I always feel like games like this die in the late-game. Once you've had fun with the exploring and are collecting resource units for the nth millionth time, the game kind of runs its course.
It would be far more interesting if, as you play, you can participate in a large economy, slowly growing your gameplay experience out from say, a single guy mining and selling minerals on a planet, to an galactic empire.
Even better if you could participate at just about any part of the virtual economy, buying, selling, crafting, shipping, policing, fighting, robbing, pirating. You could own a store on a space station or a repair shop, make enough and buy a ship, or buy a station. Now you're managing station ops.
Exploration is just one of the X's in 4x, and I feel like there's so much untapped potential in the genre.
I've been anxiously following this game ever since I heard about it last year.
No Man's Sky is the first game in 30 years that I feel will capture the awe and wonder I felt when playing the original Starflight on my family's Tandy computer back in the 80s.
The vast emptiness between systems, the uncharted nebulae, the wormholes, the topology/bio scans, mining, specimen collecting, and the mysterious force that was at the heart of the plot. Those things kept me engaged to the point of aimlessly sweeping the entire star chart coordinate by coordinate, scanning every planet, encountering probes, the risk of encountering that alien race that could almost always destroy you, finding ruins and logs left by past explorers, examining the stats of every colony of fungus and biped I could find within the fuel-range from the ship my rover had. The thrill of being able to land near a major mineral deposit without dying because the gravity was juuuust on the cusp of your lander's tolerance. It was like exploring with the crew of the USS Enterprise.
Maybe my 40-something self will never be as receptive to such mundane, non-action exploratory gameplay as my tween self, but I hope, hope, hope this game delivers even a fraction of what I loved about Starflight. The first-person nature and the multiple climates and biomes promises a much more interesting experience of exploration than Starflight ever had. The gameplay we've seen thus far is absolutely beautiful.
Yeah, I could only play it for a month before I lost interest due to the loneliness, emptiness and sameness of the universe. I guess that's the drawback of primarily procedurally generated content...
The new Powerplay update looks good though. Do you reckon we'll see any announcements at E3?
It would be far more interesting if, as you play, you can participate in a large economy, slowly growing your gameplay experience out from say, a single guy mining and selling minerals on a planet, to an galactic empire.
Even better if you could participate at just about any part of the virtual economy, buying, selling, crafting, shipping, policing, fighting, robbing, pirating. You could own a store on a space station or a repair shop, make enough and buy a ship, or buy a station. Now you're managing station ops.
Exploration is just one of the X's in 4x, and I feel like there's so much untapped potential in the genre.