Im not sure exactly where the big differences lie between elite and no man's sky as i havent read much about NMS. One thing though is that NMS plans to have stuff straight off the bat (flying through planet atmosphere and fly over land, exploring planets on foot) that elite plans to add with paid for expansions.
My big grudge with elite, which is a pitfall for all procedural games, is that theres not enough in the sandbox to have fun with. Its quantity over quality. A combat oriented character in Elite, your options are pretty slim. Before the factions patch, it was basically find some ships with bounties and blow them up for money, and its still pretty much that. I would expect things to do in each solar system that is at least a bit varied.
Things id expect from a good sandbox:
- You can influence the economy (blow some hauling ships up with solar panels in them, and watch the price of solar panels rise in that system)
- You have say, a faction in a solar system that is getting their solar panel shipment ships blown up by local pirates. You accept their mission to stop pirates, and they give you the location of a base and shipping routes for their solar panel ships.
Options:
You complete the mission that faction gave you, escort the next 3 shipment ships, get the payment, and move on to other things.
You go near the base and you farm the pirates for salvage parts
You go in with a squadron of players and set up shop near their base and kill every pirate you can, eventually annoying them so much that they either change their base of operations or just dissapear completely. This is a huge boost to your faction standing to the faction that gave you the mission, even though they never gave you a specific mission for it.
You can stop the pirates from blowing up solar panel shipments by escorting the shipment ships, and the pirates offer you payment for you to stop blowing up their ships. You say no and keep protecting ships to gain influence with that faction. You say yes, take a good chunk of money and move on to other endeavors in other solar systems.
You decide to join the pirate faction and help them expand to other solar systems
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Things like that.
It seems like alot to ask for, but some of these game elements are already done in other games. My post is more elite-oriented but the meat of the critique, that there is not enough to do within the sandbox, could also be applied to NMS if they dont deliver something that offers fun stuff to do within each solar system, planets, etc. I logged off elite when i realized what was waiting for me in the other 400 billion star systems, the same thing i was doing in the system i was in.
