Elite: Dangerous

[Tharic-Nar]

Elite: Dangerous - being made by David Braben (and Frontier Developments) ... That is all.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous

If you are not up to speed on Elite and Frontier, or David Braben, this is the man that created a game, and entire galaxy made of billions of stars, with planets, space simulator with physics, trading, space combat and randomly generated quests, graphics and sound effects... all of that, and made it fit on a 720KB floppy disk... in 1993. He's now also one of the leaders at the Raspberry Pi foundation.

Yeah, I'm just a smidge ecstatic right about now...

 

[Optix]

 

[marfig]

I'll just copy-paste what I said elsewhere:

Putting aside the fact Elite is perhaps my top cult classic game, I have a few problems with this:

(1) I can't count anymore the times Frontier and Braben have promised and didn't deliver an Elite game.
(2) With a goal of 1,250,000 British Pounds, close to 2 million dollars(!), this sure seems like yet another false start.
(3) No mention of single-player at all. This isn't Elite. Or, is Elite multiplayer.

(2) I wonder why Frontier thinks gamers should backup the entire game development costs (I'm assuming production costs will be higher). Without any own investment into it, and because of (1), I am very skeptical of the real interest in having this done. It seems more like they wanted to do it, but only if they don't have to spend money doing it. I was having an argument with Rob over this just yesterday. The difference between Molyneaux and Braben, is that 2 million dollars seems exactly like no investment whatsoever will go into the game development, whereas the lower amount requested by Molyneaux seems to indicate he will be putting his own money on the line (the size of his development team alone will cut through those 800,000 pounds in wages like their were butter).

(3) I don't mind multiplayer. It's none of my business if the developer wishes to make a multiplayer mode. What I do mind is the apparent rejection of a single-player mode. This makes me really sad. Elite was a fantastic exploration experience and I remember staying whole nights awake playing it, while my parents thought I was sleeping.