I preordered the game from GoG and played it for a few hours. It started off stuttering badly, but once I changed the res & uncapped FPS it ran great. I now only have a bit of stuttering when entering a planet's atmosphere, but nothing too bad and it otherwise runs fine. (For reference I have an AMD FX-8320, nVidia GTX 970, 8 GB RAM & game is on an SSD).
I find the gameplay soothing: just exploring, scanning flora & fauna, mining & crafting stuff. So far I've spent more time on foot than in my spaceship
. All planets (all 8 I've visited) have been sort of similar so far, though one had weird bouncy tentacle blobs as creatures, kinda funny. Not sure how long it'll keep interesting, but so far I've been having fun (learing alien languages).
I also played Elite: Dangerous, but got bored fast (was before the Horizons expansion thingy though). The spaceflight in NMS is very arcady though, nothing like E:D where even taking off is hard (landing is done autmatically for you at a button's press, same with takeoff).
Couple more random thoughts:
The UI isn't great due to the hold mouse click instead of just clicking.
Inventory management is a bit of a pain, especially since upgrades share inventory slots (you can upgrade your personal inventory from dropships on planets though and bigger ships come with more inventory slots).
Finding crashed ships is cool, but you need to spend quite some resources to repair them so only do it on ships that are a serious upgrade (and not like I did for just 1 extra inventory slot
. Ok, so according to the NMS reddit you can only find crashed ships with 1 or 2 slots more or less than your current ship and apparently you can use a beacon more than once so in theory you could get better ship > back to beacon > get better ship > ... (though that'd be utterly boring). You can also buy the ship from aliens landing at space stations, trade posts, ... though they are expensive.
While the textures aren't the sharpest, it's still a beautiful game thanks to the excellent use of colour.
So far the survival part is the worst part, collecting stuff to keep your life support going is boring. It's not hard since you come across the neccesary stuff on each planet, it's just really boring since you also need to dedicate some inventory space to it.
Seems like a lot of negatives, but I'm still having fun in the game which is most important (And somehow all stuttering has dissapeared now, even when entering planets. The more/longer I play the better the performance, so might be a caching thing or maybe a patch, dunno, buit game runs super smooth now).
Feeding creatures is possible and the 2 I've fed have shat rare minerals
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