I just realized that. Basically, I just noticed how I wasn’t even playing the main quest – I’m here building my base, growing my settlement. Upgrading stuff, having new plans of a thing I wanna build… Friends come and go from my world to theirs, meaning that I sometimes play with friends, sometimes alone. It’s one of these games I can just hop in, relax, and leave whenever I can. It’s a soothing game, that I’m playing as (almost entirely) sandbox.

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It’s a feeling I had for minecraft ten years ago. Enjoying the sandbox, building stuff and going on adventures, with friends hoping on and off the server. I sometimes restarted minecraft, but never found this feeling back nowadays. And here I am, fifty hours in my No Man’s Sky main save (not counting expeditions) and I just realized that this is how I’m playing the game. With that good old feeling.

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It’s a nice game.

I’ve recently gotten this game to run on my PC again and though I’m once again loving the experience I’m already back to grinding my teeth over the UI spam that No Man’s Sky LOVES to do. Yes, it’s just holding one button to get rid of it. Yes, it’s for showing you information on the place you just joined. But it’s unbelievably annoying how it temporarily locks you out of certain controls when you’re trying to explore systems and doing frequent jumps, let alone having to deal with forced pirate encounters that already lock out your ability to pulse/warp/summon.

On the topic of UI spam, as someone who missed out on the second, third, and forth expansions, it’s also not fun to get a planet entrance message, then a planetary info message, then get an expedition complete all one after the other. No Man’s Sky is a wonderful game and it does a lot of things right but UI spam is not one of them. It would really be a nice little QOL change to allow us to disable it or make it far less intrusive.