Elite is mostly of historical interest, but do check out FE2 and FFE (in this order).
And then FE2 was at least just as much of a step forward.
Imagine, it's 1993, the typical gaming machine is Atari, Amiga or 286.
Then suddenly, you get a space game where:
- You have (pretty much) the entire galaxy to explore.
- Star systems are realistically scaled, with no downscaling whatsoever - 1:1 planets and all that.
- You can fly and land pretty much anywhere you please. No skyboxes or other fakery - anything in the same solar system is fair game and likely visible, unless so distant that it won't even be a point of light.
- Everything rotates and orbits. If you land somewhere you will see a real time day/night cycle.
- Physics is pretty much bullshit free Newtonian - including gravity.
- The graphics is fucking sweet (for its time) - everything is super-detailed and many objects (like fully 3D clouds or the planets themselves) are made of curvy polygons. No clipping plane or distance fog either - you can have working clocktower under a geodesic dome on a colonized moon in your view at the same time as it's parent gas giant at the same time as the star it orbited.
- You could do whatever you wanted - trading, bounty hunting, piracy, mining, passenger ferrying, smuggling, assassinations, military career.
- It all fits on a single floppy.
FE2 ruined every other Elite game for me, including Dangerous and the open source versions. The combat sucked, and I was really annoyed by space being blue, but those seamless planetary landings with cities, clouds, trees! All those orbiting planets and moons and the scale of it all. It's still unmatched. No Man's Sky has the planets, but not the realistic solar systems or the cities and feeling of real civilization existing on those planets. Just those weird samey outposts, pointlessly scattered across the landscape.
They should have just ported the FE2 engine to nicer graphics, better usability, better procedural generation, better everything, and that would have been the Elite game I would have wanted to play. With Elite: Dangerous, I've played the tutorial three times and bounced of it every time. FE2 is the only Elite that still beckons me.
This tbh, I bought Starsector a few days ago and it is actually scratching the itch that I wanted Elite: Dangerous to scratch. God bless the slavs.
Starsector does have some of the same issues as Elite: Dangerous (and most space sims), like how you get money, get better fleet, so you can make more money, and get better fleet, etc. But at least stuff like travelling around the game world is fun rather than tedious, the NPC portraits look good instead of being godawful procedurally generated crash, the setting, factions, and so on are more interesting and flavourful, exploring outside of civilized space is actually fun, etc. The economy is also better implemented. It's funny how one descriptive paragraph and a small piece of thumbnail art makes every default inhabited world in Starsector have so much more character than any place in Elite: Dangerous, even capital worlds.
"Star Traders: Frontiers" is a completely different game from E:D. Not even a simulator, but a turn-based strategy game, yet there is some overlap with the promise of Elite, as it also satisfies that itch of being a space captain. But the biggest difference with E:D. is that it is an excellent game.
There is trading that makes sense, tactical combat between ships and ground combat of your crew vs. adversaries, factions, diplomacy, rising through the ranks, special events and characters, extensive ship customization, there's a Dune vibe (which is always a good think in my book)...
the most lacking aspect is probably exploration, since the universe is finite and pretty much developed. But other than that it's the best game of being a Sci-Fi Space Captain that I've come across recently.
