To be more serious here, I'm probably gonna need to revisit this opinion when I've played the game a bit more, because I haven't played it since before the last couple major updates, but from what I see here only the terrain generation and rings begin to address some of what I'd hoped to see in NMS. It seems like since the game launched and Hello Games started adding features, the developer has sort of just followed what vocal vans wanted which has steered it a bit away from what the original interviews and trailers suggested.
One example is base building. Originally NMS was going to encourage players to constantly move from planet to planet, and that's still what I'm doing. But certain design decisions were made in service of that, like making planets generally globally uniform and one-biome, because you weren't going to be there long. With base-building, you're now encouraged to stay on planets long-term. So, if HG ever decides to re-see the algorithm, it should really consider making planets no-longer one-biome so if you pick one as your "home" you'll actually be encouraged to gradually explore the whole thing or at least different regions. This would also be a good reason to finally make actual solar systems where planets revolve and orbit physical stars. Before it made sense not to do this because no one was gonna stay on one planet long enough to see objects observably move in the sky, but now someone may stay on one planet for months or years, long enough to see a whole "year" on that planet.
I'm also personally not interested in multiplayer but I see that's a big deal. In the beginning it seemed like HG wasn't all that interested in MP. It indicated NMS was going to be mainly singleplayer but with mingle-player-like elements. Now we're full-blown multiplayer but it doesn't seem too different from the multiplayer elements from Elite: Dangerous.
Basically, NMS started as a singleplayer-focused space wandering simulator. Now it seems to have turned into a land-based base-building multiplayer survival game, because that's what the audience is playing.
How does this compare to Elite:Dangerous? I've been trying to get my roommate to play E:D with a while but he'd prefer me to get this. This looks worse in every way except for the planets and bases, but I guess it's worth getting NMS for that reason alone, to fuck around with him on a random planet Minecraft style? Can you influence factions and politics and stuff in this? I may just get this to play with him, but I'm hooked on Elite and if I get into this too my free time will disintegrate lmao.
To put it simply: If you care more about surface gameplay, mining, and/or exploration, No Man's Sky is better. If you care more about space gameplay, flying, economy, and combat, Elite: Dangerous is far better.
NMS honestly feels like The Long Dark or Stranded Deep but with space ships. A lot of people expected Elite-lite which is the reason for some of the disappointment. I say all this as someone who played many hours of exploration in E:D and am waiting on that Q4 update. Like, one of the huge disappointments with NMS is that it doesn't really have actual solar systems. The "solar systems" are just a bunch of planets and moons suspended in a sky box.
