Personally I have mixed feelings about this.
There was a time three or four years ago when I would regularly check for news on Elite IV, which everybody kinda knew was 'in development' and reportedly would have been completed 'after The Outsider' due to tech development issues or somesuch.
I think it makes a lot of sense, from a capital risk point of view, for Frontier to be running with the Kickstarter method, but there is the potential for it to be viewed a bit cynically - and I don't know really whether or not I support it. It smacks of treating the game almost entirely as a capitalist venture. I want to be convinced that it is more than that.
As time has passed I'm not convinced the world needs another Elite anymore, and at this moment I am not convinced we will get a modern Elite which represents all the crazy things that the first one stood for.
What should it look like? What was it about Elite, and Frontier, that made them so 'good'?
They will need to do a lot more work on creating innovative, imaginative procedural worlds - looking back on the trading mechanics and it was not much more than a grind, masked by the magic of this free, limitless world. And combat was pretty unwieldy and uninteresting - but without comparison at the time they existed.
I just think if a new Elite is to be a 'success' in terms of game design, or creatively or whatever you want to call it - it will need to recapture some of that 'magic' of the first two (I kinda liked the third as well, but that was a bit of a f***-up if truth be told).
How does a team of 200 go about creating that? With a clever bit of networking tech?
They don't need to do too much to convince me that this WILL be a success, but I am still looking for a little bit of convincing that they can create a huge, believable, interesting procedural universe - not just that I could play with a mate.
And that concludes an exercise in saying very little with lots of words