New single planet fantasy game from Hello Games

I will be surprised if the DLC isn’t paid this time around.

I was thinking someone is finally making T'rain.

I really wanted to like NMS. The core concept is 100% up my alley, it looks pretty good, and it's a neat sandbox. I suppose it's not bad if you're the kind of player who is happy mindlessly gathering resources so you can craft an ornate base. Hell, I played quite a bit because I was determined to collect one of every type of spaceship.

But I really do think the gameplay is objectively bad by almost any possible measure. The on-foot traversal is terrible, waiting around for refiners sucks (though at least they had the sense to give a backpack refiner), trying to get the actual spaceship you want is awful, flying towards the galactic center is a chore, and I could go on. I guess the gunplay is serviceable, but the enemies aren't the least bit interesting aside from maybe the largest walker bots.

The developers literally spent YEARS adding to the game, completely for free, but they don’t “respect their players”?

They ever apologized for lying for years to the players, who they respect so much?

What are you talking about? The player literally learns nothing about the alien languages. All you do is walk up to a NPC, button mash through absolutely inconsequential filler text, and pick the option that says "teach me a word". Then a popup says "You now know the Korvax word for 'THE'", except it doesn't even tell you which alien word was translated or explain any grammar or context or conjugation or anything. Your character just does a magical substitution from that point forward.

Or you can do the same thing by walking up to the black pillars if you'd rather trudge around a planet surface for macguffins.

How in any way is that a good system? There's zero skill or challenge or reward or even real gameplay here. A word search puzzle would have 100x more depth.

Playing the game felt like satire. Basic questions I would expect other devs of sci-fi games to ask themselves seemingly either went unanswered or got super lazy answers.

e.g. "Should we let players customize their spaceships?" to which HG apparently thinks their system of solely generating ships from a random permutation of parts is plenty. Or "Do you think different planets and galaxies would have different hostile flora?", to which they decided "nah, the same 3 are fine everywhere". "Should planets have biomes of any kind, at least ice caps maybe?"... "nah, players don't care if planets are basically uniform."

EA, Activision, Ubisoft... their BS is on another level entirely and I generally don't play their games because if it.

For NMS / Hello Games it's more that I really want to like the game but find it immensely frustrating that after years and years of updates, they still haven't fixed some of the most basic elements.

Like when your character sprints, the tiniest bump in terrain cancels the sprinting. This even happens in the Nexus where it looks like flat ground. Why?

Again for the alien languages... there's no dictionary in this universe? I'm supposed to believe interstellar travel is commonplace, but they don't have an app to translate the 3 ubiquitous languages? I have a device in my hand right now that can do that.

Space combat still isn't balanced. If you alternate between the phase beam with the shield absorb upgrade and any other weapon, you can basically wear down any threat and win.

What has actually been improved about the core game of NMS? People keep telling me that in vague terms without saying what specifically was improved. I know the inventory system is better (but still kind of a mess IMO), but what else? Don't say multiplayer because they promised that at the beginning.