![[VR] Dr Gentech](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/175/175740.jpg?1623198898){kind=avatar}
Some of those are legitimate criticisms and it sounds like Sean really did massively oversell the game at the start, but a lot of them have now been fixed. I believe whoever posted that that they were broken on release, at the time, but I played through the game recently (around 60-100 hours a few weeks ago) when I got bored of Elite after trying to come back and a lot of things that post complains about are just not true anymore.
It's a massive post so I can't respond to all of it, but planets do have significantly different elements and resources, you can play multiplayer with people, portals work, ship classes do matter in very significant ways and more ones have been added, Sentinels are hard to kill, you can live just fine going station to station if that's what you want to do (that would be... very boring, but the mechanics to do so are all there, I did it myself to grind for credits), animals do respond to things in reasonably realistic ways (e.g. being scared off by close gunfire, defending each other, attacking and eating each other), there are crashed freighters, you can scan ships, there's a lot more than two weapons, traders will land on your freighter etc etc. There's also stuff that post didn't mention like planetary Exocraft and mechsuits (much, much better than SRVs), underwater environments and play (not my cup of tea but it's there and fully featured), and biological living ships. NMS still has issues but if someone is interested in the basic premise of a survival planetary exploration/space game I would recommend the game, especially when it's on sale. Story is crap imo but the rest of the game is better. I think it can provide a good 80 hours of fun reliably, more if you get into the "endgame" of ship hunting, taking photos of very unusual fauna, and designing and building large farms and industrial facilities (that's a big "if": I'd consider it a bit more "makework" than Elite's "endgame". Yes I abuse "quotes".)
I actually find it really fascinating, the difference between Elite: Dangerous, Star Citizen, and No Man's Sky. They're all from the same rough era, they were all billed as a fundamentally similar experience (a space game where you can do "so many activities!", walk around, fight, explore etc), and they've all approached that goal in very different ways. Elite decided to pick one small part of the original promise and do it incredibly well, and it's a very polished game as a result (with, of course, many resulting limits on scope so far). Their plan for achieving the whole roadmap is to roll out new sections of it when they're ready and at a high quality (despite what internet denizens may claim, compared to their competitors Frontier rolls out high quality updates). Star Citizen raised a lot more money and decided to do literally the entire promise plus everything else they could think of all at once (I'd say immediately but that would be hilariously misleading). Predictably to anyone familiar with software development this resulted in gridlock and has yet to result in anything like an actual game, rather than just a big, pretty, choppy tech demo. No Man's Sky seems to have done sort of a compromise, where it delivered the absolute bare minimum of all of the promise (people say Elite is a mile wide and an inch deep, I imagine NMS was much worse at launch), and then fill in bits and pieces closer to completion as time goes on. This strategy seems to have resulted in by far the most fan anger at launch and a huge rejection of the game, but at this stage in the lifecycle they've almost completely won over their fanbase again (or a new fanbase, it's not clear) by consistently delivering improvements and content to get the game closer to its promise for free. As a result they seem to have the most tolerant fans now because people can see that things have gotten much better and are continuing to get much better.
I don't know which model is going to "win". SC is the best funded I think, and they seem to be noticeably making... well, any progress at all, now. NMS has momentum and a very happy fanbase now which Hello Games have turned into an asset. Elite was always a relatively contained, complete game (if a niche one as a space simulator), and if Next Era does deliver significant space legs/FPS gameplay and it's attractive Elite could become a much less niche game. I'm rooting for Elite, because while I think NMS is decent now and deserves to live up to its promise (and I LOVE their funding model), I just don't really like the aesthetic or story. SC is morally trash (charging people thousands of dollars for a microtransaction on an unreleased game is a scam regardless of any other complaints about them or whatever their plans are), so I hope they fail, go bankrupt, and their corpse is picked over for cool technology that then makes its way into decent space games that either don't have microtransactions (NMS) or at least only have cosmetic ones (Elite).
