Have you listen to the UI sounds? Pretty great aren’t they.
That’s the screen that kind of killed the suspension of disbelief for me. Spaceports that are going to be empty as hell and way, way too clean. Forever. And stairs that people take once before they remember that they pack jetpacks. And of course the same four different crates you found everywhere.
I compared a lot NMS to Rebel Galaxy design-wise. How Rebel Galaxy did the spaceport thing? Interface only, no cumbersome walking or weird maneuvers to do in order to simply sell or buy things through a menu. RB still has 3D characters to talk to and ask stuff but the way they did it is smart. They keep your “flow”. They strip the game off everything that is kind of a boring task to do.
Both are space exploration games but in NMS you don’t really have a direct purpose to mining and stealing, destroying things from planets. In RB you have a purpose: you pilot a ship, you make money with it and you can choose to be a law-abiding citizen or a pirate or both.
It’s interesting to me that those small design decisions make RB fantastic and NMS feel hollow. NMS is immensely large but in today’s world it doesn’t really matter no one has the time to spend hundreds of hours on one game. It’s pretty rare. I didn’t finish RB and it’s probably a hundred times smaller.
Both are independent games made by small teams. But NMS is going to probably make a lot, a lot more thanks to a trailer that set all expectations all the way up and sold people on the game (RPS has a good article on that). I don’t think playing the hype game is worth it in the long term but Hello Games and Sony are printing money right now so, I don’t know.