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?
NMS was fun to tinker with for a while but ultimately it was a shallow experience. Even long after launch, it's just a couple dozen systems mashed together with little thought to them. There's tools to build material collection including a power plant, or you can simply mix a couple ingredients in a furnace and get more than you started with. Why go through all of that effort to harvest materials when there's a simple duplication recipe?
This has always been my impression of it, even though I have never played it. From all of the videos and discussions I have seen, I have never been able to actually identify a gameplay loop. It just seems like busywork for busywork's sake.
I'm not even against time wasting busywork games. I have spent an embarrassing amount of time playing Stardew Valley. NMS just seemed pointless and boring.
It's one of those games where the procedural generation hurts it in the long run. Eventually you stop seeing new things, and exploration is boring. Unfortunate for NMS especially when (as far as I can tell) it's an exploration based game.