"This game HAS to be made"
"WHEN we first release the game..."
"This WOULDN'T be available on first release."
Not a single IF or MAYBE there - this game is happening, people, Kickstarter funding or not...
<desperately crosses fingers>
Now, reality check. A LOT of stuff is being deferred until "later". That word scares me, because "later" in terms of Elite IV meant nearly 20 years. If Dangerous is released in mid 2014 that'll be 19 years since FFE. How long will the rest of the content take to create? Fully realistic, procedurally generated planets with wildlife and nature and individuality? Fully realised space stations containing fully realised ships and populations, including players?? Will Diso have 6 million cats on it?
I hope that Frontier aren't setting too high a goal here. I still believe that this stuff wouldn't be said if Frontier hadn't gone most of the way there already but I'm starting to wonder. Will Frontier's development staff be put full-time onto Elite following the launch or will they mostly go back to writing Wii games? If the staff are dedicated to ED then it should be an achievable goal.
Who will be publishing it? I think the only reliable option is to self publish, due to the really bad history Braben has had with publishing Frontier and FFE.
That background in the last segment (the blue sky one) looked like it had a fancy Krait on it - something that might have come out of Griff's workshop...