This used to be an iconic SF game franchise. As a kid, I experienced the original ELITE on my first computer in the 80s, that can only be described as a milestone in video game design. I also played ELITE II: Frontier (as it should have been named) in the 90s, which was not as impressive, but still a considerable upgrade from part I. When ELITE: Dangerous came out, I was full of hopes and expectations of what would come from that in the new era of the 2010s. I knew from the start that it would take years to fully develop this game to manifest the vision that the creators apparently had, and I was more than willing to get on board and undertake that journey with them. In the beginning of the game's life cycle, there were some hick-ups, like an unplayable tutorial and an extremely bland mission system, but those things got incrementally better over time. At least we had an actual game to enjoy and not just trailers and promises like in the case of Star Citizen.

However, that stereotypical "at least this is not SC" lost its effect after some years. The unavoidably shallow nature of this vast open world universe meant that the game concept quickly lost its appeal. It was always easy to play this game for a few weeks and earn enough credits to buy the largest ships available, so you could - well, earn even more credits with them to watch numbers go up even higher, I guess. Grinding credits, grinding Elite ranks, grinding for optimized equipment - that seemed to be the whole experience, and all of those factors are effectively capped (in the case of credits by the lack of things to do with more money after a certain point), so the potential for continuous progression is severely limited.

One expansion and update after another added content that seemed to address this problem and introduced new parts of the game: Planet surfaces for exploration (procedurally generated and mostly empty), "settlements" with a few NPCs, ship and station interiors, invading aliens, multiplayer faction wars. All of that sounded excellent on paper, but the execution of every single one of these aspects was as lackluster as that of the other ones before. It almost felt like management made a list of tasks to perform in game development, and some underpaid and undermotivated developer interns did just enough work on them to earn their paychecks and call it a day. I did not see any passion or noteworthy creativity in any of these new layers. They just ticked boxes and gave the results to marketing, who could draw players in with some buzzwords that misrepresented what the player engagement with them actually looked like (e.g. the whole Powerplay system that managed to make galactic warfare and intrigue the most boring thing in a space sim that ever existed). The real issues in the game's core (like the severely unbalanced and notoriously toxic PvP since the introduction of the engineering grind) were never properly addressed, the dev just added more and more things to distract from them.

ELITE: Dangerous has now become a collection of disconnected mini-games (separated by "hyperdrive tunnel" themed loading screens) that are all more or less trivial and repetitive, linked merely by a series of uninspired statistic screens you can look at. There is the dog-fight mini-game you can jump (or be drawn) into from hyperspace, there is the mining mini-game in asteroid fields, there is the planetary scan mini-game, the UPS mini-game (where you actually have to run up to braindead and generic NPCs standing around between some huts to hand-deliver packages) and always the classical "Euro Truck Simulator in space" mini-game, where you buy wares from a spreadsheat, travel to another station, sell wares on a different spreadsheet, rinse and repeat. Over and over. Year after year. This is not one whole, complex game or the "Second Life" hardcore FD fanboys want it to be; it is a funfair with a series of little booths where they offer you some cheap entertainment to earn tokens with. In the end, you go home with some tokens that don't mean anything.

The activities in those mini-game booths are not even fun, really. Especially the Odyssey expansion, with the implementation of NPCs in space stations and surface settlements, was so undercooked, buggy and overall disappointing that I would have felt ashamed to demand as much money for it as they did. The worst thing about it is that even though the Odyssey content is several years old by now, they have not improved a thing, despite all the due criticism of the new and seemingly shiny features they advertised it with. I tested that content specifically a few weeks back, and it left a bad and bitter taste in my mouth. This is not a finished game, this is an abandoned beta version of a game that was sold with the promise to be finished "soon". Well, this "soon" will never arrive, because the dev team has moved on to the next features that will turn out just as low-quality as the last one.

My patience wore thinner and thinner over the years. I saw YouTubers who used to champion this game like TheYamiks and ObsidianAnt turn their backs (giving good reasons for that too). I saw the formerly idealistic and dedicated organisers of the Galactic Mapping Project give up on the devs. I saw EDDB being shut down, that once was an indispensable third-party toolbox for commanders all over the world. The recent attempts at monetization, where you pay considerable amounts of real money or crazy amounts of your limited lifetime with grinding for some cosmetic junk that was designed and implemented without any talent or care for consistency, can only be called desperate. It is a sad case of whale-milking, and I feel for everyone who fell for that and spent his hard-earned currency on ridiculous stuff like goofy bobbleheads or different colours for your ship exterior. (Yes, AngryJoe, you can literally pay many dollars for BLUE in this game...)

No nostalgia for this legacy title can prevent me from admitting: E:D has run its course. It is lost. There are still some players left, but those will get bored soon as well. It will not get any better, it has started becoming worse years ago. Do not buy this. Do not support the lazy, greedy and incompetent company FD is today (that celebrates the 40 year anniversary of the franchise as if they had contributed anything to honour it, when in reality, they are in the process of destroying their own brand with inapt management decisions). Do not spend your money or your lifetime treading their money mill like obedient little hamsters. You, the player, deserve better than this. It is time to leave this failed project behind us and look for something else that can take its place.

EDIT (Dec 12th, 2024): I have now been banned from the community forum for pointing out - verbatim! - that this game has been "mismanaged and poorly maintained" (which it is, in fact), because a moderator deemed this to be "disrespectful". I have to conclude that this team is so desperate to hide every kind of criticism against the game and its makers that they actively suppress harmless and legitimate sceptical remarks like this under dubious pretenses, in order to mitigate the deserved negativity against FDev and to keep sales up as long as they can. Well, if those are the methods they stoop to, instead of actually improving their performance, I can feel justified in my assessment that this game is doomed, because without critical feedback, it is next to impossible that anything will change for the better in the future. Buying into this would be a severe mistake. Hands off of this game and everything else this dev produces!