What was that early ground exploration like? Apparently it was removed long before I got to know Elite Dangerous exists. The game was kept a secret to me until May 2020. But ground surveying and exobiology with an SRV sounds like a great idea.
When Elite: Dangerous Horizons released, if you wanted to know the chemical composition of a world, you had to land on it, and deploy your SRV, then hunt for meteorites and geological features to take samples of. The SRV has one brilliant piece of exploration kit on board: the WAVE scanner. Once you've mastered it, you can home in on meteorites, geological formations, and artificial sources both visually and by sound.
And if you wanted to find the stuff you're looking for fast, you had to master flyving: using the SRV's maneuvering thrusters to skip along the ground on low-gravity worlds, or boost over obstructions on higher gravity worlds. While still paying attention to that scanner.
IMO, it was a lot of fun. I spent two months, mostly on the surface of planets, as part of a crowd-sourced geological survey similar to EDSM. But there was one flaw: the game didn't remember what materials you found on the surface of a planet. And of course, the rare unicorn hunters didn't want to interrupt their exploration journeys by exploring the surface of planets in search of the rare materials needed for jumponium... at least not without guaranteed results.
In the end, Frontier decided on an easy "fix" to the problem by obviating that game loop entirely, and included a planet's chemical composition in the detailed surface scan. And my brief forey as a planetary prospector came to an end. EDO, at least, lets me hunt meteorites and other functions while searching for the three samples to scan on those worlds. But I still feel that one should land on a planet to get the chemical composition, or in lieu of that, using a consumable probe. The idea that one could fully discover everything about a world without even getting close enough for it to become a disk visually doesn't sit right with me.
At least Starfield is closer to what I imagined exploring a life-bearing world in Elite would've been like. Here's hoping that Frontier continues to add paid expansions to bring it closer to what they'd originally envisioned Elite Dangerous would be like. I still haven't flown my Cobra Mark III through the skies of Emerald over the city of Fort 'OBrian. Which is something I can still do in Frontier: Elite 2, a game from 30 years ago.