I still find the VR stuff pretty unusable, but they’ve done a great job with the main game. There are tech trees on top of tech trees, all of which you can ignore if you don’t care about that particular sub-category. There’s at least two ways of acquiring most technologies, so you can play the parts of the game you like and skip the parts you don’t. The different game modes (chill, hard, permadeath, creative) are all balanced very differently, so you can choose the level of difficulty you like. They’ve gotten rid of many of the tedious parts (most notably, you can buy a “recharger” technology for your launch thruster that makes it recharge over time, thus ending the constant dihydrogen scavenger hunts, and you can carry effectively unlimited amounts of the basic elements, so you can “stock up” when things are plentiful, or just buy stuff at the trade station rather than go back down to a planet to shoot rocks for ferrite dust).
This game is barely recognizable as the same game that shipped in 2016; it re-invents itself each time around.
That said, there’s still some rough edges I wish they’d work on:
Ironically, one of them is their main selling point: the procedural planets, plants, and creatures have very, very little variety to them, every toxic planet looks pretty much like any other.
There’s a painful minigame with your frigates where you need to repair them in space. This involves climbing all over the ship–in many cases using ladders and massive detours from one side to the other, and repair each console individually by feeding it a little bit of some material. There’s no danger during this process, and it takes forever – several minutes for each individual ship, made more painful by your slow walking speed. And heaven forbid you don’t have the right material; in which case you need to leave, go mine or buy it, return, and do it all over again. This entire concept is for them to show off their ship models, but it gets old the very first time. The whole thing needs to be tossed. (Eventually you’ll learn to never send out a fleet at the same level as the mission, only overpowered ones, and the number of repairs will go down.). Late in the game, I don’t bother repairing the frigates at all, I just let them get destroyed and buy new ones.
The whole “we’ve got an infinite universe, now explore it at snail speed” gets old, too. The only mod I tend to use–if one’s available for a given version–is to turns off running and jetpack limits, allowing me to explore the world at “limping turtle” speed instead. Otherwise, with all the upgrades installed, you can’t run for more than about 30 seconds at a time, then you slow way down and pant annoyingly.
Finally, there’s a bug that’s been there for about three versions now that the “storage containers” that you build are nonsensical about removal. It will almost always tell you that there’s not enough space in your inventory, even when there is. The solution is to randomly put something else into the storage container, at which point random items will move around. Do it enough, and eventually you end up with the item you actually wanted.
That last one–and the ship repair one–sometimes make me wonder if the devs actually get much time to actually play the game. The storage container bug is a massive, huge glitch that’s been in there for years, and still isn’t fixed.