So this game is primarily about exploration and discovery so flying through space and landing on different planets is the core gameplay loop. I had a few suggestions to make that gameplay a little more spicy without overhauling anything.

1. Animations: Little details like your guy actually climbing into the ship instead of teleporting into it, or fiddling with the ships instrument cluster when you thrust forward or switch weapons, or recharge shields or activate pulse drive etc. Think of the way your hands move in elite.

2. Immersive menus: The way elite dangerous does them, you look at a panel and interact, that pulls up the specific menu you were looking for. Wanna open the galaxy map? Look at one of your ships many panels and it opens up a holographic galaxy map like the Idroid in MGSV, so it’s still useable, but a tad more immersive. Same thing can be done with hailing messages, or byte beats even switching to third person. I believe the term Is diagetic menus?

3. Physical ships. So, instead of installing ship mods, or repairing your ship in a menu, you enter a sort of build mode go to the specific part of your ship that needs to be modified or repaired and make your additions. No more dragging things into an inventory slot. Actually get out and attach modules where you want them. They can even have their own hitboxes so they can get damaged and you’d have to fix them through that build mode and not an inventory menu.

I think that’s all I could come up with. What do you guys think? Any other immersive tweaks?

I’ve owned this game since release, and have finally gotten into it, sinking 100+ hours in a couple weeks. Loving it – aside from space combat. Having played Elite Dangerous a ton (and I’m sure you’re all annoyed hearing the comparisons constantly) and being pretty damn good at combat from smaller agile ships to larger ones, NMS just isn’t clicking with me?

I just got my 150 kill milestone, and I’m pretty sure I just hold ‘S’ and shoot for all of them. I’ve tried chasing and using different loadouts, but it doesn’t matter, because the AI just does some crazy tight turn and flips on me, and their shield are back on in 0.5 seconds. I landed on cyclotron for shields and infraknife for hull because nothing has the RPM or velocity to break shield and do hull damage, but from what I’ve seen from searches here, pure infraknife is just OP and the way to go.

So am I doing something wrong, is this just it? Hold ‘S’ and shoot with infraknife? I’m not dogging on this game in any way, I just want to know if there’s a way for the space combat to be more fun. I want to be able to chase and stay on a craft’s tail while using different weapons, or loop or scissor out of someone chasing me. The AI seems like they can pull crazy maneuvers and then be simultaneously braindead, I either have a 0.25 timeframe to shoot, or they just fly straight.