First things first - I only found out about this game a couple months back. I did not back it, I bought it outright on launch day and played for about 7-8 hours so far. The news about the lack of off-line mode didn't phase me because my PCs are online 24/7 and I really honestly don't care unless they're siphoning data off my hard drive (commence NK jokes).
The learning curve is not as steep as I thought it would be. It being a space sim, and I being an FPS fan (read: Far Cry, Crysis, CoD, etc.), I managed to figure out the flying/landing mechanics pretty quickly. Landing may take a while to perfect but its nowhere near as difficult as the earlier videos made it out to be. As a note, I do play with an XBOX 360 controller as opposed to a mouse+keyboard. Using the mouse just was too much work for me. I do want to try out this Voice Attack software for voice control of the this and other games, though (check out videos of it on YouTube).
The actual gameplay was cool for the first couple hours, traversing star systems, figuring out what could be done, and how far I could go in the world (on an absolute scale, not very far at all within 2-3 hours of play) but that shows that its an expansive game setting and I could live my life playing the game 24/7 without every even reach a fraction of a percent of the entire game world. The game reiterates the fact that we are small and inconsequential in the real universe.
The missions I undertook were simple: Carry legal cargo to another space station in a relatively close star system. I ran into no serious issues. No one trying to kill me, so accumulating credits was painless. There are other missions that allow you to engage in dogfights but the initial ship you get is not well equipped for such things. I was randomly mining an asteroid belt and some DB shot me out of the skies in 20 seconds flat. The best way to mine asteroids is to stay away from the actual set mining zones and mine elsewhere on the planets belt (as a hint to newcomers).
So far that's all I've done in the game. I've managed to upgrade my ship with a mining laser (which you don;t initially get), and a more powerful gun (I'm too afraid to engage any NPC or person in battle just yet). For now I'm going to stay in the shadows but here's a list of activities I would like to see added to the game:
1. Planetary landing and exploration. Take something from No Man's Sky and do some procedural planet generation. This will grow the game even larger than it is with minimal effort and allow players to take on possibly 10's-100's of other missions (colonizing planets, mining planets instead of just their asteroid belts, engaging in FPS fights, etc.)
2. Space activities such as races (with both NPCs and other humans), rescue missions (though this may be in the game already) that have you seek out dead ships and do rescue missions for the crew.
3. Buying and/or building space stations of your own that can be used as merchant sites for trade.
So many more things are possible in this sandbox style game its scary.