I think the Elite Dangerous model is the best way to make one of those NMS kind of games. Release something that is barely playable, and slowly improve it again and again until you have something that feels less sandboxy.
Exactly. I started that game like 15 months ago, and trading, exploration/discovery, bulletin board quests and some world PvP kept me busy for 111 hours...and there was literally barely a game there on top of the sandbox and being in your ships. Since I played, they've added all sorts of gameplay additions - the whole Horizons thing with landing + rover, factions + wars, this alien shit, and I have no idea what else, I just expect it will feel like a completely new game next time I go back.
I had zero disappointment because iteratively it never promised to be SPORE 3.0 like NMS did, or "the last game you will ever buy" like Star Citizen is touting. I've bought shit for that game like a year ago that I haven't even checked out yet just because I liked initially playing it and wanted to support them continuing development. I was mostly waiting for better VR headsets to come out...it's fucking unplayable on the Vive (text unreadable), and the Oculus is pretty good with it, but fuck supporting Facebook.
All of these space games seem to be trying to get to the same end result. Basically an exploration, trading, mining, shooting and RPG space sim. Do you think that is actually viable with current technology?
There are several games that have done very well within one of the space genres, but none have managed to pull it all together yet. Rodina was the first exploration based space game that made me truly appreciate the scale these kinds of games could have, but there is nothing in there outside of space exploration. Astroneers looks like it will end up being a really good mining/resource gathering game once they sort out all of the alpha bugs, but again, there is nothing in there except the mining.
wat, alien characters in Elite Dangerous? Even if they don't do anything, sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit I need to hook my HOTUS back up.