Re: Elite : Reclamation (Novel)
Posted: Fri Oct 11, 2013 5:07 pm
Mmm. It all depends on what you think makes Elite be "Elite".
The important differences between Elite and Frontier are basically to the wide setting - who are the major political powers and what does the starmap look like when you zoom out - and those to the flight mechanics necessary to deal with having 1:1 scale systems. Everything else is a very clear successor (though often extended):
- ship designs
- ship equipment, especially weapons
- station designs
- station locations
- trading model and mechanisms
- basic roles a player or NPC can take
The flight model was controversial, but I don't think makes it "not a sequel".
The setting, I think it's fairly clear, is probably the sort of setting that Braben originally envisaged but couldn't do due to lack of space on the BBC. I don't think it makes it "not a sequel" either: if FE2 had kept the Elite style of maps, but changed the basic galaxy seed so you were in a different Eight, and this one was administrated by the Interstellar Coalition, I think there'd be no question it was a sequel. Indeed, I think it's only one of the explicit nods to the previous game - the Old Worlds systems - which make that hard to believe. The Elite manual mentioned the Cooperative and its systems not being the only political power in the known universe, just merely being the largest [1]. (Indeed, both the manual and the Dark Wheel use "Federation" and "Cooperative" a little interchangeably... that's not the way the attempts to merge the timelines have gone, of course)
It's not as if the Elite setting was particularly coherent in the first place: the game portrayed one thing; the manual and Dark Wheel said another thing which sometimes matched, sometimes talked about things not visible or hinted at in game, and occasionally outright contradicted the game. Reconciling either the Elite game alone or the Elite manual and Dark Wheel alone with the Frontier setting is much more straightforward than trying to reconcile all three groups of setting information.
Elite->FE2->FFE->E:D seems a fairly natural progression towards a particular game and setting which Braben wanted to make (whether all the details which first appeared in FE2 were in his head in 1985 or not) but has previously been unable to for various reasons.
Oolite is a very different answer to the question of "what might Elite have looked like if made for 21st century hardware", but also has some pretty big setting and gameplay differences from the original Elite. It just gets away with them because certain obvious things are the same.
[1] Which is true: Cooperative population is around 7 trillion. I haven't counted Frontier particularly precisely but I'd be very surprised if inhabited space in that game came out as more than 2 trillion. Elite Dangerous I expect will be much larger, though.
The important differences between Elite and Frontier are basically to the wide setting - who are the major political powers and what does the starmap look like when you zoom out - and those to the flight mechanics necessary to deal with having 1:1 scale systems. Everything else is a very clear successor (though often extended):
- ship designs
- ship equipment, especially weapons
- station designs
- station locations
- trading model and mechanisms
- basic roles a player or NPC can take
The flight model was controversial, but I don't think makes it "not a sequel".
The setting, I think it's fairly clear, is probably the sort of setting that Braben originally envisaged but couldn't do due to lack of space on the BBC. I don't think it makes it "not a sequel" either: if FE2 had kept the Elite style of maps, but changed the basic galaxy seed so you were in a different Eight, and this one was administrated by the Interstellar Coalition, I think there'd be no question it was a sequel. Indeed, I think it's only one of the explicit nods to the previous game - the Old Worlds systems - which make that hard to believe. The Elite manual mentioned the Cooperative and its systems not being the only political power in the known universe, just merely being the largest [1]. (Indeed, both the manual and the Dark Wheel use "Federation" and "Cooperative" a little interchangeably... that's not the way the attempts to merge the timelines have gone, of course)
It's not as if the Elite setting was particularly coherent in the first place: the game portrayed one thing; the manual and Dark Wheel said another thing which sometimes matched, sometimes talked about things not visible or hinted at in game, and occasionally outright contradicted the game. Reconciling either the Elite game alone or the Elite manual and Dark Wheel alone with the Frontier setting is much more straightforward than trying to reconcile all three groups of setting information.
Elite->FE2->FFE->E:D seems a fairly natural progression towards a particular game and setting which Braben wanted to make (whether all the details which first appeared in FE2 were in his head in 1985 or not) but has previously been unable to for various reasons.
Oolite is a very different answer to the question of "what might Elite have looked like if made for 21st century hardware", but also has some pretty big setting and gameplay differences from the original Elite. It just gets away with them because certain obvious things are the same.
[1] Which is true: Cooperative population is around 7 trillion. I haven't counted Frontier particularly precisely but I'd be very surprised if inhabited space in that game came out as more than 2 trillion. Elite Dangerous I expect will be much larger, though.
