Elite is in maintenance mode and its remaining players are basically in denial. At least that is how it looks.
Late last year, Elite tacked on a phone mini game and called it exploration. Nothing new to discover, mind you. Just an annoying, fiddly mini game that takes you out of the cockpit and lets you fiddle with dials to “decipher” audio signals. Its basically Analog Radio Tuning, the Mini-Game. Annoying, fiddly, tedious and pointless, since their exploration update added nothing new to discover.
On top of that, they scrapped visual updates for Ice planets and Fleet Carriers. Made a nebulous announcement about the “next era” of the game, specified that it would NOT come soon, gave no dates or information about what is next and their financials revealed that they were in the Red last year, save for the stock purchase from Tencent.
Elite has turned out to be every bit the scam Star Citizen is. None of the mechanics Braben hinted at or claimed the studio was interested in are present. Nor will they be. When asked about Legs and Atmospheric planets, Brett from Frontier stated they were “PROBABLY still INTERESTED in adding those…once the tech could support it.”
So yeah, maintenance mode.