After many false alarms, finally time to pick it back up

I was one of the many disappointed faces in the crowd when no man's sky came out and was barely a game. I was so excited as a space nerd, to have something less business like than elite dangerous to satisfy my stargazing needs.

After putting the game down being as disappointed as I was, I heard about updates every now and then, and with the release of every update, I would redownload the game, start a new file, and realize that the game was still a boring mess.

It got to the point where I stopped tracking these updates, but when I saw the most recent update that came out this week, I forced myself to give it one more try. Now I don't know if some of the stuff that I've been enjoying came from updates that you all are familiar with already, but this feels like an actual video game now.

Way more guidance if you want it, quests and crafting have become far more streamlined, and the amount of variation that they have added to the extremely dull initial offering is insane. I'm playing on an Xbox One x, in visual mode and it does chug a bit byt boy is it pretty.

I haven't landed on an obvious duplicate planet yet, the new social hub gives plenty of customization bullshit to enjoy, the space stations feel way more alive and the language mechanic is more fleshed out now, although it's probably still superfluous. Riding one of the also greatly improved alien life forms is a blast, have yet to track down one of the new flying mounts but I'm excited to try.

I think what I wanted from this game was adventure for adventure sake, and the third planet I landed on had an amazing ship with quadruple my cargo capacity that I immediately made my own and lost my old ship. What I didn't realize however was that every single spot in that inventory was completely filled with broken items that I would have to painstakingly remove one by one using extremely rare resources. Even the warp drive was broken. The amount of time I've spent just getting my ship and working order has not felt like a chore though, rather an actual adventure in space. I landed on the planet that had nothing but extreme lightning storms and mostly water hunting down some activated copper, and I can't wait to go back.

Not sure if anybody has the experience but I don't know much about the crafting of a base at this point yet, I'm kind of tempted to build it on this extreme lightning planet but I'm sure that would be kind of a bitch. Anyone else have a similar journey?

I’ve put about 70 hours into NMS and just recently started over playing with a friend (crossplay— he’s on PS4 and I’m on PC). It’s been a BLAST playing together. Should have done it a long time ago.

I jumped in during one of those big overhauls, this is maybe a year or so back, and even then I felt the biggest problem for this game was how harsh some of those costs were for getting anything done. It had MMORPG levels of grind for what is a single player exploration game. Each time I came across anything halfway interesting it had a lock on it that required a significant amount of rare resources. No Mans Sky just felt like at every step it was gating fun with resource restrictions. At the very start fuel is such a precious commodity but then later on when you can craft it easily it just becomes a chore instead.

Maybe they dramatically changed the core values but when I started trying to build a base and seeing how much work simply crafting glass would take I finally put it down for good.

@humanity: I've actually started having a similar problem with valheim myself. I don't mind the resource gating at its heart, sometimes it can be really satisfying to get those resources that first time and overcome the challenge of it.

Good games, though, seem to be able to circumvent the chore issue by introducing a means of producing an automation for resources as you go. Satisfactory is one of the best examples (and any game of its ilk like factory and even modded Minecraft). You struggle to get basic resources at the start, but as you unlock machines with those resources you're given access to means of getting those initial resources in easier/automated ways.

Valheim (and it sounds like the build of NMS that you played) misses this completely. The powers that assist with resource gathering are spread out way too far to be helpful in combating the grind before I started to lose interest. If you team up with more people and divvy up resource gathering tasks it's not as bad, but then you're missing out on the mechanics I find most fun in the game like leveling up skills through use. I want to keep playing it more, but the resource mountain is just too much to overcome. I shouldn't feel like I'm spending the same amount of time gathering base resources in my 16th hour as I did in my first hour.

@humanity: I don't think your problems are gone completely, but they definitely made resources easier to come by, but there are some resources you may need to do several jumps to find. The portals make bouncing between systems easy. My main gripe last time I bounced off was actually glass, and they've made that craftable with the silicate you get from plain old ground now,

Update: planet with neverending lightning storms provides gravtino balls and storm crystals, now a millionaire

When they started offering the "Creative Mode" that takes out the resource-hunting aspect, I just started a new file on that mode immediately. I've enjoyed the game more since then. Yeah, it becomes even more aimless when played this way, but I'd rather just keep warping forward until I find a planet I want to spend some time on, and build a big, ridiculous base on it without worrying about running out of glass etc. It's been even better now that I've got a PS5 simply because the loads between systems aren't nearly so long.

I always felt like Hello Games came up with the crazy procedural generation engine and then tried to bolt a game on top of it. I think the crafting loop conflicts so hard with the size of the games universe. I spend so long at the beginning of a new game waiting for my ship to fly from one planet to another.

I'm having a hard time not mining rocks in space all the time. Salvage data gives you quite a lot of money when you starting up too. How much do you get from a gravtino ball?

I tried again about 1 or 2 big updates back and the beginning sucked just as much as ever. Landing is done blind. In the future no spacecraft have bottom cameras? Oh, and half your special landing fuel is used up landing and taking off. You can hop two times on the planet before needing to refuel. But you can fly around the planet on a different fuel. You've taken up 2 slots in the ship just to fly and land on a planet and landing and taking off is incredibly inefficient. The planets are still boring and sparsely populated.

@bigd145: pretty early on you can have self charging launch thrusters, as far as boring I guess that's up to debate, I think the added variables make for some cool places, but it is very much a slow and almost direction less game, that's just what I need right now

@sahalarious: You have to buy the specs from the Space Anomaly? And how "early" is that? Oh, its location is random. The upgrade takes half an hour to recharge. That's more a sidegrade than an upgrade.

@bigd145: I've been there, game ain't perfect and you hating on it is totally warranted. Play something fun for you instead