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.