The Elite devs are awesome about this type of play. They drive capital ships through space and drop breadcrumbs towards discovery.

Lately my group was given our own planet and faction but the sneaky devs put us in the middle of a civil war that we had to manage through.

I like Video Game Nerd Enjoy a lot, please post more.

That almost sounds awesome enough for me to fire it up. I haven't played in like a year and I think I'm still parked at Big Harry's.

Hmmm... I haven't noticed that much cool stuff... I should pick up playing again. I was so upset by the sparseness of the planet expanse I shelved Elite for awhile. I spend 80% of my time in tabletop simulator now.

*planet expansion

Eh..it's really not that different from how it was a year or two ago, except, in my opinion, negative changes.

The big thing is obviously the ability to land on moons and drive around in a buggy and do mining that way. It's kinda cool, but really just adds more time-of-flight and other headaches into the game rather than anything particularly cool. They did a big overhaul to the missions and how they interact with the factions and things like that and it kind of makes just chilling and making money as a trader not as cool as it used to be. Even the most mundane missions, no matter what they are, like taking a box of crackers to an outpost, pretty has some kind of enemy risk. There was always risk in the pre-Horizons version of the game, but it was balanced. Now you literally get jacked fucking CONSTANTLY no matter what you are doing. Before the Horizons update, I never got interdicted except when I was hauling expensive stuff or doing smuggling...now you get interdicted EVERYWHERE and there is no gauge as to who will do it. Any decent paying missions you will undoubtedly meet some massively high level fighters that are light-years beyond your combat capabilities and who will kill you in seconds for 10 units of fucking Oreos. The grind of the game has not been remotely improved whatsoever....it still takes geological time-scale measurements to afford the really good ships (unless you use exploits). They added in something called "The Engineers" where you can pick up crew members who will add passive stats to your ships, but you can only do this if you meet ridiculously elaborate requirements (again, more grinding). As usual for the devs, they are promising features that were promised ages ago, but for more money of course. The next major update, if I recall correctly, will be for money. There are in-game purchases now of really stupid things like bobbleheads for your dash and paint jobs.
I dunno...I never thought I would say this, but I honestly kinda preferred alpha Elite to what they've done with it now that it's officially "done."

The next big update from within the Horizons "season" is supposed to be actual avatars and navigable ship interiors. That would certainly be interesting, as would the promise of being able to land on highly populated worlds and planets with life. No chance that promise will be kept.

The missions don't really make sense. If you have a giant ship, you should be able to find missions for your giant ship, instead you have to grind until you have the reputation to prove that you have a giant ship. The result is that you have to run slaves or grind painite asteroids or use the high density conflict exploit where you piggyback on the bounty kills of superior fighters.
The irrational stupidity of the economies of Elite are one of the things that turned me off from the game, they could easily SIMULATE complex economies instead of having these boring cookie cutter economies.

I never quite got into deep exploration but I imagine that's something worth trying now that there are aliens. Or maybe I'll just stick to TTS.

I concur.

Most disappointing thing about fallout 4 was that when I was rebuilding my settlement everything still looked like shit.

The space game I want has a bunch of sweaty, greasy pilots hauling ice blocks and blasting Hawkwind but I'm what they call a niche market.