I give it a 6.5/10
-Very little story
-Not much to do in-game
The devs straight up lied about the game.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4y4i3a/wheres_the_nms_we_were_sold_on_front_page/
I have to admit that I was astonished the game sold this well. I thought it was just another hyped technological project that wouldn't interest most gamers because it was like, yeah, so it's the most sprawling sandbox ever achieved, but what's the actual game? It's wouldn't have been the first game to generate a ton of hype, but not much genuine interest.
Clearly I was wrong about the level of sincere interest in the gaming community, but I haven't seen anything yet to indicate I was wrong about the game.
I recall someone referring to No Man's Sky as a 'huge sandbox, with very little sand.' Fairly apt statement.
From everything I had seen that is what I was expecting. I kept waiting, kept thinking, "Okay, but we all know you're gonna need battles." I appreciated that they were trying to build a game that wasn't necessarily about combat, but...there's a reason combat sells. Combat-oriented games don't just dominate sales, either, they also dominate GOTY awards and HoF nostalgia threads where gamers talk about their sacred memories.
Combat is just exciting. It's so damn exciting. And from the get-go I could see it was an afterthought to the ambition of creating a mega-sandbox with zero imperatives imposed on the player. That just never works. Missions and tasks interspersed with other forms of sporadic adversity (either planned or deliberately but inevitably random) are what make games interesting.
Objectives are the heart not just of videogames, but all games. Board games, carnival games, rec games, sports...all are based on completing objectives, not this idea that, "Here...go explore." Exploration is a mainstay of gaming, there's no doubt about that, but only as an aside. Bethesda games like
Skyrim are gorgeous, so sometimes it's fun to just go run around looking at stuff, but if that's all the game offered, nobody would be playing it after a month. Even if the random beasts remained, if there was no reward to killing them, or if there was no consequence to ripping apart a certain camp or certain faction, then what would be the point? Where's the hunt?
Clearly I wasn't paying as close attention to all the promises, but even if they had delivered on all that stuff in the Reddit post, then what would be fundamentally different? All the stuff that seems to be missing that was promised would have only heightened the immersion, but would have done nothing to cure the lack of purpose.
I expect one of the most severe downturns of concurrent players on Steam after 1-month from the launch recorded in the history of the service.
