This has been bugging me for a while - I've heard nothing but amazing things about the previous elite games. Here are my questions!
-how would you compare the prequels to ED?
-what are some of the major gameplay/atmosphere/control differences?
-should I take some time to play the old games?
Opinions sought!
They were definitely very good at the time, and I played all of them quite extensively (FE2 the least, since FFE was released not very long after I got FE2). It's worth giving them all a go for a little bit just to see how various bits of them have been inherited, adapted, or extended for Elite Dangerous.
Gameplay. They're both easier and harder than Elite Dangerous. Easier, because you can save and reload, and because it takes much less time to equip your ship to have every military-grade upgrade it will fit. Harder, because the NPCs are much more of a threat until you've got a lot of upgrades, and it's virtually impossible to escape a battle once it's started in most circumstances (you're also more likely to be dropped into additional battles before you can return to base to repair and rearm). In the original Elite, you basically can't get enough upgrades to walkover a battle without using practised piloting skills; in FE2/FFE the biggest ships can fit enough shields and weapons that anything big enough to threaten them is an easy target. In either, you jump into an Anarchy system you really know about it - tens of ships to fight off before you reach the station.
Gameplay is generally less varied in the prequels in terms of opportunities - Elite Dangerous has a wider variety of missions (though FFE had some more interesting military missions available related to the planetary landing capability, and I preferred the FE2/FFE way of implementing assassination missions, as well). Elite Dangerous also has a much more detailed market in terms of number of distinct economic types and range of trade goods available (though as with its predecessors, 95% of the trade goods are only useful for the <1% of the game you don't have enough money to buy Palladium) and more missions tied into the trade goods. Elite Dangerous is also the only one with exploration extended beyond "you can go there and look out the window" - though, admittedly "you can press the scan button and get paid for it" is not a huge extension; it's mainly the greater variety of pretty stuff to look at.
Atmosphere Obviously Elite Dangerous has much more modern graphics and sound, but I think despite the excellent work done in those areas the game probably has one of the least satisfactory overall atmospheres of the four (better than FE2, but not better than Elite or FFE)
I think Elite in some respects actually did by far the best job here: every planet has a one-sentence description of the notable features. They're a little repetitive and not all unique, and the light-hearted style may not to be everyone's tastes - but they're much more interesting than the majority of FE2/FFE's "generic Federal democracy" descriptions, or ED's "almost all inhabited systems have no distinguishing features" style. Unfortunately none of the interesting things the descriptions hint at could actually be represented on the hardware of the time - but they did go on to inspire various pieces of fiction. Obviously with the extremely limited graphics and sound a lot of this was being filled in by the player's imagination - but it gave a nice bunch of starting points for that.
FE2/FFE had a much more "serious" atmosphere than Elite, especially with FFE's political "plot". FE2 I found very bland atmospherically, but FFE had the very good feature of having five separate news feeds you could subscribe to (one Imperial, one Federal, one "Frontier" one with Alliance leanings, a science research specialist and a trashy gossip mag) with different and distinctive editorial stances, writing styles, and so on, and you could read about various incidents (some of which you may have been personally involved in) from these different perspectives.
Another major atmospheric difference for me is
scale. An Elite galaxy is 256 systems in a rectangle about 100 LY apart in opposite corners. It takes about 20 jumps to get from one corner to the opposite one, if you take the most direct route, because your jump range is "only" 7 LY. At pretty much every stop on that route you will need to go in system to refuel (or head for the sun to scoop, though that's not really any quicker) because you only have a small 7 LY fuel tank. With combat along the way it's a good amount of play time needed. As a result the galaxies feel a considerable size. (Though, all systems are populated, so exploration basically doesn't exist)
In FE2/FFE human space is around 100LY in radius, centred on Sol. Jump ranges are increased to 10-20LY (more, for an optimised ship) and all but the smallest ships can carry fuel for multiple jumps. It takes a week of in-game time to do a full range jump (which helps with things like the news feeds only having weekly issues!) - "overtaking" a ship in hyperspace is a key tactic - and you need to service your ship once a year, so exploring is strongly range limited outside of human space. (In FFE you can get access to a couple of longer-range ships, but while they're ridiculously fast within human space they're still fairly range limited outside it)
Obviously in Elite Dangerous with a range-optimised ship you can cross from one edge of human space to the other in under ten minutes ... and reach the galactic core in ten hours.
FE2 and especially FFE had much more variety in ships and stations than ED currently has - though with 1.3 the ship variety in ED is starting to feel good, and it looks like CQC might be getting us some more station designs coming in as a happy side-effect?
Personally I think "atmosphere" - that unquantifiable thing! - is the one thing which Elite Dangerous really doesn't do well compared with the other games. Everything else is a big improvement - or at least pretty similar - but if I was setting priorities I'd hire 3 or 4 good prose writers with "system description text" and "multi-feed Galnet" being the priorities. I'd also cut out - to cries of horror and massive complaints from much of the rest of the forum, so be glad I'm not actually setting the priorities - a lot of the overt "this is a game you're playing, this is the in-game consequence" stuff: no influence/reputation effect bars on mission completion, no visibility of CCs or objective progress in PowerPlay, no precise descriptions of how civil wars are decided in the Galnet feed, and so on. (Have them visible in alpha/beta builds or documented out of game so that testers can confirm things are working as expected, of course)
Control: Elite was basic "vector in space" flight model with no yaw at all (which is part of the heritage for ED's slow yaw) and a "skip space" in-system hyperdrive for fast travel (in most versions). FE2/FFE had a newtonian-ish control model (your ship getting lighter or heavier as you changed loadout or used fuel was not modelled, but speeds were) with yaw, pitch and roll as well as forward and backward thrust (no lateral thrusters). FE2/FFE's flight model was a pain in the neck until it clicked, and then it was really far too easy because the NPCs didn't know how to use it to do strafing attacks so you'd very rapidly become the best pilot ever.
The control models had impacts on the system sizes and scales: Elite used a cartoon scale for the systems - you'd drop out of hyperspace about five minutes from the station, and could either fly there in real time or use the "skip space" drive to make hops forward much more quickly if there was no-one about. This gave a very fluid experience with opportunities for more ships to drop in very easily on an existing engagement. FE2/FFE used a realistic system scale with time acceleration (mostly realistic: Alpha Centauri was a mere 900ish AU to Proxima due to engine limitations) which meant that once a fight had started no-one else was ever going to intervene - they'd literally be hours away.
Elite Dangerous supercruise to an extent tries to combine the best features of both - realistic system scale with the ability to interact with systems in short-ish timescales and have both players and NPCs drop-in on an existing situation. It's getting better at it.
), but FE2 and FFE are both great games and worthy of playing, even today. Mind you, the vector graphics are seriously dated, and FFE had a ton of bugs, but they're still classics in space sims 
