It's been a while since I've posted on this forum. I moved from PC to Xbox purely for convenience and enjoy the odd weekend blast on ED. It seems Passenger Missions are stacked heavily now and removes the point of trading and mission runs now if you're looking for a lucrative career.
NPCs have never gotten any more intelligent in the 2 years I've been playing. Considering you can build a bot on the Facebook Messenger framework for pennies I'd have thought anyone with decent AI/ Machine Learning skills would be able to cobble together a really engaging interface to banter with NPCs, rather than the 'Roll a 6' messaging responses you get still today. I cringe at the Wedding Barge stuff for example.
To echo a point made above, this has always been a galactic physics simulation first, game second. That's Braben's passion, and the Elite we wanted or knew from way back when in 1984 is lost in there.
If you trawl Twitter, the majority of chat is about exploration and picture postcards from the edge. It's the same with No Man's Sky now, there's no game to be had in there (sadly, I got suckered in royally with the phantom promises) and all you hear about are the pretty vistas.
I didn't see the point in Engineers so stayed clear of it. Never bothered with mining because that mechanic was broken for a long time. So I did my trading runs and missions.
Played with PowerPlay but didn't see any discernible benefit and left the factions to it after a jaunt across 5,000ly to take a break from trading.
I've landed on planets, and their bases, but couldn't find the impulse to take the SRV out and scout featureless planets.
Currently I'm going about my passenger routes but you quickly have to become wise to some of the minor details that become big deals ("Secretive passengers" for example end up in an insurance claim if you don't avoid being scanned!)
All this being said, there's a lot still wrong with the game that Frontier ignore or are unwilling to fix because the core mechanic would break, but I keep playing casually in bursts, I play in Solo too since a few of the people I started out with vanished. I'm looking forward to playing around with the Fighter stuff but if the pilot AI is as bad as the NPC AI then I'll leave it alone after a try.
Again, there's a game in there somewhere. And I wish Frontier would invest in the right dev resources to create something compelling. Just not sure they ever will because rumours constantly persist that Frontier itself is limping from quarter to quarter and they can't milk Elite anymore (commercially, if you give a large majority of your player base a one-off purchase for a lifetime pass, you've lost recurring revenue streams and have to rely on "paint jobs" micro transactions)
There will never be a PS4 release (or PS4 Pro) nor will the Mac version get the attention it was promised. Even after 2.2 the Xbox version has taken a huge knock in performance.
I'll still play, to my own tune, but after two years I've learned to stop expecting anything better than wallpapered cracks.
