A request not to ruin Elite 4
I'm in my early 20s which means the original Elite came out before I was born. I have very fond memories of learning how to navigate the world of Elite 2: Frontier when I was young. Having realistically scaled star systems and planets, while somehow fitting 100 billion of them onto a single floppy disk... it was breathtaking. And still is looking back even though the graphics are so much simpler. It probably influenced me a lot to study science/physics as well.
Then in my teens I picked up "freelancer", I read somewhere it was "like elite" which of course made me instantly buy it. It was absolutely terrible. I mean not bad as a kind of arcade-console game, but naturally my ideas and expectations of space simulators were a bit more. Planets for example were not these gigantic things I could land on and navigate, there were this horrible floating textured spheres, it was completely stupid.
I read "spore" was going to do something similar in terms of scope but I never brought it after I read the bad reviews. Apparently EA dumbed it down quite a lot from the creator's original idea of it. Perhaps because it was going to be a console game, or because they wanted to appeal to a younger audience, I'm not sure. There's Eve Online as well but that sounds like it would be as disappointing as freelancer (can't land on planets and so on).
I suppose my point is, that despite how many years it's been, there is nothing like Elite. Other space sims are just these horrible arcadeish games with relativly very few planets. So if any developers read this my request is to remember what you set out to do years ago, when you made something huge and breathtaking and limitless. If you want to do voice-acting and cut-scenes then that's fine but you shouldn't forget what the core idea is.
This is from one of our engine programmers "We have an abstraction layer that hides DirectX (or any other graphics API) from the game programmers who are the guys who really write The Outsider, that way if we (the engine programmers) want to change the version of DirectX we're using we can without disrupting them."
