If you want it to be. You can skip any section of this game. You don’t need to build outposts, but if you want to use them you can. You don’t need to build a ship, but if you want to be a cargo hauler you can. You don’t need to do ship combat, but if you want to you can make that your main thing.

You can really do whatever you want in whatever capacity you want to do it in. If you just want to be an on foot land traveller, then always fast travel to settlements and not in orbit. If you want to explore space and various planets and the stations and ships that are there, you can do that too.

For me, ship building has been lots of fun and I have a strong 1/3rd of my gameplay focused on being an anti-pirate bounty hunter. There’s also entire systems locked behind skill points, so you very well could be missing an entire aspect of a type of gameplay by just not knowing about it.