Elite Dangerous launched December 16, 2014. This piece looks at the game ten years in, from a Freelancer fan's perspective.
Elite Dangerous has been updated substantially since launch. It has planetary landing now — full atmospheric planets in Odyssey. It has fleet carriers, the mobile base stations that players can own and move between systems. It has a living galaxy mechanic that tracks faction conflict and responds to player activity at a server-wide level. By most measures, Frontier Developments has built something significantly more complex than the game that shipped in 2014.
Ten years in, here's how it stands for someone who wants what Freelancer offered.
The tone is right. That's the first thing. Elite Dangerous has the quality that makes Freelancer fans recognize it as kin — the sense that space is genuinely vast and you are genuinely small. Docking at Coriolis stations by following the mail slot, listening to the docking computer, watching the rotating station fill your view. Flying into an unexplored system where the star hasn't been named and no one has catalogued the planets. The scale communicates something that most space games don't: you are one person in a universe that was here before you and will be here after you.
The flight model is excellent and demanding. This is also where Elite most diverges from Freelancer's design philosophy. Elite rewards serious hardware — HOTAS setups, TrackIR, VR headsets. It is technically mouse-playable, and the community has produced good mouse settings documentation. But the design assumes dedicated flight hardware in a way that Freelancer explicitly did not. The Remlok suit, the six-degree-of-freedom combat, the Newtonian flight assist toggle — none of this was designed for a mouse on a flat surface. You can make it work. It is not the default experience.
The narrative absence is the other gap. Elite has background story — factions, lore, a war between superpowers that has been ongoing for a decade. But it delivers this through news tickers and in-game GalNet articles, not through a scripted campaign. There is no Edison Trent. There is no through-line. You read about events happening; you don't play through events happening. For players who loved Freelancer's campaign, this is the fundamental difference.
Ten years and substantial updates have made Elite a great game by its own standards. As a Freelancer replacement — it's the closest. But close the way a distant star is close.