Well, the loop is no longer necessary apart from fixing your ship. I played it that way and completed a game without a single base. I had to place some buildings to progress with initial quest line but I never maintained it or got back to it for anything other than to progress quest line.

As for content, yes, there could always be room for more but it's far from empty and boring. You can manage fleets now, manage villages, do daily quests with other people, etc. There are things to do. Things to discover. Hunting for unique ships is especially interesting as they are located in specific planets and specific universes so use of gates is necessary.

So far game had many DLCs, all of which were free. They sat down and worked hard until game was complete. CDPR on the other hand still doesn't have many things they've promised and now there's DLC for 30€, while base game is still 60€. Still unpolished and buggy, lacking content promised initially.

[–] Goblin_Mode@ttrpg.network 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

At the end of the day this is all subjective so far be it from me to claim objectivity. That being said I don't think you could really classify a lot of that as "things to do"

Managing fleets is just about W keying in space until you see a frigate and buying a couple ships with high stats. But in my experience stats don't even really matter because the missions are almost always a success anyway. Speaking of fleet missions they are imo the most mobile game-y "come back in 26 hours" passive resource thing imaginable. No interactivity, just press a button and come back later.

Managing the village was fun for the first I'm gonna say 2 hours. Now it's just another passive resource that pays out every 24 hours and makes me do some combat every time I visit. That well is about 2 inches deep and produces just enough water for me to call it a feature.

Daily quests are very samey. A lot of fetch quests for miscellaneous doodads that basically boil down to "go to the same terrestrial bunker you've seen 100 times on 100 worlds, Kill some sentinels (or bugs), interact with console, Get some cryptic dialog, return to quest giver, receive dosh. Again, Kinda fun at first, gets boring as hell very quick.

Ship collecting is at least interesting in that the RNG and strategy mesh nicely. But without any way to customize your ship outside of just finding one that looks the way you want there's nothing more to do with them besides look at them. There's no real reason to have more than 1.

Listen I don't think the game is particularly bad. I'd even say it's an upper tier "podcast game", hell I have 100+ hours in it over like 3 years myself. But let's not kid ourselves and say it's a great game. It's a perfectly Passable time waster to keep your hands busy while you do something else like chat with friends or read an audiobook (see: "podcast game")

[–] MeanEYE@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Oh for sure I've played better games and I can't call it great. It's an okay game and I have similar amount of hours in it. But I think company needs to be praised for not doing what virtually every other company does these days and that's to make an apology video claiming it was a good lesson for them and next time they'll do better and to thank us for trusting them with our money. But they had no issue selling pre-orders, ultimate and platinum editions while fully knowing product is not finished.

[–] MeanEYE@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

And yet another free DLC from Hello Games. Even if you don't like the game, you can't really be mad when they drop content updates for free like this on a regular basis.