I did the thing that a lot of us do, and I completely ignored most of the main quests up until yesterday. For like a couple hundred hours. Which meant I had all the milestones required for each step of the path, and a well-equipped ship that could jump from station to station easily.

Which means the path was essentially: Fly to station, not understand half of what was being said because I was picking up words as I went, read the dialogue, get blueprint for thing, warp in freighter with storage full of resources, make thing, repeat. Over and over and over.

This is the part that I worry is going to get me a lot of flak. The writing doesn’t do it for me in this game. I’m not going to delve into that, because I’m sure plenty enjoy it, but I don’t play for the writing at all. But even if I liked the writing, go here, listen, craft quest item, repeat, is not exactly engaging gameplay. And that’s the whole quest. As long as you have the milestones and prerequisites, that’s it. like 10 times in a row. I get that doing actual quests in a procedural game this size would be a different task than in other games, but this really felt phoned in, and I’m more than a bit disappointed in it.

I own a Sentinel Interceptor for home-planet defense, because that’s what the ATLAS intended. Four pirates warp into my system. “Hostile ships approaching.” As I grab my controls and switch to Infra-Knife, blow a gravitino ball-sized hole in the first pirate, he’s dead on the spot. Draw my rocket launcher on the second man, miss him entirely because they’re unguided and smash into a passing freighter. I now have to resort to the Defense Turrets mounted on my capital ship below. “Tally ho lads.” The high-powered Phase Beam shreds two men in the blast, the shockwave and debris field sets off proximity alarms. I now resort to dogfighting the last pirate, select my Sentinel cannon, pull him into the reticle and fire. He bleeds out in the cockpit because high-powered photon wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as I get a “Shields down” warning.