So No Man's Sky got quite a divisive reaction at its release, which I suppose isn't terribly surprising given all the excitement and anticipation around it in the years since it was announced. There are lots of reasons why people feel disappointed by the game, but I wanted to bring up one specific thing that I thought of regarding the game's fundamental design. I feel like there's a bit of a conflict between two of the main gameplay features that has ended up detracting from the experience of the game.
I would say that in general, the main draw of the game is the promise of exploration and discovery. While there are some goals and milestones there to urge the player forward, I don't think it's too farfetched to say that the urge to discover the unknown is meant to be the main motivation for the player to play the game. However, there is another main gameplay feature: crafting; and this is where I feel that the design works against itself.
It's a fairly standard crafting system - collect certain resources to build stuff and keep your starship and space suit running, etc. Your technology depletes fast enough that you basically need to be constantly collecting resources as you go along. Where this conflicts with the exploration and discovery aspect of the game in my mind is that it removes a lot of the mystery of the unknown. When you find a new planet, you kind of already know what's going to be there, because it has to be there for the gameplay loop to continue.
There are of course other things that contribute to all the planets feeling a bit same-y, but this was just one issue with the fundamental design of the game that I thought was kind of interesting. It seems like something that could have come up even in the early design stage, to have the two main gameplay pillars of your game conflict with each other like that. No Man's Sky still a pretty cool game and an impressive achievement, I'd just been thinking about this for the last few days and wanted to throw it out there.
