Hello, I’m eyeing No Man’s Sky for past 10 years and haven’t decided it’s a game for me yet. On paper it’s my childhood dream come true - deep space, commanding ships, discovering planets, seeing alien life forms, basically everything I dreamt about as a kid reading Clarke and Asimov…
I’m not a kid anymore, but the itch is still there to some degree. Nowadays I do enjoy slower paced RPGs, interesting story and distinctive art and music style. Thinking games like old KOTORs, Morrowind, Gothic, or Pillars of Eternity, Disco Elysium or Pentiment from newer ones. I did enjoy some hours in Valheim too, but more like exploring and not so much building and micro managing the base. And I play slow. Really slow. I tend to discover all the corners of the map before moving on, just to “check” if there’s something of interest (old Gothic was amazing for this).
Is No Man’s Sky worth its asking price for me? Or will it crush me with never ending space, billions of quests and tedious base building? Does it have “main story line” or something like that?
NMS is wide as an ocean but deep as a puddle. IMHO(!) The procedural generation of all the worlds/planets doesnt provide interesting places to discover. Everthing gets really samey really fast just with a bit of different coat of paint so to speak. I also wouldnt say its a thinking mans game. Its mostly a lot of brain dead tedium with tons of resource gathering. The main goal is to get to the center of the galaxy. Everything a long the way is the fun you find for yourself. There is some sort of “story” in place. But compared to the other games you mentioned in your post i also could easily argue NMS doesnt have a story.
Personally i still use my first save file since 2016 when i look into the game for a few minutes/hours after several big updates because i find the start to be really slow and boring before you can enter and fly your ship for the first time.
tbf, NMS never managed to really pull me in. Consider my post as the pessimistic outlook. Maybe someone else can provide a more positive spin on the game.
Same with me. I don’t say this often about games, but NMS was the first time I ever thought, “this game does not respect my time.” I get in this loop where I need to gather materials to make materials to make materials to the point I forget my original goal. I play all types of survival games built around this exact premise, but NMS truly feels like a chore.
Things work a little different once you hit endgame; I have 9999x stacks of basically every needed resource and bases with mines where I can fetch more at any given moment. The resource gathering loop is a bit daunting at first, but it’s easy to overcome once you’ve got a newer, better multitool that makes gathering a breeze
I remember when hello games nerfed the prices of active iridium all the way to the floor. Didn’t take much for people to realize the easiest/shortest path to lots of money was the gel from cactus farming[1]. Does that still sell for 50k a piece?
Sure, you could go the extra mile for the next step in the manufacture for a higher price, but you’d need to waste more time gathering a different ingredient, then more time holding E several times over to transform it, etc. Going for the gel is simply more time efficient ↩︎