It's like this big group of people didn't realize exploration for the sake of exploration within a simulation was a thing before NMS was revealed. It's been strange watching this cycle play out over and over for nearly 3 years.
It's because exploration games aren't really common anymore. Even open-world games just tell you where everything is. There's no sense of finding the unknown anymore, and people who like that sort of game seem to be in the minority. Like I said earlier, NMS isn't going to be for everyone, and that's one of the reasons.
To anyone who's not interested in just exploring stuff:
--If you want something more focused on space combat and economy with multiplayer, Elite Dangerous is probably closer to what you want since it focuses more on combat and economy than exploration.
--If you want something that relies less on procedural generation, then you might be better off with Star Citizen. Similar concept, but with a lot more money backing it and with deliberately designed solar systems to start out.
That said, NMS is supposed to have all that stuff. You can spend the whole game making money by fighting or trading. Hello Games has said a lot of testers never even land on planets because they aren't interested in exploring them. The game is going to try to have something for a lot of different kinds of players.
I will probably wait on reviews and maybe even wait to see how people feel after playing for a couple of weeks as I am not completely sold on this yet.
I feel like people are overstating how replayable this will be in the long term. The idea of infinite number of unexplored planets sounds cool at first but I am not confident that these planets will be that worthwhile to explore after you see all the game assets from the first few planets. If there is nothing purposefully put there for you to find, then I don't see how this isn't gonna get old unless there is some hook to the game that they haven't revealed yet.
At some point you are just gonna run into recolors of the same wild life and probably get bored. The question is how quickly does the magic wear off and that's why I am gonna wait a bit before jumping. I might be completely wrong but we'll see. After all, the last trailer I saw from them was pretty promising with space battles and such.
I'm not worried about this because I've already been getting a procedurally generated space exploration experience in two other games: Eite: Dangerous and Space Engine.
I've spent 70+ hours in Elite Dangerous and I don't even have the expansion that lets you land on planets. What keeps me coming back to it is this small sense of interest in seeing what's going to be in the next solar system. It's also from the fact that lush Earth-like planets are super-rare, I've found a total of two in all those hours. I've probably spent a similar amount of time in Space Engine just looking at amazing landscapes in all sorts of planets, and Space Engine isn't even a game. It's just a virtual planetarium somebody made where you move a camera around but can see generated objects from surface level all the way up to galactic clusters.
Has there been some repetition in terms of what get's generated, in a way, yes, particularly in Elite. Elite has a few gas giant skins and a few rocky planet skins but it's still sort of exciting to see how each new solar system is laid out. That said, it might be just because I'm a little bit interested in astronomy: seeing what type of star each system has, how old the star is, how far away the planets are and how that affects surface temperature, seeing how big each planet is and how that affects gravity, etc. That same interest drives Space Engine but the algorithm in that game is probably a lot more varied. From a distance planets of a few different types look similar but the terrain of each one is unique. I've found some really interesting stuff in Space Engine, stuff sci-fi couldn't really think up, just from procedural generation that's supposed to be based on plausible science.
I have a feeling the generation in NMS is going to be more sophisticated than all that, if a bit more focused on creating a fun arcade experience. Again, it's not gonna be for everyone, but I know it's gonna be enough for me personally.
