Except we've known the NMS gameplay loop for a while now (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Sunday, July 31, 2016, 14:50 (3037 days ago) @ cheapLEY

You have several items: A ship, a multitool/gun, and a space suit. These can be upgraded in many ways. You can put small upgrades into each item, or you can get a whole new item that has more slots for more small upgrades.

You can walk around, shoot/mine things, and throw grenades, as well as fly your ship and shoot/mine things with it.

Some worlds are hazardous, and require your suit to have environmental protection such as heat shields or cooling systems or some sort of protection from toxic rain. All of these shields drain quite quickly so you need to mine up a bunch of the proper resource to recharge the shields.

Jumping from system to system takes fuel that you need to find or buy; you can't just jump over and over without it.

There are also animals for you to discover (earning money for new discoveries) and which might pose a threat to you. Overly mining an area or killing too many animals sets the "sentinels" on you which works sort of like GTA's wanted level system.

And you can buy and sell resources between worlds in a form of galactic trade to earn money.

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That information all pretty much tells me how the game will play out. You go to a new world, make sure your suit is set up properly to survive the environment there, farm as many resources as you can without being eaten or attacked by sentinels, and then you head to the space station, trade your valuable goods, buy some cheap goods and fuel, upgrade your stuff if you can, and move on to the next system.

We've known all of that for weeks.

The only thing the pre-release version is giving us is the rate at which those things happen (and, apparently, how specific design choices that I am not mentioning here have made the game easy to exploit in order to progress at an accelerated rate).

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We also know some stuff about the world of the game, such as factions, the way speech works, etc.. But that's not seemingly central to the core gameplay loop.

Anyway, my point is that we already have a very good idea of how this game plays. If that moment to moment play is compelling, it will be a great game, and if it's not, the game will flop hard. Except it won't flop because of how many people have pre-ordered based on hype alone, which yet again reinforces the notion that game companies don't need to make great games, they just need to make good hype. Bluh. Anyway, that's moot because the pre-release guy said the game was really fun and he's glad he spent the $1300 on it.