For fucks sake this game needs a
mule bike mod or some other vehicle or something, POIs almost 2 km away from your landing are not unusual while the rewards for walking that much are shit. 90% of the time it's either a feature for scanning or a cave with some extra minerals to mine and one container with crap inside. If this game at least had something (a drug you can make) like force speed or how was it called in kotor (the Haste spell ripoff) that would let you run 2 or 3 times faster.
Gun combat is still pretty crap even after modding away the dumb player damage penalty. Maybe should have changed player damage output to 2x or 4x like some people did, although with this dumb AI that might make the game too easy.
Spess combat is serviceable and more tactical than gun combat despite seeming like a fighter ace fantasy at first (the ships, even with skills and high maneuverability, handle more like naval cruisers duking it out in 3d than x-wings and tie fighters larping WW2 pacific dog-fighting, although guns are forward-mounted so no broadsides). It took me some skills points, learning how to not get shot at, a stolen "lvl 12" (bullshit, the engines and other components are probably gated beyond character level 15) pirate ship with gear beyond what my level allows me to buy to stop sucking at it, plus swapping out autocannons for particle beams before I could reliably take on more than one ship. And the game loves throwing 2-4 ships at you in some cases very early on (maybe because I play on modded very hard, and the mod only adjusts player and npc damage, but doesn't touch space combat?).
Also salvage rights>credits if any NPC ships ask after a bigger random shootout in orbit between multiple factions. They give about 1k while in looted wrecks I usually find 3k.
Space piracy is neutered significantly because some no-fun-allowed designer thought you should get something like 10-20% gain only on FUN, and implemented FUN TAX like registering "legitimate salvage" ships (needed to sell them) or the bounty system which while it does reduce bounties if you kill all witnesses in a remote system still leaves you with enough bounty on your head to again end up with a net gain of 10-20%.
Did two decent, although I guess they will seem copy-pasted eventually if they give each system at least one of these, lengthy combat sidequest lines in Tau Ceti and Altair that boil down to a number of space combat encounters, some shootouts on the ground and one unique dungeon (although one wasn't very big, plus maybe I just didn't see that layout again and they reuse them even for non-radiant quests). Bethpizda writing still sucks because I expected a twist in Tau Ceti that
the missing colonist group became the spacers going full rimworld raider lifestyle on the rest, so this story had wasted potential as it was just instead played straight.
Outpost building, crafting and research suffers from too many fucking resources needed for anything on top of a clunky logistics system (and no angle snapping), I think 4 or more times than in Fallout 4. And unlike Fallout 4 you can't just dump an infinite amount of junk items you pick up along the way to fuel the outpost building autism (outposts have limited storage which you must build) nor can you have colonists/crew gather random junk automatically. On the upside at least the resources can be bought from shops very cheaply in decent quantities, but you need to make a fucking shopping list and even for a simple weapon/armor crafting base with no automatic mining/fabrication the player ends up needing large cargo containers. And if you want to do craftung on your ship then good luck, cargo containers add a ton of mass (sure, it is realistic considering how much iron or aluminum you need to craft a habitat on a surface), so it will fly like a brick, but the grav drive can get you out of harms way in 2 seconds at most, so as long as shields last it's not that much of an issue as long as you don't need to fight in space as part of a quest or something. Just power up shields and grav drive to max, rest into thrusters (engines) and you can't really die from hostile spacecraft unless you have the crappiest shield in the game or something.