How long would it take to finish the story? How many hours until you are caught up with the latest content?

[P0MK0NTHA1]

How long would I need to invest in order to get caught up with the community? Thank you!

[Wizard of Woz]

Originally posted by Poogie:

How long would I need to invest in order to get caught up with the community? Thank you!

It doesn't work that way, this is not an mmo. You don't even have to do the quests, past the basic tutorial, if you dont want.

[Jalore]

Is no catching up with the community, as NMS is primarily a solo game, with limited cross play co-op. nothing like a mmorpg where start out as a newb and are playing catch up to the veterans so can play with them...

[Dirak2012]

You don't play NMS for the "story" which is basically a series of fetch quests and some lines of text. Neither to catch up, you are playing for and by yourself, everything is optional.

The story is around 20 hours but it has a lot of time gated quests. The game will ask you to return in a few hours (in real time) to do the next quest, for no reason at all.

[Mr. Bufferlow]

There are two main missions that generate a "back story" for the game. If you completely avoid spending any time reading the text boxes that explain the story and rush, you could probably get through both in about 20 to 40 hours.

Realistically, if you give any attention to the game and various new things that are introduced as you play, it takes about 80 hours to get through the two stories.

As noted, other than a brief period at the beginning of the primary mission, you really do not need to do them at all. They were actually added because a lot of players desired some kind of "purpose" to the game world other than exploring.

The main benefit of following the missions is you end up with free stuff that you will otherwise have to pay for.

There is no winning the game. Accomplishing both missions just means "in theory" you understand the backstory of the game. It is pretty common to push past some of the text that explain the backstory. Excluding the better graphics, the story feels a lot like a point-and-click graphic adventure game from the 1990's.