The title is click-bait, I admit, but it’s…kind of not? It is very much a “me thing” and while I don’t hate NMS, I wish I could rewind myself to a time when I enjoyed playing it.

Everything I want and more

NMS went from one of the worst launches in history to one of the most “ride or die” games for many. Hello Games got a lot of crap when the game launched because it didn’t live up to the hype we enjoyed during it’s reveal at 2014’s PlayStation E3 presentation. Rather than fade away beneath the weight of condemnation, Hello girded it’s loins, picked up the battle-axe of free, epic-scoped updates, and just waded into the crowd, swinging. Since then, there have been 36 updates to the game, some/many/most/all of them bringing far more than just bug fixes. As a result, NMS is almost universally lauded as not just one of the best deals in today’s landscape of live-service-with-microtransactions landscapes, but as the best success story in gaming, bar none.

Everything being equal, NMS provides everything that I want in a space-focused game. It’s got space ships, of course, crafting, base building, exploration, management sim, and collection mechanics. The universe is insanely vast. The planets are procedurally generated and while they don’t tend to offer different mechanics between them, their vibes are all over the place so they at least feel different.

Too much of a good thing

Way back when, I played a lot of NMS. I finished the campaign, which is something I used to marvel at but I think I’ve finished enough campaigns in games to not use incredulity in my posts any more. I spent a lot of time building bases and setting up production facilities. I lived in NMS as it became my primary game of record for quite a while.

But like other games that I mainline (most recently Dune: Awakening), as soon as I take even the slightest break, I find it incredibly difficult to go back. For NMS specifically, it’s been almost impossible despite the additions that have occurred since I stopped playing.

Begin again again

I find that after being away from a game for a while, starting over is my best bet. I end up forgetting more mechanics than I think I ever knew, so viewing the game through the eyes of a new player, in the starting environment, with the tutorial tips and all, is almost always helpful for me.

Thing is, I cannot stomach NMS’ starting period. Every game begins with a ruined ship and the need to seek out parts and opportunities to repair it. Then it’s out into space where I get railroaded into the main story. While the main story was cool the first time around, I find that subsequent encounters feel a bit overwrought. It’s no longer mysterious now that I know the plot, and the presentation tries to build that mystery, but it just sounds hokey to me now.

Expeditions just double-down on that feeling. They’re relatively short bursts of purpose, but damn; I wish they didn’t start from the same “zero to hero” place every time.

I could jump right into creative mode, but I feel that doing so would be short-circuiting the purpose of playing for me.

What is the purpose of playing?

So that brings me to my biggest issue: NMS makes me tired, man. For me, playing through the story was amazing, as everything was new on the first run through. After that, everything was diminishing returns, even the patch content drops.

The game’s conceit is that it’s a massive universe, and I can fly anywhere. I can land on any planet. I can see different animals and plants. I can build anywhere. I can collect ships. I can now build ships. I can head up a fleet off ships.

But why? NMS has a story that we’re provided, but if we step outside of that, it’s a sandbox, and sandbox games are always going to be what you make of them. With NMS, I don’t feel that there’s enough to make making anything worthwhile for me. I can fly anywhere and see slightly different planets, build on them, collect photos of plants and animals. I can dig up relics of the past to expand my knowledge and collection. I can interact with NPCs along the same rails as I had traveled a few times already to learn languages and get missions. Fleets are idle advancement tools. Building a ship is a temporary distraction, but it’s the same as building a base: once you have one, you really have them all because one thing can be all things if you build it that way. Doing for the sake of doing seems to be the point, but I’ve already done, multiple times, and I don’t want to do it again.

I guess I’m kind of sad that NMS is limited in multiplayer because if I could see other players anywhere, then I might feel a bit different. As it stands, NMS is both full of life and feels a bit lifeless; I’m a solo explorer, alone on a daily basis, with the occasional reveal that there are other players in the game (the Anomaly notwithstanding). This is unlike EVE Online which, I believe, has a similarly large universe, but because it’s open world, players have identified and codified specific places and routes that players tend to frequent. NMS is more like Elite: Dangerous, then, in both scope and density, and also in how I desire to play it, but can’t because it makes me sad and tired. There is a lot to do, but I can’t find a driving reason to do any of it.

This post is certainly meant to be a lament, not an accusation, as I know there are many people who enjoy what NMS offers and frequently return to the well for the expeditions and content drops, so don’t think I’m accusing or belittling the game. I have massive respect for Sean Murray and Hello Games, and am looking forward to Light No Fire when it arrives. I don’t translate my disquiet with NMS to LNF because LNF is going to give me that new feeling that I know I need, but I do hope that it focuses less on the infinite and more on the definite.