Starfield has made me obsessed with no man’s sky

No Man's Sky is definitely not a game for everyone, but it's impressive how close they have managed to get to their overblown initial promises.

What's wild is that it's still the only crafting survival game I've ever even remotely enjoyed.

Admittedly it was a couple of years ago (and then earlier this year) when a lot of new stuff had been added, but still.

I literally bought No Man’s Sky while waiting for Starfield. I’ve been playing No Man’s Sky for two weeks now and I just can’t put it down because it’s so good.

Now I’m planning to wait to buy Starfield for at least 6+ months until the developers iron out the bugs.

Now I’m planning to wait to buy Starfield for at least 6+ months until the ~~developers~~ unpaid modders iron out the bugs.
Iron out the bugs? That would be an improvement compared to Skyrim.
Trying to get to the center of the universe in Perma Death mode was one of the best gaming experiences I can remember. It took so much dedication and patience to finally get to the end (hint, play the main quests).

NMS is the only game I ever got 100% on.

I keep trying NMS hoping to find a good game in there somewhere. I'm over 100 hours now, mostly because I'm a dork who likes collecting spaceships.

But all the mechanics -- the crafting and movement and languages and even the terrain generation -- are frankly pretty terrible. It's like Hello Games intentionally hired people who don't know how to design these things.

Why do all the space stations look identical inside? Why do I have to learn one single alien word at a time, including "a" and "the"? Why are there no rivers or waterfalls or glaciers or swamp basins? And why can't I customize my ship appearance when the game itself can clearly generate one from a dozen random parts?

Honestly I agree. I think it's a great game though, at least what it has become, but I think I keep getting disappointed with certain things that are just an issue with the core mechanics of the game. There's only so much value to adding tons of content if the game is dull at its core.

I have over 350 hours in NMS but every time I try to pick it back up I realize why I stopped before.

I posted a shorter version of this elsewhere in here but I've thought more and want to expand.

Disclaimer: I really like both no man's sky and starfield. Gonna be down on both of them but I've got hundreds of hours in NMS and I expect to have hundreds more in SF, they are both good games, I have no regrets about buying either of them.

That said, I've realized that starfield is actually making me low-key kind of angry at NMS, for all the potential it wasted. It's showing just how little extra depth NMS could have used (could still use) to be great. There are really only a couple fairly minor ways that starfield is better, and yet for me and I think a lot of people they spell the difference between "fun sandbox" and "awesome game". Starfield is so shallow on all of these that despite being the first game to really deliver on the promise of an open world space RPG sandbox, it's like a wish-dot-com version of what nms could be.

First, combat. Nms has all right space combat, nothing great but acceptable, but there's no excusing its ground combat. There's effectively one enemy, they're not really designed to be fought most of the time, and they're almost never involved in battles of any meaning. The combat overhaul added some mechanics but didn't solve the problem... in a way it's worse now because fighting seems like it could be interesting. How come when I find a trading post it's never a ruin overrun by pirates, with scattered notes from the lost inhabitants, written in their native language so that if I can speak it I can read their sad story? Why don't I ever find a detail of gek security bots defending the inner chambers of a crashed frigate? Why can't I have a shootout with the crew of a frigate on board its procedurally generated interior?

That leads into the issue that there's no story at all. People complain about the main quest of SF, but nms has one of the flimsiest, poorest written central plots of any game I've ever seen. That would be okay, but there are also no side quests. You can't stumble upon an abandoned mine, or have a spacer randomly ask you to help break a blockade of their home system. There are a tiny number of very shallow fetch quests, but nothing with even a hint of effort in the writing.

I get a bit annoyed at starfield for systems not interacting. Like, i have a house, but I can't build outpost buildings around it, eg. However, NMS takes that to extremes with how outpost building, village building, and frigate building all seem like they're actively hostile to each other, as if coming from different games. IIRC even some of the outpost components won't properly snap together if they're from different 'styles' of outpost, although I may be misremembering.

Add to that that there's also not a lot of gear collecting mechanics, minimal ways to display loot, minimal character customisation, and so on, and it's just... sigh. Everything nms does feels like it falls just short of being amazing, but they get bored right before completing the last step to bring it all home and then they go work on another system that they'll get 3/4 through and then abandon. I wish it had mods.

Meanwhile, starfield doesn't do any individually thing particularly well either, but unlike NMS, it feels like I can do stuff with what I make. I can build a ship... and then take it smuggling! Or fight pirates! I can have NPCs on board and they'll chat with each other while I'm flying around, and help run the ship! They're not all well written, but they're actually written, and do more than just stand around saying one line back at me. It's frustrating, because honestly, taken on its own, starfield isn't particularly remarkable (see how bland space travel is eg) but there's nothing out there that's actually gone the very obvious extra mile of "okay we have beautiful worlds to explore, what if now we put some things to do on them"

Would you recommend NMS to someone who:

Really wants to play Starfield but probably won't have the necessary hardware for at least a year.

Is an old Bethsoft fan, having played, and thoroughly enjoyed, every TES game from Daggerfall to Online, excepting only Battlespire and the phone games.

Has been jonesing for some space sandbox for probably a decade at least.
- I'm not sure. It's a good game, but the fun you can have in it is more Minecraft style than Bethesda style. If you want that, then it's probably worth a try

So far I'm still just hooked on starfield, just stole my first ship from some colonisers

Absolutely; if I buy Starfield it'll be like a year from now. But all the hype around it has reminded me that I haven't played NMS for a while.

X4 is another space game that I've been wanting to get back to.

I keep forgetting I have X4. Loved X3. Hated Rebirth. Got X4 after joining a thread about it and thinking they were talking about Rebirth, and then proceeded to never actually play it lol
I'm currently going through X4 and I don't feel the need for Starfield, tbh

I haven't bought Starfield yet but seeing the ship creator there really reinvigorates my thoughts about how if NMS has one too it would be amazing.

I really hope starfield lights a bit of a fire under the NMS folks to fix some of their half-finished systems along those lines. NMS has procedurally generated ships, we're just not allowed to tinker with the procedural generator to make our own for some reason.
- I totally agree. I do genuinely enjoy NMS too. Plus the procedurally generated appearances also have different stats so you have to be twice as lucky to get what you want.
I legit spent hours in the ship builder in Starfield, trying to come up with a new design for my ship

There's an Expedition going on for the next 6 weeks in NMS. It's like a self-contained mega-questline. Start a new single player game and choose "Expedition". They give you lots of upgrades along the way and you'll see bases and messages from other players along the same path.

That was the same for me, but reverse. I tried to play No Man's Sky to get hyped for Starfield, but they're just such different games doing different things and one doesn't appeal to me as much as the other.

What I find funny is so many people saying “starfield is so open but there’s nothing to do.” But for some reason, no man’s sky has “so much to do.” Every planet is basically completely barren or has one of the same four types of points of interest as every other planet

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed no man’s sky and starfield does have surprisingly barren places, but to say NMS has “more to do” is patently absurd.

Comparing them generally just reveals people’s preferences/loyalties as opposed to anything useful about either game.
- Playing starfield is making me realize all I really wanted from NMS was some coherent side quests, actual combat, and a ship builder.
- I really don't get it to be honest, I'm left saying "damn I can't wait for the weekend to play starfield longer because there's so much to do" I don't have enough time to do what I want in any given weeknight. I've been absolutely obsessed with starfield...
  
  I got the early release and had a 4 day weekend, my play time was measured in days by Tuesday...
- Starfield has made me very disappointed with the planet designs in NMS, unfortunately. Like, a lot of it boils down to "This planet has purple dirt, but this other planet over here has blue dirt and is cold!" and they're always one biome only. In Starfield, one planet can have several different biomes realistically spread out (like snow/ice region on the polar caps, etc.), and it also has a bigger pool of structures to pull from. I last played No Man's Sky a year or so ago, and it always felt like there were only a handful of structures that could generate on a planet.

ya this happened to me too. starfield was supposed to he thr star citizen killer, but it looks terrible. star citizen is miles ahead of this fallout reskin

star citizen killer

How do you kill that which has no life?
- that game is still alive and well even if its an unextinguishable tire fire.

I think it can't be overstated how good VR is in NMS too. There's so much attention to immersion, even some things that bugged me at first like the mime controls for ground vehicles.

It wasn’t that great at first, but they did an update for vr that improved it so much. I don’t play it on VR, but my partner does and I’ve peeked in on his game not long ago and was kind of amazed at how much better it is now. Really feels like being in a ship flying around.
- I think it works really well with the game's commitment to diegetic UI too. Really feel like NMS is something special.

And here I am deliberately working my way though Origins->Odyssey->Valhalla so that I can completely ignore Starfield for a while until the hype train settles down and some bugs are fixed :-). I keep my eye on NMS (I was a Day 1ish player) but I feel it is soooo wide and soooo shallow it would just bore me to tears now.

Really enjoying Valhalla...

If you don't like base building, you're opinion on NMS probably won't change. I still enjoy it and fire it up a couple times a year, but the gameplay loops haven't fundamentally changed and the survival elements are still pretty loose. I haven't played the most recent updates from this year yet though.

Hmmm I might update NMS and do another playthrough. I haven't played it in a few years now.

I should preface this by saying that I am extremely underwhelmed with starfield, but I’ve been going back to playing space engineers for my sci fi exploration cravings. Everything i was looking forward to in starfield seems to be compromise after compromise, tied together by loading screens. And the setting looks good on paper but really can’t draw me in.

At least in SE, outdated and poorly optimized as it may be, I am loading into the map once and then could fly from earth to the most remote planet without a single interruption (except real life sleep maybe, because it would take literal hours to make the trip without a jump drive).

Se for me has exactly the same issue as NMS. No story, no person-to-person combat, no side quests. Just an empty world you're expected to populate yourself I guess. Starfield definitely doesn't do that as well, it isn't as much a Minecraft style sandbox. If nms or se had quests and story, I might not like starfield this much... but they don't, and there really isn't another space sim that also provides a decent shooter and rpg while having a nice open world.
- I got extremely bored and frustrated playing NMS. I'm glad other people like it, but for whatever reason it felt like an unrewarding slog for me.

Opposite for me, NMS made spend nearly days of game time so far into Starfield, NMS too hectic I feel.

sorry? I can't parse this comment at all
- you are not alone, some Bethesda bot not using chatgpt properly.
- NMS, Starfield good, for me that is. Does that compute matey?

Not space, but it actually just makes me want to play Fallout instead. I love Bethesda games, but it just isn't grabbing me in the way some of their other games did.

I've put in around 12 hours and I'm kind of done. Maybe it's also because my CPU is limiting me to around ~45 FPS (or lower) in most areas regardless of settings, which isn't unplayable, but it is distracting a lot of the time because it's more "choppy" than just like a stable, if lower, frame rate.

I'll probably wait to play it again until some more performance mods come out like they did with Skyrim.

There's a solid complaint IGN made that I think is completely true, that starfield has too many of its most fun systems that don't unlock until you unlock the appropriate skill, and nothing in the game even tells you to do that. Disabling and boarding starships is a big one, or using boost packs; modifying weapons and armour too. Depending on how you ran your 12 hours you might be missing some of those.

Performance is a big one too. There are already some good looking performance mods on nexus iirc
- Starfield has the problem that horizontal progression games like horizontal progression mmos have, which is they have a LOT of things you can do unlocked after a certain point (getting to constellation for the first time) but doesnt handhold you to any of the other features.
  
  People who get sidetracked easily dont have that problem because they like picking and choosing what they want to do. People who need guidance gets lost in the options.
- I think, yeah, that's another issue. It's got a very disparate kind of approach with a bunch of mechanics that aren't all related. I mean, that's not unusual for Bethesda, but I think I also forgot how much I prioritize in their other games and was kind of overwhelmed here and didn't really prioritize stuff like I do with Skyrim or Fallout.
  
  And yeah, going to your example, boost packs was initially confusing to me. I get one from Constellation, telling me that now I should be able to get some height but then I realized I can't actually use it until I unlock the skill.
  
  As for how I spent my 12 hours, I absolutely missed out on a lot. The game is massive, but the performance issues kind of prevented me from really getting into it gameplay-wise. Also fucked myself with some of the traits I picked, which I know you can get removed in-game pretty easily, but since you can't replace them, it feels like I might as well have not used any.
  
  When it comes to mods, yeah. Problem is right now I'm on the Game Pass version, so Nexus has some but not a fortune of compatible stuff. I'll buy it probably winter sale on Steam, which will have much better support for mods. Hopefully Creation Kit comes out early next year as well. When that happens, the quality and scope of mods is going to explode.
  
  I mean, I might give it another chance before then, but I'm content to wait a while. I'm pretty patient with all games and usually only play them a year or so after release. Only reason I played this on release is because of my Game Pass subscription. If I didn't have that, I wouldn't have bought it until like next year. Might still do that, buy it during the spring sale, rather than winter. No rush.
Consider using a frame limiter in the 30-35 fps range to fix the choppiness. That's what I'm doing on my 4790k & it's fine.

I'm waiting for patches, mods, and a sale before playing Starfield, but it did get me thinking about space games, which led me to purchase KSP. I'm really loving it. I used to play a game called Spaceflight Simulator until the dev fucked over the entire player base that supported him since his game released. That game was basically the same concept as KSP in sandbox mode but in 2D. Making the jump to 3D graphics/physics has been really cool, and I'm glad to have filled the hole in my heart SFS left.

I really like NMS, they're very different games. NMS gets very sandboxy and end game ends up farming the best stuff and upgrading it all. The process is pretty fun tho and that's the main gameplay loop.

I love NMS but I'm so afraid to log in. I've had a huge underground base (max terrain manipulation) for like 5 years even though people say never to dig out a base because eventually it will get filled in. So I feel like I'm rolling the dice every time I load in. I have hours of videos of me just running around my base across the different patches, where the flora/fauna in the connected cave system changed each time.

All the NMS comparisons that I've heard are also making me want to play it again too, lol

Sometimes I get the urge to play Orbiter (space flight sim), but then I remember that I suck at it lol. Atmospheric re-entry and landing is hard

NMS is super janky in spots… but it pulls off a whole lot of awesome things I can’t do anywhere else, so I tolerate all the junk and loading stutters and fading in geometry…

As someone without an Xbox or a PC, Starfield has very much gotten me back into NMS. Loving the last couple of updates, especially as a PSVR2 player.

I hope I get to play Starfield some day, cause it looks like a lot of fun, but it's not a hardware seller for me. Probably some day I'll pick up a gaming laptop or steamdeck or something and check it out along with the other PC games I've been missing for the past few years.