After playing the game for 3 hours I have come to the following conclusion:

1. I did no experience any major technical difficulties. The game actually just works. I might be the only one without problems. ;)
2. The interface is pretty clunky and definitely not PC friendly.
3. Graphics are OK, nothing spectacular but OK. The few building types are repeated over and over.
4. Flight controls don't feel "right". Everything feels sluggish.
5. My major problem with the game: After the first 5 minutes you just start collecting stuff and - that's it. The game throws lot's of items at you which are pretty much all the same. While game mechanics are largely underwhelming (probably) randomly generated items pop up everywhere and thanks to the very limited storage space you have nowhere to put them. It feels like Diablo in space without inventory or fighting.

Maybe the game will be improved and real gameplay will be added. For now it's just a glorified walking simulator. At least that's my conclusion after a gaming session.

I haven't bought the game yet, but after seeing the game go instantly to "Mostly Negative" on Steam (it's Mixed right now), made me decide to wait a bit longer to buy it.

My biggest worry however, if it was going to get boring very fast, as it seemed to me that the only real thing to do in the game is

1. Find planet
2 Land on Planet
3 get materials
4 trade with lifeforms
5 find planet
6 land on planet
etc

From what I've been reading about the gameplay it kind of sounds like a more closely zoomed in, "hands on" Space age part of Spore.

I have to say. Ship combat is piss poor. Especially in an atmosphere.

It's so clumsy it's unworkable. Whats annoying is enemy NPCs can fly close to the terrain, you can't. There is kind of an invisible barrier. Which means they constantly fly under you and you can't quite point to face them at low altitude. You also don't seem to be able to ever outrun them :/

I was about to hit the BUY NOW button about 12 minutes before release, but I decided to wait until the reviews started rolling in.

I'm GLAD I waited, but SAD that the actual game is turning out to be kind of a flop.
I was really excited about the game.

I'm having fun with it, but it isn't a goal-driven game. And the things you can do right now are kind of light--they mention base building as something they want to add in the future, but it isn't in yet.

If you don't mind exploring and trying to do a semi-Pokemon "collect names of creatures", it can be fun. But isn't for everyone. I like playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 to chill out to, and Elite: Dangerous to do the space trucking part (not dogfighting) and this game seems to fit in with those styles, though you do not have delivery goals. I'm not hearing much/any music so far so I'll probably throw on my own tunes. Some people might enjoy listening to podcasts or audiobooks while playing.

1. I did.
- The game stutters occasionally, no matter what graphics settings I use.
- It crashed while I was still browsing through the settings (I was just browsing, not changing anything).
- The second time around, the game actually ran without crashing this time. After playing for over 2 hours, I had to stop, because the framerate suddenly dropped to unplayable 5 FPS or something. I tried to wait for the framerate to return to normal, but it didn't improve after 2 minutes. Interestingly, I noticed my CPU load increasing (from about 20% to about 70%) and the GPU load dropping (from 100% to about 60%). Something's obviously not working right.

2. The interface is also pretty clunky on console. Or at least on PC with gamepad. You have to use the left stick to move a cursor over an item, then keep a button pressed for some time. Not exactly very comfortable.

3. Nothing to add here.

4. Agreed. Especially landing feels weird. It's almost impossible to land where you expect. I even managed to land on top of a tree. Luckily, the tree was small enough that I still managed to get back to the ship. It's also weird that I can only look around while flying. As long as I'm grounded, I can't look around the cockpit. This makes it difficult to determine where to fly to before taking off.

5. Same.



The game is actually pretty fun (as long as it doesn't crash), but it gets very repetitive and boring very fast.
The one thing I like is that you can seamlessly fly from one planet to the next. No loading screens except when you start playing.

Some really good honest input in this thread.

I am really on the fence, I know myself, and I'm afraid I'd get bored too fast, but I also know I'd really get into the game way too much at the beginning.

It's once I hit that wall of "This all feels the same" is what I'm worried about, and how fast I'd hit it, however, it IS my birthday in a couple of days, so I might use that as an excuse to get it.
lol

This is the worst thing ever. Not only is it lame that you can't even crash your ship into the ground, but it's nearly impossible to maneuver anywhere near the surface. This also makes landing completely obnoxious, because you cannot judge where the game is going to auto-land your ship. If you land in a shit spot, say goodbye to a quarter tank of your take-off fuel to reposition.

Heh, I've just now run into a landing annoyance. Trying to land in a crater or depression. When in the cockpit, you can't look around much, so I trusted the autolanding as so far its been OK. Land, it pops me out of the ship, and Immediately I start falling. Hit the ground at half health, look and my ship is parked at the top of a pine tree and I cannot reach it. Gonna have to load a save I think.

OK it let me hold Interact while jetpacking long enough to get in. Was concerned if that would work since you have to hold the key in, and you are constantly moving while jetpacking.

I think this thread is an example, of 1000s currently out there on the Net, where people's expectations have got away on them. Going into this, my perception was, if you like gathering and crafting in an MMO (plus selling on a game's market), you'll probably quite enjoy NMS... because that's what it is. I don't know whether people have bought it thinking it was a short-cut to playing something like Star Citizen, or what, but clearly there's a lot of expectations out there which have been wildly unrealistic. For me, the game is playing as I perceived it would.

Landing and in atmosphere ship control seems kinda wonky to me (keyboard and mouse)

I have seen several tall rocks that you could mine that had a white grid structure around them that clearly was not intended to be there.

Rocks float when cut off from ground.

That's about all my complaints. Otherwise I love it so far, it runs excellent with zero crashes or bugs other than what I listed above. I do worry I will become bored but I'll find that out over the next few days/weeks.

I've never really played these crafting games, what happens when you craft the best of everything? Will they release even more things to try to get or does it just "top out"? I'm used to games where you keep leveling basically forever and you can always find items better than what you have already. Not sure how this works with crafting and when you get craft the highest item available.

This was my expectation going in. Singleplayer space exploration with light gathering/crafting, no building.

Sadly, there are a handful of annoyances that taint an otherwise fine game. The game starts dropping frames after an hour or so of playtime. The in atmosphere ship controls, as stated earlier, are rather too dumbed down and frustrating. Menus are extremely finicky and unintuitive, and input and graphical options are lacking. I've honestly never played a space exploration game with no HOTAS support.

I honestly don't find a number of these expectations to be too unrealistic.

I agree with this 100%.

I really dig the chill vibe, but I do wish I could look about more without steering. It's so new that I didn't even consider hooking up my Track IR, but as the cockpit designs are now I wouldn't get any benefit from it even if it was supported.

For me, this is the one thing that limits the experience I bought the game for. Exploration is kind of hampered when it takes serious effort to look around. This is by no means a deal breaker, but I hope they will introduce some more "tourist" friendly cockpit designs.

Exactly this. This game has been a lot of fun. People didn't know what they were getting and now this great game is getting bad reviews because of it. I've explored, I've gathered, met aliens, got in some fights. Awesome experience and patches are going to add new features like base building (which I can't wait for).

That's planned in a patch comming soon.