I bought it, mostly as a diversion from The Division frustration I was getting. I played it for about 12 hrs total last weekend on it and it's fun, quite the rabbit hole when it comes to resource gathering and exploring. I think I spent almost 4 hours on the first planet.
I think the biggest gripe is the lack of anything else to do besides gather resources, upgrade your equipment/ship. I like the isolation, and flying around in my ship, it IS AWESOME. But the gathering does get tedious and your ship runs out of "take off fuel" pretty easily. I enjoy doing mostly PvE and solo stuff and it has that in SPADES..obviously. But there does seem like a lack of interaction with anything, and not just other players. Even the outposts are manned by 1 NPC alien and on space stations there isn't anything else to do but haggle with the other beings that land. I see myself coming back to this game, but I don't really see myself investing a whole lot of time, frequently playing it but I think I'll be playing it more than The Division. I do wish I had waited for this to drop below $30-40, but like I said...The Division....
Maybe people were thinking this was going to be kind of like Skyrim in space(it felt that way at first but you feel like you're a scout for the Federation or something)
All that being said, I downloaded D&D Neverwinter(free on PSN), and I'm playing the $#@! out of that lol.
See, every Elder Scrolls game I've ever played has felt "empty" to me. Oh, sure, there are NPCs wandering about saying the same 5-10 phrases ("...until I took an arrow to the knee."), but they feel more like animatronic puppets than actual denizens of a living, breathing game world. I gather that the alien NPCs in this game are all identical, as are the buildings in which they operate, and they don't say or do much at all.
And everything else I've heard is about how the game is essentially a BASIC program that goes something like this:
10 COLLECT "RESOURCE A"
20 UPGRADE "ITEM A"
30 USE "ITEM A" TO COLLECT "RESOURCE B"
40 UPGRADE "ITEM B" WITH "RESOURCE B"
50 USE "ITEM B" TO COLLECT "RESOURCE C"
60 REFUEL SHIP WITH "RESOURCE C"
70 FLY SHIP TO "PLANET X"
80 GOTO 10
And that's the game in a nutshell.
Now, in and of itself, this is not a bad thing, necessarily. If you enjoy the very process of doing this stuff over and over again, then it's probably an amazing, fun game. And, of course, one can level similar complaints against games like the Assassin's Creed series or the Far Cry series, which are similarly repetitive. But at least those games provide the backbone of a story and context to your actions to keep you going. You're not "doing" just for the sake of "doing." You have to enjoy the "doing" for its own sake to continue enjoying the game, of course, but the game at least tries to convince you that you're doing it for more than just "You know, because you like exploring and stuff."
I've also gathered that the game has not yet (and may never) figured out how to effectively balance the "grind" against the "reward" or to disguise the "grind" as anything other than actual grinding. This is a common problem with MMOs (e.g., "Go kill 10 rats to get a better sword so that you can go kill 20 rats"). Most games gate content for two reasons: (1) to act as a kind of gradual tutorial, and (2) to keep you from getting bored right from the outset. In most games, your weapons/ships/stuff/tasks/etc. become gradually more complex and at each "level," you have the introduction of new complexity/options. The idea here is that you don't start the game with literally every weapon/item/whatever you'll ever have, because that's overwhelming. In addition, if you started the game with every single power you'll ever have, you'd get bored pretty quickly. Game designers understand that people like the "leveling" process. Even sequels do this, even when they start you with everything you had at the end of the
last game, because you'll now need
new tools that are introduced by
this game.
But the thing is, that stuff needs to be sufficiently different in the experience of "doing" it. You can't just give people a sword, bow, and armor, and then say at each level "Your sword has upgraded to Sword+1." They won't care. It's the same sword, even if it's now +52 and has a blue glowy aura. Yet, it sounds like that's mostly what No Man's Sky does. Sure, you upgraded this or that, but it's still basically the same gameplay over, and over, and over again. If you like it, awesome. If not, well...too bad. Because that's all there is to the game.