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?
Maybe, but also it sounds like this is post-game, not end-game. If you’ve done the story and have unlimited resources, what is there left to do? From my experience with the game, resources are the game mostly. The story is there, but resources are what you progress through. The story just sort of exists.
That’s kinda just sandbox games in general, which NMS is one of. You just make stuff and make your own fun. Resources aren’t the game, they are the building blocks. Part of NMS is optimizing your production chains and getting factories spinning to pump out those resources so you can get on to the mid to late game content. If you’re still struggling with basic resources then you’re still very much early-game.
The story might as well be a tutorial.
If optimizing production is “the real game” then NMS is garbage. There are so many good production/factory games. NMS is not great at this.
However, I’m certain you’re wrong because that’s not how the game is advertised. Can you play it that way? Sure. Is that how it’s designed? No. Finishing the story is very much not early game, based on how the game is advertised.
Factorio? Sure, launching the rocket is the beginning, and you can tell because the marketing is about expanding your factory forever. NMS? It’s marketed as exploration and the story. I stand by saying you’re post-game, not late-game. Does that mean it’s bad? Not at all. If you like it then great! It’s not for me though, as someone who loves factory/automation games.