I could've recommended this game easily back in 1.4, maybe so in 1.5, but after horizons released, things have become harder to recommend.

I know I say this as someone with 1000 hours, but I have reset my save multiple times across that, and the new player experience is going downhill. Required ranks for missions have been removed, and this kills a lot of the need to progress to the next rank. Some updates back, your missions would be restricted based on your rank, and increasing your rank would get you more lucrative missions. Now "required ranks" have become "recommended ranks" and the game just silently bumps rewards.

This hurts even more as the now fast early game progress becomes stagnant mid-game. Prolonged combat against AIs has become unbalanced with buffs to missiles, which are still not viable for players to use in bounty hunting due to lowered ammo counts, but AIs can use fine because they are designed to spawn in and last only a few minutes. Multiple missiles to your hull will cause many modules to malfunction, effectively killing you, and making "hull-tank" ships useless for this.

Development focus has shifted across to lore and story, which can be hard and time consuming to access considering their distance away from most other game activities, and required items.

idk, as a new player you could have fun, but I still don't know whether I could recommend it now.

I could've recommended this game easily back in 1.4, maybe so in 1.5, but after horizons released, things have become harder to recommend. I know I say this as someone with 1000 hours, but I have reset my save multiple times across that, and the new player experience is going downhill. Required ranks for missions have been removed, and this kills a lot of the need to progress to the next rank. Some updates back, your missions would be restricted based on your rank, and increasing your rank would get you more lucrative missions. Now "required ranks" have become "recommended ranks" and the game just silently bumps rewards. This hurts even more as the now fast early game progress becomes stagnant mid-game. Prolonged combat against AIs has become unbalanced with buffs to missiles, which are still not viable for players to use in bounty hunting due to lowered ammo counts, but AIs can use fine because they are designed to spawn in and last only a few minutes. Multiple missiles to your hull will cause many modules to malfunction, effectively killing you, and making "hull-tank" ships useless for this. Development focus has shifted across to lore and story, which can be hard and time consuming to access considering their distance away from most other game activities, and required items. idk, as a new player you could have fun, but I still don't know whether I could recommend it now.