Every year social media hits me hard with "No Man's Sky is good now!" — and I bit and dove in with a few buddies.

To say everything in this game is half baked is giving it too much credit. It's 10% baked at best. This isn't a game; it's an underwhelming tech demo. The only cool feature of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great.

Everything else is baaaad: the quests have less logic than entry MMO quests, and are mainly fetch missions. The planets are randomly generated slop. The economy of building up your ship/fleet isn't fun (you just sell your ships over and over again). Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)

It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that are clearly just trying to trick folks into buying an elaborate space game tech demo. Can we move on from this "game"?

> Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)

FWIW, most of the systems in the game that have been there since the beginning have changed significantly since v1.

IIRC, back in the v1 days you'd give an NPC a species-specific valuable trinket and they'd teach you a randomly-selected word of their race's language. Learning words was useful for when you'd encounter a historical relic that presented an important scene from history, and when you encountered an NPC that was requesting assistance. In both cases, they'd make their speech or request in their native language, you'd be given a few context clues in the form of dialog describing gestures, NPC attitude, etc, and then you'd have to guess what action you needed to perform or resource of yours they needed. If you get it right, you get something nice.

Like many other systems in the game, this got reworked several times into what it is now: "Find an NPC, ask for language assistance, select a category of word to learn, and Bob's your uncle.". I won't claim that either the v1 or current methods of learning language are fun, but the v1 method did consume a resource that was often difficult to come by... so it made learning the language much more difficult. They could have cooked up three whole-ass conlangs and built in gradual language tutorials for each... but that'd be a surprising choice for a game whose most difficult puzzles are "Can you do basic arithmetic?" and "Can you understand which direction this list of numbers is rotating?".

There's never been much _game_ in NMS... and most any player who's made it to the center of the galaxy and both got what they were being told by the story and weren't enraged by the implications gets why. The game's first story (such as it is) is why I'm always amused by people who don't dislike it, but also take it very seriously and want there to be a ton of stuff to do in it.

Having said that, Hello Games has apparently been more than happy to add in a bunch of stuff [0] over the years. I'm amazed that they're making enough money on the game to still be working on it a decade later, but here we are.

> It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that...

Eh. As someone who pops back in for a few hours when there's a major change, I don't mind at all the detailed patch notes.

> Can we move on from this "game"?

Go for it! I'll still be popping in every now and again to screw around with it.

[0] ...some of which is clearly playtesting for things planned for Light No Fire...