those interiors of ships and stations, however they could easily implement interiors all via drones. If they added in some kind of infiltration limpet or drone (drones might be necessary if the interiors are too small for limpets), it would still give the gameplay opportunities of exploring derelicts, looting abandoned stations, boarding capital ships and looking around on stations, while also using existing ship control mechanics (saving both Dev resources as well as adding additional spaceship gameplay into a game all about flying space ships, rather than diluting the game with a spinoff gimmick). Anyone who has ever played any of the Descent games can testify how fun it is to control ships in an indoor zero-G environment.
And you clearly haven't looked into coding for FPS games, as they require quite a lot of work to prevent players falling through floors or having to jump up staircases. Collision and physics models for a free-flight model with appropriate bouncing off surfaces are completely different to a fully controllable FPS, unless they go for the easy route and say that you navigate your ships using an EVA backpack with it's monopropellant jets - in which case you are effectively in a small ship anyway.
The usage of drones would also remove the issues surrounding pilot mortality. Ships have ejector seats (albeit only one, in clear disregard for crew safety), SLFs use telepresence, but nobody would ever risk their lives to go looking around a derelict (goodbye life, goodbye game save, hello Sidewinder!).
Descent was a game in the 90s; fun for what it was back then but we've moved on from that in terms of gameplay sophistication. To be honest what you describe would feel like a gimmick to me and a cop out. I don't just want to play a minigame of walking/floating around like I've just logged into Descent: updated graphics version. I want an integrated experience that feels like I'm always playing as my CMDR in the same game: Elite Dangerous.
Decent, actual FPS is doable it's not impossible. So what you're suggesting is that we lower the bar to lessen the dev workload. That's fine if that's your opinion but in my opinion if we're worried about how difficult this will be on the devs then why are we funding them?
Seriously, why am I supporting and funding the continued development of this game if all we're going to get is the lowest viable product every damn time for everything? Simply to save the devs the time and the effort it takes to get it right.
If that's our attitude and approach then Elite Dangerous is already a complete game. For an example of the impact of advocating the bare minimum approach:
- Landable atmospheric worlds and gas giants? Nah, too much work we already have giant empty rocks to land on. That's enough.
- Comets? Nah, too much work to code, empty space is good enough.
- Exciting stellar phenomena? Too much work.
- Scientifically accurate black holes? Too much coding
- More depth to exploration? No, we're good with the bare minimum.
- Big game hunting on planets? Whoa there! Way too much work.
- Mysterious alien ruins? Meh, just copy and paste the first base we make.
- An actual military career with consequences of earning titles? Too much work, we already have a below average meaningless grind with titles that mean nothing and have no impact. That's good enough.
- Thargoids? What are you crazy!? You know how much thought and design and coding and implementation the devs have to put into this? We already have scripted alien encounters, we don't need something that's better and more exciting.
Would you want to continue funding a game that employs this approach?
