My thoughts after completing the contracts available at time of VS2 Release

Let me preface this commentary by stating that I have 1300hrs in SE1 having played from the first release, so I feel I have a good understanding of the SE platform. After 7 hours of gameplay I have completed the initial contracts and started to explore more traditional SE1 style gameplay, i.e. collecting resources and building bases/ships.

Initial thoughts:

Love the new contract system, I feel it will help tremendously with onboarding "new to the IP" players. GUI is a little cluttered at times but still displays pertinent information clearly. Textures and voxel masses are stunning and frame rates are tolerable even on my older i7 hardware. Story elements are engaging and I hope the final product delivers as much as this sneak peak promises.

Critique:

Contracts - I feel that there is a need for the contracts to force the player to use smelters and assemblers more than is currently necessary. This would reinforce the resource efficiency gains. Also it would be beneficial, imo, to introduce the concept of progression of machines at an earlier stage.

GUI - Text is a little on the large side and can obstruct vison in tight quarters. Possibly add a text scale slider in the settings to combat this. Also, and I accept there is probably a lot of work left to do in this area, the GUI is very slow to appear on my system and this can break immersion at times. I feel that some optimisation is needed here.

Ore Generation - Having completed the contracts I headed to Verdure to start building a base. I found ore patches to be reasonably plentiful, somewhere around the frequency of Earthlike in SE1. However the size of the ore generated is too small. Most I have found seem to be around 2T of ore, which when you are limited to backpack crafting, does not go very far. I feel a this could easily be fixed with a balance pass, touching on ore generation size and required materials for backpack crafting.

Final thoughts:

I really enjoyed the content you have created so far and I look forward to future updates. However at this time, for me, I will be sticking to SE1 for my survival fix. Please keep up the excellent work, the whole team should be proud of what they have achieved so far in such a short time.