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Braben reveals Elite's Future... sort of.


stingray
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I'd put it in the Duke Nukem Forever league of news bits but here goes:

Braben reveals Elite's Future

He comes off a bit like George Lucas, apparently the (network) technology wasn't ready at the time (year 2000).

Someone who can fit an entire galaxy on two 3.5" floppies has technology issues??? Gimme a frackin' break.

Anyway, at least it's still in the production line-up.

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That entire galaxy was just data. No content. So fitting it on two floppies was no biggie.

I can fit my entire game galaxy on one floppy if there was no 'content'.

Let me see him try that with E4.

Anyway he's full of sh*t. He knows for a fact that the space sim genre is not as big as it used to be and that for anyone to take E4 seriously - after the travesty that were the last two - that he'd have to literally have monkeys flying out of his butt to live up to the hype.

PLUS, factor in dev costs and the fact that no publisher will touch a space sim with the longest barge pole unless the devs were fully funding the development, what do you get? No Elite 4.

It is highly unlikely that he will ever do another Elite. Not when he has bills to pay. Especially when he can just crank out whatever rubbish a publisher happens to be paying for.

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quote:

Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr:

That entire galaxy was just data. No content. So fitting it on two floppies was no biggie.

I can fit my entire game galaxy on one floppy if there was no 'content'.

Let me see him try that with E4.


He probably won't get off that easily this time around. Data storage space isn't as much of an issue it used to be. Pong wouldn't sell very well either.

quote:

Anyway he's full of sh*t. He knows for a fact that the space sim genre is not as big as it used to be and that for anyone to take E4 seriously - after the travesty that were the last two - that he'd have to literally have monkeys flying out of his butt to live up to the hype.

PLUS, factor in dev costs and the fact that no publisher will touch a space sim with the longest barge pole unless the devs were fully funding the development, what do you get? No Elite 4.

It is highly unlikely that he will ever do another Elite. Not when he has bills to pay. Especially when he can just crank out whatever rubbish a publisher happens to be paying for.

Yeah, it sure looks that way. When even the devs don't dare to take risks anymore, who else will?

I wonder if the current drought in space sims isn't also tied to what is currently happening in space programs everywhere. The excitement is gone. I mean who cares if the Hubble space telescope gets fixed or not? Astronomers and space enthusiasts probably do, but who else?

There hasn't been much going on that would please the crowds for quite some time. Ok, so you have those private enterprises who have launched civilian space programs, some of which look quite promising, but they are still at the beginning and only reserved for the top earners. At the pace things are progressing right now it's hard to see things improve in the next decade or so.

And then there's World of Warcraft which surely doesn't help the other genres to stay afloat.

It's been a balancing act for quite some time, at least that's what space sim development looks like from the outside to me.

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quote:

Originally posted by Darien Wolfe:

David who?

Naw I know who he is, but personally...he's left it way too long for me to even be interested.

I have to agree with you, when you check out Braben's newly opened bulletin board ( http://forums.frontier.co.uk/ ) you'll notice that the Elite/Frontier forum accounts for the majority of the posted threads.

I wonder how he feels about that. I mean, it's like he didn't release anything worthwhile since the release of his last Elite game.

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