These are my thoughts after about 20ish hours. Full warning, I haven't played in about 2 years so I'm not exactly sure how new some of these features are. Also I'm sure Alex already has plenty of notes on what he wants to look at/alter so apologies if a lot of this was already pointed out or suggested.
Tutorial
This is great for introducing us to some of the lower level mechanics, but I think more could be done to indicate what exactly the core gameplay loop of Starsector is since the end of the tutorial just kind of drops you off the leash without any direction. Also, I would like to see more of a reward for completing the whole tutorial because in my experience I had a much easier time just skipping it and taking the 30k you start with that way. Way too often after completing the tutorial I was trapped in a slow death spiral as I didn't have enough money or supplies to really get out of Corvus, the local bounty ran out before I could build up any cash, and I couldn't sell my ships to get anything different since sell prices are so low now.
It would also be nice to have the option to take a commission with any faction after completing the tutorial instead of just the hegemony. New players probably won't understand the consequences of grabbing it and will suddenly have a lot of grinding ahead of them if they want to get in good with any other factions. Truthfully I'm not really sure I understand the point of commissions since it's way way easier to get mad cash by doing scan missions or named bounties and AI spawns seem difficult to predict inside systems. Are they intended to be mostly for role-playing to get access to cool unique faction tech?
Missions
These are also mostly great but I think everyone and their dog has noticed how comparatively easy scan/survey missions are for getting rich quick. There is a decent amount of emergent stuff going on between REDACTED, random pirates waiting to roll you, etc., so that it isn't totally risk-free but I'm not sure how "risky" these are intended to be as opposed to bounties or something. The mini-loop of salvaging probes, derelicts, and flying around taking scan missions seems like kind of the intended path for new players (I certainly tended to opt for these missions whenever starting a new game myself) and it is excellent, imo. Not sure if there are plans to flesh out the "get X amount of ____, deliver to Y system" missions but those aren't particularly enticing as is since the economy of the game is left to the player to figure out. Since they're just clicking through lines of dialogue on a menu I'm not sure how much more interesting you could make these, but I personally I ignore them 90% of the time unless I happen to have the requested material on hand or can buy it right there. Maybe that's the point?
Also, I'm not sure if there are some bugs with objective placement for the scan missions but a few times now I've flown out to the ass end of the map to scan something for it to turn out to be located "in the fringes of ___ system" or "in an asteroid belt" or "in the heart of ___ system" and I straight-up cannot find the thing. Definitely could be that I'm missing something but man that is frustrating.
General Notes
The derelict AI drone ships are brilliant. Probably my favorites design-wise, I love how crudely industrial and machine-like they look, very cool stuff. I fought my first survey mothership earlier today and it was awesome! I don't have as much experience with REDACTED but they feel like a good threat to keep scan/survey missions from feeling too comfortable / late game enemy to gear up for and their designs are also top-notch.
UI is mostly solid, but there are a couple of menus (planet survey, mission list while at a station/planet) that you need to hit ESC to back out of instead of TAB, which seems to do that everywhere else.
Ship availability seems a bit whack. I'm guessing that the Hegemony is supposed to bet the "beginner" faction since their low-tech ships are everywhere? The ratios seem skewed too far to the low-end ships when you realize that markets only reset after 30 days or if you clean them out of stuff to sell (could be wrong about that, this is something that should also be communicated to the player about the economy imo). I've got a solid 20 hours in and I've literally never seen an Apogee, for example, or an Astral or Aurora outside of enemy fleets. It could be that the higher tech ships are intended to be something players level into and I just never progressed that far but I would personally really like the option to choose a faction to side with at the beginning instead of being forced onto the Hegemony. Since it's kind of a grind to build up rep with other factions a lot of their more advanced ships are locked out for quite a while.
With all of that said, I'm very impressed by how far the game has come and I'm having a ton a fun with it. Kudos to Alex and the rest of the team!
TLDR
- Scan/survey missions are great, exploration is great. Maybe a bit too easy considering the amount of $$$ you get for them?
- Tutorial is very much appreciated for a returning player like myself but could be fleshed out more with info about the economy, bounties, faction relations, etc.
- UI is slick and just needs a couple of tweaks here and there.
- REDACTED and remnants/AI drones are excellent. Exploration feels very rewarding now.
- I would personally like to see more bounties or maybe the option to go on combat missions for factions as a supplementary thing? Feels a bit tough to make a living as a dedicated combat player, idk.