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.
Having played a lot of NMS and now sinking time into Starfield, these comparisons need to stop. NMS and Starfield are wildly different games.
It’s just like when people compare Terraria and Minecraft, or Overwatch and TF2. It’s a poor comparison beyond the vague theme of each game.
NMS and Starfield are both set in space, give the player a spaceship, and let the player land on planets. That’s where the similarities end.
It’s strange, people can’t seem to help themselves.
Even the Star Citizen community was full of people talking about how Starfield was finally going to deliver as the superior sandbox space sim.
Space Game is not a genre, it’s a setting. Bethesda RPGs are gonna Bethesda RPG, no matter how you flavor it.
It’s like Cyberpunk again, people gave themselves grand ideas about what a game would be regardless of what the Devs were saying, then got upset it isn’t the game they imagined but the one they were told they were getting.
I get what you’re saying, this happens with almost every major release but cyberpunk promised far for than it delivered. The version 2.0 that released soon should have been what we got in the initial release. We were promised multiplayer, that got cancelled. We were promised multiple dlc, phantom liberty is the only dlc they’re going to release. I’m still excited nonetheless.
I don’t think it’s unfair to point out that many of the people who were interested in Starfield leading up to launch thought they were getting more of a space sim than they did, proceeded to look for alternatives, and NMS was there being pretty good at what it does now. The OP article demonstrates this and is not a comparison between the games. In my case, Starfield just reminded me that NMS exists and I decided I’d rather be playing it. Fundamentally comparing the games is ridiculous, but it’s no surprise that NMS ended up in the conversation.
Maybe they should have paid attention to what was actually being said by the Devs then. They clarified that it wasn’t going to be like NMS/Elite/etc at least a year out from release.
I recently started playing NMS again right before Echoes, although I didn’t know Echoes was coming up. While I never made a conscious link between seeing all of the news about Starfield and me choosing that game when I was last looking through the plethora for something to inspire me, I think it may have had a subconscious effect on my choice.
Both also have base building mechanics, survey objectives, jet packs, mining lasers, but that’s really where the similarities end.