No Man’s Sky has had a great month, coincidentally around the launch of the other big space adventure of the day.
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No Man’s Sky has been one of the best examples of a video redemption story, and developer Hello Games never stopped expanding the game with new content, and more features. Just recently, the procedural space adventure celebrated its seventh anniversary with the Echoes update, and it doesn’t look like there’s an end in sight to this support.
But do these updates bring back players? The answer is an emphatic yes! Hello Games founder, Sean Murray, recently revealed that No Man’s Sky is having “its biggest month in the last few years.” Interestingly, this is happening across all platforms where No Man’s Sky is available - so PC, consoles, Mac, and even VR.
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NMS at least has planets without buildings or signs of life, but they’re certain types of planets (eg. lifeless/airless) There are definitely some that have far fewer ships going around too.
NMS is more expansive in some ways, but also fairly shallow in terms of some of the core mechanics. There’s a lot of things to do like having a settlement or building a fleet and sending the fleet on missions, but again, it’s a bit shallow. At the beginning you’re largely focused on resource collecting to build a base, and unlock upgrades. Over time you can automate a lot of this and focus on other things. However, if you don’t like the resource collecting to unlock things, you’re probably not going to enjoy it.
I think the space flight and combat in NMS feels better. For whatever reason, in Starfield space flight and combat feels very slow to me. It doesn’t help that the UI in the starship does this weird laggy update. The seamlessness of flying into a planet can be fun in space combat and the ships will follow you.
NMS has way more copy-paste assets. Starfield at least has grand cities and some unique set pieces or a few different options ,but every crashed freighter in NMS is identical. The buildings in NMS have a tiny bit of variance but they’re all like 1-2 room buildings. All space stations and space ports are identical (just the core race changes). There are pirate space stations, but they’re the same basic one but darker and they’ve moved the vendors inward a bit into tents instead of stalls. A little bit of this is baked into the story of NMS to some extent, but that doesn’t exactly help it.
My only quibble with this response is that in my mind ground combat is unbelievably orders of magnitude better in Starfield (you actually have access to different guns and enemy types!), and while I can understand preferring the speed of NMS space combat, I ultimately find the mechanics of it pretty shallow and enjoy the system shuffelling of Starfield, I feel like an ideal system would combine them both.
Great points! Yeah there’s definitely a lot more variety and skill involved in Starfield. Most of the NMS ground combat is in the open and is easy to cheese, but it is satisfying to hop in your ship and start shooting things (though now they have it trigger incoming aircraft).
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Lol tell this to people who are upset that every planet doesn’t have a thriving colony in it. The “empty planets” are frustrating to them.
Not that you or they are wrong, it just highlights that matters of opinion on things like this are a spectrum, and sometimes you end up on the far end. I like that I can land on a planet and have something besides just rocks, but also that’s it’s procedurally generated so that it isn’t the same every time. It’s false replayability, sure, but if I like playing the game, it doesn’t matter to me that the layouts are the same.
I enjoyed the planetary exploration in No Man’s Sky. Some planets have an outpost, but most don’t. In No Man’s Sky there are several alien races and artifacts they left behind you can learn their language from.
There are a huge number of planets, and some have strange reality altering properties. They have different weather and conditions. There is a ginormous amount of alien life that you can catalogue and interact with and even tame. The planets themselves show a huge variety of differences. There is even underground and underwater environments with unique life suited to those environments.
The base building is fun. You can do a lot and you can even travel to galactic hubs and worlds that other players have worked on.
Even travelling through space is more fun. You are able to fly to planets and land on them seamlessly. You can own several different space ships and even giant freighters that can contain your ships and frigates you can send to other star systems.
I do enjoy the zen of NMS (nothing like piloting alone on the surface of a planet with the sound of the rain falling on the cockpit), but even after all those years and cool upgrades, it still feels so empty… If you enjoy tabletop RPGs and have an opportunity to play one with like-minded friends, I recommend you try Traveller. It’s all those things you mentioned, in a way, way bigger and denser scope. :) Also with actual civilizations, empires, politics, commerce, wars, fleets, etc.
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