That's essentially like saying the game isn't for someone, isn't it? Such a shame, since there are so many aspects of it, that I absolutely
love! Read that line of argument a lot while I was still active on the Frontier forums. To the point that people argued you should rather change your life (move closer to work...) to make more room for playing Elite, before accepting that ingame time waster overhead for mundane tasks could be reduced. "Think of the immersion!" "Think of the griefers!" "People grouping up isn't in Elite's legacy!" (Argument for not giving people the option to form squadrons/guilds, back then there were no such features in the game) Whatever the excuse of the day was to gatekeep the small niche the game occupies.
It always came down to certain types of players whining against introducing potential convenience features others brought up or make them over convoluted to the point of uselessness, at no tangible benefit to themselves other than "my immersion", and certainly no benefit to players who'd actually like these features. Frontier listened, to the point of making features inconvenient messes that had been announced as something that'd have been actually useful if implemented as announced. But hey, they also did the initial Engineer grind (update 2.1), which made you grind for half a (real time) day to give you access to a dice roll to improve or downgrade your equipment. *slow clap*
I have a hard time subscribing to the notion that pandering to a niche absolves these games' developers from honoring what should be fundamental game design paradigms like: "don't waste your players' time". That should be universally appreciated in any
good game, no matter who the target audience is. It doesn't rule out having mechanics to make people happy, who really need "mundanity and verisimilitude" in their video games either, but at least make them optional/skippable. Who knows? Maybe they'd even find that it's not so much that these games only speak to a small niche, but that its just the desire and tolerance for these games trying to be great space game 2nd live MMO arcade simulations first, before being great games in general, that limits their audience to a niche. It should give anyone food for thought, when you can boot up an actual more "hard core" flight sim like Sturmovik or DCS and have a simulated aircraft or a squadron of aircraft together with your friends in the air faster than a group of friends gets to drive fantasy space ships together in your space game.
As for their 90s' predecessors, even 80s' in Elite's case, they weren't wannabe space game MMOs with the resulting far larger worlds and with forced pretend space person second life aspects bolted on. My experience is limited to Wing Commander 3 and a bit of Freelancer here, but getting to drive a ship in either game took a few clicks. Not running from one end of a city to the other for five minutes, train ride included. Every time you log in.
On a positive note, at least there's hope that Elite isn't going to copy
that shit of all things. Up until now you're bolted to your ship's seat in the game and I doubt that even the Elite game design team would think it's a good idea to have you traverse its gigantic space stations to just get to your ship whenever you log in. Which was no more part of the original Elite than it was of Wing Commander or Freelancer. Not that I wouldn't absolutely
love to be able to move through these stations, especially the habitat rings for sightseeing. A couple of times, that is or in the rare cases that I just need a super low engagement palate cleanser activity in a game. If there's a certain, especially often repeated game activity in there, all I need is a
very quick way to get there and away again.
