Well. Last time i played I finally had my first flight. It’s been possible for a while now to visit different planets, space stations and so on. But I have not tried before now. They have focused a lot on details and realism. When I opened the ramp to my ship and walked in it felt like i was there. I walked through the door to the cockpit and entered the pilot seat. Then I powered up the ship. A voice spoke and informed me the ship was online and a flurry of hud elements gave me a disorienting amount of information about fuel, elevation, ammo, comm channels and so on. After fiddling for a while I figured out how to ask for launch permission and clumsily took off. I barely managed to float up and out of the spaceport hangar I was in. You have supreme control of your ship and can rotate and tilt any which way. After getting used to the controls I used the star map to select a destination and began the quantum jump. It takes several minutes to to this. When I arrived I was on the wrong side of the planet, and so I had to do a second smaller jump to correct this. The view was something else. You really feel like you are floating far above a planet. I then got out of the pilot seat, opened one of ships bay doors and just stood there looking down on the planet below me. After a while I flew down looking for a landing place. I could not find it so I landed on a high rise building and left the ship. I then got stuck and had to kill myself to get sent back to my starting point.
The scale of the planets and the kind of environments they can have is genuinely impressive. It doesn't look like procedural generation like No Man's Sky. The cities and environments can be placed and this allows for actual planetary scale with multiple biomes which has never been done before
Of course this also causes lots of difficulties in dev since it's a ridiculous scale and being multiplayer, there's even more complexity. Plus the performance seems to be terrible sometimes