Yes.

inspired by a VF-1 (Block 6) Valkyrie of the Macross franchise.

I knew that layout looked familiar!

I’m just yanking you chain. In all seriousness though, I’m curious if you could enable finger tracking on a headset and line up your physical buttons with the virtual ones. Could be insanely immersive if the scale is correct!

Wait… does Markdown not work for kbin too??

I edited this and removed the Markdown. Hope it shows now?

Unfortunately I have no friends because I'm a bit of a twat, and while I get your point about the journey – it's pretty much what I enjoyed for that 100h – it didn't manage to carry me too far.

Notably for the vast majority of that 100h (probably closer to 200–300h tbh, since I also played on PS4 when that was a thing) I explored; I absolutely loved the "magnificent desolation" of being out in the Black, and the slowness of explorer gameplay compared to the pew pew "careers." I just wished there'd been more variation to the planets and the life you could find on them, more variation to Guardian ruins, and so on, and so it started feeling like I'm just seeing the same half-dozen planets and plants over and over, and it started feeling like a grind in itself. Tried my hand at some of the other career options but nothing really did it for me as much as exploration had, and I eventually sort of drifted away from the game. Never did much engineering to speak either beyond some easy to get FSD things and grind discoveries for a while so I could get a better ship (a lot of this was before the huge bump in exploration payouts so it really was a grind 😅).

SC – or more likely their single player game, Squadron whatever – seems like I'd enjoy it, at least conceptually. Lessee if they manage to release Squadron, I might give it a whirl if it'll run even passably on a Steam Deck (my only gaming device for the foreseeable future, although that might not be a relevant horizon when it comes to that game getting released).

Yeah Frontier really dropped the ball with game design for E:D, the ratio of grind to content is just ridiculous.

I mean it's definitely a fun game for a while and it gives space a sense of scale like nothing else, but everybody I personally know who's tried it has ended up exactly where you and I did. It's a mile wide and an inch deep, and sooner or later folks realize they're just doing the same mission, seeing the same planets, visiting the same Guardian ruins, seeing the same spaceports, again and again.

The planetary procedural generation is somehow especially disappointing. While, yes, they're all unique in a mathematical sense and the fact that it's a 1:1 simulation of our galaxy based on real astrophysics is extremely cool, once you've seen one icy lump you've seen them all; the variety of planets you can actually land on is very small, they're all barren and have no weather, no oceans or anything like that, just rock or ice. And if you're playing as an explorer the "alien life" you can scan is limited to a handful of plants that all look identical except for some minor color variation. So the fact that the topography of this particular icy lump is different from that other icy lump is lost when that's the only thing that distinguishes them

Excellent! So immersive!

How much I wish for a modern BSG sim...

Ooh, can you tell me some?