No Man's Sky

NMS has kind of a kitchen sink philosophy which is exacerbated by nine years' worth of content additions whereas older content tends not to get addressed and tweaked too much beyond the first initial couple of patches after its release. There have been some exceptions, yes, but generally that's how Hello Games seems to do it.

In order to "address" this, if you want to think of it that way, the game needs a major overhaul to its difficulty curve. Otherwise, we just have to accept the kitchen-sink factor and resign ourselves to the notion that most of the mechanics are in fact completely optional, and they have to be in order to prevent players from getting trounced by combat or the environments if either of those were made tough enough that you outright had to hide in a base or exocraft regularly or hover your freighter over the surface or have your fleet help out in combat or train and maintain your squadron or have your Minotaur on the surface or, or, or... etc. In some ways, I think that's really the game's core groove: You can play it how you want to, and if that includes or excludes using any of the stuff available that's perfectly valid.

For instance, since their very inception I found all of the exocraft except the Nautilus to be utterly useless. Like many things in the game there's a high initial barrier to entry in terms of materials cost and obtaining all the blueprints and upgrades, but then there's no major benefit to their use which offsets how cumbersome they are to deploy, use, and keep fueled. The main problem is that most of the exocraft are excruciatingly slow. It's literally faster to just jetpack-punch all over a planet surface if you need to get anywhere, plus your scanner doesn't work through the canopy glass for some reason so you have to stop to hop in and out all the time to scan things and pick up materials anyway. If there were a major transportation speed boost to offset this hassle it'd be worth it, but there isn't. A player on foot who knows what they're doing can easily outrun even a Nomad. Only the Pilgrim offers anything resembling a reasonable vehicular speed but not out of the box, and by the time you're done upgrading it you may as well just jump in your damn ship and fly to wherever you're going. I mean, donate like three things to the Merchants Guild and space stations just hand you launch fuel for free, even if you don't have a launch auto-charger.

At that rate the only reason to use the exocraft at all is for the sake of completion in fully kitting out all of them just to say you did (and then probably never touch them again) or for self-imposed roleplay purposes.

Time will tell if starships themselves eventually get relegated to this secondary capacity. Other than being marginally slower and less maneuverable than a top of the line fighter or exotic single-seater ship, which is unlikely to be much of a factor for anyone other than maybe doing the pirate ship trench runs, the only other major drawback of a corvette seems to be that it takes approximately seventeen years to complete a docking operation — especially on the Space Anomaly.

In fact, you can build your corvette to be so versatile it threatens to make your capital ship obsolete, too.

Maybe what the corvettes are now are what starships should have been from the beginning. In any case, I'll bet you 5,000 that nobody is ever touching that stupid build-a-starship panel in the back of the space stations ever again.

Personally I like them because big ship. Like you said being able to scan them hover and beam down. You can also get some crazy distance with skydiving. One of my friends said “I love the corvette but launch fuel is expensive” (as he mostly does sentinel ships with a massive stack of radiant shards). And I told him you can just not land

Personally my only complaintss are pirate and abandoned stations are missing the teleporters like the space stations and anomaly has
A corvette specific landing pad

Honestly this is the thing that made this game so fun for me. I have a U shapped ship named The Vagabond Star and a head canon of being an autophage with a deep sense of wonderful. I've decorated my interior with the trophies and clutter of a life spent wondering the black. I harvest my crop of gravitino balls to trade at the stations to fuel my journey with little more than a drive to see, to learn, and to be.

None of that would be possible in the one person car of normal ships or the floating cities of the freighters.

I absolutely loved it. I have a few hundred hours in the game and this update / expedition was enough for me to reinstall and spend some more time in it. I love Hello Games for what they've done with NMS and fully intend to buy several copies of Light No Fire when it releases. My worshipping aside, love my honkin huge Corvette, haha. It's really awesome to teleport from a space station to your settlement(s) and just see your behemoth sitilting at the edge, more than likely partially clipped into a building ,but still. Always brings a smile to my face.

Wait, what's that about beaming down? :O

picked up NMS on sale with this update and already built a rad corvette and accumulated 170M moneys, seems like it helped me "launch" my game really quickly.

I did get lucky with about the 3rd planet I landed on being a paradise planet with plenty of salvage containers. Only had to buy landing gear to build one.