I often reinstall it, but I rarely play it. It seems to be more fun thinking about playing than actually playing it for me.

No Man’s Sky doesn’t sound like thr game you’re looking for. Nothing in this universe is crafted to be interesting – there is no exploring every corner of the world to find the last secret interaction, because there are no setpieces.

Everything is generated. There are no real quests, or characters, or stories, there is only you and your ship and the bases you build along the way. You can create your own stories, but you will not be experiencing storytelling.

It’s morrowind without the cities or people or combat. There are fun parts to it, but I don’t think the things that you look for in games are what you’ll find here, based on the other games you listed.

it has an option called creator mode where you can build things for no material cost. so its as hard as you care to make it.

I like a lot of the same aspects of games as you, especially exploration and finding cool places of interest, and I bounced off of NMS after about 60 hours for the same reasons people are listing in the replies. Puddle deep, no reason to really explore and repeat activities unless you want to do them just for fun. Found a nice fighter early on, never once had a practical reason to change and no way to upgrade the current one other than “more slots” for upgrades or inventory. I had my endgame ship in just a handful of hours, so the only reason to engage in the shipbuilding parts of the game was if I wanted to for looks or fun. There’s maybe 10-20 hours of story content. The rest is getting resources and making number go up, and every problem or resource shortage can be permanently optimized out of existence in an hour or two max

It is a number go up, sandbox of a game. Bunch of stuff to do but very little reason to do it. It’s a fun game, but takes a special kind of person who knows how to make their own fun to enjoy it and doesn’t mind the grind.

There are quests and a story but they serve more as tutorialization rather than an actual “main quest line” (there is a story and lore but it’s all very background stuff that is completely irrelevant to the actual gameplay). Lot of down time and just exploration between objectives once you reach the middle, and the ending is pretty much “now you know the ‘Big Secret’, what do you do now?”

From what you described, it’s probably not your bag. It doesn’t really reward in depth exploration as planets are all randomly generated. You go, explore around a bit, then bounce on to the next planet unless you like the aesthetic enough to make a base in. Combat is the worst aspect of the game even the dogfighting, which is better than the gunplay but still meh.

It will, as you put, “crush [you] with never ending space, billions quests, and tedious base building”

I bought it at release and was disappointed along with everyone else, although they have made significant updates over the years. Fundamentally though, it’s still punching rocks for a few bits of x resource and there’s not much beyond randomly generated planets and text based shopping with zero personality

In my opinion, no, it isn’t worth the price (and not the time investment either, even if price isn’t an issue). The core loop just isn’t fun for me. I too kike the concept. It’s close to what I’d Invision for a perfect space game. However, the biggest issues are the exploration feels pointless, because planets aren’t actually special (even the rare types). You will find many similar versions of any planet if you just spend time exploring, so there no real potential to miss discoveries, which also means to discovery is meaningful or unique.

Another issue is the total lack of friction. You can’t crash while flying, and it removes your control. Also death is pretty meaningless, and combat is easy enough where that isn’t even a concern unless you try to die.

Finally, there’s not much of a narrative. I noticed you essentially listed stories, or story focused games. NMS is not that. There is a narrative, but it isn’t really the reason to play. I’m willing to bet you’d have the same issues with it that I would.

As someone with over 400 hours, expect the whole experience to be puddle deep. Granted, I last played in 2024, so my opinion is a number of updates behind, but from what I’ve seen up until then, the core of the game didn’t change and nothing pointed to it changing.

The gist of it: every planet is procedurally generated and everything feels empty and lifeless, even when the planet has lifeforms. There are some cool looking planets, but they rarely have anything interesting on the ground. On-foot exploration is rarely rewarding in any sense. Points of Interest have some minimal distance between them and nothing besides your compass pointing towards the nearest one, with any building or settlement that has one of the 3 alien races in them being little more than a pit stop. There’s very little variation in the POIs you can come across. Hell, even a town that you get to become a “mayor” feels like a big nothingburger.

You don’t really “command” a fleet, especially because space combat is super basic and boring. At one point, you just get a big freighter for free and that’s it. You can get other ships to join your fleet, but they don’t do anything while in space proper, they just look pretty while there. You can send these extra ships on missions, then wait several hours for said missions to conclude. You’ll likely forget you even sent them, not to mention upgrading your small ship to jump from star system to star system is much, much, much easier than upgrading your freighter - you need to explore derelict freighters, essentially “space dungeons” that are very annoying and slow, to get upgrades for your freighter.

The game has a “story”, but it’s pretty bland and not worth the time. Any quests the game offers can be abandoned and picked up again at any time and, when you do, they don’t ask you to travel back, they just point to a nearby place or star. Hell, I remember there was an exploit that you could pile up several pirate bounty quests (you’re tasked with killing a pirate in space), move to a star system over 2k light years away, reset all of them - which would cause them to ask you to kill a pirate in the system you’re currently in - then fly out and kill one pirate for the prize of ALL of the quests. No idea if this has been fixed.

All in all, the game won’t crush you, but the repetition and tedium might. Frankly, I recommend you try a pirate version first. If, 8h in, you feel like going further, buy it.

You could watch some lets play about it and decide based on that if its something you like. That is the best way to know about games without buying them first imo.

Have you played Outer Wilds? It’s kind of a walking simulator in the sense its 's heavy on discovering the lore and exploration instead of action and defeating baddies BUT it has space flight realistic physics and a solar system simulation. It’s a pretty nice and chill game with space exploration and a constant feel of dread when you step out of the ship but it does not have multiple ships or multiple alien forms. Still, it’s the best game I played recently.

I have about 100 hours into it. NMS has pretty much every mechanic you could imagine, but they’re shallow and become repetitive fast and there’s almost zero overlap between them. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but definitely temper your expectations.

For example: there’s an entire quest line about growing your own plants and refining them into expensive items that you can trade for millions of credits. These plants have grow times of 16 real life hours so you can really only cash in once every real life day.

You can also just teleport between a few galaxies buying low and selling high to generate infinite money in a couple hours. If getting lots of money is your goal, then that quest line is a waste of time. You have to enjoy the act of searching the galaxy for seeds of rare plants and building out a huge farm for no other reason then it’s fun. Most of the game is like this.

There’s no reason to collect the bones of ancient species, or to farm asteroids for rare minerals, or to investigate derelict freighter ships, other than it’s a fun way to pass the time.

“Procedurally generated worlds” sounds like it could provide nearly infinite exploration, but the reality is there’s like a dozen, maybe 20, archetype worlds, and procgen is little variations around them. There are some quests required to unlock access to certain world types (eg, protect from caustic atmosphere) or to access different levels of star system. There are radiant quest systems, if you care to, but they’re mostly optional. If you just want to skip from star to star, then fly/walk around its different planets, you don’t really need to engage with the quest system very much.

I tend to do enough quests to unlock most of the gear, build one main base, then little mining/teleport stations at one of each resource type. Then get bored and move on until I think I’ve forgotten enough that replaying will be fun. From your list of preferences, there’s no exploration like Morrowind or PoE, with some magic hidden behind a corner. Wait for NMS to go on sale: you can pretty regularly find it under $30, and I think the early phase of exploration, before you start recognizing the archetypes, will be that much fun.

NMS is closer to Minecraft in genre than a story driven RPG.

It’s an exploration and survival sandbox game, with a little bit of story sprinkled on top.

The most similar game I’ve played to it is Out There. No Man’s Sky is extremely similar to Out There in a lot of ways, except NMS is 3D and things like mining or fighting you have to do in-game rather than in a fade-to-black style cutscene.

Give Out There a try, and if you like it, you will love No Man’s Sky. If you don’t like it, you will probably find No Man’s Sky more enjoyable but a bit bland. Out There is on smartphone app stores as well as Steam.

If you have game pass I think NMS is still on there

I played Elite Dangerous first and never left. It’s realistic and more immersive. It’s so dam good. In VR it’s jaw dropping. Highly recommend over NMS, which is arcadey and childish in comparison