Frontier Developments founder David Braben has defended the decision to make Elite Dangerous online only, with many clarifications.
First off, the game will still have single player, and it will work fine even with weak connections. David claims he had it running on a laptop tethered to his smartphone. FD also has a backup plan if Elite’s servers ever go down, with the game constantly being archived in its online state. If worse comes to worse, FD can always release the archives for fans to use.
Lastly, this is what he had to say about the decision to go online only, and fan reaction:
As features were implemented, for the best results we chose to prioritize delivery of the online single and multiplayer experiences, with a view to providing the offline version later in development. We had to make a decision for the good of the game, and that is what we did.
