Part of the reason why exploration in EVE feels so bland is because its a system that’s been solved, but there’s also the fact that the anomaly sites are so small it kind of feels like you’re fast traveling to all the different pois rather than poking about in a landscape and discovering something hidden.
So for this I suggest an exploration anom or signature that’s in the hundreds to thousands of km in diameter. While the faction npcs will be region appropriate, everything else in the site will be randomized and generated through an algorithm so no 2 would be the same. Have ~500 unique things the generator can pull from, pick 50 of them at random, and let the program assemble the site. some things like asteroids and station / mission assets might be best if clustered (potentially with npcs guarding them.)
The sites themselves could have a decay timer (like wormholes,) have objectives to complete in order to despawn them, or be permanent features of the system. There’s also the potential to allow people to keep the temporary sites spawned by deploying structures in them.
Some thoughts about terrain features to include:
clouds:
cloaking - provides a cloak effect to any ships or structures inside the cloud. This would need some sort of counter play, perhaps a bomb that could temporarily disable the cloaking cloud.
jamming - removes the ability to use the ship’s overview, d-scan, specific types of modules, all modules.
obscuring - lowered viewable and overview range to a minimum closeish distance (ex: 50-100km)
dot - damage over time cloud.
recourse - gas clouds
anti-warp - clouds that interfere with warp and micro jump drives. (I would encourage the devs to make at least 60% of the site be covered with this effect.)
visual - clouds that have no other purpose than for making things pretty.
asteroids:
both barren and resource asteroids could be scattered all over those anoms. bonus points for having high value asteroids inside the obscuring clouds so people have to hunt for them.
objectives:
data, relic, and salvage sites for those who like treasure chests.
combat - npc power anywhere from level 1 to level 5. Since it’s random, you wont know until you’re in the site. And even then, poking around in an obscuring cloud might get the attention of something quite dangerous.
some npcs may just do the normal guard behavior, others may run a patrol route between “protected assets”, but others yet might initiate an intercept as soon as the player enters the site.
fobs - just like all the other things these sites can randomly have, fobs would also be included.
derelict / run down stations that have a limited storage space (might include loot in the form of items and ships) and limited docking slot allotment (ex: 15 frigate, 10 destroyer / cruiser, and 5 bc / bs docks.)
im sure other people might have more ideas, but the general purpose of this feature is to make exploration more exiting / interesting. Randomization can help create that interest because the sites can never be solved.