I mean I don’t totally disagree with your statements, but how much playtime do you have in NMS? I have 85 hours and I am totally satisfied aka not thinking of returning regarding new patches with new “content”. Does that make it a bad game? I don’t think so. Is it the best spacesim ever, I don’t think so either. But it gets some features really nicely done:
- like the feeling of and endless universe where you can travel wherever you want,
- the exploration part where you are looking for your favourite planet ecosystem (it NEEDS dinosaurs!)
- the crafting part, although I no clue how it changed to some years ago
- starting and landing on planets (hi Shitfield)
But I agree the core gameplay loop is quite shallow, I see it more as a “light” sandbox game.
Yeah I like the “go anywhere” feel and was happy when I found a dinosaur planet too. But it still all feels 2 inches deep in so many ways.
I’ve come back to it a bunch of times because people keep insisting it’s good or “no you just need to try X” or “but the latest update added so much”. Steam says over 300 hours now but a decent portion of that was standing around trade hubs waiting for ships I wanted in S or A class, or literally just walking away from my PC while refiners ran.
I’m not usually the type of player to use cheats/exploits but I actually had more fun when I started using a duplication glitch. No more limited inventory, money, or resources, I could just pick one ship and one multitool and max them out with all the storage and weapons and whatnot. I don’t enjoy grinding so this was a relief. But it still didn’t make up for all the bad underlying mechanics.
