Just my thought. What game dev house offer hand-crafted scenarii that span over months if not years (some of which would downright qualify as paid expansion elsewhere) instead of scripted "quests", regular updates, skins, handcrafted news feed, WITHOUT any monthly subscription on top of the initial purchase, and two massives paid expansions literally revolutionizing the game, some of it still ongoing nearly a decade after the initial launch?
Fortunately, this isn't just a spaceship piloting game, is it?
Actually it was Rubbernuke who pulled it off nicely. Credit where credit is due.
But man you pull it off quite nicely
There were two separate sources giving similar numbers - one quote from around the Kickstarter saying they had enough ideas for ten years of development [1] - and one from some of the financial reports setting the accounting period for certain ED income (LEPs, mainly) to release+7 or release+8, because you have to pick a number for tax purposes: that was picked on a "prudent" basis (i.e. "the longest we can have extremely strong confidence in")
I'm surprised there are still people playing ED/O when such an amazing, regularly updated game, with spaceships in, is in contest with it!
I dunno man, given the quality of the ideas on show.
Personally I am finding it increasingly difficult to find any motivation to play the game that, until recent events, I have enjoyed immensely.
Toxic fandom* does just as much, if not more, to keep me away from a product as someone expressing their "not perfect" opinions about said product. I'm always suspicious of romanticized reviews and commentary proclaiming perfection. Nor do I see it a patriotic obligation to offer my undying fealty to any product in order for that product to succeed. All products should succeed (or fail) on their own merits.
My complaining has been evolving from ED was launched, I just don't see anything worth getting excited about, I've been on this train for a long time pre launch (kick starter) actually, they promised a lot and delivered very little.
That's totally the problem here, you nailed it.
Well, if you don't require them to be good ideas they're even harder to run out of.I dunno man, given the quality of the ideas on show.
The problem (IMO) is that a lot of EDs development has painted FD into a corner, and not helped by lack of continuity between dev team 'eras'.
A Great War is a perfect narrative to shift things.
The economy is hopelessly broken now. Tighten it back up and the latecomers will say "pulling up the ladder", not to mention some think it's fine that you can get a conda in 2 hours. For "justice" I guess you'd have to tank the bank balances of rich commanders so the "pulling up ladder" brigade might feel mollified. This is going to end well.
I wish David Braben had kept the keys to the "vision", rather than handing Elite over to the revolving door of developers who each had very different ideas for the game. I remember a .... I forget what it was called, some kind of yearly "Elite Fest" meeting ... from earlier on, back when David was still involved in those, and he was still giddy and excited about Elite and was sharing some vision he had, and I was amazed how the lead developer and lead CM basically "handled" him, as if they were in charge and not David. They basically put a cork on his enthusiasm, as if he was sharing too much for their liking. It was quite eye-opening to me as a newcomer to Elite and Frontier as a company. Well, at least back then somebody was in charge of Elite and enthusiastic about its future, LOL.
Its more about maintaining consistency for me- a lot of whats come after compromised what came before, undermining the core of the game.
At the beginning there was a clear vision, they even told us what would come, then something happened and they were all over the place, CQC, Power Play etc. no one asked for that, what DB described in the early days was what people wanted, what we got was a good flight model, the Galaxy 1:1 and that was basically it, it was like they could not go beyond that unless it was convoluted and extremely grinding game mechanics.
