Yes there is a huge thread already about No Mans Sky on the ED forums. It is currently 69 pages in length and 68 of those pages were comments from people before the game was recently released, and not based on having seen or played the game. Anyone (like me) cant read 68 pages, when all we wanted to know was 'How does it compare to ED?'. I have watched quite a few vids on youtube proclaiming NMS as a total lie, and there are so many hate reviews for the game it is hard for the casual player to make an informed decision.
This thread is for people who have played, or watched hours of footage of people playing NMS, who want to talk about the pros and cons of gameplay.
Graphics:
The graphics in NMS are good. Not shockingly good like the demos but there is time to patch up the PC version with this stuff. The terrain on planets is slightly better then ED is complexity, but strangely not quite as good as ED in terns of sharpness of detail. Light and shadows seem about the same to me, although NMS has a 'white out' feature of you look into the sun. The lush green vegetation is welcoming after the airless moons of ED, but this is just the kind of thing which will appear later in ED anyway. We can see of few trees in some stations in ED, and they seem to be better defined than the trees in NMS - which are chunky, not as chunky as a PS2 game but perhaps like an Xbox 360 title. In general, the smoke and particles made the demo graphics in NMS look amazing, but thats not to say the final graphics dont deserve at least an 7.5 or 8 out of 10. They are not anywhere near as good as Crysis 1, but then this wasnt designed with the Cry engine, the graphics were designed using patterns of numbers from the ground up, so it is never going to be as good. There are alien art things to look at, and glow-on-the-dark caves get get lost in, very humanoid-type bases and no Roger Dean sculptured out-of-this-world cities or anything like that. The plants and animals are variations of each other, again using numbers, which can create some odd characteristics. Under the skin it plays like many animals are colour or slight variations of each other. So its an illusion of diversity. This isnt bad, and is still light years ahead of many games, and is a NMS standout feature. The graphics are not as sharp, or as high resolution as ED.
Ships:
The ships can be bought or salvaged from planet surfaces but not sold, so if you spend money on a ship you have to leave it behind (currently). There are a huge number of ships, but they all fly pretty similarly, and again with the slight colour variations. The cargo hold is the most important thing, and here the player must find a bigger ship to serve their needs quickly, due to mining and running out of storage space. Ships are expensive, as salvaging in the best option. You can strip out the contents of a salvaged ship, or take parts from your old ship to fix it. Take-off and landing is very quick. Takeoff is about the same as a fast Cobra in ED, and landing is about 8 times quicker, due to the auto-landing sequence. (Of course such a landing computer could be in ED). This is fun to zip over a wild landscape and insta-land. There is no difference in the speeds or abilities of ships, and nothing really gives ships abilities like in ED, so you cant just chaff your way out of danger, or upgrade the ship so its indestructible. There are ship shields which need resources to keep topped up, and fuel which again needs resources, and cant be scooped like in ED. This means its all about research management as to whether you have a ship which can fly or not. So in general there are lots more ship types than ED, which is good, but they all feel the same. Developing the ship is about cargo space and weapons and shields, not the modules of ED, and there is little need to upgrade except for more room to store things.
Mining / Collecting:
Resource management and exploration is the aim of NMS, and it is a survival arcade game rather than a space simulator. You must collect materials to keep your protection suit working against the various chemical, radioactive and temperature variants, and you can always go back to the ship of you want to recharge. You cant recall the ship but the suit makes sure you cant wander off too far from the tether, because if you are close to the ship you can transfer materials, if you wander too far away you cannot. The distances are huge, so you really need a ship to get around, but as ships need materials, so you may have to stop and mine some. Materials are large glowing items on the surface, often seen as crystalline structures of high slabs. You are given a multi-tool with two basic abilities: to mine or blast the enemy sentinals when they appear, and they most often appear of you kill an animal or mine/collect protected materials. If you get into trouble, your wanted level goes up, and this brings on a dog-like robot, and if you get a full wanted level, the game spawns an AT-ST walker to shoot you. The multi-tool cant be upgraded to lots of weapons, so you cant play this like Half-Life and get lasers and bazookas. It only takes 60 hours gameplay to upgrade the multi-tool to maximum, and from there it remains the same. You can mine minerals from rocks on planets, which includes an automatic harvesting function (again could be incorporated in ED). There are no mining in rings or ice like ED. The materials are made up of the periodic table, and there is little surprise there, so as far as Elements perhaps NMS and ED are about the same.
Trading:
You can sell materials at space ports and bases and small planetary outposts, and trade rates vary from planet to planet, place to place. So if a planet pays highly for a resource, all the trading will revolve around those high prices. In this respect its similar to ED enough for me to say trading is about the same, although you cant take on Delivery missions, courier, passengers etc, and trading is about materials (rocks) and high-tech equipment manufactured from those. So you can craft the materials you need to power up the hyperdrive, or you can buy them, but there is nothing for free in NMS and everything must be found.
Exploring
This means you could go back to collect resources from a previously discovered planet, but as this game encourages the player to keep going towards the centre of the galaxy, players are unlikely to want to get back to any place they have been to already. This makes the game feel like stages or levels rather then true open gameplay, and once a place is mined there is no reason to come back. You can name planets, animals and planets, and this is amusing until you run out of names for all those things. In some respects, exploring is much more rewarding in NMS when you find a cool-looking place to visit, but in other respects it appears shallow and is a serious of visuals rather than gameplay.
Shooting:
You can shoot sentinels and animals on planets, and in space there are distress calls to answer, and pirates to blow up or avoid. There are no huge space battles like in ED, and the most ships on screen is usually 4 or 5 and no much more. The space action is a lot more tense than ED, simply because the AI knows how to shoot, so the player is never safe or can hide behind shield cell banks. If you take on damage you might crash land on a planet and have to keep going. There is no buy-back or insurance, so if the ship is destroyed you will have to find a few million units of money, or find another broken ship to fix. So the battles are more dangerous and heated than ED, but with far fewer ships.
Missions:
Missions are given by aliens in bases, go to X do Y, and are very simple. Of course there is a story, and the font are large and the player is able to read the weak story-line quickly and get clues as to what is going on. So there is no depth to the stories but at least they are fun to read, unlike the pages of news info in ED. But unlike ED, you dont feel you are playing one faction off against another by bombing their bases or stealing their goods, instead the missions feel very basic and reward a word which you collect in order to learn the aliens unique language. There are at least 4 types of aliens in the game, and at first you get broken sentences so you cant understand them. Later the words become clear, but because the NPC mission givers are just static, and dont even walk around, they may as well be 2D face shots like we have in ED. This is a quirk that you cant take on a mission unless you have one free cargo slot, but this is just a small matter. So although the missions in ED are quite basic, they are nowhere near as basic of NMS. The fact you are doing the mission over a wild landscape is again the thrill, so again the graphics are the thing which make the missions any fun. In ED, if the mission is assassination, then there are no fancy grapghics, just ships in space, but again the story of ED makes shooting down some religious leader in a keelback feel like it is worth something to somebody, while in NMS the missions feel like side quests.
NPCS:
There are a few ships flying around the sky, and lots of deadly pirates in space!, but on the ground there are no aliens walking around unless you count the animals. In ED there are no NPCs walking around and only skimmers on the surface, so even though the NPCs are static cardboard cutout mission givers, this is still better than nothing. But then ED was never mean to be a Planet Sim, it was designed as a Space sim, and those are totally difference, as one works with biology and the other astro-physics.
Sound Effects:
There are some good sounds in NMS but just as good as you would expect. Nothing in the game is a catchphrase which gets stuck in your head, or a sound effect which is really outstanding (unlike ED mining lasers, turbo shield recharging, engine booster on FDL etc). So you wont be shouting "touchdown!" or "ship under attack", there are voice speech elements in NMS to tell you which of your utilities needs recharging, but these are forgettable and often sound muffled, especially in the heat of battle.
Music:
We find heart-pounding drum-driven music when the action starts, otherwise there isnt much in NMS. Certainly not concerto piano music on planets or voyage space themes like ED. The music in NMS is certinly forgettable.
Fun Factor:
I have been playing ED since release and I am very bored with it in its current state. BUT. I dont think the route of: mine, shoot sentinels, get cash, buy ship, learn word, repeat is very deep as far as gameplay. The core of NMS is the thrill of exploring a planet, and even though the environments are variations of each other, there is enough variety to play the game without seeing lots of empty space for most of the trip. NMS is more fun than ED right now for sure, and may remain so even if ED goes the same way and had earth-likes all over the place, the sheer distances involved in ED will always mean there is a waiting time. NMS tries to make the trip even more fun by flying though black holes to make long journeys quicker, and this certainly would be welcome in ED if only there was something worth exploring at the other end. But after the initial gameplay wears off, I feel NMS will look rather basic in a few years time, when ED features 50 ships in combat at the same time, 4 or 5 ways to gather materials, and both ED and Star Citizen will offer aliens and lots of unique places to visit.
Overall: (based on ED 2.1)
Graphics: ED 8/10 --NMS 7.5
Gameplay Depth: ED 5/10 --NMS 3/10
Hookability: ED 6/10 --NMS 7.5/10
Features: ED 8/10 --NMS 4/10
Story: ED 5.5/10 --NMS 6/10 (it is basic but easier to read, and relevant)
Sounds: ED 9/10 --NMS 4/10
Longevity: ED 6/10 --NMS 5/10 (Thargoids and aliens would fix ED, not sure about NMS)
ED Average = 6.7/10 (v2.1)
NMS Average = 5.2/10 (v1.0)
This thread is for people who have played, or watched hours of footage of people playing NMS, who want to talk about the pros and cons of gameplay.
Graphics:
The graphics in NMS are good. Not shockingly good like the demos but there is time to patch up the PC version with this stuff. The terrain on planets is slightly better then ED is complexity, but strangely not quite as good as ED in terns of sharpness of detail. Light and shadows seem about the same to me, although NMS has a 'white out' feature of you look into the sun. The lush green vegetation is welcoming after the airless moons of ED, but this is just the kind of thing which will appear later in ED anyway. We can see of few trees in some stations in ED, and they seem to be better defined than the trees in NMS - which are chunky, not as chunky as a PS2 game but perhaps like an Xbox 360 title. In general, the smoke and particles made the demo graphics in NMS look amazing, but thats not to say the final graphics dont deserve at least an 7.5 or 8 out of 10. They are not anywhere near as good as Crysis 1, but then this wasnt designed with the Cry engine, the graphics were designed using patterns of numbers from the ground up, so it is never going to be as good. There are alien art things to look at, and glow-on-the-dark caves get get lost in, very humanoid-type bases and no Roger Dean sculptured out-of-this-world cities or anything like that. The plants and animals are variations of each other, again using numbers, which can create some odd characteristics. Under the skin it plays like many animals are colour or slight variations of each other. So its an illusion of diversity. This isnt bad, and is still light years ahead of many games, and is a NMS standout feature. The graphics are not as sharp, or as high resolution as ED.
Ships:
The ships can be bought or salvaged from planet surfaces but not sold, so if you spend money on a ship you have to leave it behind (currently). There are a huge number of ships, but they all fly pretty similarly, and again with the slight colour variations. The cargo hold is the most important thing, and here the player must find a bigger ship to serve their needs quickly, due to mining and running out of storage space. Ships are expensive, as salvaging in the best option. You can strip out the contents of a salvaged ship, or take parts from your old ship to fix it. Take-off and landing is very quick. Takeoff is about the same as a fast Cobra in ED, and landing is about 8 times quicker, due to the auto-landing sequence. (Of course such a landing computer could be in ED). This is fun to zip over a wild landscape and insta-land. There is no difference in the speeds or abilities of ships, and nothing really gives ships abilities like in ED, so you cant just chaff your way out of danger, or upgrade the ship so its indestructible. There are ship shields which need resources to keep topped up, and fuel which again needs resources, and cant be scooped like in ED. This means its all about research management as to whether you have a ship which can fly or not. So in general there are lots more ship types than ED, which is good, but they all feel the same. Developing the ship is about cargo space and weapons and shields, not the modules of ED, and there is little need to upgrade except for more room to store things.
Mining / Collecting:
Resource management and exploration is the aim of NMS, and it is a survival arcade game rather than a space simulator. You must collect materials to keep your protection suit working against the various chemical, radioactive and temperature variants, and you can always go back to the ship of you want to recharge. You cant recall the ship but the suit makes sure you cant wander off too far from the tether, because if you are close to the ship you can transfer materials, if you wander too far away you cannot. The distances are huge, so you really need a ship to get around, but as ships need materials, so you may have to stop and mine some. Materials are large glowing items on the surface, often seen as crystalline structures of high slabs. You are given a multi-tool with two basic abilities: to mine or blast the enemy sentinals when they appear, and they most often appear of you kill an animal or mine/collect protected materials. If you get into trouble, your wanted level goes up, and this brings on a dog-like robot, and if you get a full wanted level, the game spawns an AT-ST walker to shoot you. The multi-tool cant be upgraded to lots of weapons, so you cant play this like Half-Life and get lasers and bazookas. It only takes 60 hours gameplay to upgrade the multi-tool to maximum, and from there it remains the same. You can mine minerals from rocks on planets, which includes an automatic harvesting function (again could be incorporated in ED). There are no mining in rings or ice like ED. The materials are made up of the periodic table, and there is little surprise there, so as far as Elements perhaps NMS and ED are about the same.
Trading:
You can sell materials at space ports and bases and small planetary outposts, and trade rates vary from planet to planet, place to place. So if a planet pays highly for a resource, all the trading will revolve around those high prices. In this respect its similar to ED enough for me to say trading is about the same, although you cant take on Delivery missions, courier, passengers etc, and trading is about materials (rocks) and high-tech equipment manufactured from those. So you can craft the materials you need to power up the hyperdrive, or you can buy them, but there is nothing for free in NMS and everything must be found.
Exploring
This means you could go back to collect resources from a previously discovered planet, but as this game encourages the player to keep going towards the centre of the galaxy, players are unlikely to want to get back to any place they have been to already. This makes the game feel like stages or levels rather then true open gameplay, and once a place is mined there is no reason to come back. You can name planets, animals and planets, and this is amusing until you run out of names for all those things. In some respects, exploring is much more rewarding in NMS when you find a cool-looking place to visit, but in other respects it appears shallow and is a serious of visuals rather than gameplay.
Shooting:
You can shoot sentinels and animals on planets, and in space there are distress calls to answer, and pirates to blow up or avoid. There are no huge space battles like in ED, and the most ships on screen is usually 4 or 5 and no much more. The space action is a lot more tense than ED, simply because the AI knows how to shoot, so the player is never safe or can hide behind shield cell banks. If you take on damage you might crash land on a planet and have to keep going. There is no buy-back or insurance, so if the ship is destroyed you will have to find a few million units of money, or find another broken ship to fix. So the battles are more dangerous and heated than ED, but with far fewer ships.
Missions:
Missions are given by aliens in bases, go to X do Y, and are very simple. Of course there is a story, and the font are large and the player is able to read the weak story-line quickly and get clues as to what is going on. So there is no depth to the stories but at least they are fun to read, unlike the pages of news info in ED. But unlike ED, you dont feel you are playing one faction off against another by bombing their bases or stealing their goods, instead the missions feel very basic and reward a word which you collect in order to learn the aliens unique language. There are at least 4 types of aliens in the game, and at first you get broken sentences so you cant understand them. Later the words become clear, but because the NPC mission givers are just static, and dont even walk around, they may as well be 2D face shots like we have in ED. This is a quirk that you cant take on a mission unless you have one free cargo slot, but this is just a small matter. So although the missions in ED are quite basic, they are nowhere near as basic of NMS. The fact you are doing the mission over a wild landscape is again the thrill, so again the graphics are the thing which make the missions any fun. In ED, if the mission is assassination, then there are no fancy grapghics, just ships in space, but again the story of ED makes shooting down some religious leader in a keelback feel like it is worth something to somebody, while in NMS the missions feel like side quests.
NPCS:
There are a few ships flying around the sky, and lots of deadly pirates in space!, but on the ground there are no aliens walking around unless you count the animals. In ED there are no NPCs walking around and only skimmers on the surface, so even though the NPCs are static cardboard cutout mission givers, this is still better than nothing. But then ED was never mean to be a Planet Sim, it was designed as a Space sim, and those are totally difference, as one works with biology and the other astro-physics.
Sound Effects:
There are some good sounds in NMS but just as good as you would expect. Nothing in the game is a catchphrase which gets stuck in your head, or a sound effect which is really outstanding (unlike ED mining lasers, turbo shield recharging, engine booster on FDL etc). So you wont be shouting "touchdown!" or "ship under attack", there are voice speech elements in NMS to tell you which of your utilities needs recharging, but these are forgettable and often sound muffled, especially in the heat of battle.
Music:
We find heart-pounding drum-driven music when the action starts, otherwise there isnt much in NMS. Certainly not concerto piano music on planets or voyage space themes like ED. The music in NMS is certinly forgettable.
Fun Factor:
I have been playing ED since release and I am very bored with it in its current state. BUT. I dont think the route of: mine, shoot sentinels, get cash, buy ship, learn word, repeat is very deep as far as gameplay. The core of NMS is the thrill of exploring a planet, and even though the environments are variations of each other, there is enough variety to play the game without seeing lots of empty space for most of the trip. NMS is more fun than ED right now for sure, and may remain so even if ED goes the same way and had earth-likes all over the place, the sheer distances involved in ED will always mean there is a waiting time. NMS tries to make the trip even more fun by flying though black holes to make long journeys quicker, and this certainly would be welcome in ED if only there was something worth exploring at the other end. But after the initial gameplay wears off, I feel NMS will look rather basic in a few years time, when ED features 50 ships in combat at the same time, 4 or 5 ways to gather materials, and both ED and Star Citizen will offer aliens and lots of unique places to visit.
Overall: (based on ED 2.1)
Graphics: ED 8/10 --NMS 7.5
Gameplay Depth: ED 5/10 --NMS 3/10
Hookability: ED 6/10 --NMS 7.5/10
Features: ED 8/10 --NMS 4/10
Story: ED 5.5/10 --NMS 6/10 (it is basic but easier to read, and relevant)
Sounds: ED 9/10 --NMS 4/10
Longevity: ED 6/10 --NMS 5/10 (Thargoids and aliens would fix ED, not sure about NMS)
ED Average = 6.7/10 (v2.1)
NMS Average = 5.2/10 (v1.0)
Last edited:
