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I waited for this game for years. My impression is that this game is basically about being a disabled transgender poor immigrant, but without any of the cool sex.

It beats you down over a relentlessly repetitive cavalcade of dice rolls and waiting periods, with dozens of false starts and unsatisfying endings. Once you've turned down every unsatisfying ending, there's nothing left for you. I got all of the endings within 5 hours, and that's with imperfect play.

I suppose someone out there thinks that that's the 'point': that is how real life feels for many people, a constant grind. I was even enjoying it in that dialectical sense before I put something together - everything in this game is utterly disjointed. You could be in with the space Yakuza and still get menaced by a random bounty hunter. You get your tracker taken off and you're glad to be rid of the bounty hunter that got spaced by the bar people long ago. You discover some truths and have no way to follow up on him. You spend huge amounts of time helping many people for pretty much negative reward, or rewards that don't really matter by the time you can get them.

Throughout the game, you're basically fed the hope that you'll find out something interesting or special and so on and so forth, that you'll get to learn more about the world and maybe explore it. Instead, you get a terrible low poly Blender model (it would have been 1000x better as 2D art) and dice game. At some point, you have to look past 'it's so deep because it feels exactly like being a poor person' and get to 'it sucks to play and never feels rewarding'.

Great, incredible premise. Some of the characters are cute. Completely botched execution.

Elite is so shallow and broken that it could be a very impressive tech demo. And it's not getting better.

COMBAT/OUTFITTING
Here's the lynchpin of Elite's combat: you will never be bothered by NPCs unless you choose to be. Unless you're carrying cargo, even pirates who do interdict you scan you and then ♥♥♥♥ off. Actually, unless you're carrying Thargoid stuff, even the Thargoids who hyperdict you scan you and then... ♥♥♥♥ off. You can go up right next to a wanted pirate with all your hardpoints out and charged, and fire... but as long as you don't hit, you might as well have been mining.

Perhaps this is a conscious design choice that is at least in part due to the game's broken outfitting mechanics. In normal games, you would have weapons on you regardless of your ship type, at least to give you some options if/when attacked; in theory, minimizing mass to increase FSD range and so on is an interesting risk vs reward dynamic. In practice, you'll never run into an enemy anyway.

Even if you go out looking to fight other players, you're ♥♥♥♥♥♥ if your ship isn't engineered to the gills. This is okay for an entirely cerebral experience, like EVE. It makes little sense for an action game like Elite, where skill is irrelevant against a fully engineered ship because the ship can outmaneuver, outgun and outlast you no matter what kind of other advantages you may have in skill. The combat itself is clearly the core of the game, and it's fun, but the game is not equipped to let you fight unless you spend hours doing everything but fighting.

(Also, the prices for modules pretty much make no sense. Of course, this doesn't matter because money is meaningless.)

MAKING MONEY
For the first couple days in the game, I made money by baiting the cops into shooting criminals for me. Then I did Road 2 Riches. Then I did Robigo.

Conspicuously absent: ways of making money that don't involve some kind of exploit. Of course, I did try them at length, but 'legitimate' methods of earning money wouldn't warrant a visible slice on the pie chart. I can foresee the argument that I ruined the game for myself by using these methods, but I'd have quit the game on day 4 if I didn't find out about Robigo. Of course, this is the most realistic part of Elite, except the part where these money-making opportunities in real life are usually filled up by a niche very quickly and become useless, so there's always a need to seek out new niches. Robigo has been in the game for years.

Also, you need a fleet carrier to trade items. Apparently, the only way to give someone an item is to have them dock on your fleet carrier and set the price as low as it will go. Here's a tip: when the only way to perform core game functions is through extremely convoluted workarounds, your game mechanics need to change, not the players.

UI
The Galaxy Map is a perfect example of the UI's ambition and, simultaneously, its abject failure. In a normal game, you would go around a 2d or isometric map. There would be 3d options, but you would look at it once, marvel at how pretty it was, and then never look at the 3d map again. There would be a single hotkey to whip the map up, a hotkey to select the closest system, and a key to jump.

In Elite, the Galaxy Map is completely useless. It is an unmitigated failure. It has no redeeming factors. There's a reason any vet will tell you to download three separate third-party tools. Yes, a 2d map would be confusing and difficult to arrange. No, a 3d map is not better, not until we figure out how to make humans see in the fourth dimension.

Of course, even with third-party tools, there is no escaping the Galaxy Map's less useless part, the input fields. Here, there are UI interface bugs which would have been caught within seconds in the beta testing of a professionally produced game. The input field often fails to register when you've clicked in the input field, even if the little pipe ( | ) is nestled right in the field, and it will often pop up the system you're currently in when you search for something, requiring you to do Wing Chun style kung fu with your fingers to unlodge it and select it without slowly flying halfway back across the galaxy to your current location.

The headlook panels are cool in theory, but real life cars have cruise control mapped to a switch for a reason. As it is, your only way to do things that could possibly be extremely time-sensitive (selecting a destination, for example) would be to carefully and painstakingly pull up your holographic menu that only shows up when you look at it and fiddle with it with arrow keys. It's not compelling gameplay past the first few minutes of wonder.

PROCEDURAL GENERATION
I'm impressed with the Stellar Forge, and it would be amazing in a better game. Besides that, however, the procedural generation is simply lazy. There are no interesting people, and few real factions; the procedurally generated ones genuinely feel like something that would pop out of some kind of weird open-source game like Vega Strike. (Why is a law firm fighting a civil war with the system's Conservative Party? Why does the Federation allow political parties to kill each other en masse in space? No one knows.) And, of course, everything in the game is well-documented and well-known; there are no truly unique discoveries.

And, of course, planetary exploration. Besides the interesting mechanics, the planetary exploration isn't even as deep as Mass Effect's! Shoot out a few probes in a uniform pattern, run around and poke at things risk-free with your one, unmodifiable SRV. Sorry, but this is not a fully developed mechanic. In fact, it explicitly isn't - Frontier eliminated the other two SRV types before we ever saw them. Planetary exploration is a tacked-on feature that you indulge in once or twice to get some materials and curiosities.

IT WON'T GET BETTER
Today, they released a $40 FPS grafted haphazardly onto the game. It doesn't look terrible, but have you ever heard of a little game called Deus Ex? There is an appeal to 'shooting someone in the head and then running across the galaxy to a frontier settlement', except the person you shot is a randomly generated 3d model with no family, personality or connections, the consequences are largely an apparition, and the people in the settlement are empty, randomly generated 3d models. The problem isn't in the lack of exciting things to do - it's the fact that none of the exciting things you can do matter, at all, or have significant consequences. Keep in mind that RPGs have thousands of unique quests with stories attached to them - think about the fact that they released a full game before updating or balancing missions, missions being the first thing you do in the entire game.

The thing is, they they built all these things before ironing out the game's fundamentals. Clearly, the devs are not interested in making the game more fun, or interesting; they are coasting half-finished game until the interest and money dries up, then they milk the remaining fans to pay for exciting new features. Can anyone tell me why they did this before having different kinds of SRVs, and different kind of modules?

If you want to play an FPS, play an FPS. If you want to play a space sim, play a space sim. If you want to play space vehicles, try Lego Star Wars, I guess? If you want all of them, there's always Star Citizen, which is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for many different and many of the same reasons, but at least lets you work past the paywall to its tacked-on content.

FINAL NOTES
I make a habit out of buying old Jaguars for nothing, running them into the ground over the course of two years, and then smog scrapping them for $1000 a pop, and similarly I make a habit out of running Elite into the ground over the course of a couple days, and then getting back into it again later. But I really would not call it a good game just because it can be fun to play until I remember why I stopped playing in the first place.