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?
I like a lot of the same aspects of games as you, especially exploration and finding cool places of interest, and I bounced off of NMS after about 60 hours for the same reasons people are listing in the replies. Puddle deep, no reason to really explore and repeat activities unless you want to do them just for fun. Found a nice fighter early on, never once had a practical reason to change and no way to upgrade the current one other than “more slots” for upgrades or inventory. I had my endgame ship in just a handful of hours, so the only reason to engage in the shipbuilding parts of the game was if I wanted to for looks or fun. There’s maybe 10-20 hours of story content. The rest is getting resources and making number go up, and every problem or resource shortage can be permanently optimized out of existence in an hour or two max
OK, this is basically what I feared. Back in the day when I played WoW it was fun to exp through the wilds and once I got to max level and people started their raids I completely lost interest. I don’t really car if I have +150 or +155 attribute staff or whatever. Repeating the same raid 20x to finally drop the crap? How is that fun?