NMS repeats what little it has in the way of 'tasks' on your starting planet within the first hour.
Destiny starts repeating its 'tasks' within the first 15 minutes and nothing changes ever again. This is a redundant line of argument. You can boil any game down to the same shit.
This "it's about the journey!" argument is nonsense because the journey is completely meaningless. You'll visit a hundred bland systems and do the same interactions over and over again. It's a cop out because there's zero story. The one that is there is a nonsensical text based one with no real choice or even interaction on the part of the player. The alien infected building like the one in the AJ video repeats on planets and the interaction you get from it is exactly the same every single time.
It's so incredibly shallow and completely devoid of any sort of meaning, both in story or progression, that I'm not surprised people have defaulted to the "it's about the journey" argument. There isn't anything to celebrate about this game other than the odd visual novelty and that can only last for so long under the crushing weight of tedious, uninteresting gameplay.
Have you played the game? As the other poster said, you're being overly unfair here, but worse, it sounds like you're enjoying the backlash train a little too much and are basing arguments on videos/criticism, while you almost definitely haven't personally played NMS.
I'm not defending the game to the ends of the earth. I'm not a 'No Man's Boi'. I think the experience ranges from 4/10 to 9/10 and sits softly at a 7/10. It is a very flawed experience. But I'm glad it exists.
A couple of things in your post are not true. Playing the game is a different experience to watching videos/streams and reveals just how convoluted and complex it is, even for a sliced down and simplified game.
- Yes the races and POI types repeat but their flavour text/puzzles are often excellent and I've only seen one repeat in 30 hours. Saying "there's no story" is disingenuous. There's infinitely more story here than in vanilla Destiny, for example. There are a couple of characters who particularly said some really mind-blowing shit and there's some really good lore which is dripped to you Dark Souls-style.
- Probably 9/10 planets end up feeling really samey, but every so often you'll come across one which is particularly wack or has a few really cool species on it. For many people that's a dealbreaker - not enough variation planet-by-planet - but those crazy, unexpected,
unique planets and races
do exist and they are truly great
- the progression is actually very satisfying, even if mechanically flawed. Finding a new schematic 25 hours in that you didn't even know existed and makes your journey infinitely easier. Finding a broken down ship that fits your style/tastes exactly. Finding the resource you need right at the moment you need it. Realising that you've memorised the core resources you need so you end up always keeping track of them and travelling more and more quickly as you continue. Learning tricks to deal with Sentinels efficiently, making mining high-security resources a breeze. TL;DR: Yeah, the gameplay is super-lite, but the actual progression underpinning it is really nice, for a good 20 hours at least
There is a point where it starts getting frustrating and you hit a bit of a motivation-wall. But at that point you need to start enjoying the game as a decent alien-planet simulator, and no more. It's still worth it for that - for some players.
Thing is, i would be totally fine with a game like this that is all about the journey. The Problem? The journey through space...is not "real" at all. Planets are essentially nothing but static ressource gathering spots. The experience of actually traversing space thats simulated to certain degree is not there. The sun is a skybox. No actuall physics to the solar systems etc...
Space is a glorified matte painting in this game.
I don't really get this.
1. Yes it's really bad that Sean said star systems would be fully simulated, and their not. Why the fuck he didn't just say "We had to scale it all down" is beyond me.
But 2. The only thing you're losing out on with space being largely skybox is i) killing yourself in the sun and ii) spending literally the rest of your life flying to another star system manually (it would take hundreds of years).
In gameplay terms,
it is no fucking biggie. The things that matter are there: planet-sized planets, and you can fly between them seamlessly. They look amazing. They're each unique (even if their templates get samey after a while). They're pretty cool to explore. Flying between them or having dogfights from space to atmosphere is amazing. In gameplay terms, everthing you need is here, and it's pretty damn fun.
