I haven't played it, but I've watched YouTube videos on it. I didn't know anything about the game until right before it got released, but from what I understand, there was a lot of things promised (which were included in promotional videos) which didn't make it into the game. And, having watched the game being played, it doesn't seem like there's much in the way to do. Once you upgrade your suit, multi-tool and ship, it seems like there just isn't anything to keep you playing.
Has that been your experience?
That has been my experience, yes. There is a story to complete, but upgrades and exploration are why I play and ship customization is pretty limited, and the economics are wonky. All I would like is that there was some credit for trading in an old ship for an upgrade. There is little reason to upgrade your ship until you have saved enough to buy the best. It's all wasted money otherwise. The reason is if you find a ship that costs 6,000,000 units when your ship is worth 300,000 units, if you upgrade to a 3,000,000 unit ship the big ship still costs 6,000,000 units. So do you want your upgrade path to that ship to cost 6,000,000 or 9,000,000? The economics push you to stay in your old ship.
And the only difference from ship to ship is just the number of squares it has for storage. You start with a 17 square ship and cap out at 48 squares. They try to fool you into each ship being different by randomly selecting which squares in the 6x8 matrix are unlocked but there is literally no point to this since there is no mechanic to push you to grouping ship parts adjacent to one another.
For me I saw a game that looked like a fun exploration game with mining and that is pretty much what it is.
That being said, I think its novelty has run its course with me after about 40 hours of game play. There certainly isn't enough to keep me entertained long term. My biggest issue with the game is that non-existent economy and simplistic ship systems, but the true randomness of exploration is also limited. Dwarf Fortress remains by far the most intriguing random world generator.
The thing is I have been a PC gamer for 36 year and have long since learned to avoid reading hype. I graduated from that delusion 20 years ago.
I do understand that those who followed the development closely were lied to, and hopefully there is some good that comes from this, but probably not. I think the straw that broke the camels back for me was in the mid 90s when the idea of a FPS X-Com first started and there were write-ups in PC Gamer and other periodicals with screen shots of the game that showed a cool interface where your HUD would show camera feeds of other team members. When the game was finally pronounced dead one of the things that was apparently a major hurdle was they couldn't get the multi camera feed HUD to work... so I realized at that point that all of the screen shots in all of the magazines were just bull crap. I stopped reading hype at that point.
