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> is that not enough? what else do people want?

I've bounced off NMS several times, despite having tried quite hard to get into it. So, my take is based on ~20 hours of early game, from 2025ish. Probably the best parallel I can draw is to Elite: Dangerous, which I played for several hundred ours before getting bored of it. What I find lacking in both games is that there's no _meaningful_ emergent gameplay that spawns off the procgen. Everything is wildy different on each planet, yet very same-y, because none of the differences really play into each other. In both, one can discover random biomes and creatures, but it's not like they are inherently interesting, they are mostly just following the same scripts.

Contrast this with something like Dwarf Fortress, which takes a slightly more in-depth approach to procgen, one where things have history, and in many ways, things "make sense". Or Rimworld, where the game tries its hardest to conjure up a narrative for you, dynamically, but still in a sandbox. So, basically, NMS is a perfectly functional sandbox game, and I have huge respect for them for keeping on working at it for so many years. However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch, and so far I haven't been grabbed by any of its story generation. It just felt like a long series of fetch quests and "collect them all" games.

I feel like can also compare the difference to some rougelikes where the combos of random things can yield vastly different experiences but in NMS the randomness felt more like a skin - not affecting gameplay much.

> randomness felt more like a skin - not affecting gameplay much.

DF is a great comparison, because it speaks to the composability of properties and systems as a key requirement.

2,000+ variants that still funnel through one predesigned interaction system is not variety.

The variants need to actually compose with each other into meaningfully unique experiences / systems for the player, which is much harder to align.

I think the main difference in Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld is that the world happens to you, you have to respond to the events the game generates, while in No Man's Sky you happen to the world, you choose how to interact with it.

No Man's Sky is much more like Minecraft in that way, you have to make up your own goals, the game doesn't really prompt you in any way to do anything.

> However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch, and so far I haven't been grabbed by any of its story generation.

That's basically it. It's not a simulation. So if you want simulation, then NMS isn't your game. Maybe X4 might be better suited. Or maybe not.

Sometimes people forget that not everybody has to like every game :D

I've looked at videos of Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld, neither looks interesting to me at all.

Yet I've spent hundreds to thousands of hours in Minecraft, No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous.

> However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch

Elite Dangerous is the most hardcore space game I'm aware of any I play several space games. I wish it did more fun stuff like No Man's Sky actually.

It sounds like your interest is in simulation games. I don't play those really much so I can't recommend any other than I guess Elite Dangerous.

EVE online?

Yeah this is my experience as well. At first it felt empty, but then I sort of realized it’s not a quest game it’s a building game and it’s all about building bases and ships and what not, and they’re added progressively more ways to build and customize the world. And there are explorations - there are some truly bizarre biomes but they are rare. The variants that feel repetitive are falling along some average world characteristic - probably not too dissimilar to the universe at large. It takes time to find the weird ones.

If you’re looking for a scripted arc, wrong game by construction.

I think the multiplayer aspect is a bit weaker than it could be, maybe improved more recently, but it is a something that Minecraft has done well

I looked for a situational physics game- where what you build and automate becomes part of a larger world ala EVE, with simulated factions that rise and fall depending on the players actions over time. Basically procedural generated civilization as a background game played by others..

> minecraft has like what 40 biomes, no man's sky has practically infinite biomes

Does it? I put about 80-ish hours into NMS last year. According to the wiki NMS has 13 biomes. In practice it has even fewer because the actual biome has little to no effect on gameplay. It's just a "look".

The issue is that it is a procgen game, with separate systems that rarely interact with each other and you never get an actual emergent gameplay.

No matter the biome, no matter the planet you just tick check-boxes which systems are enabled or not, but their combinations do not give you anything special back.

No matter what environment is generated you play in very similar way.

Elite: Dangerous suffers from the exactly the same issue. There's tons of interesting systems, yet you will do one thing of your choosing, that will play in the same way all the time. Like a theme park, while the game promises you a simulation.

The difference is that Minecraft gives you much more granular access to manipulate the world, which enables a lot people to feel more connected to the world and become more invested in it.

Its notable that you dichotomise using the promises of another unreleased game from the same people. Depth was part of the original NMS promise.

Obviously NMS's original marketing was bonkers and capitalised on saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people.

"saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people" is pretty much the textbook definition of marketing in general. I'm not sure why one might expect the marketing for gaming generally or this game in particular to be any different.

There are a many successful games companies and marketers in the games industry that have enough respect for others to not mislead like this. Many many marketing promotions go to significant effort to show how a thing actually works. There is a great interview with the Battlefield Bad Company people pre-release showing off destructible buildings where they go into what it is and what it isn't, and explain the trade-offs they had to make and how it makes the experience immersive.

> Obviously NMS's original marketing was bonkers and capitalised on saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people.

I don't think they intentionally misled people. It's not that different to how Spore was marketed during development - a wildly-overconfident dev team promised a living breathing simulated universe, and at some point they had to actually ship the portion they had managed to get working, and most of the complex systems landed on the cutting floor to meet the final deadline.

Spore was similarly misleading, yes.

Having subsequently met a few folks who worked on Spore, I'm pretty sure they fully believed in the early vision they showed off a year or so before release

> what else do people want?

A little bit of depth to go with all that breadth?

I'm not saying there aren't deep systems in NMS. Its just that they are sparse. You can tool around all day having only the most cursory interactions with most of the game's systems. They've added so many interesting things, yet last time I played it felt there wasn't much of anything to do with them. For example, the Pokemon clone they added a few updates ago -- fun for five minutes. Super simple battles. However many months of development for something that got old after 5 minutes.

I pretty much knew someone would show up with a condescending "if you didn't like NMS its your fault and you're a bad person". And here they are.

> minecraft has like what 40 biomes, no man's sky has practically infinite biomes, is that not enough?

Hah. Sorry but what kind of Minecraft do you play? In mine the biomes become unrecognizable because I build on top of them. What can you build in no man's sky? Nothing, judging by most reviews/comments.

You can build bases on the ground, under water, in a freighter or now in space. There’s a ton of building possibilities

Oh, my mistake, now that you've explained it like this it is magically fun for me now.

Oh, everyone else's mistake; we didn't realize all of human output had to satisfy you...of all people!

I don't get the feeling that they're wrong. No Man's Sky is now more-or-less the game that was originally promised. Many people that bought it at-release are happy with the turnaround, myself included.

If the game doesn't appeal to you, then that's fine too. But overall the game fills an interesting and accessible niche beneath games like X4: Foundations and Elite Dangerous.