I enjoyed the new aspect ships brought to crafting, and there's something special about walking around your own ship while it's in transit. But otherwise totally agree, it was kind of just space combat arenas and not much more.

PVE was indeed awful. Especially given the back drop; it should have been full of adventure across the galaxy, established characters messing with players, but was merely "run here and kill 6 kobolds". NPC AI sucked.

Would love to strip from my private server, NPC generation as-is as implementation is static and does not allow dynamic responses. Replace it with modern agents to connect like players and train them to build out the world like players can.

Also started a project to make a new client using video and segmentation, gen AI to recreate initial game engine entities as Godot scenes to have full control.

Too little time for either, initial code has sat untouched for years.