I never played Elite back in the day, though of course I'm familiar with it now, but I did play Frontier and I liked it.
One thing about Frontier that blew my mind and that Elite didn't have (AFAIK) was seamless transitions between planetary surfaces and outer space. Maybe now it's not as technically amazing as it was then -- even though right now I can't think of a modern game that does it -- but the absence of loading screens during the transition between planet and space is what made Frontier so immersive for me.
Have you seen the trailer for No Man's Sky?
Very interesting, but those transitions don't appear to have a realistic sense of scale... not necessarily a bad thing (and maybe I'm misjudging the speeds and distances)
That was awesome, thanks! No, I hadn't seen it. And yes, the seamless transitions I was talking about are there!
And there is of course Elite: Dangerous:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-danger...
And while I'm dropping links, I found this older interview with Bell (hosted on Bell's homepage, apparently):
I always thought Eve might be the massively multiplayer Elite I always want to play, but ended up being too impenetrable given limited time to play it... hopefully Elite: Dangerous' online incarnation doesn't fall into the same trap.
The world that the manual and novella painted were incredibly vivid... I always imagined that I might actually encounter a generation ship at some point (in fact, maybe that does happen, I don't think I got passed the mission to track down the stolen prototype ship).