I picked up EGS years ago and I'm just starting to play it. Right now I'm just gathering resources but I don't know what my next steps are supposed to be as far as base or vehicle building goes. NMS looks interesting as well and it's half off on GOG for the next few days.
Does anyone have any experience with these games?
No Man's Sky was an over-hyped sandbox game last time I played it but that was years ago. I can't imagine it evolved into anything worthwhile short of them scrapping both the engine and the core game design to the point where it literally became an entirely different game.
There's supposedly a big redemption story with NMS's development. Its launch was a disaster but they somehow managed to turn things around commercially at least.
They added a lot of new stuff and made a lot more things worth doing and flowing, but its still the same sandbox genre.
The redemption is that they spent years working and fixing it after being completely thrown to the gutter, something no one expected. Its less "omg they fixed it and its amazing now" and more "for no real money, they kept grinding anyway just to try and redeem their product."
Its a principle and moral redemption, not exactly a production one.
Commercially maybe, but I'll bet it's still shit.
I'll defend it to a degree believe it or not because of the sheer effort of their turn around. It's not 'great' I'd call it average by now, but at least that means that the people who bought it ( Including me ) have something of a game to play.
That's the problem with NMS now, it is just an average open world game which isn't terrible interesting. I feel like for example they could do so much more with fleet encounters and stuff like that. They recently did an introduction of pirate barges which is pretty cool and I think introducing more capital ship style and fleet combat would drastically flesh out the space part of the game and also make it look awesome.
NMS is still as vast as an ocean and as shallow as a puddle. Once you notice how "different but the same" the procedural generation is the magic wears off.
It's a lot better now considering the absolute mess it started in, the engine didn't need any work they had just barely pooped out a playable demo and gotten way over their heads with how hyped people were for such an idea.
It's still got a way to go yet before it finally becomes interesting, I think that's why I'm not that into it but I like a lot that they're adding space stuff among other things, the fleets look very cool when they warp in. They run a very real risk though of becoming another Elite Dangerous style project where they've got the occasional interesting moment but zero substance because they made their universe far too big. It's because of games like No Man's Sky that I'm very much against big world games these days. If I see the open world survival tag I usually click off.
Elite is NOT too big, every other game is too small. Elite's scale is exactly one to one. Just because it doesn't have a Sorting Algorithm of Threatening Geography like every braindead Nintendo game ever doesn't mean it is bad. The endgame of Elite is to put your name in the galactic records: https://edastro.com/records/ It's just not a game for you, so stop bashing my game.
No, stop being a pussy, although I give you credit for being honest about that.
You are a goddamn woman. You refuse to leave other peoples shit alone. Go away.
What was the problem with Elite Dangerous?
What wasn't. Outside of the flight model and basic combat, everything is shit and they keep making it worse, not better. And you can't even really enjoy the combat because of the engineering grind. Want competitive weapons? Fly to fifteen different rando goons across the universe and do their fetch quests, so you can spend tens of hours fetching more bullshit materials from unfun gathering spots, or be locked out of PVP relevance.
Don't want to engage in that content? Many pve enemies are tied to your player rank, and once you get high enough THEY get the engineered shit.
Classic open world problem of being too big with too much empty space and I'm someone who really liked the idea of Elite Dangerous initially because I love space sims. Once you've done a few missions you've done them all because they're just generic generated ones and there's only a few events around among other things. That's very much what Star Citizen is like even with their constant claims of alpha so they've reduced themselves to pumping out silly ship releases every five seconds because they seem incapable of coming close to what they promised.