The whole pvp / combat section was utterly confusing too. I don't think I care about this at all. The beginning sounded great though, like Starfield without a plot and more focus on exploration and base building. Doesn't sound like they have ship interiors though.
Eh well Elite Dangerous is technically an "online game" in the most minimal sense possible. And it's the best spaceship sim ever made by far. It's not perfect by any means and I hate Frontier Studios, but it's still the best. It depends how "online" this game is. Could be good. Could also be hot dogshit. Idk.
Aside from the rebuttals already mentioned - I've always had an aversion to online only games because GaaS means that someday the game can just stop existing, especially for a smaller studio. Give me at least the option to play P2P, if not single player.
I cant tell if youre serious or not. If not, people can pursue activities for other reasons than stories and playing with other people. For example, they can enjoy gameplay, interactive stories, visuals, immersion, being creative, etc.
I have this jank-ass game I found because of Starfield discourse that does everything you want from a space game, but without polish and the story line part isn't finished so it's mostly just a sandbox right now (though this is acceptable for me, since I just wanna sandbox game anyway).
My biggest complaint is that it doesn't give you enough info to really understand what everything is or does so you need to look it up elsewhere. But even with all its jank and weirdness, it's more fun than Starfield.
Hoo boy if you want a janky as fuck space game that's also insanely fun, check out Empyrion: Galactic survival (Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/383120/Empyrion__Galactic_Survival/). Specifically, Reforged Eden, which is a full overhaul mod of Empyrion. Shoutout to HWS, the public PvE server I played on.
Explore planets, kill aliens, do some mining, build a base/production site, build a lopsided ship from scratch and realize that weight and center of mass are a thing, cry when you didn't put enough shielding on your fuel tanks and they explode your whole ship.
Explore space, kill alien space ships, do some space mining, build a space base(!), realize that artificial gravity is a thing as you sail away from your space station, cry when your oxygen runs out.
A lot of game aspects feel like they're from the 90s, but other aspects are super in depth and really fun to figure out and optimize.
This sounds ambitious for a small studio. It doesn't help that both Northgard and Dune: Spice Wars felt feature-light to me, maybe due to their signature genre blending.
Could be they've scaled up (and trust me, I'm yearning for more space games in the AA category), but too many of these projects are shooting for the moon and falling short. I'd love to see a stretch of releases with smaller scope--like Everspace 2--that the industry can build on, because space games are not where they were in 2000. Chris Roberts is off in his ivory tower doing his thing, and the big devs are either planetbound or obsessed with procgen.