The game still surprises me from time to time, and after 36 hours I feel there are still some bits that I haven't explored at all (I've yet to have a proper space battle or attack a capital ship for example), but I think the game has some fundamental problems that need a major rehaul, to the point of maybe doing another hard reset of the universe down the line.
Since I've spent most of the time looking at upgrading my stuff, most of my gameplay has been on land (and it seems most of the game in general is designed with that in mind), but the sense of progression is seemingly tied to what your gear is at the moment, and the entire universe feels like it's adapting to your current status. So ships become better and more valuable the more your own ship is leveled up, as opposed to progression being spread out spatially/regionally throughout the galaxy, like finding stranger and better ships the closer you are to the galactic center. Adding the fact that most planets are packed full of all types of structures, every one of them, is probably the greatest hit to the exploration aspect of the game.
It feels like they made some last minute decisions to try and make the game give more immediate and more frequent rewards in shorter spans of time, so for example I ended up spending more time on a single planet and pretty much upgraded more than half of my Exosuit inventory slots on that one planet, which is completely crazy to me. Such a thing should not have been made possible in the first place. Once I started making a few more hyperjumps to other systems and when I relieved myself a bit more of the burdens of a small inventory, it became much more apparent to me that this game should probably be played with much more frequent hyperjumps and visiting only like a half a dozen POIs per planet, to keep things fresh. Which is funny, because I thought that's what the game was all about while following the pre-release info, but the game pretty much stops you from doing that at every turn and at the same time enables you to "progress" by staying in one place.
On one side, it has some very oldschool-feeling design decisions, as someone previously mentioned, a lot of the lore-based and terminal POIs are reminiscent of text adventures, choose your own adventure books or tabletop games (very much in the vein of FTL, for example), and the entire minimalist approach does remind me of very old action adventure games, but the newer survival and inventory elements kinda ruin the sense of mystery, mostly because the moments that are supposed to be more spread out and far inbetween are extremely condensed, all packed into almost each and every planet, so the mystery and uniqueness is gone.
For one, I think they did a pretty decent job with the planets, even though there are a lot of repeating elements, each planet still feels reasonably unique and I'm genuinely interested in walking around. It's just that after a few seconds, I see an outpost, a temple and an obelisk a few kilometers from one another, and the illusion is gone.
Basically, the "dungeons" in this game are not varied, or I should say distinguishable enough mechanically from one another to make a difference. The elements are there, so if I land on a dangerously radioactive planet, I should expect it to kill me in less than a minute, maybe longer if I have some protection, but I should also expect it to be littered with a rare element or two - and not much else. Rather, in my 36 hours of gameplay so far, I have died a total of two times, both times in space because my large inventory ship was full of valuable cargo and was gunned down by pirates. Not a single death on planet, so clearly there's a problem with the survival aspect. So like there are Gravitino Ball planets, there should be rare outpost planets, crashed ships planets, suit upgrade planets, temple planets, creature planets, or rather have these be the prevailing elements on those planets, with other tidbits scarcely scattered here and there.
The only real challenge in this game is the lack of inventory space, interstellar travel speed and to an extent the lack of resources (but is closely tied to inventory anyway). The game wants to be about survival, but it also doesn't, it wants to be about exploration, but it stops you from doing that at every turn, be it by the refueling costs, sucking out the joy out of flying or by filling each planet with almost everything all at once. I don't really see how adding personal freighters or base building will help this game in the long run, without first fundamentally changing some core elements.
All that being said, it still has some hooks if you make some of the tedium less limiting by grinding and expanding your cargo space. I've only just started following the Atlas path, I love the looks of those interiors and how much they contrast the planetary visuals, I've yet to even think about going to the galactic center, go into space battles, black holes or even see what a four and five star Sentinel alert looks like, but they are sadly minor goals enveloped by problematic fundamentals. I still think I'll squeeze out some fun out of this game, so we'll see.
