It is fairly shallow, yes, but it's also open ended so you can set your own goals. It's also pretty good for creative types, with building bases and ships and such. I have some 700h in it but spread over a few dozen saves, played during updates over the years, and very few go past the 30h mark. I also haven't touched some gameplay elements so there's that. But it's a great game in shorter batches.

I agree and it was the same comments on the hacker news article about the release too. Most people dont like a sandbox with no progression system, and specially when you can feel that the world is just different colors and different animal skins but otherwise the same.

Beautiful game but feels boring, and I guess it's the lack of progression system and that everything feels like the same.

I definently need some constant goals set by the game to feel happy.

Is every space station still carbon copy of each other including merchants? Is every base in every planet still copy?

Yeah, thats a bit revisionist? I will always be mad what a fucking liar Sean Murray was pre-release. There is just no dancing around that fact. He also wasnt some suit from the publisher. He is credited as a programmer on the game at wikipedia(you know boots on the ground good guy). Almost every promise he uttered was broken. He was on the fucking Conan late night show and educated us on how hard they had it(and on top lied about every single feature the game would have).

And yeah, they redeemed themselves. But i have to say that 10 years later i still regret my purchase. I revisited the game every other year or so after several bombastic update trailers. I'm still not impressed or even entertained. Also they got rid of the only thing i ever really liked at release: the artstyle. Which makes me even more angry. Fuck this game. I should get a hold on myself. I should let it go after 10 years of free update. But seriosly fuck this game and fuck Sean Murray.

I got it at launch and I love it, but it is not a game I am trying to finish, rather a place a visit now and then.

When they run an expedition it's got a good set of quests to follow and usually accelerated progress from the rewards. There's a new one with this update, not sure if it's live yet.

I played it before as a grinding game but you can easily play it as a casual game. There's not really a defined playstyle for nms.

The missions from what I remember give you enough guidance on how to play. You essentially use your explorer tools (scanner, mining tool, combat weapons) to gather resources and explore the universe. Missions are there to guide you and give you things to do but you could just ignore most of them lol.

There's aspects that are geared towards grinding like exotic ships, mine construction, sector economy, etc. but they don't matter for casual players.

There is no direction to go, it's a sandbox, and discovery and exploration is pretty much the whole meat of the game. If you don't like that, this is probably not the game for you. There are random events, there are questlines that eventually happen which you can optionally pursue, some of which get pretty in-your-face in case you're worried you might miss them. Crafting and base-building is simplistic and mediocre. "Survival" is almost trivial on all but the very hardest difficulty settings, and even at the hardest difficulty and with willing suspension of disbelief it's not really a fulfilling part of the game. There are a variety of other meta-systems tacked on too like language-learning, ship customization, fleet management and missions, settlements, universe-hopping, etc but these are just addons, they're not the core of the game.

If you want a more "guided" experience you could try watching for some of the time-limited/seasonal expeditions they do as live-service events. Some of them are easier to follow than others, but they all sort of have a theme and usually give you a good workout in a variety of the game's different systems.

I would wait until their next "event" that they have after every update. That will give you kind of a hand holdy "tutorial" to bring you up to speed with the core mechanics, along with a direction to go. Plus during these events you can find lots of other players with cheaty bases you can quickly farm to get all the materials/credits you need with minimal grinding.

when last did you play it?

I played it while high earlier this year and managed to kinda figure it out because the tutorials were helpful enough

granted

I just wanted to build shit and kill shit, so I picked one of the easier game mode options

I think you can sidestep the more difficult survival/crafting mechanics if you want

that's if my memory holds up

I might have been playing donkey kong or some shit

You can also mod the game, which can let you unlock items and progress faster in single-player.

There is a plot you can follow, but it's not exactly a game known for its memorable plot. Like many other survival crafting games, the "what" you're supposed to do is kind of up to you and your own creativity. It's not for everyone, certainly.

Yeah I found that there was so much stuff going on that it made the world feel uninteresting. Every planet had aliens already there and life and ancient monuments.

What I liked about Elite Dangerous is that 99% of systems are boring and that makes the lagrange cloud/earthlike world/giant star really memorable

I could offer Mars.

I love NMS, but it is shallow for the most part. Just like pure vanilla minecraft is shallow.

I've tried it several times through the years wanting to like it because it sounds like something I'd enjoy, but it just never sinks its teeth in.

And that's okay. Not every game has to be made for me. I love that people love it and that the developers have worked so hard to deliver on everything they promised and more. I don't enjoy the game but I'm so glad it exists for those who do.

Strange. I've always wanted to send other people into it

Maybe we should get together.

In earlier versions the sun was a part of the skybox rather an object within the gameworld, so it couldn't actually be visited, which you can now do with this new update. Haven't tried it myself, but from what i have heard it takes somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes to get there (probably depending on how upgraded the impulse drive, this games equivalent of supercruise, is) from the systems hyperspace exit. Should drop you out of impulse at a certain distance, planets and other points of interest do that too. Getting too close deals constant damage to your ship.

ED stands for Erectile Dysfunction haha

I bought the game when it first came out. I didn't really buy into the hype, so I wasn't disappointed at launch. Fucked around for like 20 or 30 hours, then never picked it up again.

Is it finally time?

I haven't played in a few months, but my partner and I have a few hundred hours in co op. What did you find janky?

I've been able to get more than just an hour of enjoyable game play out of most of the major updates, and really, that's more than fine with me. I've had a lot of enjoyable hours in this game and I love that they are still pushing updates to it... this just makes me look forward to Light No Fire all the more.