4Game

hello.

i don't post things much on the internet these days but i thought i'd post on the internet today.

i've liked elite for a long time. when i was a scrawny amiga child in the nineties i was fixated with elite 2. all i ever wanted to do was figure out the fastest way to a panther clipper without weird credit exploits. i lost my mind when i realised there was some mad glitch that meant you could do hyperspace jumps of insane displacement if you moved N sectors in a particular direction. in primary school, as part of a project, i came up with an incredible merchandising campaign using hypercolor t-shirts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercolor wowwwwwwwwww!) to improve the game's standing in the world. it had a great tagline. it went "elite, elite, changes in the heat!"

amazing stuff. bezos level ingenuity.

so yes, i'm old now, and i've been into this series for a while. i've also played elite dangerous from launch and it's gorgeous, and ticked a lot of the boxes i felt were missing from the original games while growing up, and i've gotten a lot out of it.

HoWeVeR, in the last couple of weeks, i've started playing no man's sky and golly gosh, sokath, his eyes uncovered. i've started to realise that, as a game, ED is imprisoned by the schematic upon which the series has been painstakingly built for the better part of 40 years.

i understood the need to sit in menus, and interact with the entire universe through menus when the game was a procedurally generated masterpiece that sat on a 720KB double density floppy disk, but that stopped being the case some time ago. we could be at the stage by now where we're properly interacting with these planets and systems, being able to build bases, making a genuine impact on a beautifully simulated galaxy in which we can feel invested. instead, we're still modifying high-level system metadata, via menus, like it's 1995.

i'll always be a friend to the franchise, this series has literally moulded me from the ground up, but i'm starting to get an "end of the road" feeling about it all and it makes me sad, although maybe it shouldn't. maybe elite is what it is, and we're at the TERMINUS (hurrr) of david's vision for his game.

tl;dr, it sure would be nice to build a base, wouldn't it?