Fiction based on science and realism is an art direction as much as medieval, or lovercraftian Fantasy.
But we have enough overblown fantasy creations in majority of games. I personally enjoy Elite as it is - more grounded in reality.
As for lacking in imagination - reality is actually more fascinating and more fantastic than any fantasy people can came up with. It's rarely cheap, though.
I would say that those who really lack imagination tend to fill everything with big monsters (that are usually bigger copies of things they know), big swords and lots of other cliches.
We have various creatures living in deep space in Elite. Plant-like organisms and non sapient creatures like Molluscs and such.
I don't mind them - I would mind gigantic dragonlike, or fishlike beings that hunt spaceships for some reason.
Yup I agree, I mean if some critter did evolve into a giant nebula prowling monster, I'd expect it to feed on something like gas clouds and be evolved to do that by some form of chemical process and radiation basking, but not evolved to eat random space ships. Of course if it was a proto-molecule type energy vampire it might be attracted to your drive plume or powerplant. Still it most likely wouldn't look like a giant dragon with big nasty teeth! Then again if such a 'monster' did exist, it might be part of some ecosystem that did include some type of predator, or more of it's own species that did/could cannibalize, so maybe something would reflexively try to eat a ship, or attach itself to your ship causing hull, or PP, or drive damage until it was removed by overheating or a SLF to pew pew it.
But the current POIs like floating crystals, space mushrooms and wierd little plants on planets, of a handful of variations, that mostly vary only by color across vast distances in space gets old pretty quick. It was a cool addition at the time but 'seen one, you've seen em' all' is pretty much how I feel about them now.
I do like the electrical storms, they're pretty cool to fly through and they do actually damage your ship. It would be interesting if there was something highly valuable to be mined from inside them, requiring you to take damage/risk to obtain it, so you'd need a specialized ship to do it. Scanner, mining lasers or sample collectors, repair limpets, collector limpets, afmu, cargo space obviously. This could give FC a role as deep space mining platform for this rare, valuable commodity. Return your FC back to the bubble to sell, or enlist space truckers to haul it back to the bubble for you, negotiate some buy/sell prices, idk, but I can see some potential there.
