Would Elite Dangerous have been been better as an offline, single player game?
Yes.
Has Elite as an MMO provided a better experience than it could have if it hadn't made this evolution?
No.
But I could probably be a bit more helpful than that...
Pretty obviously, you ask a question like this, then for the most part what you'll get back is responses based on how people feel about the game, rather than based on dispassionate empirical analysis of it.
My feeling is that
Elite 1984 was a single-player game. So was
Frontier. So was
First Encounters. There was nothing about the lore, setting or nature of any of these games that lends itself well to multiplayer, and this is especially the case for the latter two:
Elite 84 was a huge game for its time, but FE2 and FFE were dizzyingly so. There simply wasn't a need to put any two players in the same instance of a connected world -- at least more than would have been possible with a local, direct peer-to-peer connection if they really, really insisted they had to fly together. The galaxy is just too big. We already have people complaining that there isn't enough player density for 'proper' mass multiplayer action; yet in implementing a multiplayer environment, we've sacrificed much that might have helped ED really take off.
(And I'll put my usual disclaimer in here and say that I
love this game and it's my automatic go-to whenever I have free computer time. I generally say that in most respects ED is a
magnificent remake of the original
Elite. What it isn't, in my eyes, is the
Elite 4 I'd hoped would one day appear.)
I could list a number of gameplay elements I think have suffered from the decision to make ED a pseudo-MMO. A recent thread talked about the ease of getting around the galaxy - as demonstrated by the speed with which the first ships reached Sagittarius A* once the Bubble was opened up. Yet in
Frontier and First Encounters, such a journey would have been far more challenging, since every maximum-distance witch-jump would have taken a week of game time: these two games had an ingenious hyperspace model, which meant that every witch-drive (
Frontier's FSD) covered its maximum distance in seven days, with lesser jumps proportionally faster.
That's one gameplay example: it can't be used in ED because time has to be synced for everyone -- so short of making players wait a real-time week to jump their FSD range, the only workaround was to have FSD jumps take a few seconds, no matter how far. As a result, the galaxy, no matter its massive number of stars and planets, is relatively tiny and easy to get around.
Aside from gameplay, I think ED lost a lot from the fact that, as a multiplayer, always-on game, it shut out what I'm sure would have been a keen modding community. You've only to look at the peripheral tools and cosmetic modifications people have created: all the trading websites, the ship-fitting tools, the OCR readers to work around the more glaring functional gaps in the game itself. Now imagine what these people could have done if they'd been let loose on a game that was entirely contained within its own client software on the player's own machine. And I know it's been suggested that a home machine couldn't possibly handle the background simulation on its own -- although it's also been suggested that a single-player mode was seriously considered, so I'm not sure I'm inclined to accept that. Someone, at some point, clearly thought it could be done.
But imagine an ED with a proper, detailed trade feature modded in, or libraries of custom-built mission types for download from modding sites; extra ship models; adjusted flight dynamics; more detailed ship controls, an improved Air Traffic Control system at space stations and settlements; a whole swathe of astronomical features and phenomena; exploration or mining sub-games that actually demanded an element of skill... These are only the few things I can think of given my specific areas of interest: I'm sure combat pilots could come up with countless more. And if anyone doubts that the players would or could come up with this sort of thing, you've only to look at how
Oolite has been expanded by its own community -- or, if not that, then consider Microsoft's
Flight Simulator, with every new release fleshed out and expanded almost beyond recognition by enthusiastic fans. Anyone remember
Falcon 4.0, the old military flight sim? If so, do you remember the 'Superpatch', which essentially rewrote the entire game from the ground up, and made a highly detailed and dynamic flight simulation vastly more of both?
This was, in my view, one of the biggest losses to ED, and is a direct result of the decision to crowbar multiplayer into the game.
I also think the game's suffered from "doesn't-quite-know-what-it-wants-to-be" syndrome. The desire to give everyone the chance to "Play Your Way" is admirable, but isn't fully supported by a massively-multiplayer environment, because there will always be players who want to stop you Playing Your Way, and make your Play Their Way instead. Ah, but, there's an opportunity to use Solo mode -- but the interaction of the modes with each other has been a constant point of contention on these forums since the game's inception. To say that Solo, Private Group and Open sit uncomfortably together is a massive understatement -- and I'm not going to cover the reasons the various factions have given for their views on this, because there have been many thousands of posts on the subject already.
If, though, ED had had a single-player mode, or been a single-player game, I'm reasonably sure that there wouldn't have been half the difficulty over this.
So yes, I think ED would have benefitted greatly from being designed as a single-player game. It wouldn't have been contentious in the first instance, because it would have been perfectly consistent with every previous Elite game -- and they always had a multiplayer
feel to them anyway. I remember as a kid swapping space stories with my friends who also played, as we explored the eight galaxies of
Elite. And I'll admit a lot of the stories we told each other were exaggerated bull, but that was sort of the point: we had a lot of fun doing it, and we all felt a little like adventurous space pilots, discovering the galaxies on our own, in our own way.
