I bought this game in tandem with my DK2. I fell in love with the sleek and intuitive UI, vast game world and lore, environment, and combat.

I started off having no set morals to the game. Initially my first action was to start trading to make some quick cash. Not knowing anything well, however, I resorted to the Bulletin Board which got me into human trafficking / smuggling. Clearly the only option for any player focused on raising credits because they simply pay the most. Not once did I ever have any trouble--from the law or elsewhere--delivering countless human lives or hundreds of tons of narcotics. I got bored, quickly.

After making enough money to transition into a Cobra MK3, I decided to try my hand at bounty hunting. Thinking of how it worked in Cowboy Bebop, I went to the station and got assassination missions, thinking that was bounty hunting, until I went into an RES site which I soon found is literally just a farming zone of lifeless enemies with no stories or goals. They just enter and die repeatedly for some reason because their unlimited pirate buds apparently don't value their lives or have any underlying comm systems to warn each other that "hey maybe this High Intensity RES filled with 10 police Anaconda is not the place to be shooting miners". The combat is fun until you realize you can actually really easily beat every repeatable pattern that the AI has in stock, or die when one is left unchecked due to you chasing his wingmate and not him. I got bored.

I explored twice. I came back not wanting to do it again due to the fact that I was spending more time waiting for fuel scooping and watching the FSD loading screen than I was enjoying myself.

Now I look onto Horizons beta footage, the best sign of what content awaits us, and arguably one of FD's biggest chances to change opinions about the game.

I will preface this saying that Horizons looks fantastic for explorers, racers, and anyone who would want to land on planets. The bases look great and they give me hope for the future of the game.

However, FD has done virtually nothing to assure the player base that fixes to profit / fun, instancing issues, or lack of content / connection to the game world are on their horizons. Fuck the SRV. Fuck potato shaped planets. None of these add any true content, just another place to be, just another vehicle to be in. We as individual players need to feel relevant in Elite's world. Missions NEED to be revamped completely and they need to have purpose. They need to be linked more with small factions and there needs to be an overall reaction that the player can see once they've finished a mission. Otherwise this game is just the same old grind fest on another place in another vehicle.

One suggestion is adding random parameters to missions such as "this is a big haul slave run for lots of creds" can turn into "our comms were found by a few officers, either run and have a bounty or kill them then and there to try to not get caught"

or maybe you could have "kill this high bounty target" and when you pull the guy out of supercruise he could bargain with you, he could hire you to kill the guy who put the hit out on him, there just needs to be variation and it needs to have enough possibilities that it gives the illusion--atleast for a while--that it isn't all scripted or that there is some uncertainty or that maybe these characters in the mission's play are less linear than "target x = $"