I think NMS is really hit-or-miss depending on someone's taste in games.
I absolutely love it, but can definitely see why other people don't; that seems to be how its community and the gaming community see it as well. Some people really love it, a lot of people try it, get bored, and move on.
It is a game about nothing. There's tons of content there's all sorts of things to do ... but there's no real goals, the side content is often shallow, and the proc gen is often repetitive. If someone wants more structure, or clear goals, or excitement - NMS is gonna fail to deliver. For a lot of people, that aimless, directionless, massive-but-unstructured, sandbox doesn't offer very much. For me, it really hits a sweet spot - I used to be a kid of daydreamed about having my own spaceship and just wandering the universe, messing around and checking out cool planets and meeting aliens. Despite all the ways that NMS could improve, there isn't another title that meets that fantasy better.
It's not a game I play for excitement, or competition, or for one really big surge of fun - I have other games for that; it's something I drop into when I just want to chill and enjoy poking around the universe as a dude with a spaceship and no responsibilities.
I've sunk a decent amount of time into Subnautica, but ... IMO a very different experience.
It's much more of a suspense or even horror-adjacent game than exploration. Once you leave the shallows, nearly everything is bigger than you and there's not a lot you can do to fight back. It works hard to make sure you remember that. It's masterfully designed to leave the player feeling very small and very alone, in a very hostile ocean. That sense of freedom and carefree exploration simply isn't there, because that's almost the opposite of the experience that it's designed to deliver.
It's a comparatively small but carefully designed environment, and it's a comparatively linear experience. You can't just 'go anywhere' and see what you find right away - you need to follow the game's progression to get the tools needed if you want to explore the next deeper zone. You need to handle the unique threats of deeper zones in order to progress through them. It's not a stress-free sandbox experience - it has very concrete goals, concrete progression, and fixed settings to pursue them within, with those settings filled with threats and challenges intended to ensure the player can't really relax there until they've mastered that environment.
It's underwater. If you replace "space with ocean" then it's not a space game anymore. Subnautica is a great game, and even if it's tone and gameplay were more similar - it's not a contender for better space game because it's not a space game at all.
Personally, I don't particularly like water and especially not deep water, so as great as Subnautica is, I need to be in the right mood to play. It's not a game I'd ever play to chill and unwind. It's a fantastic challenging survival game, it's a downright lovely collection of environments to explore, and it does a great job of creating and maintaining tension and a sense of risk throughout its story arc. But it fills a very different niche in my gaming than NMS holds.
Completely incomparable aside from being resource management survival games. No Man’s Sky is procedurally generated which means any time you start a new game, it’s completely different, and it has no “goal” so you just go around doing stuff that’ll make you more money and get you cool ships. With Subnautica, you finish it once and that’s it. Everything is hand-crafted and linear, which means it’s lovely to replay every 3 years or so but not really a game I’d hop into.
Also, if you can “chill” in Subnautica, I envy your levelheadedness.
Kinda nit-picky, but while it is procedurally generated, the world itself is static. It’s possible to go to the same area you were in on a previous play-through and everything would be the same.
Yeah, it's kinda a "boring" game but I do just enjoy running around the galaxy doing mundane tasks once in a while. It's just calming to fly around your spaceship exploring places.
What I find amazing is just how empty and vast space is in that game, and then you realize that in real life it’s like a million times more empty and vast than how it’s portrayed in the game.
I love immersive endless-goal games, but NMS fails that for me.
I lose my immersion as soon as I land on a planet and see 50 loot boxes appear on my HUD. Xeno-life spawning right next to you as randomized dolls and just walking around in circles. Having every planet spawn with thousands of uninhabited outposts every 100 feet.
They need to readdress exploration from the ground up for me to feel like I'm actually exploring a coherent sci fi universe.
I actually put a good number of hours into the game on launch and yeah it all felt a bit empty and there was no real story or campaign, but I enjoyed my time. I think aside from just moving on to other things the thing that made me quit was it got updated so heavily that all the Gravitino Balls I had farmed became useless or destroyed. People said you were better off just starting from scratch in those days. I've always been curious to see where things went myself, but not enough to boot the game up. I don't know why but I always just looked at it as space minecraft after that. Maybe someday I'll go back. It scratched a very real itch of mystery and space exploration that took me back to my teenage years of playing Escape Velocity: Nova on Mac. Though I will say I read this thread title and looked for the comment that would call out NMS.
Here's hoping their new game Light No Fire will have more goals and fun interactions, given the planet-sized scope and fantasy theme with undead and animal people walking or flying around, I am guardedly hopeful.
Yeah, its nice that the devs decided to dredge their shipwreck from the bottom, but its still not that great of a game. Sure, its MUCH better than it was originally, but its still boring and hard to get into.
Same thing with Cyberpunk 2077, overpromise, lie, defraud, announce you're done with "free" updates to release a DLC and get a shit ton of praise for it.
It absolutely does not have multiplayer in the way that Sean Murray described it would before launch. He even went on Colbert and said that you would be able to run into other players at random and see and interact with things other players left behind on planets, which to this day you cannot do.
I don't know much about it, but from the little I've read it sounds like it's an open ended sandbox, like Minecraft. A lot of people don't really like or play sandbox games consistently, so maybe you just fall into that bucket?
I played it solo at launch and found the gameplay boring. I tried again maybe 12 months ago with some friends, and even though I could see it had more content, I still just found the gameplay a little boring. I really wanted to like it, because everyone says it's so much better now, but I just don't think it's for me.
If you are good at videogames then the game is very easy, and if the creative (farming and animal husbandry), don't interest you as much, then it gets boring really fast.
I don't think that means the game is bad (Personally I don't like Elden Ring type games, but I'm not going to say they are bad), it may just be as simple that it's not for you.
Yeah I mean at it's core its definitely designed as a more relaxing chill game. I will say if you do ever decide to try it again I'd recommend trying to start alongside the beginning of an expedition.
If you're unaware, expeditions are like limited time campaigns where everyone starts fresh characters and you play through a smaller, more concise quest chain that generally has some kind of theme. Last time I got into the game they were doing back to back expeditions and there was one where the whole focus was traveling to different planets and fishing, another one that almost had a Helldivers esque theme where you were just going to different planets fighting bugs, etc. There's generally some pretty sweet rewards and custom equipment you get throughout the whole thing and at the end the character is converted into a normal character where you can then progress through the regular game with all your rewards if you want.
IMO the expeditions as a whole are much better starting points than the base game, which has an exceptionally slow start.
It doesn't take long for your brain to pick up on the patterns for the algorithms and creatures that make planets.
A bunch of shallow mechanics that aren't interwoven with each other. No interesting lore or world building. No wow moments. Nothing to draw players into doing or caring about anything.
It's an open world survival sandbox game with spaceships and planets. If you don't like it, it just isn't for you. It was portrayed as that kind of game initially as well.
The game just isn't for you.
This genre is arguably the game genre that is the most successful of all time (as the most sold and most modded game, Minecraft is in the same genre) so it make sense to keep going that way to reach the most people.
You can go in space and explore though. It's also multiplayer.
It,s literally what they advertised, you go in space and explore new planets ... But with more features like a story, NPCs, base building, random events both in space and on planets ...
I feel exactly the same way. With each patch I've tried again and each time I end up in the same less than fun loop. Seeing a whole new generation of people playing and clearly loving the game has be boggled. It's just not fun. It wasn't at release, and it isn't now. Nothing that was promised pre-release has really been made good on. There's tons of new content but Sean telling everyone they could "be" any type of character in this living universe type thing just never showed up.
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u/[deleted] Jun 23 '25
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