this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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No Man's Sky
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NMS is one of my most played games with over 500hours. What experience does it offer better than Starfield? Outside of seamless planet travel, NMS is a lot less compared to Starfield. Everything is proc gen, the variety is pretty low.
Your first 100 hours in No Man's Sky will be packed to the brim with discovery, holy shit, random thing, stuff you didn't even know existed, three or four ships you didn't even know you could get, giant space cruisers, black holes on an almost never repeating dispense to your face.
Generative Aliens and planets aside, NMS is full of surprises.
True, but once I went through my first black hole, I came out somewhere in the middle of the great unknown, and I thought ok, now what? Do I just go back and diddle around in my own area, or what is this endless vast space even for? I kind of had an existential crisis making me wonder why I was doing anything in the game at all, why did anything I do matter? Never felt that one on a game before, haven't gone back yet because I'm not sure what to do.
That is pretty much what my first hundred hours of starfield have been like as well, though, except Starfield has some story, and fewer of the systems seem to contradict each other.
Mostly I don't think it's fair to either game to compare them. They're trying to do different things for different audiences on different budgets and different timescales.
They get compared because Starfield borrows a ton of gameplay concepts from NMS without even adapting them much. The exploration gameplay is quite literally identical to NMS except with uglier procgen planets, fewer abilites and no freedom to fly around everywhere.
Which is why people who were interested in the exploration aspect tend to be more disappointed with Starfield. The rest of the game is typical Bethesda stuff which is fine, but exploration outside of cities gets really stale really fast. I think that disappoints a lot of people, including me, because exploration was one of my favorite parts of previous Bethesda games like Skyrim
Yeah but who cares since it's all generated?