First impression is pretty good actually, it looks like a light simulation and the first game were I had to reactivate my X45 Hotas in years. The downside is that I now have to learn and configure the controls and I am currently not in the mood.
I concur, its even worse than before. Now if you want to use the new engineer system they implemented recently it requires dozens of hours scavenging, hundreads of LY travels, scanning planets surface, to find rares amongst an hundred of different materials (with very limited cargo space of course),the engineer will apply a random modification on your module. Ton of grinding , no guarantee you will even have the effect you want.
Stupid ,poorly thought system, unwanted ,unfun, grindy, pretty much like every updates since release.
Ah this game should be moved into MMO too if star citizen is there, this "game" is in no way a simulation.
Do you need all this stuff or is it possible to play this game casually? Point is from looking at videos it was never my intention to built up an empire with hundreds of million credits, but rather to fly around and go with it. My impression is that players get under some sort of stress to fly from system to system to system to get the highest tier of equipment asap, but that ruins gameplay. I personally only powergame in single player games because in multiplayer everything will be gone anyway sooner or later.
And the main point is that the original Elite was like that. You started with almost nothing, profits were minimal and getting to Elite status required you to play the game literally for months. Elites success was mainly because it was a very challenging game. When you started it seemed ridiculously difficult to make any money (with the digital joysticks at the time everyone just crashed into Coriolis station) and then when you managed to land and made your first profits it was all the more satisfying.