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A big name in proc gen is Kate Compton who coined the term "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" to describe this phenomenon of technically unique but not different enough to matter - I googled "10000 bowls of oatmeal" to see if there was a good article and the second link was about it and nms

https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowl...

The best things about the game (and it is a good game at this point, they continued to add to it at a steady pace since launch) are the human written stories.

But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast. But also, the worst thing about the human-written stories is that they're often transparently designed around getting you to visit more abandoned malls. The procgen infinity of space is almost a negative, even though it's the game's whole schtick.

I guess now that I think of it like that, it's really impressive they made a fun game despite having to make it fit a boring repetitive universe.

It more or less reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode. They were playing an asteroid shooting.

> Morty: it's boring. crank up the realism slider to max

> Rick: why does it get even more empty? Wait, I got it... because the universe is empty.

At the end, I think there is little point in simulating the vastness of the universe in a video game (even just a fraction of it).

You do occasionally find some pretty cool stuff.

I found a barren planet in a black hole system where the vibe was all dark and shadowy with the light being tinted purple, and just some crystals or something on the surface, alongside a damaged robot that you could interact with.

There was also a world that had high Sentinel activity where I founded a settlement (well, more like took over managing it), however as it turns out it’d have those gravity storms often during which you could soar through the air.

There was also a world where the surface was toxic and you couldn’t stay on it for long, so I excavated a base underground, like something out of Red Faction.

For what it’s worth, a lot of it can feel samey (most of the scanning) and kinda boring, but while there aren’t that many insanely huge and cinematic moments, sometimes RNG hits just right and you get something nice.

Are you sure that you've played it recently? They added an actual story, a huge quest hub, unique items, tons of stuff to do really. I'm quite overwhelmed with the amount of things to do and I don't typically enjoy sandboxes.

The first 50 hours of NMS are really great but then you start to learn the patterns, even though it is a randomized/procedural, at some point it becomes predictable and boring. The other problem is that the battles are boring, they lack something and building big ships and bases feels pointless.

I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse". A thought that comes to me as I type this is what if you try to co-evolve the ecosystems so it doesn't feel like it's just a mix of the same base components in different quantities.

I like to tinker with making games now and then, and I have learned that there are lots of game ideas I have that are more fun to make than play. A lot of those look like No Mans Sky. I feel like the devs fell in love with procedural generation and never thought about what kind of experience they want to have.

I say this because I feel the same thing as you when I go back, and I really want to like it.

Because most of the new feature are not connected to each other. Take a gravition coil. It's like in Half Life - but You can only use with very limited set of objects, that were added in same update as gravition coil. Make it useless and not fun...

Same. Every time i re-download it and start a new game I never get past the tutorial because i was so incredibly bored so soon, i always wanted to like this game and i love how much effort they keep making but... sandboxes games are just so boring.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. I have tried coming back to the game multiple times and every time I just feel bored and underwhelmed by the whole experience.

If you are interested in the sandbox element, and space, and building - but want character - Satisfactory pulled me in for roughly 1200 hours over three years. I"ve got the scenery, and new discovery's burned in to my brain - elements of the landscape are more vivid in my memory than a lot of real places I've visited.

What's interesting is that there is zero procedural generation - single world with about 20 Biome, each one with all sorts of character. Monsters are incredibly well balanced, and the sheer terror I got from the spiders (which I think are a tad OP - especially the ones that launch)_ triggered my fight-flight reflex (mostly flight) more than any other game I can recall.

The game can be played in so many different ways too - you can take the factorio/big factory build out approach and speed run that, or just spend your time exploring, or, perhaps best of all - watch hundreds of hours of Youtube Videos to get a sense of the architect aesthetic that some of the top players bring to it. Epic Tech Tree. Cute back story.

I consider it the greatest Sandbox/space game ever - I don't know if we'll ever see anything like it again.

Agreed. I want to like this game _so bad_ but I think the problem is that I'm looking for a feeling of fulfilling progression when in reality this game is just a bunch of disjointed sandboxes which is certainly not my type of game.

NMS's art-style is low-detail, but highly aesthetic. It can look amazing at times, but only when you're looking at grand cinematic vistas. It rarely looks good in closeups. This parallels the game's systems in many ways.

NMS is a technically impressive game. You can build a custom-spaceship, either with the in-game editor or by importing one from outside the game, dogfight in it, land on alien worlds, etc. and that's just one of the loops. However, the spaceships you build aren't simulated physical objects. They don't even feel as substantial as styrofoam fins tacked onto a model train. There's no real challenge to flying them. They all just float through space like nothing.

The game has dozens of ways to progress, finding resources and earning cash. They're all so easy to break that you have to consciously resist doing so. Craft a few donuts and you're rich. You don't have to worry about finding buyers for your obscenely high-end pastries. The market board will buy anything at the listed price. Game breaking bugs that trivialize finding resources have been left in the game forever because the developers were afraid that some people might be upset if they actually had to grind for resources. Why what is, ostensibly, a single player game with multiplayer support tacked on even has grind mechanics is another valid question.

I log into NMS occasionally, but my big problem with it is that it's gameplay devolves into a sequence of grinds that are all optional. The things that should offer a challenge (e.g. ship combat) don't. Every play session becomes a case of, "Where do I find this stupid mineral I need to build an upgrade that will make what's already too easy even easier?".

The technology on display in NMS is absolutely impressive, but the gameplay isn't. I'd love to see a fork of this game where they focus on more challenging gameplay with less focus on grinding and sandbox elements. I see the expeditions as an attempt at this, but they don't go far enough.

I was just about to say this. I have a lot of respect for the dev team but man is it so not my type of game.

I wish somehow the complexity of eve could meet a game like this. I would sell a kidney for that

considering the company still exist and servers are still up I assume not everyone shares your opinion. its a pretty good milestone for an online game.

not everyone enjoys the same kind of gameplay.

When it first released I correctly predicted that the game was overhyped and destined to flop, making fun of friends who bought the game and ending up being disappointed.

The internet historian video made me buy it, thinking it was maybe worth it now.

I think I got like 5 hours in before feeling like I was just doing an endless grind. I felt like I had fallen for the hype, which I think was deserved ;)

Maybe the game doesn't get good until you grind past the first N hours, but I just don't have the time any more.

I remember first hearing about NMS' concept and wishing that they would take the general idea but downsize it by at least 10 orders of magnitude. A universe with 1-100 millions of planets would still feel absolutely massive and way more than individual players would be able to exhaust, yet it would allow the creators to do a bit better curation, allow players to actually meet, maybe add more hand-crafted experiences. Basically, give up on technical purity in favor of fun.

I had a different experience.

I bought it on day one in 2016, and like everyone else, I was wowed by the planet hopping experience for about an hour or so. Then I put it down and didn't think about it again.

Then I picked it up a few years later, and discovered base building. Had more fun than the first playthrough, but it didn't click. Eventually I hear about something called the Galactic Hub, which is a star system marked by players as a central spot to build their bases. Kind of like a human home in the vast empty universe of NMS.

I get curious about it, and look up instructions on how to get there. I did some quick napkin math and realized it would take literally dozens of hours of grinding - nonstop travel - to get there. However, as it turns out, there's a loophole with black holes. When you enter a black hole, it spits you out into a totally different place in the galaxy. From the players perspective its random, but players got together and figured out that each unique black hole always sends you to the same spot in the galaxy. So they constructed a black hole "highway", along with an app that let you input your desired coordinates, and it would give you the list of black holes that would most optimally get you near your destination.

So I spend an evening playing the game, switching back and forth from the game to my laptop, inputting coordinates and slowly making my way closer and closer to the hub. Eventually I find it, and what was amazing was that it was the first time I'd seen any evidence of another player in the game.

That moment felt utterly magical, because while I was playing a game, I had an actual, real objective that I formed entirely on my own.

So yes, the game is an odd duck, but it can really open up with the right mindset.

Exactly sums up my experience. Bought it day one. Still bores the hell out of me.

Exactly how I feel about this game. While its redemption arc is one for the history books, every time I come back to it, I feel nothing.

A mile wide, and an inch deep

Every time these epic announcements go out, I try co-op multiplayer again, realize it's still miserable, then close it and wait for the next release. I'd love to play it with my wife but completing our own objectives, building our own bases, not being able to directly interact like in other games this decade, progressing forward separately, fixing our own ships, etc. etc. etc. is just a non-starter. Good luck to them though!

I tried it a few years ago, following all the "It's actually good now!" stories.

But a few hours into the tutorial, at a point of yet another "go gather 20 wolf Pel^H^H Ores from that other planet and bring it back", and I lost interest.

The inner gameplay loop didn't work for me, and I need that hook.

Have there since been improvements to that inner loop?

In contrast, Destiny 2 keeps hooking me back in because its inner loop, the gunplay and abilities, and variety of builds, really works for me.

Disney found this out the hard way with Infinity. On v3.0 a large chunk of their IP was staged into a fully customizable and open universe.. and it was so unremarkable that they shutdown the servers and killed all development a few years later.

I feel the same way about Starfield. Just soulless projects instead of engaging video games.

Weird take cause the game is definetely there and it has tons of content. Admitedly it is not for me because I just do not like the way resource gathering works. Does not tickle my fancy. But saying there is nothing substantial is an odd take, there is base building, space battles (fighter and corvette), expeditions. You can even do a little automatisation if you are into it.

A played it, got stuck in a giant crater with seemingly no way to get out of it. That was basically the extent of my experience.

I kinda feel the same way. I loved slowly going through the main story and probably put 50hr into the game, but the sandbox alone (amazing as it is) just doesn't do it for me.

i played it day 1 back then and even bought a PS4 only to play it and played it over the years repeatedly after every larger update for about 1000 hours in total. The fundamental promise they made was never shipped, which was originally a large variety of procedural flora, fauna, and planet. It is still the same uninspired boring stale core that it was day 1 with minimal extensions which produce absolutely boring world that immediately repeat. The game was always Waiting for Godot, waiting for a game that was originally announced with an interesting procedural feature but never shipped. Meanwhile I discovered the history of procedural games, which is a story of fails.

I still sometimes hope that the actually rewrote the entire procedural variety system but it cant happen because people built persistent shit on those planets. They probably have to launch a new game.

Video games have always been part tech demo

And the story aspects are played out no different than Hollywood

NMS has more in common with Minecraft. It's a virtual chat room that looks Star Wars-y

Also don't discount simply not being a kid anymore. Biology isn't static. Memory does not allow for that same initial burst of excitement.

By 'coming back', do you mean actually firing it up and playing it?

This is why a cool tech solution (procedural generation of "levels") by itself isn't good enough. The core gameplay loop is fundamentally the same on every planet. The graphics and descriptions may change but once you've played it for a bit, it gets boring.

I think video games are art, so take my opinion in context of if this is right up your alley and you really love it, then keep on keepin on!

Every year social media hits me hard with "No Man's Sky is good now!" — and I bit and dove in with a few buddies.

To say everything in this game is half baked is giving it too much credit. It's 10% baked at best. This isn't a game; it's an underwhelming tech demo. The only cool feature of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great.

Everything else is baaaad: the quests have less logic than entry MMO quests, and are mainly fetch missions. The planets are randomly generated slop. The economy of building up your ship/fleet isn't fun (you just sell your ships over and over again). Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)

It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that are clearly just trying to trick folks into buying an elaborate space game tech demo. Can we move on from this "game"?

I've heard it described as "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle"

To me it feels like what i actually want is Eve's economy, PVP/PVE strapped onto the noman gameplay, at least personaly

Agreed. And this tech demo was a day 1 purchase for me back in the day. While it has gotten better since then it just doesn't hold my interest. I do like using it whenever every few months I feel inclined to get my PC VR headset out (I'm using an old HO Reverb G2 with the Oasis driver) I think it's a great VR title.

I remember when it first came out, there was so much hype but I immediately wondered, “where exactly is the game loop?” I also remember how aggressively defensive fans were about it.

This is why you really need a good geologic, climate etc models. Like a full blown simulation.

I feel the same. I want Rust in space, where there are constant stakes. NMS either takes too long to get to a part of the game where stakes become relevant, or doesn't have any.

If anyone has any recs on PvE/looting/base building games in space with the polish of NMS, please share.

Agreed. It's incredibly boring. It lacks an interesting and interactive story with good pacing. What they have done is cool, don't get me wrong, but I think they got carried away by the tech coolness without enough attention to what makes a game fun or interesting.

Do you think the same of Minecraft?

I think this kind of game needs another innovation to make it interesting. I don't think adding more generative or LLM generated content is the solution.

I had some great moments in NMS. But, you're right, it needs a plot or storyline to follow.

This perfectly describes how this game makes me feel.

I felt this way for a while until I decided to sit down, start a new game, and engage with it.

It's a completely different game, it just doesn't look like it if you picked back up where you left off. Without the right context, you have a tendency to just repeat what you were doing before, and it feels like nothing changed.

But believe me, everything changed. You should revisit it, because I don't think you've seen the actual changes to the game.

they add feature after feature. but never a good drive for the player. 'why should i go to this planet?'

i have an idea for it,

Let users populate the universe with custom quests. Scriptable quests with dialog and multipart structure. You need a custom script language and some limitations on it. Example quests:

- "Bandits have occupied our town", but actually bandits are tax collectors. You instead may help them document the goods.

- "Our star is dying", instead a huge starhip is recharging and refusing to move without some condition.

also add a rumor system to lead players to quests.

you can use my idea Hello Games, you have my permission.

Yepp. Biggest buy misstake ever.

Right on the nail.

How people interact with LEGO varies. Some people like to buy specific sets and make them. That's fine. Some people see a random pile of bricks and build a massive city [1]. There are also competition events for what people can build from a random pile of bricks. There was a TV show about this too (ie Lego Masters).

Some games are problem solving, others are competitive, yet others are elimination but an awful lot of games have a component that requires you to inject imagination. The Sims and even Minecraft (despite it having a survival mode too) spring to mind.

That's what NMS is. Some people like to find the perfect looking ship. Others build bases to look a certain way. Others just explore. Yet others make money.

If that's not for you, that's OK. But NMS can't be dismissed as being repetitive or boring.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfVCmkexl2E

>but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay.

to me that has become a big positive aspect of the game. The non-teleology of it, that you just run around and immersive yourself in it is pleasant in its own right. Especially modern games to me seem to have substituted games as an experience with reward system driven busy work. Everything is always instrumental.

I started to notice this when games like Journey came out, or Death Stranding during the stress of the pandemic. No Man's Sky is obviously not as artistically strong as either one but the exploration only for explorations sake has me come back to it very regularly. It genuinely is a game about nothing (so is Seinfeld, never hurt the show) but to me that boredom is a genuinely good thing.

NMS seems to epitomize the excesses of the Agile development philosophy with most of their release updates -- small targeted tack-ons to the game engine that provide something tangible yet shallow for users to explore, usually disconnected from narrative. The same cargo drop configurations, how damaged containers always require removing the same rusted metal or goop, and how shelters have the same exact configuration, never ever evolve or change. It has such a strangely repetitive ghost town character. They could easily target their "agile" deliverables around diversifying and breathing more life into the worlds if they could span more "sprints". Unfortuntately, the tack-ons feel hollow, empty, and often ship incredibly buggy. They used procedural modeling to create an impressive array of planets, but never modeled the planet drops with the same care and diversity.

That's because there were no idea behind it in the first place. It was an ambitious overpromising project that hasn't delivered almost anything they promised. They didn't have any story or interesting gameplay in mind too. Pity.

It's a great game to play with friends. Explore, find cool animals, and most of all - build your fantasy space home. It's relaxing, fun, and can be a great shared experience. I imagine it wouldn't be quite as engaging completely by yourself.

It's kind of like ARK, they spent so much time on all the "cool" stuff that looks great in trailers without focusing on what actually would make a game like this incredible, which is a real persistent singular world with consequences and meaningful group based PVP or PVE that works at scale. What you end up with is just a simulacra of multiplayer that basically boils down to a visually represented Xbox Live lobby.

How I feel as well.

This game just doesn't scale well from mid game on - it's way too easy, even on permadeath + hardest difficulty. Like, making money is way too easy, combat is way too easy, everything is too forgiving. And the entire loop is centered on like, 3 things to do that are all variants of the same exact thing. Really hope they do a much better job in Light No Fire.

To the guy who replied to me: Our genius overlord moderators rate limited my responses so I'll post here.

> I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding

You and I have very different ideas of what forgiving means. A reasonably intelligent 7 year old that enjoys and has experience playing video games could play this game on max difficulty settings and not have any issues. And while I never had an issue finding anything (shit is literally everywhere), resource scarcity doesn't equally an unforgiving game mechanic unless it's gated by some sort of difficult fight or something, which this game doesn't have. Combat is laughably easy and repetitive. I've got a couple hundred hours in the game, and at one point I was running the same bounty missions over and over again for some outrageous amount of money - the mission took 7 minutes round trip, the combat encounter was literally the exact same every time, same number of enemies just with different names. And that was the most efficient way I could make money in late game on the permadeath server on max settings. If that's the best economy loop a game can come up with, a 100% brainless combat encounter, then the developer has done something very wrong.

I opened the game.

Played 30 minutes. Found a start of game bug that blocks progression.

Looked online, everyone claims this exact bug had been squashed years before.

Started a new game. Bug returned. Left it for a few days. Bugs still there. No workaround.

Raised a thread somewhere. Got yelled at for "Pretending" to have the bug.

Uninstalled the game.

My 2 cents is that it looked like a really shitty MMO with nothing on top, but I cant really say because it never let me leave the tutorial.

> I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.

A lot of people simply aren't as enamored with the shallow gameplay, even in the current version. I'm not surprised that they've sold a lot over the years since they've been putting out free content updates year after year to lure people into reinstalling it every six months or so.

As someone who played this game on start I want to share that I enjoyed it. This game was and still is a chill exploration experience at the core. There’s a lot of stuff bolted on top, but it’s just a busywork. If you enjoy that kind of games you’ll love it.

Another thing to point out: technical patching is top notch. I’m talking about how fast they come around to support new console, new VR helmet etc.

I don't think anyone disagrees and I don't really see negative comments about the devs or the studio.

The problem is the game itself, gameplay wise. It's just boring for many (including me)

Eh. As a Mac user, my AAA choices are limited. I mostly play Borderlands 2 & 3, and NMS. I’m not a huge gamer, and these have been enough for me. I just play in bursts, when I’m taking breaks from coding.

I don’t like playing with others, as the experience of being fragged by a 15-year-old, shouting biologically impossible suggestions to me, is not really on my bucket list.

I’ll play it. It won’t be super exciting, but, if I was serious about gaming, I’d get a dedicated Windows rig.

> I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.

It's the sandbox concept. Some people load into Minecraft and think, "AWESOME! I'M GOING TO BUILD A MALL!" Some people load into Minecraft and think, "WTF is this? Why is there no story? What the hell am I meant to do?"

I'm not going to cast judgement. It's a preference. The people who bounce off NMS are the latter. NMS is a very fun sandbox. The story is secondary to making your own fun.

The developer is great. The game isn't.

I enjoy games based on content and gameplay, not volume.

Also no layoffs, ever. Who would've thought that providing your people stability would lead to a better product.

The game has so much stuff to do its actually overwhelming. The game is definitely a sandbox though and I think for some reason a lot of people don't like going out and doing the different things you can do in the game if the game doesn't force you to or if there's not heavy progression.

I feel like the same thing happens to other sandbox games too. Minecraft is one of my favorite games of all time and I could easily spend a thousand hours in a vanilla world and still find things to do, however the game gets constantly shit on by the community no matter what it does. They speedrun through the progression and then lack any creativity to do anything else in the game.

I personally love building bases and customizing and collecting things, which is a large part of the gameplay in NMS. I could spend hundreds of hours doing that but I guess some people just need a constant sense of progression and the game telling you what to do because they aren't capable of setting their own goals. Anyone who says NMS lacks content or things to do has barely touched the game.

I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development - the game of the last few years is absolutely nothing like the early one and I agree, there is a surprising amount of stuff to do.

I think some people don't understand what a procgen survival-craft game is. They're not wrong about it being an open sandbox, that's kinda the point. People talking about taking too long getting to space might not know about the limited time expeditions you can just start in for a different take, or turning the game to creative mode so they don't need to spend time resource farming to get their ship working so they can go fly around if that's all they want from the game.

The story and those quests will be rooted in building something. The space exploration will be rooted in finding a cool place loosely intended for your next base. The space battles and encounters will be part of the same core procgen survival craft cycle.

I won't deny there's probably only 20-40 hours of "real content" in the game. Most of what is there is shallower, or easilly missable, without the expedition(limited-time event) that launched it. A lot of things do seem like "grind X yourself, order team to do Y every few hours, fly to Z and talk to someone" which will get repetitive if/when you keep getting the same ones.

When it first released, the criticism that it's mostly empty procedural generation what what got currency and stuck to the no man sky name.

That still sticks around as people who've never played it comment & upvote the same things.

I've never played it. Just witnessing the cargo culting. If I were wanting to give an opinion on this post without actual information, the 'empty procedural generation' critique is exactly what I'd say, since that's all I associate with this game from the briefest commentary when it was released.

There are lots of things to do, but the actual mechanics are for doing them are shallow. The best example of this is the trading system; the way trading works is there are 7 economy types a star system can have, which determines which goods they produce (can buy in large quantities) and demand (can sell for a higher price than at normal systems). Thus the best way to make money from trading is to simply find a loop of systems which chain together the production -> demand goods. For instance, the economy types trading -> advanced materials -> scientific -> trading each produce the goods demanded by the next economy type in the chain.

So the system is fairly shallow, since what you end up doing is just jump from system to system and buy and sell everything.

Noone said it was empty. Noone said there wasn't a lot of 'stuff' in NMS. What many of us are saying is that all that stuff doesn't make the game fun.

And all of it is like, run around, press x. load stuff in processor. take stuff out of processor. wait. load stuff in processor. take stuff out of processor. wait. oh your crops are ready. pres x, x, x, x, x, x, x. go to sales terminal, sell crops, go to processor, take stuff out of processor load in processor again. oh hey crops are ready again, x, x, x, x.....

Missions: fly to randomly chosen planet in solar system and to same generated structure and find the object in the same spot as it always is in this generated structure. fly back. your crops are ready again for harvest, press x, x, x, x, x, x...

People who didn't follow up their post-launch recovery still have the impression made at the launch (first impressions matter a lot). I didn't play the game (yet) but I have followed their recovery path. It is an incredible story and it seems that the game has evolved a lot.

I wonder if they won't add generative AI to create infinite stories/missions inside it, that would get rid of the 10K bowls effect.

stuff to do != fun stuff to do

I recently tried out the multiplayer with two friends and must say, while I like the games vibe, the multiplayer is deeply disappointing. You don't really play together, you just happen to be roughly in the same area at the same time. Nothing is shared really, every quest you need to do for yourself, and the sync is broken to the point where two players standing next to each other have completely different weather and see different enemies. If they fixed that I would come back, but I don't really feel like doing everything by myself.

As someone who bounced off Morrowind in favor of Gothic (II) because there weren't enough guardrails in place for my old self, how much of the old "here are some breadcrumbs and here's the game's final goal, but the way in between is up to you to find" design intent is in No Mans Sky? I love finding little niche stories, but they have to be crafted with intent, (procedural) environmental storytelling does not scratch that itch. Is NMS worth trying out?

no matter what, that always happens with this game. Any news about it causes the people who played for 10 minutes at launch however long ago come back to tell you how much they didn't like it.

I don't really enjoy the game for more than 10-20 hours after picking it up (gets boring fast for me), and have problems with it, but kudos to the dev team. I agree, huge turnaround

For sure. Even as someone who bounced off the game several times, the scope of their post-launch additions are truly impressive, even matching up against a lot of the subscription games (whose whole deal is regular content drops)

There is no such thing as a turnaround. People wait for a game to be released. When you give a release date, you must give one that shows the almost complete state of your game. Not something that is half done, not something that will feel completely different 1 year later. When you buy a thing you get an experience. If your game is a different experience 1 year later, well, I couldn't care less about it. I'm not gonna sink another 10+ hours into it, just to see what you have done in one year's time. Imagine you go to the matrix and you get a half movie, bad coloring and the like. Just ridiculous.

Early access, early release, beta, whatever is just an euphemism of becoming a backer. You thought you buy something final, and in the end you become a financier. You lend your money upfront. All this because a group of pampered kids can't keep a deadline. And think that the world is a playground and they can keep their game 5 years in early access. Get a grip.

Sorry. You release your shit, it gets evaluated, end of story. Nobody cares the rest. Gaming space is already half dead because people think that sitting at a game company means you get to have knitting lessons during workhours, and you can daydream and chitchat all day long. Ridiculous.

I disagree with this logic.

They launched an empty, hollow game. And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. Most of their new systems are half baked—confusing and only adding to the game design mess the game came out with.

I'm convinced the reputation that they executed a "turnaround" is based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.

The benefit to the NMS team for this is they'll have people half willing to try their next game because they "didn't give up". Not the worse idea, but I think we're over stating the heroicness of this.

I think you have it in reverse, it's pure soul but very little game. It's just like Noctis IV, an interactive piece of art. This one has more pretense to looking like a game with its crafting system and survival mechanics that you can thankfully disable. It also has a narrative, several well-executed threads of them. It's a very introspective game with things to say about itself and the experience of living. You might not like it, you might have found it unengaging, but to deny it lacks humanity, artistic substance and a story to tell is crazy.

There's also not very much I would say is technically impressive about it at all, and definitely not anything people normally reach for. The bandwidth of the asset streaming they accomplished on the PS4, with such a small team that still had to build the rest of the game, is the only thing that makes me raise an eyebrow. In fact, that may as well have been the real gain of crunching down how planets are described rather than the huge number of planets themselves. Even that's not particularly groundbreaking if you take away the context of the small team. And at that point we have to ask ourselves if it's groundbreaking, or just very intelligent and clever pragmatism. Impressive in a labor lens, not a technical one.

In a way, it might reflect accurate space and our universe. We really might be alone.

Ironically less so as they've added more to do but:

> NMS is an amazing game with no soul.

I found the game in the early days to be incredibly soulful - it was almost an interactive poem. Full of emptiness and loss. I loved it back then.

Was going through a rough patch in the early oughts. Noctis and ambient music were my solace.

> I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours.

Yep, me too. It's a decent sandbox to spend a bit of time in, and it's fine that that's all it is.

> Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials.

They have spent substantial amounts of time on UI, UX, and tutorials... several times. Unless you're proposing they convert everything into a brain-dead "mobile" game UI (which would be a significant downgrade), it'd be very difficult to do much better than they already have with the inventory management and conversation UIs.

> It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content.

I mean, it's a sandbox. If they did all of the UI overhauling and tutorial creation you wanted from them -and nothing else- would that keep your interest for weeks and months... or would you play for a few hours and get bored? There's not much _game_ in the game and it's been that way since the beginning.

I do not have high hopes. It's been 10 years of constant NMS updates but the game still has nothing that keeps me hooked. Everything feels insignificant to me, every interaction is like the one before and the one that comes next. They added stuff to the game, but it just feels like more of the same. Light No Fire will surely be just more of the same.

Part of me is secretly hoping / assuming they’re releasing new features as a testing bed for the changes in Light No Fire. I’m also very hopeful for Light No Fire. *VERY* hopeful, but I have to assume all these updates are for their broader engine. I hope..

I have at least 100 hours in the game, and I have to disagree with you. There's a surprising amount of variety in the creatures and the world generation.

I spend a lot of time building / designing my base. In that aspect, the enjoyment of the game is limited only by my creativity. I've definitely got $25 worth of entertainment from it. I will say, though, it is more fun if you have others to join your squad.

It's vastly better, imo, than Starfield. That was a game which really let me down -- I wanted Skyrim in Space, but I got 1,000 planets with the same cookie cutter quests on each. Or a team member saying something like "I can't believe we're the first ones to set foot on this temple" when there is a randomly generated outpost plopped down right next door.

It did well commercially looking just at steam stats, not to mention the other platforms. It seems like alot of that was used to turn it around to save their reputation to keep going not only with one game, but to make sure the next isn't "stay away" labeled even it is "wait and see" for many.

AFAIK, there is no in-game microtransactions or anything, so basically retail sales I suppose? The studio is relatively small (indie-scale) last time I checked, and the launch was pretty big and I'm sure they pulled in a ton of money, even though as always on the "vocal internet" the launch was a huge failure, they still sold a lot of copies. "Just" 1-2 million copies would go a long way to fund a small passionate team. The all-time peak for simultaneous players on Steam (PC only) was 200K, so I don't think 1-2 million copies sold is far off as a minimum.

Small studio, don't have to generate a lot of sales to keep them afloat. Updates push visibility and generate new sales. Obviously, they need new projects to keep them afloat in the future.

No Mans Sky has sold over 10 million copies. I'll let you do the math. They are still basically an indie company as well.

I feel like NMS is definitely catered to people who prefer to define their own way of having fun. There’s practically zero hand-holding. There isn’t much emphasis on narrative either, and the story is almost completely optional. It’s more about finding your own game within the game, where simply existing and exploring such a vast universe can be the whole point.

In that sense, I’d argue it’s almost more of an environment simulator than a traditional game. I can totally see why someone coming into it expecting a strong narrative, memorable characters, and lots of character development might end up disappointed.

For me, though, this is the game I keep coming back to. There’s just nothing quite like heading into a world that nobody has ever visited, with a pretty good chance that nobody else will ever visit it, and still leaving your little mark there.

Probably better than most given how quickly they're able to push out updates this big.

Outer Wilds (not The Other Worlds) gives you a very similar feeling on that first flight. It's not a VR game, but I made a VR mod for it a few years ago.

I think the multiplayer is very smartly implemented. The big "Anomaly" space stations can feel very busy. I don't feel very alone playing tbh, unless I want to be. MMO raid-like expeditions are right there if I wanna join up with people.

It runs great on Linux and Steam Deck

https://www.protondb.com/app/275850

> ... only runs on windows.

The version I bought on Steam runs fine on Linux (in Proton of course). I just click "Play" and it plays.

It's $23.99 on Steam right now.

Sadly NMS could get 1000 years of updates and it still wouldn't be even 1% as complicated or deep as Eve - and I'm not an Eve fanboy, I stopped playing that more than 10 years ago at this point.