How I Went From Bronze to Diamond in One Season
April 29, 2026
Indie Gem Discovery: The Best Space Games You Have Never Heard Of
May 2, 2026
• Where Starfield’s “1000 planets” actually delivers — and where it fakes it
• Which game respects your time and which one wastes it with repetitive content
• A straight pick for tonight based on your mood and budget
⭐️ 5 min read
I bought No Man’s Sky on launch day. August 2016, paid $60 on Steam. I was sitting in my Brooklyn apartment with a cold pizza, watching that infamous Sean Murray E3 interview one last time before hitting download. The hype was blinding. I genuinely believed I was about to explore the most alive universe ever made — creatures that actually eat each other, planets with unique ecosystems, galactic economies that react to player actions. 12 hours later I requested a refund and swore I’d never touch it again. Felt like I’d been conned. The trailers showed jungles with dinosaurs, the game gave me barren rocks with floating jellyfish. I was furious, not just because the game was bad, but because I’d believed in it so hard.
The Comeback Kid vs The New Challenger
No Man’s Sky: From Liars to Legends
I gave NMS a second chance in 2020 during lockdown, purely out of boredom and a friend insisting I try it again. I’d heard about the NEXT update but I didn’t believe it would fix much. I thought it was too little too late. I was wrong. Embarrassingly wrong. What I found was a completely different game. Base building that actually works, real-time multiplayer where I could see my friend flying next to me, freighters you can walk around in and customize from bridge to cargo bay, a main story that doesn’t suck and actually makes you think about simulation theory, underwater exploration with giant creatures, and a derelict freighter system that feels like a horror game. I played 200 hours that year. I felt embarrassed for rage-quitting in 2016, but also pissed — because it took Hello Games four years to deliver what they promised back on day one. Even now in 2026, seven years later, they keep dropping free updates. The latest Worlds Part II update added deep ocean biomes, gas giants with extreme weather, and procedurally generated underwater ruins that actually made me stop and stare for a solid minute. Not bad for a $60 purchase from 2016 that I almost wrote off as a total loss.
Starfield: Big Promises, Small Universe
Starfield dropped September 2023. I’d pre-ordered the Constellation Edition for $299 because I’m a sucker for collector’s editions. The watch is genuinely cool — I still wear it sometimes. The game itself is very mixed. I’ve put 150 hours into Starfield across three playthroughs so I’ve seen most of what it offers. The ship builder is genuinely addicting — I spent 6 hours once just designing a Star Destroyer clone with full interior hab modules. The Outpost system has potential but it’s so disconnected from the rest of the game that I barely touched it after the tutorial. But the exploration. The exploration is hollow. You land on a planet, walk 200 meters, scan three rocks, find a copy-pasted research outpost identical to the one on the last planet, and leave. I found myself fast-traveling everywhere by hour 30 because walking between points of interest was pointless. The “1000 planets” claim feels like a marketing flex, not a meaningful game design choice. I found exactly 3 hand-crafted quests that matched the quality of Fallout 4’s best content. The rest felt procedurally generated even when they weren’t. That honestly embarrassed me for a team of Bethesda’s size with Microsoft’s budget.
Combat, Story, and That Grind Feeling
No Man’s Sky combat is simple. You point your multi-tool, shoot, the sentinels get angry and call in waves. It’s never the core loop and the game knows that — you’re here to explore and build, not fight. Starfield combat feels like Fallout 76 in space with slightly better gunplay and worse enemy AI. I had a stealth sniper build that broke the game by hour 40. Enemies just stood there while I picked them off. Story-wise, Starfield’s main quest is fine but I honestly can’t remember most character names. I remember the ship names I built — “Void Walker,” “Star Hammer,” “Budget Cutter” — but not the NPCs. No Man’s Sky’s story is weird and existential and I actually think about the Atlas sometimes. The lore logs you find in abandoned buildings paint a genuinely tragic picture of a dying universe. The grind is real in both games but NMS respects your time more. In Starfield, you mine half a dozen resources manually, haul them to your ship, craft an upgrade, repeat. In NMS, you set up automated mining outposts that collect resources while you explore. That’s the critical difference — one game treats you like an adult with limited gaming hours, the other treats you like a full-time employee.
Which One Should You Pick Tonight?
If you want to relax, build bases, explore colorful planets with weird creatures, and listen to ambient synth music while drifting through space — No Man’s Sky is the easy answer. It costs $10 on sale now and keeps getting massive free updates. I bought it once seven years ago and it’s turned into something I never expected it to become. If you want Skyrim with guns set in space, with a ship editor that’ll eat your entire weekend and a thousand loading screens between planets, pick Starfield. Just don’t expect the exploration to surprise you after the first 20 hours. I play both. I’m honest about their flaws. NMS won my heart through sheer stubborn improvement — Hello Games shipped a disaster and kept patching until it became a masterpiece. Starfield won my ship hangar because I’m a nerd who likes designing spaceships at 2 AM with nothing but coffee and bad life choices.
TL;DR:
• NMS redeemed itself through 7 years of free updates — scam to masterpiece arc complete
• Starfield has the best ship builder in any space game, but the exploration is wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle
• Pick NMS for chill exploration and unlimited content; pick Starfield for ship building and gunplay
• If you can only buy one right now at full price: NMS is cheaper, fuller, and still getting free support
— Written by a guy who bought NMS at launch, refunded it, bought it again years later, and lived to write this comparison. 350+ hours across both games. I still can’t decide which loading screen I hate less.