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?
I have about 100 hours into it. NMS has pretty much every mechanic you could imagine, but they’re shallow and become repetitive fast and there’s almost zero overlap between them. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but definitely temper your expectations.
For example: there’s an entire quest line about growing your own plants and refining them into expensive items that you can trade for millions of credits. These plants have grow times of 16 real life hours so you can really only cash in once every real life day.
You can also just teleport between a few galaxies buying low and selling high to generate infinite money in a couple hours. If getting lots of money is your goal, then that quest line is a waste of time. You have to enjoy the act of searching the galaxy for seeds of rare plants and building out a huge farm for no other reason than it’s fun. Most of the game is like this.
There’s no reason to collect the bones of ancient species, or to farm asteroids for rare minerals, or to investigate derelict freighter ships, other than it’s a fun way to pass the time.
The only reason to investigate derelicts is to pray you get a halfway decent upgrade for your own freighter, which almost never happens