Juicy wrote:Shores of Hazeron immediately comes to mind as something that already does everything NMS tries to do while actually having gameplay. There's Rodina and Starmade, which are pretty recent, and Noctis, which came out in 2000. Battlecruiser also let you land on planets and explore in a buggy, which was in the late 90s. Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
NMS is just a scam that's only popular because it was marketed towards the console market, which is full people who aren't aware games like that already exist.
Shores of Hazeron is... not comparable to NMS. Sure both have procedural generation, and similar "features", but I don't think you can argue that Shores of Hazeron is at the same level as NMS. It lacks polish in UI. It lacks polish in graphics. It lacks polish in mechanics. It was incredibly clunky, and from the time I spent with it, not actually a whole lot of fun to play. And I "play" Aurora and Dwarf Fortress.
(Also, their sketch website now seems to require you to pay to play. Which is fine. If their website didn't scream "Oh my god don't come near me I AM CONTAGIOUS" on every spidey sense channel I have the ability to perceive. If anyone has another way to gain access to it that doesn't make me want to take a flamethrower to my machine in an attempt to "purify" it, so I can give it another go, that'd be great.)
Battlecruiser was bugged as hell. Sure you could land on planets, but it was certainly not at the same level as what NMS is trying to do. Then again, BC did manage to have a level of depth not easily matched by any games to date. Not that it was all that playable anyway.
Rodina is half baked and almost completely desolate in terms of features. Oh look, I can mod in the Kepler from FTL! Cool! And it is! It just is not comparable to NMS's depth or level of gameplay. There is a point to exploring in NMS beyond finding audio logs and weapon caches. I am excited to see what happens with Rodina, especially if development picks up the pace, but it is not fair for either game to compare them to each other.
Starmade is cool, but again, it isn't a fair comparison. NMS is an exploration game. Starmade is EVE Online with voxels and shipbuilding. NMS, whatever it is, is not that. I feel no urge to "explore" in starmade. While I have stumbled across cool planets, I have no one to play with, so I spend most of my time building ships offline. Which is fine. But for me, that doesn't compare with NMS; a game about exploration and probably fear of the unknown. With starmade, most content is in other players. In NMS, running into other players is incredibly unlikely and most likely a source of excitement, but will not form the backbone of what makes NMS fun.
While Noctis has the GUIDE, which is like NMS's discovery system, I don't think it is comparable to NMS either. It doesn't have gameplay beyond exploration. NMS does.
All of the games you listed, while they share similar surface level mechanics with NMS, are either not to the same level of development or polish as NMS, or are only tangentially similar.
Kerbal Space Program is like Orbiter, but with ship building and loads of other stuff. Doesn't mean KSP is a "scam" of orbiter, you know? Just because similar games with "similar" features exist in the annals of the internet doesn't mean one of the most anticipated games of the year is a scam. The logic you use could be applied to almost any game on the market, even the ones you mention.
Even with starmade you mention, there are not only similar games in the past like starmade, a game called Blockade Runner was in development first, and if they actually get their act together, will have features well beyond what is scoped for Starmade. Is it fair to argue that Starmade is a scam of blockade runner? I don't think so; both have different planned mechanics, a different feel, and a different overall direction. Was The Jupiter Incident a scam of Homeworld? No. I could go on... but the point I am trying to make is that a game isn't a scam because there are games with similar mechanics out there. If they were, would still have Myst, Total Annihilation, the first Elite, etc. The first in every genre would cap that genre, as anything "derivative" of that original work would be a scam.
Music! Perfect analogy. There are many rappers. There are many classical composers. There are many punk rockers. Are musicians in the same genre scams of each other or their inspirations just because they have similar styles?
We haven't seen anything like NMS before, not because games haven't had similar features, but because nobody has pulled off the combination of mechanics it shows off to the degree and polish that those mechanics seem to be at.
I do apologise if my tone is aggressive. I do not intend for it to be construed as such. As this was typed quickly, I also apologize for typos/grammatical issues, as I lack time to proofread effectively.
*Edited for Snark*