(Hi, first post, woo!)
The thing, in this day and age, is that if developers want to make money from games they have to release to consoles. If we presume that Elite 4 could be one of the biggest games of the decade, why limit it to just PC gamers?
The question comes in, with the aforementioned "dumbing down" that could occur. This probably depends on the target audience, again, an economic concern. The wider the demographic, the more sales you get, but said wider demographic brings a knock on effect of enforced dumbing down.
If Elite 4 bears relationship to it's predecessors then the simulation aspects (newtonian physics in space) are the main area I see where lengthy tutorials having to be introduced.
I write for a magazine that covers driving simulators that are predominantly PC based, as part of this work I talk to many developers who have often detailed the challenge of pleasing "hard core" simulation enthusiasts at the same time as providing a satisfying experience for first timers. I am not sure any of them have got it right yet, and I am fairly sure the flight simulator market have given up even trying.
What this can lead to, of course, is hundreds and thousands of copies ending up in 2nd hand sections of game stores, or legal piracy, as Mr Braben puts it.
Games with the level of complexity of FE2 or FFE are rarely, if ever, produced for consoles these days. The sad reality is that the games industry is rarely interested in putting out a game that you will play for more than five minutes because this could prevent you from buying the next game they produce. Alas, direct content provision and long term development mean that such things are on the way back in.
Aspects that draw in console gamers and encourage them not to sell games back to stores, are multiplayer and quick fix action. I don't like the idea of Elite 4 going MMO, because then everything drills down to the lowest common denominator, but a mutliplayer aspect that can bring instanced dogfighting could work, making the multiplayer aspect largely independent of the single player game.
When it comes to quick fix action, well, that is down to missions. If you give a young starpilot the option to just join the Imperial navy or Federal fleet, you can have them up and running in spacecraft that are kitted out and provided by the military in minutes, running sorties, killing off baddies, escorting big goodie ships, running through a storyline and generally doing all this "completion" stuff that kids are so keen on these days. If after all this they decide to jump into a Cobra and go it alone then, well, that's jolly good and nice.
Meanwhile that could have been what us old hands are up to all along, and we can all meet up in the mutliplayer to have a fight and get on some world ranking table somewhere to find out the true ELITE, etc, etc, yada, yada...
However, if you've still got newtonian physics this could still struggle to get off the ground with the casual gamer.
I genuinely think that convergence can occur and that well rounded, deep and intelligent games can be produced across both platforms, but it takes a balance and potentially some amount of compromise on both sides of the coin. Sadly, the hard-core gamer or the casual gamer never want compromise, they want perfection.
J.
