No Man's Sky

Thanks also for the Errant Signal pointer - great source for more mature reviews.

yeah i forgot about the errant signal guy for a couple years but he's great

I edited down the game text dump to a lore file (spoilers aplenty). Those looking for gnostic tropes in modern media would have a field day.

the update has started to address a couple things. a bit more variety. also more
jittery

first tweets from Sean Murray since August 18:

Sean Murray ‏@NoMansSky 2m2 minutes ago
If anything was a mistake, it was using Linked In without 2FA.

Sean Murray ‏@NoMansSky 14m14 minutes ago
Server hacked. We're binging Mr Robot Episodes as quickly as we can looking for answers. Ep05 is a cracker

u ok hun

server hacked huh? good thing this isn't a multiplayer game ;)

this game finally got a big update yesterday. among other things it adds a Creative Mode which focuses on exploration and basebuilding, and a Survival mode which does the stuff you'd expect.

http://www.no-mans-sky.com/foundation-update/

i dropped into the new no man's sky to see if the fundamental experience has changed. it has not. after the initial positive vibes to be had from seeing more aliens in space stations and buildings, and some different architecture types, you're still ultimately aimlessly floating above planets that all end up being similar. apparently the patch added different terrain, greater elevation variety, more naturally clumped vegetation, etc, but exploration still feels pretty much feels the same. Creative mode allows you to buy ships and freighters for free. skipping past the "gameplay" of spending hours and hours searching for shit to mine, trade in, and craft so that you can upgrade your shit, i instead warp sped to the reality of having a freighter (which basically is just a glorified Stash that you can access to store even MORE items!!) and a nice big ship, and the feelings it inspires: nothing at all. wow, now i have lots of space on my ship to store all this other shit. and i am learning new alien words as i go! i didn't get into the basebuilding or farming (you can now grow your own plants which give you resources).

(i haven't tried survival because it seems like it would only magnify all the original mode's faults, but who knows, maybe it makes things more intense and urgent in a fun way? probably not).

back to the witcher 3

40% off on Steam offer isn't even tempting to me anymore

truer sadder words have never been etc etc

Still my game of the year. But I never had an issue with what it wasn't. I enjoyed what it is.

and star citizen is going to be amazing

(jokes jokes)

Aside: This post election environment really sapped my desire for escapism. It's one thing to fantasize in an era where hope is possible, and another when all the institutions around me are poised to be used to entrench awful people. My global warming reading queue is way too long for me to enjoy NMS right now. I look at the icon on my desktop as I used to eye the bottle of vodka I once hid behind the monitor.

I look at the icon on my desktop as I used to eye the bottle of vodka I once hid behind the monitor.

This is great

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/youmakespacejesuscry1_8171.jpg

i'm kinda there with you sanpaku but trying to figure out how to normalize internally, not externally and i think fantasy is still part of that

http://www.polygon.com/2016/11/30/13791782/no-mans-sky-false-advertising-results

kinda nice to see these guys winning for once. there were 23 complaints total lol to doomsayers.

someone posted an insanely tall structure indicating Fallout 4-level base building with no height restrictions

Seriously, some of those complaints re the ad are hilarious. Speed of galaxy warping!? Come on, you're not going to show 20 fucking seconds of loading screen in an AD. Might as well raise a complaint because some Star Wars movie wasnt as punchy and fast paced as the trailer, i mean ffs.

it looks like Astroneer is the actually good version of this

Yeah been keeping an eye on that one, looks promising.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice-

Actually yeah I will probably check out astroneer.

http://blog.astroneer.space/system-era/50-days/

just watching that video, i see that the astroneer development team has somehow mastered the impossible problem of how to allow two or more people to walk around on the same planet and do stuff together

WOW

*excited*

this is pretty cheep now and latest update is tempting. still a bad idea?

i got like 15 hours out of it before i got bored the first time around, haven't checked out the updates yet but at a lower price point its probably worthwhile. i dunno if there's another game yet that hits the same notes this does, though i'm sure a few studios have one in the pipeline

actually looking at the info on the latest update is making me want to install again, here we go..

i was also kind of intrigued by the latest update. i think that after a few more updates, maybe by next year, it'll finally resemble the game a lot of us thought it would be in the first place, but by then another new game will have come out that does the same thing but better.

I still think the vistas of alien worlds NMS sometimes offers are fantastic, though I still think all the improvements since launch are frosting on a turd of a game loop. While there are a number of long standing projects with procedurally generated worlds, to my knowledge only Elite:Dangerous has woven its lifeless rocks into an engaging game, and I haven't seen notices of anyone else making the attempt.

I think NMS could have been a lot more interesting if most worlds weren't inhabited, so that the player could believe they were actually explorers, and the three cultures had some sorte of mystery to be solved, preferably in a way that would require collaborative effort for month/years by players. E:D is doing something like this with its Thargoids, for several years.

currently on offer at £16 and with this new update (plus previous ones) I'm started to get real tempted.

$20 on gamefly
https://www.gamefly.com/#!/game/No-Man's-Sky/5010179

i played it a bit this weekend and the gameplay still feels half-assed even with more quest line stuff - i enjoy just wandering around in creative mode more than playing the "actual" game. there's definitely fewer buildings on planets now than there used to be, i found some worlds that didn't seem to have any, whereas last time i played you could go down to any planet and just cruise along the surface and run into outposts everywhere even if it was 100 degrees celsius and barren. there's a little more variety in the environments but you still won't see major elevation differences, flowing water, anything resembling a forest, etc.

it's still a pleasant experience that isn't really replicated by any other game, but it only really works in small doses before you start to see a lot of lookalike planets.

actually looking on reddit now it seems people have been able to find foresty planets and some bigger mountains now - i haven't seen any yet myself though.

Caved and got this last night. I'm really enjoying the story mode so far, it feels quite intriguing and I'm loving the atmosphere. I've only visited half a dozen planets but they are strikingly similar which is a little disappointing. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong with some more exploration.

If they are all this similar then the creative mode will be pointless.

The UI at first was the most baffling thing I've ever encounted, but surprisingly I became really comfortable with it in a short time.

(Had a quick go in a land vehicle on creative mode though and urgh those controls)

Looking forward to playing more anyway, well worth sixteen quid imho.

planets are definitely not ALL similar but the game definitely has a certain kind of planet that it likes to generate and so once you've played a bit the only interesting ones are the 5-10% that deviate from that, or have something rare/weird going on (bubble planet???). you can scan planets from space now though and learn their 'type' which makes it a bit easier to predict what they'll look like without taking the time to land.

decided against it, got E:D instead

probably wise. im already bored of NMS again

how is this different or better than escape velocity

did anybody end up actually getting astroneer?

gbx: it is so much worse than escape velocity.

if you liked EV as much as I did, you may enjoy Sunless Sea

oh yeah? i completely adored EV

if you're asking about this game vs an older game then this is not the game you're looking for.

it doesn't do anything interesting that other space games haven't done except for visuals/atmosphere

I'd never heard of Sunless Sea, just checked it out. Nice.

is this worth playing yet

I all-of-a-sudden just stopped playing, didn't even have an excuse of having any other game to play either.

After my initial enjoyment I became frustrated with the similar looking planets and this just ultimately lacks... something.

I still think there's a fair variety among planets and a lovely aesthetic. But the game play loop was an afterthought, and even proceedurally generated worlds should create more interesting stories than "I got lost in a neighborhood where there was a convenience store at every corner."

https://kotaku.com/no-mans-sky-is-getting-full-multiplayer-at-last-1826134668

“I remember getting a death threat about the fact that there were butterflies in our original trailer, and you could see them as you walked past them, but there weren’t any butterflies in the launch game. I remember thinking to myself: ‘Maybe when you’re sending a death threat about butterflies in a game, you might be the bad guy.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/jul/20/no-mans-sky-next-hello-games-sean-murray-harassment-interview

first interview since launch, big new update coming next week