I think most of these 10-year-plan people don't have a clue as to how long 10 years really is. The average development cycle for a middle-market game is not 10 years, people. That's an extraordinarily long time to wait for a game to be feature complete. Some of us may not even stick around that long. Hell some of us might not even be alive by that point. Overlong development cycles tend to kill games rather than nurture them.
Most of us posting "negative" comments actually want to see the game improve, which will attract more fans and in theory more money, which enables further development. Lots of people felt burned by Horizons and its blatantly empty launch feature set. I don't care what gets added in the upcoming patch because by the time it launches Horizons will have been out for six months. SIX MONTHS without any additional content beyond 1 SRV, 3 AI Drones, Barnacles, ammo crafting, and a ton of 99% empty planets. Can you imagine if an expansion to another MMO launched with next to no content and promised to patch stuff in six months? Especially when the base game the expansion is building on still has many outsanding issues? They would be crucified. But because it's Elite, and because FDev totes promised stuff, like for reals, it's all swept under the rug. Take a look at the review scores, people. Post-Horizons the once positively reviewed Elite saw its rating fall off a cliff. This is not good because positive word of mouth, either firsthand from players or secondhand from reviews, is one of the ways games that depend on maintaining a user base and drumming up repeat sales see success. Sweepingly negative or even mixed reviews put people off, plain and simple.
Bottom line, Horizons should have launched with more content, and the next expansion, whatever it is, needs to be more than a skeletal framework that gets a slab of tissue bolted on every six months. I want this game to do well and I will continue to support it, but I refuse to drink the Kool-Aid and mindlessly cheerlead for FDev while they wander aimlessly astray.
What about us who still play games like UT99 , what about those who still to this day play Oolite or Eve or wow or any game thats old and is still standing.
The plan and the dream is that elite will be one of those games and I belive it will.
If it fails then it fails and I move on , at least I had fun whiles it lasted.
10 years of expansions on a solid foundation is not the same as the other doomed games were its 10 years of in house work often resulting in starting from scratch over and over again.
We got what they promised us , all the bad stuff on steam is from users who dont read whats in it , 2.0 was allways going to be nothing but planets and over the year they were going to add on to it thats the plan , season 2 is finished when season 2 is done.
You know there were other MMOs that came out with allmost no content...
EVE was hated when it first came out it was falled a failure , empty , pointless and devoid of content... look at it know , the same is thing is going on with elite.
No one is giving any favors to FD in fact I think everyone is being harsh insulting elite and giving praise to other games that are either in early states than elite or not even out.
I get it you dont care much for the planetside of things but thats what 2.0 was about they never said anything about more than what we got hell... even during kickstarter they told us everything would be done step by step
First the location , then the content then the polish thats what we purchased thats what I got.
Its too early to call horizons a fail until all of it is out then call it a fail or what not but I found season 1 to be decent , powerplay was not what I hoped for and CQC could have been something else but again they were the basic ground works for something bigger , a game of this scope can not be done all in one go without it taking forever to be made and I am happy I get to play it bit by bit as it comes out...
I would argue that the bottom line is users should read the store page and see that a season is in multiple parts eatch with there own content that in the end make a massive new expansion.
Like the future CMDR creator on its own its not much but merged with whats down the line its massive.
There is a lot of info on the kickstarter and in older newsletters and you can see there that everything went as planed