I think FD have done an incredible and amazing job with horizons. Years before you had fractal terrain, now they have put unique procedural planets among the 400 billion stars. I can't think of any other game out there that comes close at all for the horizons addon. The package has been well worth it to me. Fights are great, passengers are back like they were with FFE, Multi-crew is functional , all the gameplay invovling missions on the ground, mining with the SRV, massive bases, small interesting mining or research bases and how powerplay changes control of them. I never understood what was so bad about engineers. It makes sense module tweaks would need items that are not readily available at a retail distribution market. Most sci-fi tropes involves special items or materials needed for some thingamajig to work by a talented techhead character.
Well, looks like we had a week of positive morale with renewed faith in FDev with the PS4 launch. It was fun to see how the game felt better than ever on the forum and congratulating the devs' dedicated and bar-setting work. But I guess the salt is coming back now..
In my opinion I think it's part due to the constant update media from SC that misleads expectations in the space setting gaming industry and as a side effect diminishes the bar-setting achievements of ED. SC's "procedural" planet demo turned out to be just another scripted animation. Not enough procedural depth in horizons, would we want the procedural nonsense filler that was seen in NMS? i didn't think so. Even if Fdev settled on fleshing out one or two planets, there would still be complaints about how the rest of the millions of planets had nothing on them. Take a look at simmarket.com where it takes various different third market teams of developers months, even years to build a scenery set for a location or a specific complex plane addon for FSX. In the 13 years since FS2004 and a few years later FSX, the 3rd party development has built hundreds of scenery locations but still a long ways from covering every airport and county in the world , so I think in comparison it's amazing what FDev has done in house so far.
