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Comment by zzalpha | Hacker News Reader

So what's your personal take on the posted article?

The post article would suggest NMS is being pulled in a lot of different directions... it has a single player quest, but it's not a great quest-based game. It has sandbox elements, but no obvious gameplay loop to make the sandbox compelling. It doesn't speak to the multiplayer elements, and I don't have personal experience with them, so I don't know how well they fit.

The Verge seems a fair bit more charitable regarding the changes, while acknowledging that the game is still flawed. They seem to like the additional quest components, and feel the overall engine improvements have been well done. But it still doesn't seem to address the core issue this article is focused on, which is that they feel NMS is a jack of all trades but a master of none.

So what's your take?

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I was a fan of what was released initially, and thought the uproar was completely ludicrous. But I also didn't pay insanely close attention to the hype machine.

When my more "invested" friends pointed out all the things the developer said would be there, that weren't, I thought, "Well, it'll probably come later." And behold, now some are. Maybe more will come.

As a game, I probably lost 40-60 hours playing the initial release of the game. I treated it as a weird independent/art house game which was more about an experiment than about a crystalized game loop experience.

It was fun, and interesting, and what systems were present were pleasant enough.

Having played with the update, all of the updates are great and worth revisiting. It definitely changes the feel of the game.

It's not a "great" game, but what it is is great. You can fly around a universe and see things literally no one has ever seen before, including the developers. There are some mechanics to make exploring easier, some things which make you more powerful, and a loose, cryptic plot.

It's easily worth the 60 bucks, which is all you can ask of it.

As someone who actually followed the development from the day it was announced at the VGAs, I also found the uproar to be ludicrous and the claims of the developer lying to be overblown.

I think it also might be that I am pretty aware that games/most projects in any field are never going to be what is said when first announced. I used to feverishly follow game developments when I was a kid and became intimately aware that features promised at announcement don't always make it to the end and that I also impose a lot of my own desires onto the project that never had any reality of coming true.

Finally I will say I found NMS to be a pretty boring game, but one that is incredibly beautiful. The sense of planetary scale in the game is unmatched IMO and I think that Hello Games or a developer with similar tech can make something truly special with that.

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