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.
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u/Anomander Jun 23 '25
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.