It was never meant to get there. Regions in ED are locked for a reason.
Yeah they're locked for the delivery of 'future content'.
However (and I realise that as a very casual player you might not be aware of this, or may have forgotten in your rush to polish your lance and mount your white charger yet again) they have been locked for delivery of 'future content' since
MAY 2016. Hell, Polaris has been permit locked since I started playing which will be
three years next month.
So tell me, do you think it's actually unrealistic of players to expect that over
TWO DAMN YEARS later, some of that famed 'future content' may have actually turned into 'current content'? Especially coming immediately after a point update with a 2 gigabyte download last week?
Personally, I don't think that's unreasonable at all and that's where much of the disappointment that some players feel is coming from.
Like a lot of players, I actually hoped that the reason three specific systems had been left unlocked in the permit locked sector was that there was going to be some even vaguely significant new content there for us to discover and engage with. Maybe something that could drive an
actual narrative forward with regard to the Thargoids because so far their 'narrative seems to consist of 'they blow things up and they keep sending bigger ships'. Let's be frank; it's hardly Tolstoy is it? There's actually way more genuine narrative around the Guardians than what is supposed to be the legendary 'big bad' of Elite.
Yeah it's great that the first ever live attack on a megaship happened. It looked great in the video that I watched after I got up, before I went to work, by which time it had already ended.
So what do we have now? A new Thargoid for people to shoot, even bigger than the last one, which was even bigger than the one before.
Really, I'm totally delighted for those players who can sate their gaming needs by just shooting bigger and bigger NPCs, for no meaningful purpose whatsoever. Nothing to be done with any of the stuff they drop, nothing even faintly resembling a storyline around them. Just target practice.
Since the INRA bases were found God knows how long ago, there has been essentially nothing to move anything resembling a story around them forward. We know nothing more about them, where they're from, what they want, literally nothing. The game used to have an evolving mystery around them, what the hell happened to it?
The whole thing has just left me feeling somewhat meh. I can understand what FDev tried to do in terms of not wanting to just say 'nope' to Canonn and fair play to them for trying to balance out their need to keep a lock on the sector without just dropping the player group's plan completely, but what it's really served to highlight is just how much people are crying out for some really in-depth content in the game rather than superficial
'here, have a bigger thing to shoot and shut up for another few months'
Jam tomorrow...
Final point - I will (and do) happily praise FDev when they do praiseworthy things with the game. I'm not in any way a hater, or someone consumed with relentless negativity. However that is where my legitimacy comes from when what I have to say about something may be less complimentary and much as they expect us players to do, I'm sure they understand that they need to take the rough with the smooth when it comes to feedback.