So can someone who has really enjoyed the game help me understand the core loop?
I bought the game day one and didn't care for it and decided to wait until the team had time to flesh out what they wanted to do. A year later, here we are.
I'm even coming as a person who considers Minecraft Survival mode to be among the greatest gaming experiences ever, so I'm fairly open-minded about a non linear structure.
What bothers me and STILL bothers me after all of these updates is that the actual loop action of being on the planet consists of mining materials to build a better spaceship so you can keep going to the next procedurally-generated planet where they may or may not be a few traces of benign lifeforms rolling about.
I just started playing this summer and I never followed any pre-release hype. I learned the game from scratch
on a Permadeath Survival longplay though I did have 3 attempts before this that I died before reaching my ship lol. Wrote this a few weeks back why I think NMS is a great survive-explore-prosper game, how its simple gameplay loop sort of keeps me attached, and why the last two patches are a big reason for that because of base building + permadeath.
It may answer your question because you also like Minecraft Survival, and for me NMS has become basically Minecraft Survival in Space.... less prosper/base building depth but still similar attachment and even better exploration and survival.
I was LTTP on it (both the pre-release hype and the release) but maybe that also afforded me a different set of expectations, perhaps. But whatever it was, I started playing NMS (and learning basically anything about it) about 5 weeks ago, and, firstly, I see why the game would have been received differently at release.
But at least for me, starting the game now and only ever having tried/learning the game on Permadeath mode with the added Survival difficulty, and the game is probably the best 'survival' game I've played on consoles in a very long time, and also one of the best permadeath games.
I could see that without added difficulty and permadeath, and without base building, I'd probably feel pretty aimless. But those two changes have made NMS into a great game because:
Permadeath (plus the new hard difficulty) transforms the risk/reward of the gameplay very dramatically:
The survival elements, scavenging resources, protecting yourself from elements, even the simple risk/reward of... shooting I tried pulse to that planet if it's 1:30m away? should I really try even land on this planet by that new crashed ship without enough zinc or plutonium... what if its aggressive? survival my first planet and finally reaching my ship was a pretty amazing experience, and damn have I had some stressful close calls with my first encounters with pirates, storms, aggressive animals, and landing my starship right in front of a hidden cave hole -_-
Base building can give you a sense of place:
I can imagine aimlessly warping between randomly generated systems before and eventually getting bored and feeling aimless. but with base building, at least if you're a Minecraft style player, suddenly you have a home, a backyard, a sense of attachment. I've basically stayed within a base Warp Drive range of my starter planet the whole time.
These are all mundane details of little matter to anyone else but will help me illustrate a point: I know the local NPCs, like Exporter Tobradilbra or Mining Overseer Yobrada, I remember by [geographical] sight how to fly to the local trading post 2m away from my home base or even the location of my first crashed ship 5m away; I remember the name of the NPC I bought my second ship from after I got a freighter (thanks Broker Uul); I remember the names and the general geography around my 'trading post beacons' on my top 4 favorite systems nearby, the names of the pilots of the coolest systems in those systems, where the gold is nearby local trading posts...
Those are all sort of random mundane details, but the point is that the game sort has become a survival permadeath Minecraft-in-space for me... I spend all my timing mining and building, or exploring for better places to mine, cooler desert planets to mine on, and in general basically the same things I do in Minecraft. And I genuinely feel I have a home, an 'attached' home in the same way you do in Minecraft. Even more so because I have attached to a much bigger local geography, local planets and systems, local fauna, even local NPCs, the colour of the sky in certain systems (I found 2 with the most amazing vibrant orange, another with this amazing red/pink and a desert moon where the entire horizon is basically just either the red sky or the red planet the moon revolves around).
I'm not sure that changes NMS for everyone. I'm not even sure what most people expected or would want from the game. No idea. I think it would be torn, too, if I was already 500 hours into NMS and then they patched in permadeath and survival -- it would be pretty hard to restart. It's been an awesome experience but I'm not sure I'd want to restart.
But at least for someone brand new to the game, zero expectations or hype, every single part of the game being new, the base building and mining elements have basically made it like a sort of Minecraft-in-space for me, but alongside that 'prosper' element are much larger explore and survive elements than Minecraft typically has. In the same vein, it has more exploration and base building than better survival games, and so forth. It may be the best combination and balance of all three in any game; to be sure, there are games that do all 3 and are better at 1 of those, and are perhaps better overall games. But in terms of balancing all three elements and offering each in a fairly grand amount -- plus the new hard survival difficulty and permadeath -- have made NMS one of the best overall survive, explore, prosper games I've played in a long time.
