What I want most from Elite Dangerous, or any game really, is to have the opportunity to make
meaningful decisions as I play the game. Early in this game's development, every decision I'd make would be meaningful: from the ship I'd fly, to the class of modules I'd install in that ship, to the variety of commodities I'd buy as I flew between stations, to the route I'd take from the arrival star to my destination. Success would bring profit and ship upgrades, while failure might mean I'd have to downgrade a component or two. I truly felt like a struggling commander, always one bad experience away from bankruptcy, which is the experience I expected from an Elite game.
Over the years, the overall number of meaningful choices as I played the game decreased. Credit reward inflation meant I could fly any A-rated ship I choose, and still expect to make a generous profit even if I performed extremely poorly. Despite the variety of commodities increasing, the number of valid choices in cargo decreased, because the new commodities were usually
far more profitable than the old ones. Missions compensated for the loss of meaningful choices somewhat, but were even more profitable than the new commodities were. Where once I felt like the struggling commander I was in previous games, I now feel like a wealthy dilettante, who simply flies her ship to cure her ennui, and supports brave freedom fighters struggling against the Evil Galactic Federation for the thrill.
Horizons delayed this downward trend for a while. Engineering represents the biggest net increase of meaningful choices in the game for me. I don't grind for my components, so choosing to risk my ship, my cargo, and my mission success by dropping into a potentially hazardous USS has meaning. The choice of taking a mission from "the bad guys" for a G5 reward vs working with the "good guys" has meaning. Heck, the fact that I need to stay alert for USSs along my route through a system is a
meaningful choice.
Passenger missions, as much as I enjoy putting passengers through my “adrenaline tours”, brought with them even more credit reward inflation.
Odyssey is the first expansion where I felt like there was a net increase in meaningful choices, despite a doubling down on credit reward inflation, and then normalizing on-foot equipment to that standard… and I just realized there really isn’t much of a point to this post besides me rambling on. Especially since ship interiors are fairly low on my priority list.
Since I don’t want to rambling on after past lunch, here’s the TLDR version of the rest of this post:
Anything you don’t like can seem like busywork, as well as stuff badly implemented. If Frontier is going to devote time to developing interiors, I hope it won’t seem like busywork. But I’d much rather they devote time to full atmo planets, because exploration needs a lot of love, and exploring a life-bearing world should be awesome with the current EVA ability.