I bought No Man’s sky on sale several years ago for 20 bucks. I didn’t play the game on launch 10 years ago, but watched A pretty large amount of streams on the game, other people playing it, and was at least somewhat educated on the state of the game at the time that it was released. So I know how much of a broken mess it was and why people claim that they got scammed for buying the game. The developer, hello games, did a pretty good job of developing the game past 10 years and improving it significantly…

But as of today, nearing the end of 2024, the game still feels half finished to me. The reason for it is actually quite simple. The core features of the game are simply underdeveloped, and they seem to have no intention of fixing them whatsoever.

Let’s start with combat. Combat is very poorly developed and basically lacks any sort of challenge whatsoever. You’ll never encounter any enemy in the entire game That gives you any sort of challenge, whether it’s in a space fight, or alien creatures on the ground, or robot sentinels. It’s no challenge whatsoever. Things are simply harmless and non-threatening. I had to install mods to increase the number of aggressive enemies like predators and other hostile creatures, even then it was a snore

Space is not very realistic or interesting. The saying goes, as vast as an ocean, deep as a puddle. It’s very true. You can explore an entire system and find almost nothing interesting there at all. Some of them are just barren and have nothing but rocks and storms. Other systems are like Paradise planets and have tons of beautiful trees and scenery, animals running around that you’ve never seen before. There are no gas giants, which is insane. Most planets have no moons. There are obstacles that you have to overcome in order to travel to green or blue systems, which are supposedly hotter. But once you get there there’s nothing interesting really there. Is slightly more dangerous and has a little bit more volatile planets, but nothing that’s dramatically different.

Multiplayer is terrible. It’s such a hot mess and many people just turn it off because it’s not even necessary at all. Finding people to play with or communities that are actually active and worth spending time on getting to know people in are very rare and few and far between. But even if you found someone you wanted to play with, it’s not like you can really do that easily. There’s no direct co-op mode to just play with friends and run around together or explore or do missions or anything together

Suing conclusion, the game has been in development for 10 years, and it’s half finished, and people are basically boasting that this is some sort of amazing hidden gem of a game. It is a hidden gem for 20 bucks. But the game is not finished at all, and they’re already moving on to their next project which I think will fail colossally, light no fire. It’s like this game in many ways, but only on one planet. So the best part of the game, this space exploration and adventure, is going to be completely stripped out. I have very little hope

TL;DR: NMS has been out for 10 years. Game feels unfinished, and poorly developed. Combat is a joke and offers little challenge, multiplayer doesn’t work well, barely any realism, unclear direction, leaving players confused as to what to do with their time.