Day 1 player here, kind of old (50), and only interested in exploration.

I enjoyed v1 tremendously, still my favorite gaming moments to date.

So at a personal level, i’m only interested in terrain generation and the rendering engine, the rest doesn’t exist.

I never built a base, didn’t do the stories/missions (and will never if it involves killing creature for sport/money), never used any of the fancy gadgets

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All i do and want is to play Creative and have nice walks on exotic environements with a sense of mystery and discovery to take pictures and memories, with vintage humanist SF books in mind (thinking Van Vogt, Clarke, etc.).

v1 (up to PF) gave me a lot of that.

Much less since the downgrading of the terrain generation to round hills, and i’m part of the old timers that think NMS has lost a bit of its soul.

But this game remains a unique and marvelous wonder in the gaming galaxy imho and i can’t help being attracted to it, patiently waiting for THE update that will bring back everything i miss.

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That said, i understand the directions it took.

The two main features besides the story are now multiplayer and base building.

Whatever we think of them, they were and still are necessary to the game: multiplayer was the n°1 requested feature and was not negociable and bases provide half of the screenshots on this reddit so they are obviously now one of the foundations (pun intended) of NMS.

The other gadgets certainly add some colors to that soft, the living ships are beautiful, etc.

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Everything’s all right, i can see why HG did and added what they did, and i’m thankfull for that: even if i don’t use any of it, the game simply wouldn’t be there anymore if it weren’t for those features.

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My only real complain is that base building prevent HG to have the full liberty to reset the universe often, which in turn severely limits the evolutions they can bring to the terrain generation :-/

I know they’re trying to workaround that, but it can’t be the same as full freedom for them.

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At its core, NMS is a unique jewel, i hope it remains true to this core, while adding bells and whistles for the more action oriented players, there’s room for everyone in this universe.

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The reason for this post is that, seeing how many people regularly request PVP, combat improvement, melee weapons, war factions, etc, i’m wondering if there are many lonely hippie travelers on this boat.

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Peace.

Despite being a Day One player, with several hundred hours on the game (and all expeditions) I never attempted a Permadeath run.

My first day one “clear” was on hard difficulty and, depite the game being very basic at the time, it was challenging and never unfair. I almost always played normal during the years.

I have to confess that the harder difficulty settings of Permadeath is a lot more fun. I don’t mind about the fear of losing the save (I died 7 jumps from the core because I fell down a cliff) both all the balance setting that Permadeath implies. It was about the fact that despite a normal game, the event density (and their variety) is higher even if the difficulty is not so much challenging.

Being chased if you have valuables in the ship is fun, encountering lots of bounties is fun (you can never be sure they will evade or come after you), there’s more variety in fauna attitude towards the player and so on. Having the system patrol ships or the freighter fleets doing something useful is fun. Almost every jump lets you have an event. I completely forgot, for example, that pirates may attempt ground raids. It was so rare in normal difficulty that I was suprised to have 3 raids in a very short game (about 15 jumps, including a black hole hop that brought me at about 4K LY from the core).

The only mildly frustrating element is the material scarcity and the inventory limits (but is mangeable if you know the game very well).

Maybe the only part that is unfair is the starting tutorial. It has the same dilated timing of the normal run but in PD you don’t have time to lose: usually the starting planet is just a deathtrap you struggle to survive due to resource scarcity or very harsh environment. When you regain player agency and can plan your next move carefully and choose the risks when going afterresources in the next planet, everything becomes fun again.

I’m the only one that was surprised by how the permadeath difficulty settings makes the game more enjoyable?