The thing with Frontier though is it was written for 16 bit machines with limited scope... so yes maybe game play-wise it may have been limited in some respects - but it still set a bench mark that I personally thought other games would follow. To me its realism depth should have been the foundation that all games of its genre that followed should have been built on. I guess that's where my disappointment came from - I expected the new games developers and the technologies they'd use would look at Frontier and First Encounters, pick up the realism baton, and take it from there.
When Eve Online came out in 2003 I remember going into my local games store, seeing the DVD on the shelf, reading the blurb on the back and thinking, great! This is an online version of Frontier!
How disappointed was I when I learned the galaxy was tiny, the background environment static and just canvass back drops, planets weren't real (you could even warp through them !), and the sense of adventure non-existent within a week. Granted it had a lot of other cool stuff going for it, but it just didn't have that 'wow' factor that Frontier had 10 years earlier. And this from the CCP guys who quoted Elite and Frontier as being their inspiration for developing Eve!
Braben laid the foundations for realism but no one else built on them. They went for the lowest common denominator in my book - which was all show and little substance.
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