That hits the nail on the head. It's a shallow MVP with barebones mechanics nowhere near of what has been promised during the Kickstarter era, which hides its thin content behind a worse grind than what you find in freemium games, deliberately designed to waste your time. They only thing which has been implemented to a meaningful depth is the combat and consequentially all content extensions focus on that. Everything else looks almost like a placeholder.
This MMO has clearly been put in maintenance mode, because it didn't pan out with the number of active players Frontier imagined for it. All future paid expansions have been canceled - because nobody would buy expansions for an almost dead MMO. And it doesn't help that the few remaining players are all separated by platform.
So all you get in the future is trickle updates paid by micro-transactions until theis finally shut down, when these don't cover the operating cost anymore.
It's also quite telling that people get triggered by reviews of their favorite space MMO or when someone mentions they stopped playing it. There is a huge overlap between the Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous crowds and the only difference is that David Braben managed to fuck up less than Chris Roberts and at least get his MVP out.
omigosh, I can't agree with most of what you've said about ED. The game imo, has fulfilled much of the base promises of the KS. ED is literally FE2&FFE expanded tenfold. Yes, the combat is great, but so is the ship design, the sound design and the rotating stations are well done. The background "starbox" is literally composed of the galaxy model with an astronomer hired to help with the stellar forge mechanics. Landing on terrain is implemented. Collisions and even different gravities are working where debris and materials from collisions and explosion act and roll down hills believably at the different possible gravities among the myriad planetoids of systems. All this among other working systems including the procedural achievements. Yes, there are placeholders, but as I and others have mentioned on the ED forum plenty of times, the game continues to be gradually worked on and we are still on year four out of a proposed timeplan of ten years or more. There is so much new and updated since the initial release so what FDev have done is not unsubstantial. Not panning out with players? ED has the highest steamspy counting of different logins per week of the entire space game genre. It's hard to congregate multiple players because the simulation is so realistically vast, where players could be among thousands of possible system locations and that's just counting the populated bubble. Beyond isn't maintenance mode. Development may seem slow at times, but ED is far from maintenance mode which is more like just leaving the lights on for the login servers. Braben hasn't f'cked it up, he and Frontier have made a successful game, made Frontier the most successful it's been in its history. JWE is sensibly the priority now, where every game company has to deal with priorities to meet release dates among different products in their line. And they've recently put out listings to hire some programmers to work specifically on ED particularly on improving the networking.
https://www.frontier.co.uk/node/858 (principal position, hopefully expanding ED's network infrastructure)
https://www.frontier.co.uk/careers/disciplines/art/concept-artist-vehicle-and-weapon-specialist (means more assets planned)
https://www.frontier.co.uk/node/809 (mentions Elite)
https://www.frontier.co.uk/node/857 (says to "work across existing titles")
https://www.frontier.co.uk/node/856 (quoted : "includes both new additions to Frontier’s popular lines of games such as Elite Dangerous and.." )
https://www.frontier.co.uk/careers/disciplines/programming/core-technology-programmer (quoted: "you could be working on future developments of our highly successful Elite Dangerous game" )
https://www.frontier.co.uk/careers/disciplines/programming/graduate-programmers (quoted: "opportunity to quickly make an important contribution to the development and improvement of some of the industry’s biggest and most loved games, for example Elite Dangerous,")
https://www.frontier.co.uk/careers/programmer-application-guidance (quote: "we also have a team concentrating on technology
shared between our games.")
I get it some ED players were/are SC backers, but the Star Citizen thread on the ED forum has majorly demonstrated most ED forum members have woken up to the SC ponzi in the past two years and some posts praising SC out of the blue are far in the minority and possibly shilling, since the ED moderation is demonstrably far more open to freedom of discussion even to the point of disgruntled players who have already enjoyed hundreds of hours of ED than the SC forums themselves. I'd guess perhaps you've caught on to the ED forum malaise that the game is "dying" fueled perhaps in part by burnout of playing ED. I would continue to wait and see. Once JWE is released, there will be almost certainly a boost in priority for Beyond and ED again. I'm looking forward to see the improvements to come in the years ahead for ED.
