The update information looks actually pretty good. I liek the idea of buying freighters that transport stuff for you from other planets. This gives the whoel game an economy, you invest resources (fuel or whatever) in finding planets, "claim" them, build resource extractors there, buy some freighters and let them ship the stuff to your main colony.
However, that you cannot freely create your base is a little... underwhelming. This might not be bad if it works similiar to Subnautica, where you can freely place corridors, rooms and whatever to your base how you like.
But the way how they show it seems more like the Skyrim version of "build your house". You simply buy the next upgrade/room for your house and it gets added to it. You may change what room exactly you want to have at that corner of the house but you are still pretty much limited to your options. And since they have a creative mode, I don't think this is a smart idea. Misery can proof me of course wrong int hat since he owns the game and I don't.
The other thing and let's face it, a too high difficulty kills the mood of playing the game. And no, don't give me the "it's a survival game" bullshit.
Survival game is not the same as harcore game experience. Look at Dark souls. Got advertised as hardcore experioence, everyone sees that it is that, no one complains.
Look at minecraft. It even HAS a mode that says "Hardcore". However, Survival is not the same as "this is so hard you have to fight for every inch to survive".
I could now search for a detailed explanation of the genre but I will just do it on my own. The survial genre fits some basic concepts.
You need something to sustain yourself. This "something" will deplet over time. If you want to refill it, you have to gather something. In most games this is "hunger" and you have to gather "food" to refill it. It could also be energy (like in Fortresscraft Evolved and I think in NMS as well).
Gathering the resource you need should not be a simple task but also not impossible. You don't know where said resource is at the start, you have to search it. It may take longer or shorter depending on how good you are at searching or how far away it is hidden.
There might be additional dangers, enemies for example or natural dangers, fire, lightning storms, stuff like that. Might also be traps or anything like that.
You have or have not an end goal. In order to reach it you have to live as long as possible, therefor survive a slong as possible.
Now, I believe that NMS has all that but the point is, the basic concepts do not state that the game has to murder you at every corner. It is rather that you MAY die at every corner but the game DOES NOT do so. While NMS does as teh review stated. And even you said yourself so, Misery, that the game is brutally hard, you even told it in the screenshot I saw that you died right at the start. This shouldn't happen. Being a hard game is great and all but a game shoudl also be FAIR. See Dark Souls again. The game is brutal. Teh game is terrifying (psychologically speaking) but it is also FAIR. You have a chance to beat all the bosses.
Making it POSSIBLE to surive is not the same as making the game FAIR. We could now try to argue what is fair but let's keep this short. In my opinion fair means, when every player get's the same chance of experiencing the game. Equal chances for everyone. That is not the case with this game it seems. And no matter how you want to put it, players get murdered for things that shouldn't murder them. liek pirates stalking a specific player endlessy despite him having no resources at all.
Hmm, to answer various parts (I'm too lazy to split up the quote):
Base creation: I haven't done it yet. Though, it's also not really my focus in games that allow it, which works well as I'm very bad at constructing things that actually make sense. In Minecraft for example, a "house" made by me usually ends up as a distorted, twisted mess. It functions, sort of, but it sure doesn't look like it should. In Starbound I don't even bother, I just find a pre-constructed building on the surface and snatch it. If I need more room for stuff, I just drill holes in the floor and stuff boxes into them. In NMS, it's likely to be awhile before I start with the base-building. I first must complete my quest to find the freaking zinc. However, it's still an attractive prospect due to it's practical use. If it lets me grow the accursed zinc plants, it's a good thing. From most of what I hear from other players, the base creation mechanics overall are pretty nice. But it's certainly not block-based as in "sandbox" games like Minecraft (where terrain building/deforming/destroying is half of the game; in this it's more of a side thing).
High difficulty kills the mood: Feh, this one is really subjective. Some players don't like this sort of thing because it ruins immersion or whatever. In my case, "immersion" is a throw-away concept that gets ignored. Interesting though the landscape in games like this may be, it's mostly just pretty pixels to look at. Which has some decent value, but it's more of an "Oh, that's cool" sort of thing. I, and many others who requested (and ended up enjoying) this new mode, get the most out of a game like this when the difficulty is high. Even with Minecraft, this is the case: I often play it with mods that dramatically increase the difficulty. Normal skeletons aren't very interesting... mildly annoying at best. But they sure get more interesting when they can move at high speeds, hit like a freight train, fire twice as often, and go into "crazed axe murderer" mode if you get too close (and axes can break shields). For me, that's when things get fun. It's the same for the main genres I play, bullet-hell and roguelikes. Or both at once. With easier games, my attention wanders too much because there isn't anything to focus it on. The AMOUNT of difficulty is also very subjective. Dark Souls, for example. I know people that wouldn't touch it with a 100-foot pole because "It's stupidly hard, how is that any fun?". I, personally, think it's too easy; it's like the first Castlevania, in that once you've learned an enemy's patterns, they no longer present a threat. The earlier games in the series were the same way, and I got bored with them fast. Player reactions to that entire series vary wildly between those two extremes. Even with NMS, and the new mode, there are those that think it's STILL not hard enough.
Dying at the start shouldn't happen: Lots of games do this. Bullet hells and roguelikes are BUILT on it; they will murder the funky hell out of the player way harder than this one does, and it's as if the designers not only know this will happen but ENJOY the fact, and so the cruelty increases. This, too, is subjective though, to the skill of the player. Again, Dark Souls: There are many who will NEVER CLEAR THE TUTORIAL ZONE. I know a couple of people like that. They simply cannot get ANYWHERE in it. Even with a game like Isaac, this does happen... and Isaac isn't very hard. This is one of the design issues that all developers will face, sooner or later: You cannot create a game that has the right difficulty for everyone. It's impossible. Trying to do so is an exercise in stupid. I can say from my own experiences with Starward that is it frankly a bloody annoying process.
The game isn't fair: It is, actually, in a technical sense. I have yet to encounter a "how the hell was I supposed to deal with that?" situation. And as I've said often when referring to Starward's design, that's basically the cardinal sin for me, if a game pulls that (meaning I wouldn't exactly be so pleased if NMS genuinely did it). With Starward, if a situation that causes that is found, I change it ASAP. With NMS now, one example of people saying it's not fair is Thamium: The element needed to power your life support systems (well, there are other ways, but this is the simplest). People complain that "they cant find any!" on basically any planet. I have discovered this to be untrue. The stuff isn't exactly covering the landscape, but... I've still ended up with a big surplus of it, and as I know how to go about searching for it (with or without the scanner) I wont be running out anytime soon. The difference between my approach and theirs though is that I simply KEPT GOING until I learned how to really get at the stuff easily. The same goes for basically everything that isn't zinc. But I'll figure out the damn zinc sooner or later. People have the unfortunate tendency to give up on stuff really easily... how can they know if something is fair or not when they didn't TRY long enough to even fully understand what was going on? Same for the mechanic of dealing with the weather. People complain about a lack of caves in some areas. But one thing that EVERY world has (because it's necessary) is resource nodes. Big lumpy blobs of some element that you get at by actually digging into them. Want a spot to recharge your thermal thingie? Just dig a hole in it, and walk in there and stand for a short time. It may be simple shelter, but it's still shelter. The problem that players encounter though is that like many high-difficulty games, NMS doesn't explain itself very well. I suspect that this is actually because the previous version was *just* easy... it didn't really need to explain all that much of advanced techniques because those were only necessary on the occaisional super-dangerous world. Players didn't need to learn those things, so they enter the new mode without them. This is similar to how roguelikes approach things (where they are happy to tear you to shreds without teaching you a freaking thing), but people don't expect that utter lack of explanation in a game like this. That all being said... the normal mode still exists for those that want it. I do, however, think that one more mode should be added, one that's between the two extremes. I cant speak of pirates yet as I have not dealt with them in this mode. I'll be expecting them though; I'll carry my blasted resources into space as much as I want as I'm stubborn like that, so I rather expect they'll attack more unpleasantly than they do for some players. It'll get interesting.
"If I die to these pirates, I lose nothing and respawn in a better spot."
This is entirely untrue. You lose some stuff if you die. Been there, done that, with the one death I did have (bye bye, Thamium and Plutonium). I suspect that those players that are doing as you say are actually just sending items back to the ship..... which only works if the ship actually has space for them (and throughout most of the game, it wont). Even Minecraft can do this, without mods (Ender Chests, which have massively grown in power with the new Shulker Chests. Which can be shoved into the Ender Chests. You could put 30 inventories worth of items into an Ender Chest and simply leap into a pit of lava to "warp" home quickly. Some players do this. With Minecraft's low difficulty, these things aren't exactly hyper difficult to get). The derpy part with NMS (and I don't like this bit) is that the rule changes when you're in space. I don't understand why that is. Games do this bit sometimes, that rule change, and it always bugs me.
That being said, this one is still actually a very weak point. MOST games, and I really do mean most of them, do not penalize the player for dying. Even the basic concept of "lives" is gone, these days. Some of them don't even have the guts to PUSH THE PLAYER BACK A BIT. They cant even do THAT. You simply respawn WHERE YOU WERE. God forbid we actually have the player feel like a failure, they might not buy the next 20 sequels. Now THAT is ridiculous. Even if NMS had no loss of items... what you DO lose is all the progress towards your destination (and this often means a very significant travel time that you must now do again). It's the same with Minecraft... I often don't worry too much about lost items, because items are bloody everywhere, and chances are I've got a squillion backups even of armor back at base. The reaction I have if I die stupidly somewhere is "Uuuuuuuugh I have to walk aaaalllllll that way again". I get a much worse version of this reaction if I die in Starbound, where the trek back is *really* long in most cases. But most games don't even do that. Devs are too afraid of making the player feel like failures, so.... most of the time, the player cannot REALLY lose. Some games even go so far as to give you a BOOST if you die in the same spot more than a couple of times.
"If I just delete my game, maybe my starting world won't be on fire in a pit of acid."
This happens in other games. Even in Minecraft.... even I've done this. Why? Because starting on a tiny, deserted island with one bloody tree on it is more than a bit obnoxious; that one sucks so much that even the monsters don't want to show up there half the time. Same with starting in a hideous lumpy pile of jagged rocks that stretch in all directions, making travel take 10 billion years. Or a forest that stretches on for a thousand miles (even more irritating to navigate). When you're dealing with procedural worlds.... sometimes, you get a pile of suck when you start. The one game I've seen that avoids this is Terraria, because it's not ENTIRELY procedural. For example, you will *always* start in a grassy zone with trees. This will *always* be bordered by the corrupted zone. The Jungle as well as the fortress will *always* only appear beyond the corrupted zones. Oceans will *always* be only on the very edge of the world. You get the idea. That's the one and only way to remove this problem from a game in this sort of genre, and many devs don't like the idea of doing this.
