The Frontier really should have been a non-modifiable, non-sellable ship that’s just there to paper over the issue of you needing a ship until you can buy, find, or steal one for yourself.

It should have been trash too, literally falling apart, practically space junk. But they made Constellation into this fantasy of a secret society of explorers that flies through the unknown killing literally everything on every single planet they visit with near limitless resources from their benevolent CEO billionaire with bottomless pockets because he’s just in it for the “passion” of exploring space (I’m hopeful that this turns out to not be true later on, but I have low expectations).

The ship they give the player to start out with is too good. And fundamentally starts the game off on the wrong foot.

Having the player need to beg/borrow/steal to get their foothold in space would fundamentally put the player in a headspace of feeling grateful for what they have. Alternate start mods can solve this, and then modifications to ship prices and so on can tie it all together.

I think part of the problem here is that Bethesda are scared of making their game too roleplay heavy. They have always tried to avoid any limitation on freedom of the player, no matter the skill of the player. This makes the game fun for anyone but comes at a considerable expense to storytelling.

One of the main problems is that a spaceship is the price of just fifty guns. But this is because looting is boring and they don’t want to force the player to do too much of it just to survive.

Another problem is probably the inventory system itself, allowing the player to carry too much. I think if you have crew on a ship you should be able to order your crew to loot a vessel/spacestation/facility for you(after clearing it of enemies). This would eliminate the need to painstakingly search a facility from top to bottom. You would do “crew action>loot location” and then some time would pass and you’d get a list of all objects in the location and the option to load them onto your ship cargo or not. With this kind of feature you can then limit what the player can carry more significantly (2-3 guns, some medical equipment, ammunition). The general point here being that if you’re the captain of a starship with a crew you should be able to use that crew, and this ties into fixing problems with the pricing. If you increase the pricing of everything then you also need to increase the loot you get and make doing that looting enjoyable in some way. Obviously a space encounter needs to somehow give the player enough loot to pay for that encounter too and turn a profit on top otherwise you’re just encouraging the player to avoid it all.

Money sinks need finding to make up for this. Fuel probably being the biggest one. Infinite generated local missions on settled planets need to be worth enough to get the player enough fuel to get into space. And they need to be fun too. That or thievery in some way. Robbing Galbank or some corporation ought to be a viable alternative for a quick buck but come with the negative effect of them sending people to kill you later.

I can seriously think of a lot with regards to overhauling this. On the same scale as Requiem for Skyrim.

The prices they’ve chosen are really just about fantasy fulfilment for the player, they went with making everything cheap and easily attainable, since most of it is fairly meaningless. You fly around in a flying house with every amenity you need for one, you don’t need properties.

Modding has a lot of potential here though. Rebuilding the economy and pricing combined with a good survival mod that takes advantage of the game having native temperature and climate features… Add fuel necessity and costs to the game too. You can really make working and doing missions to earn a living a necessity, and you will be able to get stranded on planets where you starve/freeze and die. A significant amount of depth will come from deepening this. The temperature feature in particular feels like they added it specifically for modders since it’s effect is negligible in the base game.

I also think that we need a “cities don’t allow space suits” feature so players have to lose their armour in cities and become more vulnerable. Make decisions more meaningful.

Generally I feel like the gameplay should be balanced around Fromsoft’s approach to combat as well. Death should be quick for players that make mistakes but combat highly rewarding when you play it well and smartly. The powers in particular seem like they can be VERY powerful and will remain strong even when you raise damage significantly.

There’s a lot to work with here. I won’t pretend I’m not a little excited about modding, I really do think it’s the best game this studio has released since Oblivion even with all my criticisms of the lib writing. They REALLY need to put something into solving performance issues though, because when you add script heavy stuff into a game that already chugs it will literally break.