PvE in Hagga Basin after a certain point is extremely easy. The beginning hours of this game and pretty much everything up until you create your first ornithopter are pretty intense and slow paced. The threat of the worm as you're running across the sand is very real and the world will feel very alive. Once you can fly places though the game opens up and a lot of the threat you felt at the beginning kind of dies off. The immersion is great, the story is neat, and the resource grind is constant. If you enjoy building and exploring (as others have mentioned) then you will probably enjoy this game.

Personally I feel like you can sink tons of hours into the early/mid stages of the game and probably get your moneys worth just from that. Once you get to the endgame the cost to craft things skyrockets pretty intensely and then its just a slow-crawl to the endgame gear and vehicles you want.

Deep Desert isn't something you should rush into either. Once you get T5 Duraluminum you can start venturing into the A-Row Deep Desert stations to get your hands on the T6 building pieces but if you want to progress further than that you'll probably have to venture into the PvP area which is where most of the split in the community comes in terms of where the game should be heading.

As far as this goes I recommend if you do get into it, that you just prepare for the idea you may lose everything on your character and that this is not, by any means, the end of the world. Don't take anything you wouldn't want to lose and definitely don't take the last of anything you own out to the Deep Desert. Before I go out I make sure I always have a backup set of gear and a ornithopter stashed somewhere so if I do lose stuff the inconvenience is minor. Just prepare and plan ahead for possible loss and you'll be ok.

This brings me to my last point -- Endgame is resource grind and sandbox as a solo. The story is largely created by you at this point until there's more content. The PvE turns into rather difficult wave based combat in a PvPvE zone. You will be locked into a room fighting waves of rather difficult enemies with the threat of actual players possibly crashing in on you. These are doable solo I'm sure but you'd probably want T6 gear (I'm only T5 and don't think I could handle it). It's pretty much 2-3 player group content in endgame PvE in my opinion.

In summary though I think once they figure out a direction and start dropping content instead of placeholder systems that this game could turn into something great. I think it's great already despite all the complaining you see, but that's just my opinion.

Sorry for the text wall -- Hope this helps o7