Gaming

No Man's Sky is definitely not a game for everyone, but it's impressive how close they have managed to get to their overblown initial promises.

I literally bought No Man’s Sky while waiting for Starfield. I’ve been playing No Man’s Sky for two weeks now and I just can’t put it down because it’s so good.

Now I’m planning to wait to buy Starfield for at least 6+ months until the developers iron out the bugs.

I keep trying NMS hoping to find a good game in there somewhere. I'm over 100 hours now, mostly because I'm a dork who likes collecting spaceships.

But all the mechanics -- the crafting and movement and languages and even the terrain generation -- are frankly pretty terrible. It's like Hello Games intentionally hired people who don't know how to design these things.

Why do all the space stations look identical inside? Why do I have to learn one single alien word at a time, including "a" and "the"? Why are there no rivers or waterfalls or glaciers or swamp basins? And why can't I customize my ship appearance when the game itself can clearly generate one from a dozen random parts?

I posted a shorter version of this elsewhere in here but I've thought more and want to expand.

Disclaimer: I really like both no man's sky and starfield. Gonna be down on both of them but I've got hundreds of hours in NMS and I expect to have hundreds more in SF, they are both good games, I have no regrets about buying either of them.

That said, I've realized that starfield is actually making me low-key kind of angry at NMS, for all the potential it wasted. It's showing just how little extra depth NMS could have used (could still use) to be great. There are really only a couple fairly minor ways that starfield is better, and yet for me and I think a lot of people they spell the difference between "fun sandbox" and "awesome game". Starfield is so shallow on all of these that despite being the first game to really deliver on the promise of an open world space RPG sandbox, it's like a wish-dot-com version of what nms could be.

First, combat. Nms has all right space combat, nothing great but acceptable, but there's no excusing its ground combat. There's effectively one enemy, they're not really designed to be fought most of the time, and they're almost never involved in battles of any meaning. The combat overhaul added some mechanics but didn't solve the problem... in a way it's worse now because fighting seems like it could be interesting. How come when I find a trading post it's never a ruin overrun by pirates, with scattered notes from the lost inhabitants, written in their native language so that if I can speak it I can read their sad story? Why don't I ever find a detail of gek security bots defending the inner chambers of a crashed frigate? Why can't I have a shootout with the crew of a frigate on board its procedurally generated interior?

That leads into the issue that there's no story at all. People complain about the main quest of SF, but nms has one of the flimsiest, poorest written central plots of any game I've ever seen. That would be okay, but there are also no side quests. You can't stumble upon an abandoned mine, or have a spacer randomly ask you to help break a blockade of their home system. There are a tiny number of very shallow fetch quests, but nothing with even a hint of effort in the writing.

I get a bit annoyed at starfield for systems not interacting. Like, i have a house, but I can't build outpost buildings around it, eg. However, NMS takes that to extremes with how outpost building, village building, and frigate building all seem like they're actively hostile to each other, as if coming from different games. IIRC even some of the outpost components won't properly snap together if they're from different 'styles' of outpost, although I may be misremembering.

Add to that that there's also not a lot of gear collecting mechanics, minimal ways to display loot, minimal character customisation, and so on, and it's just... sigh. Everything nms does feels like it falls just short of being amazing, but they get bored right before completing the last step to bring it all home and then they go work on another system that they'll get 3/4 through and then abandon. I wish it had mods.

Meanwhile, starfield doesn't do any individually thing particularly well either, but unlike NMS, it feels like I can do stuff with what I make. I can build a ship... and then take it smuggling! Or fight pirates! I can have NPCs on board and they'll chat with each other while I'm flying around, and help run the ship! They're not all well written, but they're actually written, and do more than just stand around saying one line back at me. It's frustrating, because honestly, taken on its own, starfield isn't particularly remarkable (see how bland space travel is eg) but there's nothing out there that's actually gone the very obvious extra mile of "okay we have beautiful worlds to explore, what if now we put some things to do on them"

Absolutely; if I buy Starfield it'll be like a year from now. But all the hype around it has reminded me that I haven't played NMS for a while.

X4 is another space game that I've been wanting to get back to.

I haven't bought Starfield yet but seeing the ship creator there really reinvigorates my thoughts about how if NMS has one too it would be amazing.

So far I'm still just hooked on starfield, just stole my first ship from some colonisers

ya this happened to me too. starfield was supposed to he thr star citizen killer, but it looks terrible. star citizen is miles ahead of this fallout reskin

There's an Expedition going on for the next 6 weeks in NMS. It's like a self-contained mega-questline. Start a new single player game and choose "Expedition". They give you lots of upgrades along the way and you'll see bases and messages from other players along the same path.

That was the same for me, but reverse. I tried to play No Man's Sky to get hyped for Starfield, but they're just such different games doing different things and one doesn't appeal to me as much as the other.

And here I am deliberately working my way though Origins->Odyssey->Valhalla so that I can completely ignore Starfield for a while until the hype train settles down and some bugs are fixed :-). I keep my eye on NMS (I was a Day 1ish player) but I feel it is soooo wide and soooo shallow it would just bore me to tears now.

Really enjoying Valhalla...

I think it can't be overstated how good VR is in NMS too. There's so much attention to immersion, even some things that bugged me at first like the mime controls for ground vehicles.

Hmmm I might update NMS and do another playthrough. I haven't played it in a few years now.

I should preface this by saying that I am extremely underwhelmed with starfield, but I’ve been going back to playing space engineers for my sci fi exploration cravings. Everything i was looking forward to in starfield seems to be compromise after compromise, tied together by loading screens. And the setting looks good on paper but really can’t draw me in.

At least in SE, outdated and poorly optimized as it may be, I am loading into the map once and then could fly from earth to the most remote planet without a single interruption (except real life sleep maybe, because it would take literal hours to make the trip without a jump drive).

I really like NMS, they're very different games. NMS gets very sandboxy and end game ends up farming the best stuff and upgrading it all. The process is pretty fun tho and that's the main gameplay loop.

I'm waiting for patches, mods, and a sale before playing Starfield, but it did get me thinking about space games, which led me to purchase KSP. I'm really loving it. I used to play a game called Spaceflight Simulator until the dev fucked over the entire player base that supported him since his game released. That game was basically the same concept as KSP in sandbox mode but in 2D. Making the jump to 3D graphics/physics has been really cool, and I'm glad to have filled the hole in my heart SFS left.

Opposite for me, NMS made spend nearly days of game time so far into Starfield, NMS too hectic I feel.

I love NMS but I'm so afraid to log in. I've had a huge underground base (max terrain manipulation) for like 5 years even though people say never to dig out a base because eventually it will get filled in. So I feel like I'm rolling the dice every time I load in. I have hours of videos of me just running around my base across the different patches, where the flora/fauna in the connected cave system changed each time.