Looking for a Open-World Exploration Game.

No Man's Sky still isn't really an exploration game as much as it is a grinding game - which sounds like a negative but it's a mechanic some people love. Planet's mostly vary in terms of terrain colour and danger but all end up feeling incredibly familiar. Any 'interesting' locations found on planets are copy and pasted bases and buildings that always include one alien, the species of which depends on who controls that galaxy. Always just the one alien, never abandoned, never a full crew - just the one guy chilling on his own. It gives you the sense that, rather than exploring a cool new world you've turned up somewhere 5 minutes late and missed the party. Clearly people had been here before and you've arrived when there's nothing less to experience.

To be a really good exploration game it needs to be smaller in scope which opens up the ability to have more scripted elements and more unique designs from the game's artists. It's one of the reasons I thought Breath of the Wild was really cool because the generic open expanse was always littered with puzzles that you could tell a human created and placed into the game. In NMS the size of the game comes from how everything is procedurally generated but also the sense of disappointment comes from how unoriginal procedurally generated randomness really feels.

It's not an awful game, but it's core mechanic is grind and that's just not my type of game.

/r/ShouldIbuythisgame Thread Parent