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?
It is a number go up, sandbox of a game. Bunch of stuff to do but very little reason to do it. It’s a fun game, but takes a special kind of person who knows how to make their own fun to enjoy it and doesn’t mind the grind.
There are quests and a story but they serve more as tutorialization rather than an actual “main quest line” (there is a story and lore but it’s all very background stuff that is completely irrelevant to the actual gameplay). Lot of down time and just exploration between objectives once you reach the middle, and the ending is pretty much “now you know the ‘Big Secret’, what do you do now?”
From what you described, it’s probably not your bag. It doesn’t really reward in depth exploration as planets are all randomly generated. You go, explore around a bit, then bounce on to the next planet unless you like the aesthetic enough to make a base in. Combat is the worst aspect of the game even the dogfighting, which is better than the gunplay but still meh.
It will, as you put, “crush [you] with never ending space, billions quests, and tedious base building”
OK, thank you, it more and more looks like the actual game is not for me even though the idea of such a game is.