So my brother got No Man’s Sky and encouraged me to get it so I can play with him. I’m more of an JRPG fan who plays a ton of single player, narrative-driven games that deep dives into character relationships (e.g. Xenoblade Chronicles, Nier, Persona).

I used to play FPS multiplayer games when I was younger but not really anymore. I never played an open sandbox game and the game’s visuals looked great. I love the sci-fi and space genre and the game was on Steam, sale so why not?

Unfortunately, I find the whole mining/crafting and base building pretty tedious, boring and a monotonous grind. Conversely, my brother loves it. He’s already spent 40+ hours on it. I’m only 9 hours so far.

I changed a lot of the settings to Free for Crafting, Purchases, Blueprints etc. because I hate grinding (even in RPGs and other games). But now, I’m not sure what to do now that I can just get everything for free.

The one thing I do like is the exploration. Seeing new planets. Traversing the different systems and taking in the visuals. Admiring the landscapes, fauna, animals, etc.

I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m bashing the game. I genuinely want to find a way I can experience this game in a way that’s fun for me and enjoy it with my brother or solo. But feel free to call me out too if you think this isn’t the game for me.

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To preface this, I absolutely adore the game. But like most games we play there’s always personal changes you’d make to it to make it your ideal game. This is what I’d love to see in NMS.

-1. I’d love to see a more realistic representation of the size and distance of space within a star system. When you look at planets in our real-life solar system they show up as nothing more than a speck of light given their distance away. A way you could do this in game is planets show up as little highlighted specks of light in space, you use the scanner in your ship which has an attached hyper-advanced telescope, you zoom in on the planet and then you’re able to see what it actually looks like and scan it’s resources. Then you use your pulse engine and that little speck of light quickly expands to the size of a planet considering you’re moving nearly the speed of light to get there. I feel like this would be very satisfying and immersive giving a real sense of scale.

-2. Asteroid landing and construction. There’s already a billion asteroids in each system, I wish that there were always a few large asteroids floating around that you had the ability to land, walk around and base-build on. It would just add a lot more variety to what people build and come up with.

-3. Space station building and space walks. Though you can build on your Freighter. I wish you could literally create a space station in the vacuum of space just like the ISS or wherever your imagination takes you. Then added with that I think the ability to just float in the endless expanse with nothing but your suit and thrusters to keep you from floating away… Frictionless for eternity.

-4. STARS!!! Seriously like we need the ability to pulse to the star in each system. Obviously you can’t land on it, but it would be a great opportunity to find rare items or do dangerous missions. Think, the star gravity could be a constant threat once you get close enough to it where you’ll need to use your engine boost just to get out of its gravity well, once you get close enough it starts destroying your ships technology and if you get sucked in, well game over.

-5. Gas planets. This kind of ties into the stars, obviously you can’t land on it without dying… By getting imploded by gravity…. This would just add another element of variety to each system and with that the gas planets could still have moons you can land on with a gas giant lighting up the sky. Also there could be another cool way to harvest resources from the gas planet… Maybe a starship gas vacuum-harvester 😂.

-6. Planets with multiple biomes and actual rivers.. This is pretty self explanatory. But yeah correct me if I’m wrong but I have yet to ever witness a planet with actual rivers. It’s always just bodies of water.

-7.(This is more of what Hello Games could just add to a simple update) More RNG assets for star ship parts and animals just to add more unique visual variety to the many ships and animals we see. Sometimes the stuff you see feels very “same-y”.

That’s about all! Forgive me for the novel. I’d love to hear what kind of ideas you guys come up with!

Safe travels.