Apologies if this has already been covered, I've been sort of trying to avoid this thread because I don't necessarily want to know too much and am worried that seeing the lovely screenshots and hearing your stories will ruin the element of surprise, should I decide to buy the game. But I find myself still very uncertain about whether this game will appeal to me, even after talking to people who own it, reading some of the posts in this thread, reading some early reviews, and even watching people stream some of the early gameplay.
I'm pretty down with the idea of crafting, so long as it's towards a greater purpose. I never really enjoyed crafting for the purpose of making the +2 sword that's incrementally better than my +1 sword, but I adore the complex crafting system in, say, Atelier games to make ridiculous items with strange properties. I also like the idea of slowly evolving my ship and equipment over time to let me do new things (or old things more efficiently, though that's less revolutionary obviously). I feel like I'm someone who likes exploration, but the last time I played a game with an explicit exploration aspect was Elite: Dangerous, and I never felt like I was really equipped to explore, nor did there seem to be much point (yay I found an undiscovered star, but what the hell do you DO with it?). On the other hand, someone else in this thread mentioned Fallout 4, and I loved walking around the Boston area running into random encounters and new sets of computer logs and other kinds of environmental storytelling. But my sense is that No Man's Sky is not the kind of game to fill its world with intricate little details, if only because the procedurally generated nature doesn't really allow for it.
I guess the fundamental question I have is this: I've seen complaints in this thread that people fly to new planets and see lots of the same stuff. I've also seen people praising the game for how wonderful the exploration is. How do people reconcile these two things? Are the first group of people exaggerating? Do the second group of people have a different idea of what "exploration" means that includes seeing a lot of the same environments repeated? If so, what is that idea? Even the Ars Technica review notes that "exploration" feels pretty good, while also decrying the repetition of assets and environments. How can you have both these things?
