Comment by Ars_Armegis
14 hours ago
A lot of criticism from no man's sky, like this one, comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what no man's sky is, i fear... No Man's Sky really is just a sandbox game. a sandbox game doesn't need infinitely complex mechanics, it just needs to give you a blank canvas to do what you want to do... minecraft has like what 40 biomes, no man's sky has practically infinite biomes, is that not enough? you can build a unique ship nobody else will ever have, you can make a unique base on a unique planet and even build cities with other players, you can decide to be a space pirate or a wanderer and just explore to your heart's content, is that not enough? what else do people want? people always say nms planets are boring but is it just because they are a single biome? sure it would be amazing to have real planets, like light no fire but for all 18 quintillion something planets, but that would mean having a 30gb folder for every planet! just because they're procedurally generated doesn't mean they don't use up storage when they are generated, and it would be, i think, completely unfeasible to offer what light no fire promises to do but for the entire universe. IMHO you should view the entire nms universe as your equivalent to a minecraft world, and every planet as a unique-ish (there is some repetition but really not a lot) biome in that world. at least it helped me contextualize what the game does, because you're really not meant to spend the entire game on one planet. it's no man's sky, not no man's land...
> is that not enough? what else do people want?
I've bounced off NMS several times, despite having tried quite hard to get into it. So, my take is based on ~20 hours of early game, from 2025ish. Probably the best parallel I can draw is to Elite: Dangerous, which I played for several hundred ours before getting bored of it. What I find lacking in both games is that there's no _meaningful_ emergent gameplay that spawns off the procgen. Everything is wildy different on each planet, yet very same-y, because none of the differences really play into each other. In both, one can discover random biomes and creatures, but it's not like they are inherently interesting, they are mostly just following the same scripts.
Contrast this with something like Dwarf Fortress, which takes a slightly more in-depth approach to procgen, one where things have history, and in many ways, things "make sense". Or Rimworld, where the game tries its hardest to conjure up a narrative for you, dynamically, but still in a sandbox. So, basically, NMS is a perfectly functional sandbox game, and I have huge respect for them for keeping on working at it for so many years. However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch, and so far I haven't been grabbed by any of its story generation. It just felt like a long series of fetch quests and "collect them all" games.
> However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch, and so far I haven't been grabbed by any of its story generation.
That's basically it. It's not a simulation. So if you want simulation, then NMS isn't your game. Maybe X4 might be better suited. Or maybe not.
Sometimes people forget that not everybody has to like every game :D
I feel like can also compare the difference to some rougelikes where the combos of random things can yield vastly different experiences but in NMS the randomness felt more like a skin - not affecting gameplay much.
> randomness felt more like a skin - not affecting gameplay much.
DF is a great comparison, because it speaks to the composability of properties and systems as a key requirement.
2,000+ variants that still funnel through one predesigned interaction system is not variety.
The variants need to actually compose with each other into meaningfully unique experiences / systems for the player, which is much harder to align.
I think the main difference in Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld is that the world happens to you, you have to respond to the events the game generates, while in No Man's Sky you happen to the world, you choose how to interact with it.
No Man's Sky is much more like Minecraft in that way, you have to make up your own goals, the game doesn't really prompt you in any way to do anything.
Yeah this is my experience as well. At first it felt empty, but then I sort of realized it’s not a quest game it’s a building game and it’s all about building bases and ships and what not, and they’re added progressively more ways to build and customize the world. And there are explorations - there are some truly bizarre biomes but they are rare. The variants that feel repetitive are falling along some average world characteristic - probably not too dissimilar to the universe at large. It takes time to find the weird ones.
If you’re looking for a scripted arc, wrong game by construction.
I think the multiplayer aspect is a bit weaker than it could be, maybe improved more recently, but it is a something that Minecraft has done well
I looked for a situational physics game- where what you build and automate becomes part of a larger world ala EVE, with simulated factions that rise and fall depending on the players actions over time. Basically procedural generated civilization as a background game played by others..
The difference is that Minecraft gives you much more granular access to manipulate the world, which enables a lot people to feel more connected to the world and become more invested in it.
> minecraft has like what 40 biomes, no man's sky has practically infinite biomes
Does it? I put about 80-ish hours into NMS last year. According to the wiki NMS has 13 biomes. In practice it has even fewer because the actual biome has little to no effect on gameplay. It's just a "look".
> minecraft has like what 40 biomes, no man's sky has practically infinite biomes, is that not enough?
Hah. Sorry but what kind of Minecraft do you play? In mine the biomes become unrecognizable because I build on top of them. What can you build in no man's sky? Nothing, judging by most reviews/comments.
Its notable that you dichotomise using the promises of another unreleased game from the same people. Depth was part of the original NMS promise.
Obviously NMS's original marketing was bonkers and capitalised on saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people.
"saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people" is pretty much the textbook definition of marketing in general. I'm not sure why one might expect the marketing for gaming generally or this game in particular to be any different.
> what else do people want?
A little bit of depth to go with all that breadth?
I'm not saying there aren't deep systems in NMS. Its just that they are sparse. You can tool around all day having only the most cursory interactions with most of the game's systems. They've added so many interesting things, yet last time I played it felt there wasn't much of anything to do with them. For example, the Pokemon clone they added a few updates ago -- fun for five minutes. Super simple battles. However many months of development for something that got old after 5 minutes.
Oh, my mistake, now that you've explained it like this it is magically fun for me now.
Oh, everyone else's mistake; we didn't realize all of human output had to satisfy you...of all people!
I don't get the feeling that they're wrong. No Man's Sky is now more-or-less the game that was originally promised. Many people that bought it at-release are happy with the turnaround, myself included.
If the game doesn't appeal to you, then that's fine too. But overall the game fills an interesting and accessible niche beneath games like X4: Foundations and Elite Dangerous.