Many of my livestream viewers and I have been saying we would like a space update for No Man’s Sky soon. The Abyss and Visions did a lot to improve planets, but things to do in space seem to be a bit neglected now. Here are some of my ideas for how to improve gameplay in outer space.
More Space combat with greater rewards
While pirate attacks are very common, completing them does not yeild much reward, just some magnetized ferrite and alien standing; they are just an annoyance, not an enjoyable gameplay feature. Bounties are cool, but they just give units, and there’s so many other way to make units. Big space battles are rare, and since NEXT they no longer give warp cell, antimatter and units like they used to.
I think big space battle should be more common, or even ever present in systems that are “At War” or other high conflict levels. Finishing these fights should give rewards again and even offer new, unique rewards to encourage players to participate in them.
Improvements to the Frigate system
Currently, we just send our frigates off and collect rewards from them when they get back. It would be nice if frigates had more engaging uses, such as having them participate in the above mentioned space battles, or letting us go with and participate in the expeditions in some capacity, which might require an overhaul to the way NPCs work in the game.
Space Whales and stuff
This isnt my idea, so I won’t describe it, I’m just mentioning it because others often have. Y’all can help explain what this feature would entail.
Derelict Freighters in Space
Same as previous. Please add your ideas on how this would work.
For a space update, basically they would not have to look further than good old freelancer. That had a really nice system with local asteroid fields, nebulae and similar stuff in place, where you could find hidden pirate bases, derelict ships and stuff like that. All completely devoid of astronomical and astrophysical logic, admittedly, but the same is very much true for NMS. Just give those systems a bit of structure, some nice stuff to find and a way to get occasional pointers to said stuff.
I think it would be enjoyable for space flight scanning, and scanning in general, to be more radar based. Kind of like adding mini games to accomplish larger tasks such as, instead of pushing a button to scan and roll the dice to see if you get a marker why not have a sweeping scan of 90 degrees in front of you and if you get a ping in a direction then move the sweep in that direction and if you can hone in on that ping then scan indicates something vague about what it is. Closing range on the ping will give more details. It’s a more involved way to do scanning and can work on foot too. Opening doors, hacking terminals, etc could benefit from small mini-games ala lockpicking minigame in the elder scrolls games. I remember when i first saw the number sequence code when trying to open a terminal…I thought cool, this will be awesome…and it was until i got the same ‘sheft the number’ puzzle again and again. It may not be specifically space update related but I thought i’d mention it.
What if the developers add the ability for us to visually customize our ships and freighters. Here are a few ideas:
We complete special space-only missions that will reward us with Quicksilver. I’m not sure what those missions will be at the moment.
Once we’ve collected enough Quicksilver, we’ll fly to a third space station or a space dock, that provides a variety of ship customization options for engines, wings, paint schemes and so on.
Every two weeks or more, the developers could “re-stock” the space dock with new designs.
Ah, Stellaris. Finally enjoying it after the LeGuin patch fixed the very, very oversimplified economy. I still think some kind of currency system could be great for the game, and the trade routes are still very simple creatures, but at least there’s something that feels like an economy now.
Still, GalCiv2s system of letting you make other empires completely dependent on your trade and then dominating them with cultural influence is still unbeaten when it comes to economy based gameplay in a 4x.
