It’s been quite a while since I commented on NMS. I’ve played it quite a lot since getting into it but it is almost an entirely different game today. Just look at this screenshot of my ball-hauler in a dying swamp with fog, lightning, cloud cover, flying animals, etc. This isn’t even an unusual planet to land on.

The game is still primarily an exploration game. The quests are not involved any more than ‘go to the marker and do a thing’. The worlds still feel somewhat empty, though effort has been made to improve that by encountering random NPCs in the world. Unfortunately those encounters ‘exist’ but don’t feel like there is much purpose.

You can ride and tame creatures, but not breed them, and their products don’t seem to have much meaning beyond cooking which can give you good buffs but the game doesn’t really require buffs for survival even on the hardest settings.

Perhaps one of he more intreguing additions to the game recently is the inclusion of derelict freighters in space that you can land on and explore. Think of them an instance dungeons. They aren’t terribly difficult but the are creepy and the atmosphere in them is fantastic.

I’d really like to see better AI, more enemies, and harder instanced content. Something more geared toward the PC mouse-keyboard players. My opinion is that the content is balanced more for joystic/controller play than mouse-keyboard so as a seasoned PC FPS player my controls are simply faster than the difficulty requires making at lot of the content feel effortless.

In a effort to make the game just that little bit more exciting I’ve recently started a perma-death game. One save file, automatically deleted on death. We’ll see how far I can make it in the universe before I become a marker for another traveler to discover.