Honestly, I’ve played Facebook “City Sim” games with more depth and interactivity.

They bring literally nothing to the table except a time and resource sink with no real return or fun.

Nothing you build can be interacted with or do anything unique, except the “Starports” which require you to pay materials to build a roof, but then just turn out to be a single “Alternative” landing pad that random ships can land on, and have no roof in sight

Nothing you build creates related items that can be harvested, or sold. Markets are completely empty and don’t house traders. The hazard control building is literally just an empty 1×1 box that doesn’t do anything or cause your settlement to act differently if their are hazards. Every building is filled with storage items and nothing else. No unique living quarters.

All the buildings are literally just made from the players base building kit and are incredibly uninspired and pop up with no structure or thought to pathways and lane flow. Citizens just amble around doing absolutely nothing except looking at data pads, hovering 4 feet above the places they try to sit, and have the least inspired Sims style mood indicators that also cant be changed or interacted with and have no actual meaningful purpose.

The output materials your base generate are randomized, un-customizable, and have nothing to do with the building you build or the citizens you hire and they accrue incredibly slowly at rates that make worthless for selling or building.

My base has a Jelly Donut Farm as a status modifier. Is there a farm? No. Is there a restaurant? No. Is there a chef npc somewhere I can talk to to buy donuts from? No. Does it switch Settlement production rewards to donuts for me to sell or eat? No.

Settlements are ugly, hollow, shells that sit around and wait for arbitrary decisions that cost you both resources and hours of your life as it can take up to 4 hours per tier of a building to complete, with each building having 3 tiers. 12 entire IRL hours and decent amounts of resources to build a landing pad that isn’t even a unique asset, that I can plop down in 6 seconds in base building mode for like 25 pure ferrite.

It feels so under-baked, it’s basically raw.

But thanks for the base building overhaul I guess… even though its incredibly buggy now, it was a semi-thoughtful overhaul but still left the base building at “Pretty much pointless after a certain progression and lacking decorative assets.

On the positive flip-side – I love this game already and I can see myself dumping at least 100-1000+ hours into it. On another positive note I will probably enjoy Starfield equally. On the negative side of the coin, I will probably be incredible frustrated at not having the best of both worlds.

Do you think interior ship design will happen with NMS? Or building your own ships? It feels kinda weird that you can’t chill inside your ships. A void Starfield will fill.

What I wanted some discussion, thoughts and opinions on, if you guys feel like sharing, is the following; Why do you think it’s so hard to make a game which has the best of both w/o too much compromise? A game like that would probably satiate everyone into an everlasting gaming frenzy.

Is that a technical challenge? Economical one? Development time? All of those or others?

I’m playing NMS like a relapsed crack addict who just found a mountain of cocaine atm. And I’m friggin loving the game. And I’ll probably love SF when it comes out. However it does leave this frustrating thought eating at me like… these two games seems to both lean towards everything I want in a game so closely but not perfectly.

Anyway, /endrant! Glad I discovered this game despite being late to the show. Finally a game to fill the massive void.