Thanks, I'll re-watch those. I remember him talking about a persistent evolving galaxy but I thought that meant.... something else....
Edit: just watched
Dev diary 2 - I think that is the relevant one, He talks about player actions and events being significant, a rich evolving galaxy, something exciting that has not been done before.
This actually encourages me for the long term. I just have to get around seeing PP and the whole current appearance of the game direction as going in a direction that is not compatible with this vision. I need to view it as a small stepping stone that happens to appeal to a known mass market with familiar gameplay tropes while it is at a simple stage of development.
I'm curious as to what mass market and familiar gameplay tropes you're talking about? We still don't have a PVP arena. We still can't talk to NPCs, let alone hire AI wingmen. Hell, it took a
post-release patch, and no small one at that, to introduce something as mundane as the ability for players to form parties, and communicate easily via general area chat. In terms of mass market appeal, PP is... really
really not a mainstream money-maker; I'd go so far as to say that its introduction of
yet more numbers will be something of a turn-off to your average gamer. God knows it turned
me off, and I'd been playing Elite since release.
Whatever you "need to view it as", so be it, and I truly commend your optimism. But we're 8 months post release now, with a long list of post-Elite space sim titles having already set new (actually very old) standards, and No Man's Sky looming on the horizon like a big playerbase-stealing storm.
Given that they spent so much time and effort on PP, and given that they shall now be spending so much time and effort
fixing PP and perhaps even reworking it... and given that many of the biggest ideas (like planetary landing) are so frequently requested before anything else, at what point do the excuses begin to falter? In four months, we will reach the 1 year mark. That's not such a long time. When we reach that mark, will we honestly be able to say that the game's current state reflects a full year of post-release development?
Maybe so. Maybe we'll all be proven wrong, and the unbelievers will hang their heads in shame, before cooing in delight at the Elite: Dangerous they were always hoping for.
Maybe.
