It's kind of weird. By itself, from the point of view of exploration, the game is fine. I enjoy poking around the planets, spent many hours doing so, despite over a dozen crashes that have had me grinding my teeth. Survival mechanics are rubbish, as are upgrades and crafting, but if I had just heard about the game a week before launch, and the last few years of trailers, IGN Firsts, interviews, etc had never happened, I'd probably be absolutely hunky dory with it. For such a small team, it IS impressive what they ultimately accomplished.
The thing is... what they've accomplished is SIGNIFICANTLY below what the aforementioned trailers, interviews and showcases led us to believe. And I'm not talking here about features that were never, ever said to be in the game, like 'I wanna have a space army and declare war on other players and form guilds and and FARM UNICORNS!' I'm talking about stuff that, at various points in development, were described by Shawn, or shown in trailers. No portals on planets, no battles between different races or factions or whatever, none of that 'there is no skybox' stuff as I can assure you, personally, that the sun in each solar system is not, in fact, an actual celestial object in game, but an unmoving light source that can't be reached. -_- Resources that, in earlier trailers, were seamlessly build into a planet's topography are now either giant crystals (the color of which literally corresponds to whether it's an isotope, a silicate, etc, rather than the material might look like,) big hunks of ore that stick out of the ground in giant lumps or pillars or, in the case of Copper, mysterious chunks of ore that are positioned high above the ground. On every planet it's found on. Even the planets without float-y islands.
As for what's at the center... not going to spoil, but it's something I TECHNICALLY guessed, only it's actually substantially less exciting in execution. Again, won't spoil. xP
There are just... UGH. Even though I've found the niggling core of a game worth playing, it still falls so short of even my exhaustively researched expectations that it's just massively disappointing. :/ And honestly, infuriating. If so much stuff spoken of or shown wasn't going to be used in the final product, then SOME announcement, a heads-up, even a vague one like 'Some features shown in the past didn't make it into the launch version' would have gone a long way to tempering expectations. And even now, with the Internet piecing together all those differences, the response from Hello Games has been... well, there hasn't BEEN one. o_O The smegging dinosaur trailer is still front-and-center on both Steam and PSN, and there are like THREE things in that trailer that have been removed or downgraded since!
I mean, the Internet was up in arms once because Ubisoft downgraded the visuals of Watch Dogs, in some ways this situation is SUBSTANTIALLY worse. >_
Zanten, Doer Of The Things
Unless He Forgets In Which Case Zanten, Forgetter Of The Things
Or He Procrascinates, In Which Case Zanten, Doer Of The Things Later
Or It Involves Moving Furniture, in Which Case Zanten, F*** You.
