New No Man's Sky update dropped and it is HUGE

Well there are 16 of them and they have a playerbase in the millions on every conceivable platform this gen and last plus the dinky Switch and the game has an absolutely absurd number of moving parts. A big part of the NMS update hype experience is getting to play unpaid QA tester for the first few days while they lock themselves in the office overnight for a week and push out fixes at all hours of the day and night.

Yeah the game used to be just

"You are on a hazardous planet. Sort it out." for the intro and while that was a lot of FUN, they've now added what seems to be a very robust tutorial that covers approximately half a percent of the game's mechanics but makes the beginning fairly smooth.

Once you've got a hyperdrive installed you're free to go anywhere you want and nothing is gated behind anything (aside from unlocks from missions with specific rewards obviously). You also don't need to worry about like Oh I can't go too far or I'll never find my way back here or anything because if you get decently far away from any mission that game lets you reassign it to a new location locally. Nothing is missable at any time.

The starting ship is 1) a C-Class (on a scale of C to S) 2) Shuttle (other types of ship are fighter (combat and maneuverability), explorer (distance), hauler (pretty useless after the Waypoint update honestly), solar (too hard to explain), interceptor (the current meta, excels at speed and combat and most importantly fashion), and exotic (all S class but lower stats than upgrading any specific dedicated ship type to S but dirt cheap and cool aesthetics) with 3) no upgrades, it handles like a particularly poorly designed boat and that isn't you lol.

Anything that is frustrating or annoying now—most notably jetpack distance, health, shit inventory space, ship handling, resources, etc.—will become utterly trivialized after playing for awhile. Progression is real and tangible and there are unironically absolutely no QOL problems whatsoever, people just often get frustrated in the beginning because it seems like a grind as you scrabble for early game resources. This does not persist. Eventually you will have automatically charging launchers and a hyperdrive that just needs 1 of 939292 radiant shards or hypercores you have, you'll be able to stand in an extreme grade storm for hours without feeling it, tornados can throw you into lightning and it'll do virtually nothing, you'll have ships that handle better than a lot of racing games, you will have thousands of inventory spaces, life support will need you to toss like 3 oxygen into it every few days, hazard protection becomes functionally limitless, etc.

NMS is my neurodivergent special interest you're under no obligation to read any of this I just feel a moral obligation to explain and defend it because it very strongly relies on a rough, somewhat frustrating early to create the omnipresent sense of progression and growth and people often mistake this for poor design because there's a lot of irritants early on and they assume they're the entire game. There is no grind. There is just scrabbling for shit when you start out until you learn to make it unnecessary.