I have huge respect for HelloGames. Internet Historian did a great video on the history [1]. I have played for probably ~300 hours? Maybe more? I started 2-3 years after release and by then it was in pretty good shape. I like the new stuff they're adding but I see some glaring omissions in what they should be doing.
Planets:
- Different gravity
- Tidally locked;
- Localized weather (it's global on a given planet or moon);
- Different biomes on a planet (eg polar ice caps). Having a world be a single biome seems limited for no real reason;
- Rivers
As for general features:
1. Top of any feature wishlist should be better base building. What they have now isn't bad but it could be so much better. Some things are just annoying (eg certain parts don't snap to other parts) but as we've seen from the Sims, Minecraft and similar games, people will happily spend hours just building a base to their liking;
2. They added a feature (resource nodes) and in 4.0 basically nerfed it into irrelevance, to the point that it may as well not even be there. What did it do? It allowed you to build activated indium farms for essentially infinite money. Money doesn't really matter in this game and there are other infinite money glitches. I had fun (pre-4.0) building my activated indium farm. Now there's absolutely no reason to go through the effort;
3. Race tracks, preferably player-built. Have a mode where you have to stay on the track. Players do this anyway;
4. Also in 4.0 (IIRC) they nerfed technology modules for really no reason. Like a ship could have 6 S-class Hyperdrive modules, 3 in the inventory and 3 in the technology slots. So you were trading storage for jump range (which you could get to 2500+ light years). They just decided to remove inventory modules so you didn't get this choice anymore. Your ship had random supercharged slots so you could almost get up to that same range with 3 modules but honestly it felt like a worse version of what they had.
5. The core story isn't really the point but it probably needs some attention. Last time I did it there was a mix between the new story and some of hte old features like finding people to man consoles on your base.
Planets:
- Different gravity
- Tidally locked;
- Localized weather (it's global on a given planet or moon);
- Different biomes on a planet (eg polar ice caps). Having a world be a single biome seems limited for no real reason;
- Rivers
As for general features:
1. Top of any feature wishlist should be better base building. What they have now isn't bad but it could be so much better. Some things are just annoying (eg certain parts don't snap to other parts) but as we've seen from the Sims, Minecraft and similar games, people will happily spend hours just building a base to their liking;
2. They added a feature (resource nodes) and in 4.0 basically nerfed it into irrelevance, to the point that it may as well not even be there. What did it do? It allowed you to build activated indium farms for essentially infinite money. Money doesn't really matter in this game and there are other infinite money glitches. I had fun (pre-4.0) building my activated indium farm. Now there's absolutely no reason to go through the effort;
3. Race tracks, preferably player-built. Have a mode where you have to stay on the track. Players do this anyway;
4. Also in 4.0 (IIRC) they nerfed technology modules for really no reason. Like a ship could have 6 S-class Hyperdrive modules, 3 in the inventory and 3 in the technology slots. So you were trading storage for jump range (which you could get to 2500+ light years). They just decided to remove inventory modules so you didn't get this choice anymore. Your ship had random supercharged slots so you could almost get up to that same range with 3 modules but honestly it felt like a worse version of what they had.
5. The core story isn't really the point but it probably needs some attention. Last time I did it there was a mix between the new story and some of hte old features like finding people to man consoles on your base.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkADi3OAM5M