I have about 12 hours on a normal save and have never done an expedition before the current one. I just finished it (took about 12 hours) and here are some takeaways.

The amount of free stuff chucked at you throughout is mind boggling, from an amazing starship to free tech to a free freighter. I didn’t even know solar sails and freighters were a thing before the expedition.

Staying alive isn’t hard. I have been shocked at the number of complaints about permadeath. I went into this knowing sodium, oxygen, and ion batteries are key mats, and to be wary of overusing the jetpack. I never came close to dying beyond the one required time. Even when doing the whispering eggs, which I’d never seen before, and sentinel combat.

I learned more about the game by doing the expedition than playing my normal save.

Overall, it was a fun, educational, and not frustrating experience for a new player that knows little about the game. Again, I’m surprised to see so much backlash. I feel like there are more training wheels on this expedition than in the normal game.

Sometimes NMS will give me a small existential crisis, not a huge panic attack or anything, but just a thought that comes and goes every once in a while when I’m playing. The game ha so many world that it would take the player almost 900 billion years to see them all. The game has about 18 quintillion planets after all. This makes me just think for a moment about how small we are and how impossibly have the universe is, and how we will never even leave our system in our lifetimes, and how the chances of this happening to anybody in the future are slim. We will never get to see any of this, we just get to see this tiny rock we live on. But about a minute later, this thought fades away and I continue mining for copper, waving to other players in VR, fighting space pirates, or whatever I was doing before. I appreciate NMS for giving us the chance to see all of this that we otherwise never would have.

TL;DR NMS sometimes gives me a small existential crisis where I am reminded about how big the universe is, how small we are, and how we will never explore any of it.

Now, since this is a discussion, have you ever felt this way while playing?