The game was backed the way it is, and has been sold to all players on that basis. To make such a fundamental change now would be considered to be a bait and switch.
Because it involves forced player interaction, something that Frontier clearly understand is not to the taste of all of the players theyhave sold the game to.
The question I'm asking is more basic than that. What is it about forced player interaction (which already exists, in an indirect form, as possibly the least optional mechanism the game has) that makes it fundamentally different from any other forced interactions? How is a change to the mode system more fundamental than a change to any of the major changes that have already occurred?
The flight model and outfitting have significantly changed. We've gone from a spaceship in space only perspective, to ground vehicles, to first person infantry. Engineers, Horizons, and Odyssey were radical changes.
I get that the weight anyone will assign to any change is subjective...which is why it's strange to me that it so often seems to come down to a PvP vs. PvE dichotomy, which personally strikes me as an artificial one, especially in a purely multiplayer game that has never had provision to work without an internet connection or MMO style player contributions.
Dunno, the core game is still very similar. The UI has had a number of overhauls, but if you remembered how to do the basics from back then, you'd still get back into it quickly... although the auto-undock might surprise you and the ability to plot long routes.
Ships don't react to control inputs the same way they used to. All those nearly hard limits on velocities were added with the Gamma, after you and I started playing, and they were even more impactful to the flight model and how I used my ships than things like the directional velocity caps of FA Off (which didn't exist when I started) or even Engineering. Ships didn't 'stall' prior to this addition when approaching their much softer velocity caps and those velocity limits could be exceeded on a whim through basic trichording. The single most fundamental aspect of a spaceflight game, the flight model, never felt the same after their heavy handed 'fix' for this--they didn't scale thrust to stay within the confines of the main engine/peak forward vector, they dramatically kicked up the forced negative acceleration at the soft cap, to make it nearly a hard cap (though with things like gravity assist we can still prove it's not a hard cap)...it's like hitting a wall when performing maneuvers near the velocity limits and it feels damn weird, to this day. Even post-release there have been multiple, often undocumented, changes to aspects of the flight models, generally on a per ship basis. There are several ships that can't do things they used to be able to do, and some that can do much more.
The addition of wings and wing beacons in 1.2 changed combat and supercruise travel to a degree not repeated until Engineering and SCO. Around the same time upkeep costs were reduced by a factor of ten or so, which made it much easier to field larger ships and accumulate credits.
Horizons added a whole new mode of play, further altered SC travel (one can't be interdicted in orbital cruise, but can still observe the SC instance), and introduced synthesis, which was a dramatic change to attrition mechanisms. Prior to 2.0, what you had when launching from a station was all you got until you docked again. Post 2.0, if you liked burning around in the SRV, ammunition and most other consumables (other than SCBs) were never an issue again. This reshaped combat and exploration.
Sometime around Horizons, the network model, or perhaps it's underlying infrastructure, started to change significantly as well. I used to be able to
reliably drop out of SC within a few km of my desired point (I'm talking about manually, with no destination lock)--precision enough to make it a meaningful tactical ability, even in crowded instances. This changed to the point that one is lucky to land within 30km of where they attempt now.
Engineering's implications should be obvious, but suffice to say I consider it the largest change to the game since the Beta 1.x to 2.x update. Nothing was ever the same again.
Changes to heat mechanisms, even prior to Engineering, significantly reshaped stealth and depreciated popular tactics that were, in my view, contributors to balance. The nature and degree of NPC challenges has generally been softened and made more optional/more avoidable as time as gone on.
I almost forgot Fleet Carriers. I try to forget Fleet Carriers.
There are far too many changes to try to list them all. Every decimal point update brings them and the cumulative effect is profound, even within a single major update/season.
The way I see it, the game is only superficially similar to what it once was. The core has transformed so profoundly in the time I've played that the UI is about the most consistent part. Imagine porting a game from an early Unreal engine to an Id Tech engine of similar era, you could make them look almost identical and try to give them identical gameplay mechanisms, but they'd feel completely different. That's past and current
Elite: Dangerous.
Of course, the players have changed as well, and that's possibly the most profound change of all.
I still enjoy quite a few aspects of the game, but if you showed me what
Elite: Dangerous would become back in 2014, I never would have backed it. The game has died a half dozen times, to be replaced by a generally inferior incarnation at each step.
