I'm playing another game that easily has more progressive grind required to achieve all unlocks and upgrades, in terms of how long it takes to get everything. The fundamental differences are twofold: One, in order to get all unlocks you simply have to play the game and two, once something is unlocked then it's done, you do not need to repeat that unlock again for as many items as you might want. As "just playing the game" is very fun, almost all of the time, then there simply is no grind to it (and there is absolutely no "quick skip" option here, no relogging to replenish materials/credits, you just do missions and they're all procedurally generated and so never repeated). The progressive function is based mostly on leveling up initially (again by doing the same missions, made faster if you increase the threat of the missions and succeed), which in turn unlocks upgrades that are gated behind a sequence of mission types you need to complete, called assignments. You then simply go do those assignments to complete the sequence and unlock the item, then buying said item with credits and materials obtained from doing missions, with a trader function available for an optional way of re-balancing your currencies (which is, itself, locked behind its own assignment). Every item has its own sequence of optional upgrades (and in a lot of cases, choosing between these is a personal choice and there are very few cookie cutter molds). This all costs resources but it's genuinely fun getting them. It's all just "in the game".
Once you've unlocked the item, you have it. Done. There's no reason Elite couldn't have used the same process. There's no reason Elite couldn't have made the act of unlocking a compelling and unique experience per item (and, more importantly, open to allowing the player to opt to do that however they choose; but this isn't as necessary if say, unlocking access to an engineer followed a cool little sequence of missions that were hand-crafted for that engineer).
Elite's upgrade system is the antithesis of "play your own way", though. And in more cases than you can count, "the way" is no more compelling than "kill 10 rats" in WOW. Only one must do it countless times, forever, unless one decides to simply stop upgrading ships or trying new content (which is currently all based on AX stuff, mostly all gated behind its own list of "kill 10 rats").
At least with the current new content, it's all happening behind a very atmospheric backdrop and story. But the hoops jumping is way more extreme than any other game I've ever played when it comes to AX stuff.
It's just a shame because it didn't have to be like this. There's no rule dictating that it had to be this way for Elite. That other game is entirely proc-gen as well. It just contains itself so much better than Elite does. And, as I said above, I tend to guage the quality of a game by the number of conditions or caveats I must deploy when explaining to someone why I think they might like that game.
For this other game (Deep Rock Galactic), the only condition is "if you like playing first person shooters, specifically cooperative ones". I am not exaggerating here; if you love coop shooters then you'll probably love this game. Every single element of it after that is just well designed and fun, as challenging as you want it to be (up to extremely so) and very, very time consuming. I can't pick out anything bad about it, even that it is time consuming. You are consuming time doing uniquely fun stuff that requires skill. 100% of the time.
For Elite, the list of conditions is vast and, following the usual obvious ones like "if you like space games/sims", then the very next ones out of my mouth are "just be aware that a lot of the cool content is gated behind a huge grind wall and it's extremely repetitive most of the time".
I don't think it's unreasonable for me to think it'd be nice if that condition didn't exist and the process of upgrading ships was unconditionally fun. And if anyone tries to tell me that it is unconditionally fun then I just think they don't play enough games, if I'm honest. And I get that... a core of this game's most loyal followers probably don't play anything else. It's cool if that's the case but it shows when they try to persuade everyone that engineers is "fine".
I'd challenge anyone to say that engineering and the general upgrade process of the whole game is "amazingly fun all the time". Because that's what I'd say about the other game's process. Shouldn't that be what every game should aspire to and when we give feedback counter to that, is it right to just dismiss it by saying "ah it's fine, just don't do it/do it another way"?
The reason it's such a shame is because, what I do also tend to say about Elite, is this: No other game does what Elite does (and even the handful of space games that do similar stuff don't come close to Elite for a lot of its features). Although my list of conditions for "enjoying Elite" are long, the list of things that are unconditionally amazing is equally long. They're just heavily gated behind oh so many things that don't need to be the way they are. And I stress: that list isn't getting shorter as the game gets new content. I look at maelstroms and then I look at the list of "things one must do to enjoy them" and it's just silly.
More like 100% for G5s.
