The Expedition rewards hugely speed up your progression, but it’s also just another set of goals to grind.
Putting everyone in the same place and on the same path basically gives it a theme park MMO flavor, where every system near the rendevous goals is already discovered, covered in player bases, etc. I strongly dislike this, so I’m rushing for rendevous #5 (and will hit 5k nanites for another goal at the same time), before I ditch the crowd.
My group has had some trouble trying to co-op as well, being unable to join full star system instances, and having players disconnect from the group at random.
I did an expedition with my friend but yeah, the clutter of other players is too much for me to care (also it makes warping pretty crazy).
Also I somehow ended up in a situation where sentinels followed me into space, making me warp away, but I ran out of fuel for warp speed and no asteroids around, so I’m kind of stuck.
Either way, I’d rather just go back to an offline mode. There’s been 2-3 updates since I last played so I’m trying to figure out if I need to start fresh to see some of the new stuff (I think one of the updates required new seeds but I can’t remember).
I think the expedition mode is designed to be rushed. At least that’s how I played it and I enjoyed my time with it. I completed it in about 3 days. It was fun to just zoom through all the content as fast as possible. I have another save on survival where I just meander (really) slowly through the game so it was a nice change of pace. Completing expedition mode unlocked a cool golden S class ship in my main save too.
Yeah, way overhyped. It created a bunch of confusion on the NMS discord when new members kept popping in and asking about the “war”. No one had even heard of this thing.
“While PvP is a common experience in certain modes” - from article.
At best a misrepresentation of some players attempts at ganking/trolling - and most commonly encountered with base building hacks on quest locations. Common is a non-starter for accuracy under even the most generous of interpretations. Maybe they saw “survival” mode? (which players know has same PvP settings as every other mode). Makes me wonder if article’s author has ever played?
There was definitely some sort of concerted effort to create a “war” of some kind in Galaxy #50 (iirc). The person who posted the tweet that’s linked in the Polygon article also tweeted out a discord link, where presumably this stuff was being organized. (I didn’t go any further than finding the link to it.)
But yeah, NMS really doesn’t lend itself to this sort of gameplay, imo.
