As someone with over 400 hours, expect the whole experience to be puddle deep. Granted, I last played in 2024, so my opinion is a number of updates behind, but from what I’ve seen up until then, the core of the game didn’t change and nothing pointed to it changing.

The gist of it: every planet is procedurally generated and everything feels empty and lifeless, even when the planet has lifeforms. There are some cool looking planets, but they rarely have anything interesting on the ground. On-foot exploration is rarely rewarding in any sense. Points of Interest have some minimal distance between them and nothing besides your compass pointing towards the nearest one, with any building or settlement that has one of the 3 alien races in them being little more than a pit stop. There’s very little variation in the POIs you can come across. Hell, even a town that you get to become a “mayor” feels like a big nothingburger.

You don’t really “command” a fleet, especially because space combat is super basic and boring. At one point, you just get a big freighter for free and that’s it. You can get other ships to join your fleet, but they don’t do anything while in space proper, they just look pretty while there. You can send these extra ships on missions, then wait several hours for said missions to conclude. You’ll likely forget you even sent them, not to mention upgrading your small ship to jump from star system to star system is much, much, much easier than upgrading your freighter - you need to explore derelict freighters, essentially “space dungeons” that are very annoying and slow, to get upgrades for your freighter.

The game has a “story”, but it’s pretty bland and not worth the time. Any quests the game offers can be abandoned and picked up again at any time and, when you do, they don’t ask you to travel back, they just point to a nearby place or star. Hell, I remember there was an exploit that you could pile up several pirate bounty quests (you’re tasked with killing a pirate in space), move to a star system over 2k light years away, reset all of them - which would cause them to ask you to kill a pirate in the system you’re currently in - then fly out and kill one pirate for the prize of ALL of the quests. No idea if this has been fixed.

All in all, the game won’t crush you, but the repetition and tedium might. Frankly, I recommend you try a pirate version first. If, 8h in, you feel like going further, buy it.

I have about 100 hours into it. NMS has pretty much every mechanic you could imagine, but they’re shallow and become repetitive fast and there’s almost zero overlap between them. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but definitely temper your expectations.

For example: there’s an entire quest line about growing your own plants and refining them into expensive items that you can trade for millions of credits. These plants have grow times of 16 real life hours so you can really only cash in once every real life day.

You can also just teleport between a few galaxies buying low and selling high to generate infinite money in a couple hours. If getting lots of money is your goal, then that quest line is a waste of time. You have to enjoy the act of searching the galaxy for seeds of rare plants and building out a huge farm for no other reason than it’s fun. Most of the game is like this.

There’s no reason to collect the bones of ancient species, or to farm asteroids for rare minerals, or to investigate derelict freighter ships, other than it’s a fun way to pass the time.

I’m approaching almost a thousand hours played in NMS (according to Steam), 90% of that in VR. NMS frequently goes on sale at 50% off and is well worth that price, IMO.

You can play it for the exploration, the base building, the ship building, farming, animal husbandry, faction alignment, piracy, settlement overseeing… There are lots of things that you can do, or not do, depending on how you like to play.

That said, taking off from the planet surface and flying seamlessly to the stars in VR is phenomenal.

NMS is closer to Minecraft in genre than a story driven RPG.

It’s an exploration and survival sandbox game, with a little bit of story sprinkled on top.

The most similar game I’ve played to it is Out There. No Man’s Sky is extremely similar to Out There in a lot of ways, except NMS is 3D and things like mining or fighting you have to do in-game rather than in a fade-to-black style cutscene.

Give Out There a try, and if you like it, you will love No Man’s Sky. If you don’t like it, you will probably find No Man’s Sky more enjoyable but a bit bland. Out There is on smartphone app stores as well as Steam.

You could watch some lets play about it and decide based on that if its something you like. That is the best way to know about games without buying them first imo.

Have you played Outer Wilds? It’s kind of a walking simulator in the sense its 's heavy on discovering the lore and exploration instead of action and defeating baddies BUT it has space flight realistic physics and a solar system simulation. It’s a pretty nice and chill game with space exploration and a constant feel of dread when you step out of the ship but it does not have multiple ships or multiple alien forms. Still, it’s the best game I played recently.

“Procedurally generated worlds” sounds like it could provide nearly infinite exploration, but the reality is there’s like a dozen, maybe 20, archetype worlds, and procgen is little variations around them. There are some quests required to unlock access to certain world types (eg, protect from caustic atmosphere) or to access different levels of star system. There are radiant quest systems, if you care to, but they’re mostly optional. If you just want to skip from star to star, then fly/walk around its different planets, you don’t really need to engage with the quest system very much.

I tend to do enough quests to unlock most of the gear, build one main base, then little mining/teleport stations at one of each resource type. Then get bored and move on until I think I’ve forgotten enough that replaying will be fun. From your list of preferences, there’s no exploration like Morrowind or PoE, with some magic hidden behind a corner. Wait for NMS to go on sale: you can pretty regularly find it under $30, and I think the early phase of exploration, before you start recognizing the archetypes, will be that much fun.

NMS is wide as an ocean but deep as a puddle. IMHO(!) The procedural generation of all the worlds/planets doesnt provide interesting places to discover. Everthing gets really samey really fast just with a bit of different coat of paint so to speak. I also wouldnt say its a thinking mans game. Its mostly a lot of brain dead tedium with tons of resource gathering. The main goal is to get to the center of the galaxy. Everything a long the way is the fun you find for yourself. There is some sort of “story” in place. But compared to the other games you mentioned in your post i also could easily argue NMS doesnt have a story.

Personally i still use my first save file since 2016 when i look into the game for a few minutes/hours after several big updates because i find the start to be really slow and boring before you can enter and fly your ship for the first time.

tbf, NMS never managed to really pull me in. Consider my post as the pessimistic outlook. Maybe someone else can provide a more positive spin on the game.

Love NMS but as others have said NMS seems gigantic until you after you’ve played it for a few days. The constant free updates are great and it keeps me coming back every couple months when they release a new feature. I don’t engage with most of them on anything but a surface level but its still neat. I’ve likened the gameplay experience to “round peg goes in round hole” but the same could be said of Minecraft or Terraria or or or. End of the day its got its niche and it absolutely worth the 30ish bucks when its on sale

I played Elite Dangerous first and never left. It’s realistic and more immersive. It’s so dam good. In VR it’s jaw dropping. Highly recommend over NMS, which is arcadey and childish in comparison

There’s no rush in NMS. Everything (except expeditions) can be done at your own pace. The starting missions can drag (especially) base building , but once you’re past them you won’t have to build another base if you don’t want to.

While expeditions are a timed affair, they are fairly streamlined and offer decent rewards.

Like the other poster said NMS is a mile wide and an inch deep, but in my opinion is still worth the money.

It’s a great game to play for a while and come back to every so often.

No Man’s Sky is an incredibly uneven experience. The one thing it does better than its peers is the variety of aliens and flora/fauna. There are easily 30 hours of fun in just exploring around and seeing some cool alien vistas and ecosystems, trying to survive on ice or acid planets etc. The game gives you good reason to visit them too.

However, it sort of falls apart after that. The space flight, mining, and combat aren’t nearly as good as (e.g.) Elite, the quests are pretty meh, the base building is okay but it falls down on automating production of anything you actually care about (I.e. it’s mostly aesthetic, but it can be cool to have a home base in a neat spot). Some of the recent updates added things like big carrier ships, and the game contrives to give you one to captain with a quest… But that sort of obliterates the ship progression.

You may have more fun with something like Elite or X4 depending on what you’re looking for, but if you just want to fuck around and see neat stuff on your own timeframe, NMS could definitely justify its price tag.

If you have game pass I think NMS is still on there