I really love the addition of corvettes to NMS. I was literally thinking about re-installing Starfield, partially to play with ship creation, when this update came out. Needless to say, I did not re-install Starfield (maybe some day).
I have to wonder what the long-term impact will be to the game, and whether and how Hello Games will address it. In many ways having even a barebones corvette is better than Exocraft and even regular ships.
For example, you can get out of the pilot seat, use your visor to find and mark what you're after, fly there, and beam down without landing. It's an overall more optimized experience than what you can do with a ship or Exocraft. Will they bother to address this or just allow ships and Exocrafts to become more vestigial?
The main hurdle is having enough units to buy parts or a Terrain Modifier to grind for scrap. Expeditions tend to begin with providing you a ship that you typically have to repair. The level of effort depends on the expedition nature and storyline. Will future expeditions avoid going to systems with Salvageable Scrap to prevent players from just making a corvette?
Not being able to use regular landing pads is an annoyance. I tend to make bases in caves and more than once I've teleported to a base only to find my corvette spawned in, partially underground and embedded in the dirt as opposed to spawned on a landing pad like a regular ship would. Will they eventually deal with it like they did with Space Stations, Freighters, and the Anomaly? Admittedly, I think how they handled landing on Freighters feels a little cheap and awkward, but it's an easy solution to the problem.
Given the procedural nature of the game, a big part of the NMS community has been centered around finding that "perfect" ship, multi-tool, and companion, which is why we have communities like !nmsglyphexchange@lemmy.world on Lemmy and Reddit. While I don't think that focus will completely go away, will the community shift from finding the perfect ship to building the perfect ship, which is similar to the Starfield community?
It's also possible that Hello Games never really addresses these. After all, NMS is nearly a decade old at this point and many of the new features it's getting are actually a test bed for Light No Fire features. They may not be too concerned with "cleaning up" the overall NMS gameplay.
What are your thoughts?
My original, Normal save has been maxed out for ages. It got to the point I had to delete entire bases because I had hit, not the base part limit, but the save part limit. I literally couldn't place anything else. So while I go back to that save once a while, there's not much for me to do.
My attachment to an Expedition save varies. I've had some I played a lot afterwards and some I couldn't be bothered. Those were the first to get deleted when I ran out of slots. Some of the early expedition routes are ghost towns of bases, like Pioneers, which was the first expedition. Some of the newer ones are still pretty active though, like Utopia and Aquarius. If I load either of those saves, there are still people traversing the systems.
It's funny though that some expeditions did not seem to capture people, like The Cursed. I never see anyone if I load that save. Could just be timing or it could be people just didn't enjoy that expedition enough to stick around.
If you're kinda looking for a reason to play, you can always set yourself a mission. I took one of my expedition saves, Polestar I think, and turned a system into a Status Device farm, which requires the system to have the right kind of planets and building one base on each planet so they can all be uploaded.
https://photon.lemmy.world/post/lemmy.world/21002664
At the moment, I am slowing going through my active saves and building corvettes.