To be honest as a person who played Elite and Elite 2 ( Frontier I think was its full name) extensively in my childhood and adolescent years they were always "wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle". And speaking of Elite 2, it wasn't kidding. I still marvel at how 500kb of a game (I distinctly remember it was only a single disk and a disk to hold save files) contained entire galaxies and planets not only you can land but traverse with your ship. Sure they were procgen but still it was really breathtaking to see all those vistas I would never see - barring a wormhole

They were all about creating your own story, I think there wasn't a base storyline. It was like "here you have a kestrel with some equipment including atmospheric shielding and some pulse lasers. Now do whatever you want" But because I knew the trick trading route between Barnard's Star and Sol carrying Luxury goods and industrial stuff to and fro I could amass a huge amount of money in no time to buy me a Cobra MkIII and do military and imperial missions. And this was my story, a lot of people have different experiences with it. And even though it doesn't have any deep, life changing experiences it was fun and I think current iteration of E:D is faithful to that legacy. It is you who make the game deep with your experience I think. I don't play it, because me and internet-is-required games don't get along but from what I've seen I can make that claim.

Wing Commander and to an extent Freelancer can be seen more deep compared to Elite. But it lacked that free spirit Elite conveyed. Also on an unrelated tangent I still think a game with Freelancer controls (actiony rather than simulationy) with X-universe freedom can be a thing still.

Thanks for reading.

X3:Terran Conflict and X3:Albion Prelude have almost nailed the mouseflight controls of Freelancer and the overhauled menu system is slightly less annoying and slightly more intuitive than that of X2:The Threat or X3:Reunion. The weapons are even gimballed so you don't have to track an enemy perfectly to be able to shoot them.

This description makes me wonder. There are lots of games who have huge amounts of depth like Paradox's grand strategy games. And they also claim the "tell your own story" environment, reasoning that the depth gives the environment that you can use to tell a story. So kind of the opposite of what you say being required.

Why do you think depth is not a requirement for this self story telling game? Isn't it getting boring quickly?

Not OP, but I think it has more to do about affordances [1] than depth.

From my experience with Oolite, a FOSS, modable Elite clone, providing a bunch of career choices (trader, pirate, bounty hunter) and NPCs that react to who you choose to be (e.g. bounty hunters will go after you if you choose to be a pirate) is a good start. Affordances for goal setting can be as simple as the traditional character/ship equipment upgrade ladder.

Oolite players tend to stick to the "non player centered universe" paradigm; that is the player is not a hero or destined to save the universe even though it is a single-player game. When a mod provides a new weapon or upgrade, it is considered better if the NPCs can use them too. They removed the Energy bomb that was present in Elite, an obvious player-only weapon.

In my experience, when the game doesn't make distinctions between NPCs and the player, your player instincts tell you to become stronger than NPCs.

A corollary of the non player-centered game paradigm is that the beginning of the game can be rough for the player. Typically in Oolite with the standard startup, the players spend their first couple hours staying away from any other ship and fleeing pirates because they cannot really fight back without a decent equipment.

One could name that a "difficulty inversion": a game that is difficult at first, then get easier as the player acquires better gears. Oolite has this problem. I was trying to make a set of mods to fix it before my interest shifted to another game. Not that I got bored of Oolite, it's just that I've found something even more interesting to work on, and sometimes I have an Oolite itch, because solving similar issues but in a full sandbox multiplayer game is even more difficult.

The endgame can be a problem too, because eventually players can afford the best gear and one-shot most things. My take on this is to use the "high-score" game approach, that is making it more and more difficult to survive (really just like Tetris). More specifically, in Elite/Oolite there's a mysterious and hostile alien race than can be used to create an unstoppable invasion force scenario. This approach both helps with increasing the difficulty proportionally to the wealth of the player, and provides a story-telling affordance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance - my spellchecker doesn't know that word so I guess it's not common?

Um... I don't? I am only telling Elite was always a game like that (wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle) and criticizing it because it was faithful to its origins is not a valid thing imho.

> It seems to me that Star Citizen is much more successful, which is surprising, because the E:D approach is more in line with modern startup advice.

That advice is predicated on getting some amount of money from an investor who wants a return on their investment, rather than getting that amount of money as pre-purchases that from consumers who expect a game at the end of the process.

Yeah, exactly that.

You cannot define "the game" as MVP, make it as good as possible, and then be sad about not making money.

You go there without a game(!) and put different stuff in front of people's faces that they can pay for. Simple things that you can produce in a few hours. A kickstarter page, game_object.jpgs, planning schedules that you move up one year each year, engine demos, and then you look what brings in most cash.

And only if it's "engine demo" that brings in most cash, and only if it seems that the paying customers of that "engine demo" want "more gameplay" then you start building a game. If they pay more for schedules or for kickstarter pages, then you do more of that.

So I would argue SC follows much more closely the MVP+iteration principle than ED, and that IS(!) why it is financially more successful.

All that said I would not fall into the trap of defining "financial success" as only success. Financing the building of a game that is mostly there for people to enjoy a space simulation is also a succss! And in that regard X4 and ED are much more successful than SC will ever be.