The worst thing for elite was being made by frontier as they are now. Frontier now is just a tycoon simulator game generator, that's all they care about. It's like the FIFA of the tycoon games... spit out another one every year or two and who gives a rats ass about the stuff we already made or haven't completed.

I loved what elite wanted to be, I hate what the bean counters did to it...

People shit on star citizen for their dev cycle, but elite took the worse route in my opinion: they released a minimally viable product and then intended on building it into something bigger, but got cheap/lazy and just accepted that what they have out is "good enough" so they dumped all the internal ship plans (braben spoke about boarding ships and piracy on foot in a ship, that kind of thing.) They dumped so much of the simulation stuff and just stuck with the BGS... it's frustrating to see what could have been.

Yeah, i still play it sometimes, but i think the same

Elite's biggest issue is that it never really knew what kind of kame it wanted to be. An MMO? There aren't enough multiplayer features for that. A (mostly) single-player space experience? It's too shallow with no story, so it won't satisfy the RPG fans. A space "simulator" where you just have fun flying ships? It's probably closest to that, except you can't fly any ship you want, and in fact it takes dozens of hours of grind to be able to switch things out so they're fresh and you have more fun with the game again. And the simulation is very simplistic and not all that fun either, so it's not for hardcore simulation fans either.

And because of this approach it has a bad combination of features that not only won't fully satisfy either of the potential target groups; they also often work against each other. For example the multiplayer component is a dealbraker for me: I want a truly SP game where I can dictate how I play it - where I can mod it, or at least use cheats to find my own pacing, fly different ships on a whim, whatever. But the game simply won't allow that.

But it's also not a fully-fledged MMO where you could build (or at least own) systems/planets/bases whatever with your clan and compete against others for ... idk, something.

And, again, it's just not a story game that you could play from start to finish for the storytelling and worlbuilding.

Really sad, because the potential is there to have any (or perhaps even at least two) of those types of games.