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?
“Procedurally generated worlds” sounds like it could provide nearly infinite exploration, but the reality is there’s like a dozen, maybe 20, archetype worlds, and procgen is little variations around them. There are some quests required to unlock access to certain world types (eg, protect from caustic atmosphere) or to access different levels of star system. There are radiant quest systems, if you care to, but they’re mostly optional. If you just want to skip from star to star, then fly/walk around its different planets, you don’t really need to engage with the quest system very much.
I tend to do enough quests to unlock most of the gear, build one main base, then little mining/teleport stations at one of each resource type. Then get bored and move on until I think I’ve forgotten enough that replaying will be fun. From your list of preferences, there’s no exploration like Morrowind or PoE, with some magic hidden behind a corner. Wait for NMS to go on sale: you can pretty regularly find it under $30, and I think the early phase of exploration, before you start recognizing the archetypes, will be that much fun.