Comment by pkilgore
17 hours ago
NMS is an amazing game with no soul. A metaverse. A monument to technology without the depth or people or narrative (prewritten or emergent) that makes it interesting.
I'm certain there are some people whose brain is wired exactly right to love it.
But I have more fun playing the n100th Call of Duty clone hearing real voices on the headset in a tight, fun game loop.
But the company behind it deserves to be applauded. Might be the best value for money / care / support of any game, especially one so poorly received initially...
I think you have it in reverse, it's pure soul but very little game. It's just like Noctis IV, an interactive piece of art. This one has more pretense to looking like a game with its crafting system and survival mechanics that you can thankfully disable. It also has a narrative, several well-executed threads of them. It's a very introspective game with things to say about itself and the experience of living. You might not like it, you might have found it unengaging, but to deny it lacks humanity, artistic substance and a story to tell is crazy.
There's also not very much I would say is technically impressive about it at all, and definitely not anything people normally reach for. The bandwidth of the asset streaming they accomplished on the PS4, with such a small team that still had to build the rest of the game, is the only thing that makes me raise an eyebrow. In fact, that may as well have been the real gain of crunching down how planets are described rather than the huge number of planets themselves. Even that's not particularly groundbreaking if you take away the context of the small team. And at that point we have to ask ourselves if it's groundbreaking, or just very intelligent and clever pragmatism. Impressive in a labor lens, not a technical one.
Ironically less so as they've added more to do but:
> NMS is an amazing game with no soul.
I found the game in the early days to be incredibly soulful - it was almost an interactive poem. Full of emptiness and loss. I loved it back then.
In a way, it might reflect accurate space and our universe. We really might be alone.