I thoroughly enjoyed that story. I know it's a BBC patriotic puff piece a little but the tech tricks they did were neat. I hadn't heard of Elite at all and that's too bad because it would have been right up my alley back then.
Maybe it still is? Elite: Dangerous is an absolute blast.
It's good for a while but it get's boring fast. There is still only one ground vehicle, they haven't added new ships in years, just skins to purchase for cash. Most updates they do now are just to the background story with events like systems changing hands due to the thargoids etc.
Every space station is the same but with some changes to signage and colour. and mostly the same layouts despite existing in different empires so far apart the travel can take days. The stations just function as a 3d mission board.
Star Citizen and even No Mans Sky appear to be moving ahead of them.
Remove the FPS shooter and I don't think there is more here than what you would see in the old elite games. The distances are so vast and meeting other human players is so rare beyond certain star systems that the game should have just been made single player.
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I played on PC but was a bit annoyed that they just nixed it for consoles when they couldn't get performance with graphics these consoles were more than capable of. And only came up with a process to transfer saves to PC after the fact(even though save data is stored with them) because players were obviously annoyed they would be losing a decade of progress.
Their process for creating player factions was astonishingly bureaucratic, you had to fill out some google docs etc. As of 2023 they've removed that too. To make progress in any reasonable amount of time you basically need to be unemployed and constantly have a wiki or other 3rd party tools open in a browser.
The had game that was years of the competition but have lost that lead and many of the original Kickstarter plans were dropped.
FDev also doesn't seem to pay attention to anyone critical of issues or the direction things have went outside beyond their forum where their most uncritical players hangout and just share samesey screenshots of ships parked next to things.
The game is pretty much in maintenance mode, so many mechanics that haven't received any updates despite needing them.
The story has dragged on for years with anything of substance happening so rarely that it's like they wait for the hype to totally die down before moving forward.
Years ago they designated some large sector as closed , for story reasons. And I had to email them to get my ship moved as I loaded my game only to find I was locked in this bubble near the Horsehead nebula with no path my ship could take out.
I logged about 1,500 hours, got all the updates/season passes and even bought some ship skins.
It was a game I wanted and tried to like.
I gave it so many chances but eventually had to just accept that FDev didn't really care that much about improving the game when one of the powerplay powers 'collapsed'. The original deal with regard to that happening was that FDev would remove that power, progress the lore and maybe introduce another power eventually. Instead they ignored it and allowed other players to exploit the situation, completely breaking powerplay as a system.
But the game is a _grind_. It does not respect the players time at all.
I haven't even touched Odyssey yet.
I think Elite is just surreal, the scale of it is just astonishing. My main is an ASP Explorer, and I like to just travel with it. Just hop from star system to star system and see what's out there.
One of the most beautiful and engaging experiences in VR, flight is fun, the freedom is nice, but if you actually want to DO anything in the game, like get a good ship or participate in a plot or anything like that, you are basically stuck doing a couple specific trading routes that the community figured out were optimal and even then it's a slog.
I don't know why video games you have to pay $60 for seem to be so against you actually playing through the game. If you want engineered ship components (some BS upgrade mechanic) you basically have to do a galaxy wide fetch quest that takes tens of hours real time even if you have a walkthrough.
The C64 version had more features but was slower. The Sinclair Spectrum version was faster but missed the C64 docking music.
There was an Amiga spin-off, as I recall, with filled polygons but it didn’t hold my interest.