"No Man’s Sky’s contemporaries – namely Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen – make a point of having your ship feel like a real machine, with screens to monitor, systems to manage, and controls to learn. Overshooting your destination is possible. The vast distances involved require skill and smarts to conquer. The fact that Elite’s galaxy is made up of endlessly repeated shit is somewhat mitigated by the attention demanded by its finer details. Another valid comparison is Euro Truck Simulator – a game that’s dull as fuck, but gets away with it by putting all of the player’s attention on the driving, not the destination."
"...No Man’s Sky doesn’t have time for any of that. Interplanetary travel is as easy as pointing your nose at a planet (that usually fills about 20% of your screen) and engaging the pulse drive. Landing is automatic, and requires no more interaction than a single button press."
"...It’s not that No Man’s Sky is wrong to attempt to simplify space travel, or to take the minutiae of it out of the player’s hands. It’s just that it does so to such an extent that getting around its galaxy is devoid of any tension. The stakes are so low that the space travel itself, the very thing people buy this to do, becomes little more than a nicely shaded loading screen between locations which, behind the window dressing, are functionally identical."
