Seems like "procedural techniques" is a huge factor with this game. I haven't played the first ones, but it seems like auto-generating galaxies and stars was what enabled the game to make it feels huge.
I'm wondering how these "procedural techniques" will work with high quality graphics? Also, for those who played both Elite and Minecraft, is it a similar feeling? Is there any other similar - yet more recent - games in that genre?
The vastness of the universe in the original Elite had a wow factor, but really didn't serve much purpose in the game.
Much more important was the trading aspect.
Some systems were safe, and law abiding, and had police ships. Some were criminal, and had pirates circling. Many goods were common across them, but you could buy narcotics and slaves from criminal systems. Your behaviour affected how other ships would react - trading slaves was profitable, but you'd be attacked by police and pirates. Attacking other cargo ships (to capture their cargo) would turn you criminal. Attacking pirates would make you more law-abiding.
You could find two systems and find the right product to buy-low, sell-high.
There's more in common with games like Fallout 3, although fallout 3 didn't really have a good trading system.
(All the above is from memory. I have no doubt made mistakes.
There is one minor aspect of the game that deserves mentioning - the mildly brutal learning curve just to fly the ship. Do you remember the first time you tried to dock with a spinning station? And how the autopilot mocked you, priced at 10 times your net worth?
Docking was my favorite part of the game. Particularly when under fire and heavily damaged. How fast should I come in? How steep? Can't be too cautious or this pirate on my tail will waste me. Glance the edges and I'll be dead anyway.
<armchair role=gamedev>
There are other places in Elite where similar high pressure situations could be added. The obvious one is to make the sun scoop more dangerous. Make it work better the deeper you go in the sun. But in addition to the hard surface to avoid crashing into, the sun does damage over time proportionate to depth. (Maybe collection rate is linear to depth while damage is squared, with a small safe zone for the patient at the top.)
A less exciting one would be cargo transfer. What if cargo was moved by porters? The union guys take their time, but do a good job. You could do it yourself, but you'll get irate customers if you clip a corner and damage the stock. Better hurry though, the police inspections are only a few docking bays down the row from your ship.
Minecraft and Frontier EliteII conveyed pretty much the same feeling of absolute freedom, yes. Of course, Minecraft was based on a completely different premise - changing the world instead of exploring it.
It can be argued that there has always been a contrast between procedural games and handcrafted games, a contrast that has followed us since the dawn of game design. Procedural tends to mean lifeless, Handcrafted tends to mean depthless.
There is no longer a clear distinction between the two, though. Games tend to include procedural elements and interweave them with handcrafted ones. Procedurals are generally used to provide a longer game experience, while Handcrafts are generally used to convey a story or a designer's cut of fun.
A recent example could be Diablo 3. This is at the core a Procedural game. The game has been divided in acts, chapters and quests. Each quest ends with a handcrafted challenge, each chapter ends with a handcrafted miniboss fight, and each Act ends with a handcrafted "act boss" fight. Everything in between, including the fights, the rare monsters, the champion monsters, the stage layout and of course the loot, is procedurally generated. The designers have a set of game rules that dictate how and when this or that monster can spawn, how it looks like, and how, when, and what kind of loot it can drop.
For some players, this extends the game's depth and the fun they can get, from a dozen hours of handcrafted content to hundreds, possibly even thousands of hours of procedurally generated entertainment.
Another great example would be Skyrim. Again at the core, the Elder Scrolls series is procedurally generated, but with a twist; in Daggerfall, the third episode, they pushed the envelope to its limit with a really humongous generated world, of a size that only Elite games could surpass. With time they realized that they went too far; they had to restrict the procedural aspect and resume the handcrafting. Using the procedurally generated content as a mold, they could "paint" the game on top of it to make it feel more lively, possibly more epic with each following iteration thanks to a better engine and of course a bigger budget.
Then there's the opposite line of game design - those that start as Handcrafted with increasing amounts of procedurally generated elements as the franchise advances. The Dragon Age series is widely seen as taking this path (a mistake in my opinion).
For some other games that are pretty much only procedural, check The Sims, Sim City and their ilk, Dwarf Fortress, Audiosurf, NetHack of course, the Civilization series, etc. The whole line of EASports games could also be seen as procedurally generated as well depending on your point of view. "God Games" such as From Dust are also generally procedural.
Quite well actually. There's a space MMO project called Infinity, by Flavien Brebion that has demoed it for years but has released little material lately.
I'm wondering how these "procedural techniques" will work with high quality graphics? Also, for those who played both Elite and Minecraft, is it a similar feeling? Is there any other similar - yet more recent - games in that genre?