I am a huge E:D fan, but they really botched the last expansion, to the point I no longer play at all. I get the feeling they are starving for programmers and designers.
I've honestly been meaning to get around to playing E:D for years but it never happened. First I tried No Man's Sky at I think the Atlas patch, which is the point where it started to become really good. And then... other stuff.
Part of me was turned off by how long it seemed to take to travel between systems. I saw some streamers play this and taking an hour to do something like that is just way too much for me.
I was excited about the idea of the new expansion. Like being able to walk around in a world you can fly in seems like such a good addition but I've come to realize that you're really developing a completely different game with almost no crossover.
My main problem with E:D is that you can't casually jump in and play for 20-30 minutes. I'm just a casual player who juggle work, parenting, some side projects and occasionally I have enough time to play games. But if the pause between two E:D sessions is more than a month (and usually it is), I need to sit down and do my homework - where am I currently, what I want to do and then start playing. So when I have time to play, I usually don't have patience to do everything I need to do, and just get Oculus and hop in in some training mission to look around for couple of minutes. The game is so pretty, and Frontier somehow nailed ship physics, at least for me.
(To me Elite Dangerous is the VR experience. Anyone who love space and have a chance to try E:D in VR absolutely should do it. I refuse to play E:D in 2D, and I'll probably give Frontier money for the new expansion even if I will not play it for many months just in hope that the game will stay around in years to come to have a chance to scratch my space itch)
That's true, and I think FD knows about this. After all, it took many years for them to deliver it, and it's pretty much presented as a hame of its own.
But they had to develop this. The fans have been asking for it since forever. I think that what the fans actually really want, isn't just the ability to walk around their ships and look at space stations up close. The FPS game that is built around it isn't actually that interesting to most ED players, and I think the people who will be playing it is a different category of people.
I haven't done much walking around since it's giving me single digit performance on my 4k screen, so I need to get a new graphics card. The flying part is perfectly fine at 60 fps at 4k.
I just hate how much they say "screw you" to those who want to get money through combat and how freaking grindy the game is. They've taken the freemium model of "basic advancements should take weeks to save up for" instead of "players should get to have fun"
