I’ve recently upgraded my PC which allowed me to try this game for the first time. I remember it getting crucified upon launch but people said it got better over time.

So after spending about 100 hours in the game i can say it definitely ticks all the boxes, but the biggest issues it has are design based. Namely, even though this game is huge in every way it just feels small.

To explain my reasoning i’ll talk about another game i played a long time ago, that did the exact opposite, despite being comparatively small it made me feel like it’s huge.

It’s 2003 game called Freelancer. In the first mission, straight out of the gate, you are dumped in the New York System. As soon as you reach space there’s already 3 stations and the planet you spawned on, and despite intractability being limited by today’s standards this immediately gives you the sense of scope.

In the course of that mission you travel trough the asteroid field made of trash to planet Pittsburgh, which has completely different set of goods, ships and equipment from planet Manhattan. There’s a total of 2 planets, 2 shipyards, 4 stations and 2 outlaw bases in New York system alone, along with 4 asteroid fields. So the fact that you are stuck in the system for the first 2 missions is no issue at all, it just gives you the time to take it all in.

There’s a really nice early trade route from one of the stations that produces arms back to the planet Manhattan, but on the way you risk getting attacked by outlaws on both points. One could conceivably remain in the New York system indefinitely, mining, trading, hunting pirates. It’s far from the most optimal way to play but it is possible.

Compare that to NMS, a game that came out over a decade later. Only one station per system, which you are dropped on top of immediately upon entering, all the outposts on all the planets synced with the system wide network, making intra planetary trade impossible, and teleporter system making travelling between stations and your base utterly trivial.

Trading between stations is as easy as can be and involves no risk. All ships are perfectly able to carry as much goods as you can possibly gather, meaning no reason to pick a slow and bulky freighter that’s vulnerable to piracy. Not that it matters since you can just instantly teleport between stations in different systems so even if your ship can’t even move you just bypass that part all together.

This issues can be fixed however, all the ingredients are there, it’s just the recipe that’s rubbish.

I’ll say remove teleporters all together. I mean it, portals exist, so it’s not like there’s not a fast travel option between the systems. Unlike teleporters portal network is not trivial, you need to first find the portal, that’s the first hurdle, and then there’s the fact that portals are fixed, and can’t be moved, which means if you want to trade with a station or outpost you need to fly there, making you vulnerable to piracy.

And while we’re at it make prices local based rather than system based, and allow more than one station to exist within the system. Bonus points, localize resources more, have different biomes on the planets have more of one resource and less, or none, of the other. Then have outposts spawn near resource deposits and base prices on that, with resources they have locally being cheap, while those they don’t have being more expensive.

Same could be true of space stations, every space station will be near one planet or another, have prices on space stations depend on what they can get from the planet they are near.

Doing this would make every system feel a lot more vibrant and lively in itself, rather than just jumping from one station to the next and to your base. What’s the point of having this huge universe if there’s no reason to experience 99% of it.

Weeks ago I learned the blueprint for a conflict scanner, but I couldn’t finish installing it because I needed a walker brain. I left it unfinished in my ship, flashing at me as a reminder.

Yesterday I was on a planet with aggressive sentinels, and decided to pick a fight to see if I could get a walker brain. One important thing to note is up to this point I thought a ‘walker’ was the quad-leg dog sentinel. I’ve killed one or two of them before and only received a quad servo, but I thought maybe you got different things, and I was just unlucky not to get a brain. (Trying not to laugh at myself as I type this.)

So I start a fight with the sentinels, and after killing two of the dogs and getting quad servos I start to get annoyed at what I think is my bad luck, when I hear the announcement that a sentinel walker was on the way. I finally clued in to the fact that what I thought was a walker was not in fact a walker, and I needed to quickly come up with a plan.

I’m sure there are better ways to kill walkers, but I jumped into my ship and took off, and spent the next few minutes flying low and slow passes above the walker while strafing it with my photon cannon. Eventually I killed the walker, got its brain, and now I have a working conflict scanner.

This game is so fun!