No Man’s Sky has had a great month, coincidentally around the launch of the other big space adventure of the day.
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No Man’s Sky has been one of the best examples of a video redemption story, and developer Hello Games never stopped expanding the game with new content, and more features. Just recently, the procedural space adventure celebrated its seventh anniversary with the Echoes update, and it doesn’t look like there’s an end in sight to this support.
But do these updates bring back players? The answer is an emphatic yes! Hello Games founder, Sean Murray, recently revealed that No Man’s Sky is having “its biggest month in the last few years.” Interestingly, this is happening across all platforms where No Man’s Sky is available - so PC, consoles, Mac, and even VR.
I have played both. I prefer No Mans Sky. It’s just a better game by far.
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NMS at least has planets without buildings or signs of life, but they’re certain types of planets (eg. lifeless/airless) There are definitely some that have far fewer ships going around too.
NMS is more expansive in some ways, but also fairly shallow in terms of some of the core mechanics. There’s a lot of things to do like having a settlement or building a fleet and sending the fleet on missions, but again, it’s a bit shallow. At the beginning you’re largely focused on resource collecting to build a base, and unlock upgrades. Over time you can automate a lot of this and focus on other things. However, if you don’t like the resource collecting to unlock things, you’re probably not going to enjoy it.
I think the space flight and combat in NMS feels better. For whatever reason, in Starfield space flight and combat feels very slow to me. It doesn’t help that the UI in the starship does this weird laggy update. The seamlessness of flying into a planet can be fun in space combat and the ships will follow you.
NMS has way more copy-paste assets. Starfield at least has grand cities and some unique set pieces or a few different options ,but every crashed freighter in NMS is identical. The buildings in NMS have a tiny bit of variance but they’re all like 1-2 room buildings. All space stations and space ports are identical (just the core race changes). There are pirate space stations, but they’re the same basic one but darker and they’ve moved the vendors inward a bit into tents instead of stalls. A little bit of this is baked into the story of NMS to some extent, but that doesn’t exactly help it.
My only quibble with this response is that in my mind ground combat is unbelievably orders of magnitude better in Starfield (you actually have access to different guns and enemy types!), and while I can understand preferring the speed of NMS space combat, I ultimately find the mechanics of it pretty shallow and enjoy the system shuffelling of Starfield, I feel like an ideal system would combine them both.
Great points! Yeah there’s definitely a lot more variety and skill involved in Starfield. Most of the NMS ground combat is in the open and is easy to cheese, but it is satisfying to hop in your ship and start shooting things (though now they have it trigger incoming aircraft).
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Lol tell this to people who are upset that every planet doesn’t have a thriving colony in it. The “empty planets” are frustrating to them.
Not that you or they are wrong, it just highlights that matters of opinion on things like this are a spectrum, and sometimes you end up on the far end. I like that I can land on a planet and have something besides just rocks, but also that’s it’s procedurally generated so that it isn’t the same every time. It’s false replayability, sure, but if I like playing the game, it doesn’t matter to me that the layouts are the same.
I enjoyed the planetary exploration in No Man’s Sky. Some planets have an outpost, but most don’t. In No Man’s Sky there are several alien races and artifacts they left behind you can learn their language from.
There are a huge number of planets, and some have strange reality altering properties. They have different weather and conditions. There is a ginormous amount of alien life that you can catalogue and interact with and even tame. The planets themselves show a huge variety of differences. There is even underground and underwater environments with unique life suited to those environments.
The base building is fun. You can do a lot and you can even travel to galactic hubs and worlds that other players have worked on.
Even travelling through space is more fun. You are able to fly to planets and land on them seamlessly. You can own several different space ships and even giant freighters that can contain your ships and frigates you can send to other star systems.
I do enjoy the zen of NMS (nothing like piloting alone on the surface of a planet with the sound of the rain falling on the cockpit), but even after all those years and cool upgrades, it still feels so empty… If you enjoy tabletop RPGs and have an opportunity to play one with like-minded friends, I recommend you try Traveller. It’s all those things you mentioned, in a way, way bigger and denser scope. :) Also with actual civilizations, empires, politics, commerce, wars, fleets, etc.
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I honestly cannot fathom how would you could possibly think that no man’s sky is a better game by far.
No Man Sky’s is a good engine / tech demo to build a game on, but it’s barely a game.
Ground combat suck, space combat sucks, the story is just random notes tucked away with zero interesting characters or character development.
It’s basically just grinding it out to fly around and scan a bunch of plants that look identical but have a slightly different name.
Really? You can’t fathom how someone would consider NMS a better game? Both games are barely comparable other than using space as a backdrop. Judging by the reaction online, it seems like many people were lead to believe that Starfield would be a space sim and came up wanting when it was more of a sci-fi Fallout, with mostly optional engagement with the space elements. For those people, I can see merit in recommending they check out No Man’s Sky, which has a shallow, bit widely-spread space simulation to engage with.
I don’t think it’s useful to try and argue which game is better, but I would much rather play No Man’s Sky any day of the week. Bethesda RPGs have long lost their luster for me since the Oblivion days, and now just stand as a testament of disappointing writing, stagnant technology and under-baked systems. Starfield does not show any meaningful signs of breaking the norm.
Correct.
People who say X things aren’t comparable usually seem to grossly misunderstand how comparisons work. They’re very similar games and even if they weren’t they would still be comparable, the end result of the comparison is just that they would be different.
That’s fine but I still can’t fathom why. The only part of it that’s better than Starfield is flying to and from space.
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I thought this way back when i first played it. But I’ve been spending the lasts days playing and it got so much better.
The environments are no longer the same everywhere, sure you will find matching planets but they don’t all look like asteroids with hair anymore. Minerals dont stick out of the ground anymore. And underground caves exists.
The multiplayer aspect got better too (or so i hear, didn’t get to try it yet).
The stories are more engaging with specific npc’s interacting with you.
Never thought space combat sucked? It’s not to the level of Elite Dangerous, but it’s somewhat entertaining, and accomplishes what need to be done imo.
It’s an MMORPG so of course you have grinding, and for my current playthrough it isn’t boring yet. I’ve got a minecraft vibe, where you upgrade gear and ammass items for future uses.
love that you can get pets now and use them for more than simply have around, I got some kind of panther yesterday, was able to mount some guns to it and now it helps me in combat (kinda tedious to use idk if i fully figured it out yet, but sometimes the companion won’t attack).
All that and i only started playing, there’s the whole frigate thing, and also settlements to protect. I’m told you can have some kind of fleet to send on missions, and i’m certain there’s other huge content i’m missing that i dont know of yet.
I played it like 3 months ago before the Echoes update, so this isn’t based on the launch version or anything.
I mean yeah, but they don’t look any better or more varied than Starfield’s planets, that’s for sure. It’s neat that they added caves but the caves are also pretty boring. There’s not much in them beyond some more resources. You don’t have the expansiveness or endlessness of minecraft caves nor the buried mines and mob spawners and lava and more interesting underground stuff.
It’s serviceable, but I wouldn’t describe it as fun, as in I don’t actively enjoy the space combat. I find Starfield’s juggling of systems and targeting on top of standard dog fighting maneuvering at least a little more engaging, but a serviceable system that’s not that much fun kind of describes most of No Man’s Sky to me.
I find it’s crafting to be far less satisfying than Minecraft’s or say Subnautica’s, and a lot more grindy, but that could just be me.
Again, I know they have all these different systems, but it really feels like each system is just barely enough of a system to entertain you for a couple hours, but doesn’t have the depth / polish / interweaving complexity to truly hold you.
Did they fix the hitboxes? The robot dogs and flytraps meleeing me from 5 meters away was really annoying when I played the game
Seems so, i haven’t encountered this issue (and i got attacked a decent amount)
Yeah, I think you are describing the game at release years ago. It has grown so much since then.
I played it not that long ago. The comment above is still pretty much spot on. There’s base building now I guess. There’s still nothing to keep it interesting.
I literally played it like 3 months ago, before the most echoes update, but from the looks of the update notes I think my description still likely stands.
The space exploration seems leagues better in No Man’s Sky than Starfield.
I would certainly hope so as that is No Man’s Sky entire gameplay loop