It seems the main goal was travel. You can sit down for an hour and do stuff in a system which you've definitely never seen before. Said stuff is unfortunately garbage and seems almost entirely self-contained. I don't exactly know how you get to the center of the galaxy, but inventory space seems to be the biggest bottle neck. I think you need better warp drives, too, but all the other shit? Uselss. It's dirt farming to dirt farm faster.
Yeah I think this was a problem. When you make the main (only?) goal of the game travel to a distant point, that's not the best idea since it discourages making any one place feel like your home. Instead its just on to the next planet to plunder. And the next and the next and the next, etc.
There had to be something substantial to do on individual planets to make them worthy and worthwhile and interesting. That is probably base building at a minimum.
The game should have essentially had all kinds of other mini-games in it. Creature collection, creature breeding,etc. All that stuff Japanese games are good at filling out their game design with.
My personal issue was the survival portion of the game. I was the most interested in that as I thought it would be really unique and interesting but that portion is shit. It's so basic and simple that there isn't anything to it. I thought just surviving and navigating and trying to stay alive would be the fun part. Basically kind of like The Martian, The Game.
Solus Project looks more in line with what I wanted I suppose.
The more I see of No Man's Sky, the more it reminds me of something that no one in their right mind wanted more of:
the planetary exploration sidequests from Mass Effect (which actually one of the DLC ones ended up being pretty good). Just futzing around on shitty planets that are all essentially the same with almost no reward to be found.
Totally agree. What we see is the craziness that can inhabit some indie studios. They're more prone to fall in love with their own idea. Like when you read the design doc for the tech your inner geek is like "Yeah, that concept for tech is pretty cool." But they never bothered to ask the question of "Why is it compelling?" We see this too in modern classical music. People will write mountains of procedural code to create mathematically derived music which is all rather impressive when you see the effort they put into it, but terrible to listen to. And when you ask why it's compelling they say it's interesting to them. That's all well and good for them. But when was the last time you saw a procedurally generated piece of music place well on any chart? You don't. Because it's only compelling to the people who wrote it, and a handful of people that are actually interested. It's just not generally compelling. The thing with a major studio is that they have to front the money so many times they'll start off with "Why is it compelling?" What's happened though is this cult around certain indie devs where they're in love with their idea and they get a small number of people that are in love with their idea and it grows into an echo chamber sometimes that can be so loud they might get funding from a big publisher hoping to seem like an Indie supporting darling. But really there were some fundamental questions that were either ignored or simply never asked.
"You can walk around planets!"
"But why is it compelling?"
"Every planet will be different!"
"But why is it compelling?"
"15 quadrillion planets!!"
"BUT WHY IS IT COMPELLING?!!"
"So many planets!!"
Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh, there were some cool concepts that could have at least answered the compelling question. Things like factions, custom ships, multi-player while I think they wouldn't have saved it, it at least would have given a compelling reason for some. But they largely ignored all that and stuck with their beloved idea of procedurally generated worlds. Which, really, if they had only done 7.5 Quantillion planets and focused more on the stuff that would make the game fun, I dare to posit that no one would've noticed the missing 7.5 giggillion planets.