What is the 'Must Have' feature Elite Dangerous needs to please hardcore fans?

[sscadmin]

This is a good question and sometimes its hard to pick one thing, on one hand you want Elite: Dangerous to be a totally new game and concept to see what they can come up with and in the other hand you want them to stay true to the game you played 20+ years ago. I know for me to be satisfied I would like my actions in the game to effect the game world, whether its on a small scale or large one depending what I did or did not do. Immersion is a huge thing for me and I would gladly for-go graphics and sfx for making me feel like 'I matter' in the game world. So here is hoping that 'immersion' is dead on in Elite: Dangerous.

[VonPaulus]

I'm 100% with you on the immersion feeling. We need cockpits and in that regard I would also welcome TrackIR support. For those who have it, it would enhance the immersion feeling.

[Cody]

Immersion is crucial - I've played far too many games with nice flashy gfx, but absolutely no immersion-factor.The game is in the head, not on the screen. Yes, the eye-candy is nice - but without immersion, it's wasted!

[StarMax]

Frontier was my fav of the time and I was playing non-stop. But I still remember thinking way back, how cool it would be to be able to walk tru the ship and such.

[sscadmin]

If I couldn't walk my ship it would least be nice to walk the stations, but ships would be perfect since you will be spending most your time in it.

[Pinback]

The living universe, it was touched upon in one of DB videos with a space station being built over time.

[nevilclavain]

leaving my pilot seat and walk around, in the ship/station/city/planet

[Geraldine]

Looking at (or rather trying to see the monitors behind David in his first video) what has been posted so far, it seems it will have a 3D cockpit similar to the one on FE2 but updated. Mind you, this is only the alpha build so that could change.

[Vaipa]

Well they said they will make it possible at least at some point to walk the ships, however this is a space game about shooting and trading and exploring in SPACE.Cockpits don't really add to the immersion or the game, but they are somewhere on a checklist of every sim fanatic. You always end up with one of 3 variants:1) A token cockpit, like in the x series, where you have a model and that's about it. Everything else is 2d hud that could be there without the cockpit model as well.2) A 2d cockpit, like in the old games, xwing, tie fighter, wing commander , where you control everything 100% but it's so 90s3) A full on 3d cockpit where you map everything on the model, displays, switches, etc. Everything in there. However that is not ergonomic, because you'll be either making the HUD parts of the cockpit stay as flat on the screen as possible, or you'll battle mipmap issues because your indicators will be unreadable when everything starts to move. My 2 cents  All in all I hope they will do a good space game, with good controls and a nice universe that makes sense. That is immersion