The very first generation of sims began around the same time as Elite - so you had Aviator, the first 8-bit flight sim i was aware of, from Geoff Crammond, and then for example Revs, the very first racing sim in the modern vein, also from Geoff Crammond..
These were true 'sims' in that the 'game' element was in learning to control the vehicle against the natural physical forces being applied to it as you move through the world - so keeping your airspeed up, your landing speed down etc., or sensing the rubber-squealing limits of lateral traction as you cling to the edges of the 80's Silverstone GP layout..
So when i wasn't playing Elite, i was playing these games, or else if i wanted an arcade blast then i'd load a shoot-em up or scroller, or maybe a puzzle game or text adventure etc..
So the 'sim' category of gaming became well established in the same years we were playing Elite..
..and within that context, classic Elite was a space adventure game with space-sim aspirations, in that it was a fully 3D environment that gave the player 6DoF, and thus 3D spatial awareness of your heading and direction relative to other bodies, of what nearby ships were doing, and in the heat of battle especially this spatial awareness was incredibly immersive, and felt compellingly 'simmy'.
You were also very much aware however that it was taxing every last transistor in your micro, and the framerate could drop to 1 FPS as enemy hulls popped off around you in a tight furball..
And much was plainly 'missing' insofar as its belonging was implied by the core defining game concept (seamless 6DoF with no walls or limits), even though it was clearly not practical to include; so for example if you fly too close to a planet, you just explode without any planetary-specific effects.
And there were just two types of planet - death stars and basket balls. Both did admiral jobs in conveying shape and spin, but they were obviously too small and too coarsely detailed for the game concept that was implied, as opposed to what it was actually feasible to include.
Elite's 2 & 3 blew the lid off those constraints, because Braben arguably only needed a few more kb's to add them, whereas the Amiga had 64x the available memory..
Thus the Frontier: Elite engine simply pulled out all the stops - there were no more limits for all practical intents and purposes, so planets had terrain, craters, land bases, cities, rivers and bridges and sprawling suburbs whether open-air or domed, atmospheres had 'density' and 'viscosity' in terms of drag and hull heating relative to speed, thermodynamics modelling in terms of damage relative to heating - basic implementations, but they were there. All basic 'consistency' checkboxes, covered..
So yes, absolutely: Elite now became the proper sim it was born to be, what it had always wanted, and promised, to fulfill. That realism was no longer 'implied' or 'alluded to' - it was jut all there. No limits, go where you want, do what you want, how you want, when you want.
And it totally worked, in a magical and exhilerating way that no game before or since has been able to touch. Frontier: Elite belongs in the Science Museum. It should have borne a virtual space race that would've lead to a modern Elite that pwned half the internet..
The result was that 'the game'
was the simulation. Frontier: Elite basically opened up a portal to another universe, a near-infinite playground of naturalistic, emergent thrills limited only by the imagination..
Note here for example, i've clocked incoming attackers at range, and lead them down to the surface of a nearby planet, choosing a battleground to my advantage:
clickme
Note the yellow "hull temp" bar on the console as the ship first tucks into the tenuous atmosphere, the complete freedom to thrust and rotate in any plane or axis, skimming the surface while panning around.. likewise, the enemy ships getting it wrong and exploding as they enter atmosphere too fast, smoking debris falling back down under gravity..
This, surely, is what Braben meant when describing the game's 'sense of immediacy' - it's fluid, intuitively responsive, a quality that comes into its own in Elite's classic furballs:
clickme
And OMG - gravity! Just that one, beautiful simple element - a constant, uniform acceleration towards bodies as a function of their mass and distance! So simple to implement as to be virtually free, yet a whole transformative world of gaming in its own right!
The art of falling.. falling,
with style. Wild elipticals, or expertly-low altitudes with near-zero corrections:
clickme
Aerobraking against a brown dwarf, or slinghotting around a neutron star. How about a figure-8 slingshot between
two neutron stars, or between a neutron star and a blue giant? Go find 'em and try it!
It's the promise of that first, classic Elite, finally realised. No fakesies:
clickme
That's sim-gaming, no question, right? It's messing about on the water.. stretching your wings, a Sunday drive, or sitting on a bench in San Andreas watching the world go by - the game is the sim. You can do anything, but don't have to. VR.
For a taste of what a modern Elite might offer, look no further than Pioneer:
clcikme
It's a pity Pioneer lacks Elite's intense fixed-beams CQB - imagine a good furball in those environments!
But in conclusion, ED is, by design, the modern 'anti-elite' - the literal antithesis of everything Elite stands for: you're not allowed full ship control, you're not really managing conservation of momentum or kinetic energy or gravity in a naturalistic way, it's all canned FX and arcade set-pieces for a MMP skinnerbox cash-cow, only faithful to the first-gen game in alluding to and implying the possibilities it can't actually deliver, all of Frontier: Elite's breakthoughs abandonded but for the dissociated backdrop of astronomical realism..
The result, for this old commander, is that when i point an ED ship at a planet and open the throttles, it lurches forwards, groaning, then the thrusters shut down and cease responding to inputs; the planet should immediately start growing to fill the screen, yet nothing happens and i'm just stuck there unable to move..
So you gotta enable the no-clipping mo- i mean, "warp drive", with a transition, with a countdown, with a loading frenzy and a change in environment and then more of these interrupting transitions removing more and more freedom of movement - orbital cruise, glide mode, critical attack angle - all of which belong in scare quotes of course - the gameplay limitations are slave to its inner gears, springs and pulleys and they're simply incapable of rendering the 'Elite' gaming environment, so can only paint allusions and homages to it.
I see ED fans as naive, not realising they could actually be doing all this stuff for real, instead of the pretense and artifice of realism that is all ED can fulfill.
I'll be generous, and say that ED is faithful to classic Elite
only if ED2 is basically Frontier: Elite 4, finally making good on the promise of its foreunner. It remains a complete affront to the Frontier: Elite ethos though - which found the game in the simulation, rather than just tacking disparate game elements onto a spacey backdrop, selling out the brand & concept for a revenue stream..
TL;DR - too damn right Elite's a sim. The mother all.
But ED ain't Elite..
Pioneer is, plainly, more Elite-ish than ED, yet it too falls short of that marque, with no fixed-beam CQB. But it's still a sim, in the Elite tradition.
ED is a game
about that sim, referencing it in many ways, yet whilst replicating almost nothing of its actual gameplay; the allure is there, but possibilites never realised have only so much enduring appeal.. and going through the motions of pretense in ED when i could be playing the real deal with slightly older graphics is no compromise..
Edited as this ghastly forum s/w breaks all your yt links
