He was a 12-year veteran of my colony and my only engineer, an old man now suffering with alzheimers complicated by dementia. One fateful autumn night he forgot where he was and eventually collapsed into a deep sleep outside in the cold rain. He froze to death that night before my doctor, occupied with treating multiple plague victims, could remind him where his bedroom was - a fine meal and one less mouth to feed for my starving colony in its time of need. Some say you can still find the remains of projects he abandoned, half-completed, strewn wide across the planet's barren wastes. He'll not be forgotten, whatever his name was, that incompetent waste of life.

Elite has spent most of the last decade locked in a deathmatch with Star Citizen to see which can be less of a complete game.

Star Citizen releases a new module that's totally non-functional? Elite comes back swinging with new economy exploits that let you speedrun to "endgame" ships within a few hours. Robigo passenger missions? Heck no, you think I've got all day to break the game? We've got VOID OPALS now!

Star Citizen adds shooter combat? Nice try SCAM CITIZEN, Elite's got you covered there too, and its FPS mode is 15 times better because it literally runs at 15 FPS on a 3090.

Star Citizen overmonetizes its paypigs? Check this out, Elite added its own CURRENCY so you don't have to agonize about how much you're spending on cosmetics in dollars and cents anymore. Also the patch that added their microtransaction currency to the game was so hastily tested they didn't notice it broke basic game functionality.

Elite has so much potential, but every time it sounds like Frontier's going to add something cool to the game, they do it in the most roundabout, annoying way possible. Fleet Carriers sounded great - but you'll have to spend whole minutes every month mining void opals to pay for their maintenance, and they serve basically no function aside from being a mobile gas station.

Why can't I build mines and refineries and stuff? Why can't I meaningfully interact with other players in some fashion besides combat? Why can't I hire AIs or other players, form a fleet, and take over stuff? Why can't I do research? Why can't I upgrade my character's skills somehow? Why do I need external third-party tools to find weapons, ships, commodities, and so on? Why do anything at all when the economy is so broken?

Why is 1/4 of Elite a brilliant genre-defining game with limitless potential and 3/4 a total afterthought?

Sometimes it really feels like the developers realized they'd screwed up the fundamentals so badly that they just gave up trying to fix things properly. Or maybe they looked at the money Star Citizen was pulling in and got so demoralized they don't care anymore.

Maybe they're working on a sequel now? Who knows. I'm a sucker, I'd probably buy it.