Elite, Braben, Kickstarter!

Wow. I wonder how it will translate to the modern era? I spent so much time playing that game as a kid on my Spectrum.

If it had coop I would love roving round the galaxy with a couple of mates on Teamspeak.
 
I'd love to see another Elite, but I'm not sure that Braben can deliver it. We all saw what a disaster the Frontier games were. Not just in the bugs, but the design decisions that made it not that much fun to play.

Interestingly enough, if you read up on the old interviews with Ian Bell where he's asked about what he contributed to he original Elite, it seems to me that Bell did all the work and had all the ideas that made the game good.
 
I can honestly say I played the hell out of both games. Being able to land on the planets was huge in Frontier, and the galaxy was amazing.
 
Combat was terrible in Frontier compared to Elite. It was just terribly unsatisfying.

Sure you could land on planet in Frontier, but then you just sat around waiting to intercept some ship that you wanted to trail from the planet. It took so long you just autopiloted down. There was new stuff you could do in Frontier, but it was very quickly pointless and samey. There was just no soul to Frontier.
 
The combat did leave a bit to be desired and was buggy as hell, true. I just felt like the game was more immersive overall though, which is understandable given the increases in hardware.
 
I always thought the main driver of Elite was basically earn money from combat/trading in order to buy better ships, equipment and weaponry. Frontier tried to make it more interesting with missions, but they were just variations on a few different themes, and all of them pretty boring, especially with the poor combat. The improved, solid shaded graphics were not enough to carry the game.

I think Frontier's problems went deeper than the bugs, and right down to a lot of the important gameplay decisions. I think Braben tried to "improve" too many things, and actually broke a lot of the stuff that made Elite special. Maybe he was trying to prove he was as good as Bell, and so didn't want to be accused of using Bell's original ideas from Elite in Frontier's design.

The analogue joystick on the BBC Micro also went a long way to giving Elite a special feel that later 16 bit conversions and Frontier on the 32 bit generation really didn't have.
 
Frontier was ace, I liked it alot more than Elite. Even though the combat rather sucked - its a perfect example why games should never bend towards realism unless it adds to the game.
Sadly, this mistake is still done over and over
 
Nice to see they have abandoned the poor full newtonian flight model from the Frontier games and gone back to something much more like the original Elite model that was a lot more fun to play, especially for combat.
 
Seeing David Braben and Chris Roberts chatting is sort of surreal and makes me wonder where Lawrence Holland is. Maybe he is just done with games.

This space sim rekindling is thrilling stuff. The intarwebs is proving useful after all!
 
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
Nice to see they have abandoned the poor full newtonian flight model from the Frontier games and gone back to something much more like the original Elite model that was a lot more fun to play, especially for combat.
Click to expand...

I loved it, though I wonder how could you actually play the scenario where you start without an autopilot. Touring the solar system in a "realistic" way was very fun (though I think it didn't go as far as making you do gravitational sling shots)

Sadly I had an "unauthorized" copy of the game so about the third time I went to a space station or port the "police" would bust me and sentence me to be thrown back to DOS.

An issue is I once landed on Uranus. I would not try to do that in real life for sure. But on the new Frontier they'll have you fly realistically into gas giants instead, that's great. The planet will have to kill you if you go too deep, it would be great if it depends on your ship and equipment.
In Frontier, I think Jupiter killed you before you reached the surface. It might be a really, really bad idea to go there in real life too.

Will neutron stars and black holes be introduced? go fly anywhere near those if you dare :LOL:
 
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Pretty good for an alpha that's been under active development for what, half a decade+ now? ;) At this rate, maybe the game will hit gold by 2020 (and still be a horrible, buggy, unplayable mess, going by historical prescident...)
 
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