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?
As someone with over 400 hours, expect the whole experience to be puddle deep. Granted, I last played in 2024, so my opinion is a number of updates behind, but from what I’ve seen up until then, the core of the game didn’t change and nothing pointed to it changing.
The gist of it: every planet is procedurally generated and everything feels empty and lifeless, even when the planet has lifeforms. There are some cool looking planets, but they rarely have anything interesting on the ground. On-foot exploration is rarely rewarding in any sense. Points of Interest have some minimal distance between them and nothing besides your compass pointing towards the nearest one, with any building or settlement that has one of the 3 alien races in them being little more than a pit stop. There’s very little variation in the POIs you can come across. Hell, even a town that you get to become a “mayor” feels like a big nothingburger.
You don’t really “command” a fleet, especially because space combat is super basic and boring. At one point, you just get a big freighter for free and that’s it. You can get other ships to join your fleet, but they don’t do anything while in space proper, they just look pretty while there. You can send these extra ships on missions, then wait several hours for said missions to conclude. You’ll likely forget you even sent them, not to mention upgrading your small ship to jump from star system to star system is much, much, much easier than upgrading your freighter - you need to explore derelict freighters, essentially “space dungeons” that are very annoying and slow, to get upgrades for your freighter.
The game has a “story”, but it’s pretty bland and not worth the time. Any quests the game offers can be abandoned and picked up again at any time and, when you do, they don’t ask you to travel back, they just point to a nearby place or star. Hell, I remember there was an exploit that you could pile up several pirate bounty quests (you’re tasked with killing a pirate in space), move to a star system over 2k light years away, reset all of them - which would cause them to ask you to kill a pirate in the system you’re currently in - then fly out and kill one pirate for the prize of ALL of the quests. No idea if this has been fixed.
All in all, the game won’t crush you, but the repetition and tedium might. Frankly, I recommend you try a pirate version first. If, 8h in, you feel like going further, buy it.