Sure, very small minority. Is it "fun" objectively or fun because you play with friends and like mining which happens to be the only thing that actually works? Hard to say
My 2 cents here..
It's still not a "game" by any stretch but much more of a quickly glued together CryEngine with a quick & dirty 64 bit hack that happens to break a lot of things in its physics engine, with a lot of cool looking 3D assets thrown in. Did they put any effort in the game engine ? I doubt it. They did put a lot of effort in the graphical assets though. Anyway.
I'm a flight sim fan (generally speaking) and space sim fan (1000+ hours on KSP, 1000+ hours on ED.. you get the picture) so the initial promise from nearly 10 years ago bought me entirely even though I always disliked CRoberts and his KS stage presentation was cringe inducing to say the least. But still I would think that a competent team of devs would be able to pull something despite him. I was 50/50 on it back then.
What do I expect now when i decide to have a look at latest patch and press that launcher button ?
- to have a decently challenging flight model simulation (still no there yet) so i could actually just enjoy flying things around, as there's no real satisfaction out of achieving something that has zero challenge. Flying an hypersonic jet in KSP with full realistic aero mods ? hell yeah. Honing combat manoeuvers and low altitude flying in DCS ? anytime. The honestly amazing variety of ship sizes in weights in SC would have me expect vastly different flight model characteristics, and some interesting skill ramps for flying these different ships, and have fun learning that and achieving good things there. So far, it's been very disappointing (arcade flight model). Thruster orientation does nothing (hitting that VTOL toggle is just for looks), ships hover magically, and still have instant accelerations, and atmo lift and drag are not implemented at all, some ships with specific shapes and wings obviously made for atmo flight dont make any difference there.
- to have an immersive universe. Those space legs have to do a lot of mileage to counter the excessive jankyness of the still tier 0 game engine, with immersion breaking things like the FPS game like character movement, the completely broken physics engine, or the completely unrealistic ship movements. Still, there's something to be said about how they try and integrate everything in that poor engine that braces under the load, with proximity VOIP actually helping there, and the ability to get friends onboard a random "adventure" (by that it means usually fight the game engine itself but i digress). Manning turrets, shooting at the zombie-like AI can entertain for some time, if done with friends.
- to have meaningful interaction since it's supposed to be a MMO. Well there it kinda falls flat on its face. It's just as meaningful as Garry's Mod. Spawn things, agitate them around, rinse and repeat. Zero consequence and zero long term effect.
- to have some challenging game loop to complete. Cargo hauling is still meaningless and not even tier 0 (and still broken last time i checked). Mining has its minigame complete (I think ?) and would be the only thing one could spend a few hours on, by itself its kinda relaxing actually, flying over a moon/planet surveying its surface for deposits then breaking rocks.. Too bad the cargo hauling / economy sim (subsumption, production workflows..) that should wrap this minigame with something meaningful arent there yet. Jumpgate had this almost perfectly.
- shopping around for ship upgrade parts and actually choosing them is becoming a bit more interesting, though I expect more developments in this domain so it's less of a "A-grade everything with milspec hardware" and more of a "pick the best compromise for your purpose", we'll see, there are enough parts around for that now and it's more a matter of balancing things out. The basic game parts are there.
- have a vast universe to explore, and find interesting places, cargo shipping lanes, and new challenges - nothing of this is present. So the "fun time" is quickly over once i've tested the basic game loops like mining and hauling stuff to see if it affects the flight model (still doesnt).
- yeah we can pewpew but it's either against zombie AI (only compensated by numbers and ship size..), or against lag/desync players that move like mosquitoes on crack in their space fighter. And yeah there's also ganking but that gets old quickly since there's zero long lasting consequence to anything.
So yeah I did try and launch the latest patch, have a flight run in my C2 Hercules, saw that it flies exactly like every other ship in SC, and actually fits better in hangars than the Caterpillar (it's shorter in length ! no more scraping the paintwork !), also saw that most "cargo terminals" are still broken. Also tried the mining minigame to get a feel of the new refinery UI, it's OK, one could certainly bring out a Mole (the ship, not our resident Scotsman) and a pair of friends and have an actual good fun run getting those rocks to explode in our face due to server desync ("TURN OFF THE BEAM !!!! - BUT I DID !! - BOOOM") and have another run at it until we get tired of falling through floors, ladders and ramps or getting ejected through ship hull due to looking at the game the wrong way.
I know there's also a certain form of fun to be had at the expense of the broken game engine, with, in addition, everything being made out of explodium (ramps and trolleys being the latest trend), hundred tons ships being blown out by the wind, huge armored vehicles bouncing like beach balloons etc. but for me that gets old reallly fast and that's definitely not something I expect out of this game. This reeks of lazy implementation of a basic game engine with zero understanding of the side effects of just about everything.
In short the "fun" lasts maybe an hour or so, a bit more if i find friends willing to try out team mining, and that's it until next patch.
