In terms of what they've pre-sold and pledged to deliver, almost everything is missing
But more pragmatically, if we were to forget all the grand sales pitches, not discuss whether the existing game mechanics are good/bad, and focus purely on what is missing for an absolute Minimal Viable Product?
- Persistence: Money and kit disappear on a whim. Hell, sometimes avatars change gender mid-session. Any accrued earnings or ship purchases are reset between wipes. (The last aspect was supposed to receive a partial fix in the latest patch, termed 'baby long term persistence'. It does not seem to have worked particularly well to date.)
- Stable Servers: The current system is a half-built Frankenstein concoction which falls over with regularity. '30k' crashes, massive desyncs where you can pass through your ship and watch the general game functionality melt around you. The theory is that this collection of half-functions will be assembled into standard instanced server regions at some point, which may work better. (And then the genuinely 'never been done before' server meshing is supposed to happen, creating a unified player space. This was supposed to happen in 2019. It is currently nowhere close to happening.)
- Functioning AI: The AI is currently woeful. Supposedly due in part to the state of the servers. The ground NPCs are the most amusing. In FPS they can shoot through walls, or be rendered immortal, or all run at you in a mad mob, or just not react to your presence at all. The more decorative ones at stations frequently just stand in stationary collectives in doorways, or stand looking wistful on chairs. Or curve their heads down in a rubberised way to look at their own armpit. It's weird. Not that they really have a function, but somehow they manage to anti-function. Several of these issues have been 'fixed' previously only to regress.
- Bug Squashing: The accrued bugs in SC are legion. Ones like ships spawning without their components (doors, engines etc) are ancient. Others like players spawning without their head, or in an invisible state where they can't interact with anything are almost as old. But the list is absurdly long. You can break your legs, have a heart attack, or simply fall through the floor doing the most mundane of actions. Random decompressed areas will kill you, lifts will kill you, duplicated trains will trap you in an eternal limbo. Ships will Quantum Travel directly into the heart of planets, which are explicably filled with water (explicably for reasons that are too long to mention), and kill you. On and on and on it goes. (If your UI disappears a popular voodoo fix with the community is to change the colour of your eyes. This probably says a fair bit about the state of the game
)
This may all seem hard to believe, but it really does seem to be that janky at a functional technical level. See Mole's post above yours for a recent 'review of the year'
This is all just keeping it brief though. If you want a long list of all the more glamorous gameplay that they've pre-sold but are absolutely nowhere close to delivering, then that would require a lot more words and pictures
Here's my review of the last year of SC
But of course, that doesn't stop CIG making a load of money yesterday by selling ships with green paintjobs.
