I actually read the sentence "I will be playing ED for what it's going to be" in this thread.
All I can think as I read that line is "Wow, so that's what a sucker truly is."
We're beyond the Kickstarter days, this is 1.0, except the amount of content and gameplay variety makes it more of an alpha, if that.
A solid framework is exactly what you should have... in Alpha. Content is what makes games interesting. If you don't have the content, then you need systems to let the players create content. When you can't play with your friends unless you get lucky in open play, when there's almost no other players, when you can't trade with other players, when you can't land on planets, when there are a tiny amount of missions that become mission madlibs as you read the same description with the old system name scratched out and a new one written in... Then you don't really have a finished game.
There's nothing hardcore about this game, there's nothing challenging about it. It's braindead easy, the most exciting part of the game is when an interdiction pulls you out of the coma-like stupor of sitting in Supercruise for 15 minutes. "It's like Euro Truck Sim but in space!" Bullcrap, in Euro Truck Sim I have to stay on the goddamn road, in this game you point at your destination and walk away. I only have one qualification for something to be a video game: Interaction. I should never be walking away from my goddamn video game while it plays itself!
Trading is easy, NPCs are awful pilots so dogfighting is easy, mining is easy, exploring is probably the "hardest" part because you actually have to plot out your route and make sure you don't end up without fuel on a star you can't scoop from, but exploring is also the most boring because there's no point to exploring 400 billion systems when they're all the same and terribly instanced to where they're literally invisible if you try to get to them outside of your hyperdrive.
This game launching in this state might have actually killed it, because who is going to be recommending this to their friends 3 or 4 months from now? The only people that can continually play this for that long are the same people who can play ANY game for extreme periods of time without feeling the tedium. How are we supposed to get to those paid expansions if they don't sell enough copies? The future you're waiting for has a chance of not arriving if the game doesn't do well enough. Rushing a launch for a stupid anniversary is stupendously dumb when your game has almost nothing in it.
The game is big, but big doesn't mean anything.
This:
Is more fun and engaging, and uses way more imagination, than this:
ED doesn't even have the basic toolsets necessary to allow you to use your imagination to make your own content, and that's a damn shame.
I want this game to be incredible, I love space sims, I love using my imagination, I love making my own story. But ED doesn't want me to do any of that. All the story bits are essentially a Twitter feed in stations and a bunch of numbers that don't seem to actually physically change anything in the universe. If I have to look at a graph to see what's going on instead of looking out of my cockpit, you done messed up.
