I'm curious about how much you actually explore a planet. All the demos seem to have you landing conveniently by a lake and near buildings, but I don't remember anyone flying around the planet to find that landing spot. If exploring is more like 'fly down from space to spot X' then that would lower my interest. I want the exploring on the ground to be as interesting as flying around in space. I want to be able to (meaningfully) spend time on a planet rather than just land/tag stuff/take off.
Um. Planet's are just
there. There's no scripting or on-railing surrounding them.
You can fly around a whole planet and pick where you want to land based on wildlife; buildings; resources; safety.
If you want, you can upgrade your ship's weapons and blow a hole clean through the planet and fly in to mine.
The choice is yours. It sounds like 75% of their work has been making the on-planet exploration as meaningful as possible. You can break into buildings, meet aliens, hide from space-based pursuers, tag wildlife, look for portals, etc etc.
That's the point, I've been through the thread and I don't think anything has been explained. Unless the answer is "not a lot".
There are a bunch of written hands-on previews by journalists from early May. I recommend reading those. Very enlightening and have interjections from the devs explaining stuff. In short:
- your 'objective' is to reach the center of the galaxy. When you open up the starmap you can see all nearby systems but also a 'breadcrumb trail', a gold line showing you the most direct route to the center
- the devs are very secretive about what is there, so we don't really know if it's a maguffin or if it will have meaningful content (presumably the latter, TBH. You don't give players a massive objective like that and then make it nothing but the credits)
- you start on the outer edge of the galaxy with low-tech gear. To get
anywhere you need better engines, more fuel. To get these items/upgrades you need to hunt for resources, survive dangerous weather/animals, etc (this is the beginning of the 'what you do' gameplay loop)
- the closer you get to the center of the galaxy the more dangerous planets and space-faring races become. Planets will be more toxic (poison atmospheres, high radiation, freezing/extreme heat), and have more dangerous wildlife. So you need to keep upgrading your weapons, suit and ship to survive here. You can't just fly along merrily to the end of the game. You'll die repeatedly if you do. The devs are dedicated to making the game challenging (see my quote above to eXistor)
- reaching the center could take anywhere from 50-200 hours, or forever if you weren't interested and just wanted to explore
- there are a bunch of hand-crafted (ie non-random) space-faring races who you can enter dialogue with, who have faction affiliations, etc. Build up affiliation with them and you can have good trade. Kill them and you can steal their stuff but aggro other race members. They have buildings on planets you can break into, destroy, gain access to through dialogue. There are hints you can hire positive-affiliation race members as wingmen for more fire support. Different races are at war across the galaxy and these battles are just dynamically
happening of their own accord
So as a player you have the choice to:
- just muck about in an endless, unique universe exploring and finding cool shit
- aim for the center of the galaxy to 'beat the game' and see what happens (will still lead to a long, hard adventure)
- join forces with an alien faction and take part in the galactic war
Ofc, you're basically making your own fun either way. Unless there's some really game-changing shit at the center of the galaxy.
Edit: and ofc none of it might come together and the game might still be shit
