Hopped in a bit last night:

The barrier mechanic is both fun and really annoying. Basically, unless you grind a resource sink item near constantly you’ll regularly be attacked by ghosts. You can shoot them (and the expedition starts you with a boltcaster) but it basically feels like all the annoying parts of sentinels cranked down to maybe a 7.

And I REALLY like the progression this time around. Near as I can tell there is no actual hyperspace (?) jumping and it is all working toward portals. So no need to hope a system has whatever world I need for whatever item I need to grind to get the next milestone. Was refreshing to realize I would need a storm world because I was being warned about storms while walking toward another objective.

Which… maybe this is not the two weeks to have a fixed progression route where everyone gets funneled to the same comm ball spam location but it wouldn’t be NMS if it didn’t make some really bad decisions.