No Man's Sky

There's no way this can live up to the hype, right?

https://youtu.be/v5sBbjckyzU

FUCK I messed up the thread name. I'll get a mod to change it.

Anyways this game isn't coming out for months and months and there was already a New Yorker article about it

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/world-without-end-raffi-khatchadourian

i haven't played video games or owned a console in years but i think i'd snatch a ps4 for this

I'm not convinced this game will be fun to play.

“I hate the idea that people will go around and say, ‘It’s like Minecraft but in space.’ Fuck off!” - a thread for No Man's Sky

remember when the new yorker had that whole article about the braid guy and his new game and the new game was just myst

pretty into this

It looks pretty but I'm skeptical bc the article made a big deal about how it was all about exploration and then the demo is mostly shooting stuff? Wondering how much they had to compromise the original concept to make it marketable.

I have noticed that whenever the New Yorker has had a big drooly article about some upcoming entertainment that's outside their usual sphere of snooty art, that thing when it comes out invariably winds up sucking.

more like poo porker

would rather have like 10 handcrafted artisanal planets than a zillion procedurally generated planets, gonna be more like the dungeons in oblivion than spelunky levels

small batch planets pls

i might actually care enough about this to save the money i don't have to buy the console i don't have in order to play it. i've always dreamed of a game where you don't have to interact with anyone / do anything but walk around an infinite space, realize i'm probably in a very small minority on that one though.

it's coming out on PC too if that helps you any

why yes it does, ty

i feel like the fact that there was so much shooting in that demo was out of fear of having something to show. i think he says like the badguy robots only show up if you start destroying the planet, so you could jsut... not do that i guess.

i feel like the joy of this game is preceisely going to be BECAUSE there is no small-batch artisanal free-range planets created... like the fact that they're all procedurally generated means a lot of them are going to be lame and sucky, and a few will be really cool, and a few will be lol-glitchy... it adds to the magic of going to the new planets. what will you get this time?

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2015/08/03/35-amazing-things-about-no-mans-sky/
this could be a thing for me

Animal calls are procedurally generated
We’ve created special software that models throats, allowing animal calls to be defined by the shape and sizes of their bodies. Every planet’s soundscape is unique.

Oh man, I hope they make this modular as fuck. Let people mod it and build out the initial systems.

what's good about that game is it's going to take a long time for anybody to really fuck it up

argh that article ! so good

It has amazing music
65daysofstatic are Sean’s favorite band, and they’re making No Man’s Sky’s soundtrack album. We are incredibly excited about this.

We held a concert at PlayStation Experience
65daysofstatic came to Las Vegas with us and played a concert. It was incredible. Watch it here.

did lj help make this game or something?

still have the nagging feeling this is a Molyneux-style fakeout

oh for sure but a man can dream

Ive been hanging out for this one purely for the 65DOS soundtrack!

haha turns out it's a crafting/survival game http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/thirty-minutes-with-no-mans-sky/1100-5407/ that sucks

Crafting things and installing upgrades is the name of the game, and there's a three-pronged upgrade system split between your weapons, ship, and spacesuit.

obv it's only 30 minutes' worth of impressions (which is weird) but it sounds like there are meters that go down that have to be refilled, which i personally do not care for.

i've been thinking of it as an extremely ambitious roguelike the whole time so this makes perfect sense to me

can i still get baked and wander around vibrantly coloured alien worlds? i can? sold

Bizarro I have this great Will Wright game from 2008 I think you might really like--I can let you have it for cheap

maybe there will be an option to turn off the depleting meters. a few recent games have offered that and it seems to be well-received. there are definitely games where i enjoy the tension of constant approaching death, but based off of what i've seen of No Man's Sky, i think i'd rather just explore and collect stuff and not have to worry about eating peanut butter or whatever it is

gotta click on the peanut plant until it turns into peanuts then pick up the peanuts then open the menu and hold x to craft the peanuts into peanut butter then press y to consume it

will it be creamy or chunky? only procedural generation will tell

Bizarro I have this great Will Wright game from 2008 I think you might really like--I can let you have it for cheap

inbox me dude

gotta click on the peanut plant until it turns into peanuts then pick up the peanuts then open the menu and hold x to craft the peanuts into peanut butter then press y to consume it

if the irl universe really is infinite, than there's a version of this game that features this exact mechanic

then

Hah speaking of Will Wright I reaallly hope this doesnt disappoint me like that did (assuming yr talking about Spore)

oh i think this is sorta destined to be spore 2.0

I gave up on Spore before I even got to build a spaceship :( and I'd been so looking forward to it.

will it be creamy or chunky? only procedural generation will tell

― adam, Thursday, March 3, 2016 12:44 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

yeah, i'm worried about it being Spore 2.0 as well. guess i'll wait a week or so before making a decision. i WANT it to be good so badly, though.

i made a LOT of little animals with spore. I think i used the character creator for hours. i think i played the game for like twenty minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-MnJtLIdlI

lol

snore

all this isn't to make No Man's Sky sound like a mundane resource-management sim; it's still a first-person action game at heart.

double meh

I asked if there's some kind of story justification for why these same-looking robotic police are ubiquitous across the galaxy, and the answer is yes. Hello says it's working with a writer to flesh out a backstory that contextualizes that sort of thing.

oh good eight years in and a quarter before release and they've decided to add "story"

I was so stoked for this on a conceptual + eye-candy basis

i'm stoked for the concept/tech mainly, even if the game is a bust surely it will pave the way for better games with similarly ambitious procedural content?

there's certainly no reason why there should be a dead end for fun procedural games somewhere between spelunky/minecraft/etc and this

This looks cool, but it's not without precedent, e.g. Noctis. Ambitious nerds love working on these kinds of projects, so I can' t imagine they'd go anywhere.

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

sean murray is kind of a dipshit

Looking back on the sometimes deafening pre-release hype for No Man's Sky, which included a major presentation at Sony's 2015 E3 press conference, Murray took himself to task a bit for talking up the game's potential so heavily. "We were naively excited about the game, and we talked to other people who were naively excited about the game and they interviewed us and we all talked really excitedly," Murray told Eurogamer. "And I will not do that again!"

Part of the problem at the time, Murray told GamesRadar, was not being direct enough about the overall style of space exploration game players should expect. "I thought we were making it clear that No Man’s Sky was a weird lonely experience. But some people were looking at our trailers and thinking it was Star Wars, when really it’s more like 2001!”

i don't think too many people thought it was Star Wars. it's definitely not at all like 2001.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/07/sean-murray-breaks-his-silence-on-no-mans-skys-development-launch/

it shares some important themes with 2001, like taking place in the universe

i too loved EV, do the updates make it more akin to that? i found an open source clone of EV called endless sky i'm excited to check out

Endless Sky is great!

tempted to reinstall this again even though i don't really have time to play non portable games atm

it's definitely better now though i wish planets with giant flora weren't so hard to find, i've seen some nice screencaps but nothing yet in my adventures

Its only $30 on steam and I think my new laptop can cope with it, might have to give it another try. I liked it well enough playing on PS4 when it came out, it was just so samey was all.

i reinstalled it the other day to give it a shot after reading generally positive reviews, and i lost interest after a couple hours. there was more variety in the biomes and some quality of life improvements in the interface, but overall i still felt like most of what i was doing was going on fetch quests, grinding for parts, and moving things on the inventory screen.

it's pretty demanding on pc specs just as a warning, if your laptop doesn't have a dedicated gpu i dunno if it'll work. i had trouble running it at more than 10 fps on mine

Imagine if they made a Metroid installment (with boss fights, etc) off the bones of this

i'd rather metroid take inspiration from xenoblade x than this i think

though i don't think there's been any metroid game with wide open areas to date, it's kinda supposed to be claustrophobic

Ive got a GeForce GTX 1050 with 2gb dedicated gpu ram so it might be ok.
(its a gaming laptop)

i played for under 2 hours and returned it

I played this on Creativity mode this time because I thought that the fetching and grinding was the worst part, but the experience is even emptier without any reason to do anything. Should I shoot rocks for no reason? Fly around some more?

yeah that should be fine to run it at 30fps

my 1070 can't quite sustain 60fps which is the first time I've seen it choke on a game, this definitely isn't the most optimized thing

you could build a spaceport 10 miles high and then take a screenshot. this will take you 7 weeks irl

xpost

i only play this in creative mode, I just wander around the galaxy and look at things, it's enjoyable enough to me

occasionally if you're lucky you stumble on a system that someone else has been to before and the planets are named like "poop" and "pee'

i reinstalled it the other day to give it a shot after reading generally positive reviews, and i lost interest after a couple hours. there was more variety in the biomes and some quality of life improvements in the interface, but overall i still felt like most of what i was doing was going on fetch quests, grinding for parts, and moving things on the inventory screen.

a couple days later, i found myself wanting to at least get work my way through the opening quests so that i could see some of all the things they've added over the couple of years. for some reason it manages to be addicting, despite the clearly bad game design, which hasn't been substantially altered by any of the updates. many of the rewards in the game are simply things that make the thing that you hate about the game slightly less worse - you can get a few more inventory spots, you can upgrade your mining beam so that you won't have to stand there for quite so long while gathering resources, you can upgrade your running speed so you're not quite so fucking slow.

all i wanted to do is try out one of the planetary vehicles, but quickly found that i need to complete a few quick simple steps before i'm allowed to do it:

Make sure you've got the blueprints and built a circular building/foundation. This will trigger the Overseer's appearance.
Talk to the Overseer for the first time. Receive the Blueprint for Glass.
Talk to the overseer. Go to the marked abandoned building, use the terminal. Receive the Storage Container building part.
Talk to overseer. They request 2 Voltaic cell. Scientist required to complete. Receive Weapons Terminal building part and recruit Armourer.
Talk to overseer, he asks for 50 Pugneum. 55 New building parts are learned.
Talk to overseer, he asks you to hire a base Armourer and acquire the Haz-Mat Gauntlets.
Talk to overseer. He asks for 50 Solanium Receive Agricultural Terminal building part. (Build terminal to continue)
Collect 50 Mordite. Give to overseer. Receive 12 decal building parts.
Talk to the overseer. They ask for a Circuit Board. Receive Galactic Trade Terminal building part.
Talk to the overseer. They ask you for a Gravitino Orb. Receive Landing Pad building part.
Talk to the overseer. They ask you for 100 Mordite. Receive Cuboid Room blueprints.

*interplanetary moans of despair

I also reinstalled and put in 10 or so hours. Some changes are real improvements: there are no longer bustling trade centers every few hundred meters on uninhabited planets, landscapes are no longer dominated by ore deposits, there's a third person view that allowed me to express my inner Gek/robot. However, since I was playing solo and wasn't too interested in base building, the gameplay loop remains the same: explore/exploit/craft, just so one can explore/exploit/craft with fewer annoyances.

The freighter mechanism may be broken, as I was *given* not one but two large freighters within an hour's play, just for clearing off a half dozen fighters in each case. I haven't figured out what to do with them, but park them next to stations (some of which they dwarf).

finally gave in and bought this. only had time to play for a few minutes yesterday. the first game i started i died from radiation pretty quickly. the second game i figured out what i was doing but realized i was in a deep crater with my ship unreachable way up on the cliffs above

Same thing happened to me on my first game. I think I read recently that the first planet always has some sort of hazardous condition. Seems kind of crazy to make the most difficult 30 minutes of the game the first 30 minutes!

I appreciate the attempt at a tutorial that immediately throws the player into a real situation, but they need to revamp the entire first 3 hours of the game.

I'm not sure revamping the first 3 hours in a positive way is really possible from a "writing" standpoint, given the interfaces the underlying game loop offers. They're there to teach the player how to repair/upgrade/fuel in a stepwise fashion, and the game loop for the 100th hour is upgrade/fuel.

As is, it works if the player works really hard to immerse themself in their character's role as a Traveller, a sentient minion of a simulated intelligence in a simulated universe. The stakes are an entire universe of 18 kajillion planets, that players won't care much about because its just a dozen planetary types/biomes repeated 18 kajillion times. There's still an arresting vista on every planet.

This might be a lot different in multiplayer, but as nothing beyond bases is "owned", there aren't stable social groups (yet), and most of the player base is seeded 25+ hours away from the galactic core, there really is no hope of an emergent EVE-like gameplay. Prosocial games are designed with enabling emergent collective player actions from the outset. Tech demos are designed for arresting vistas on every planet.

If you don't buy into any of that, it remains a way to pass time while coming off psychoactive drugs, and a pretty nice one. No shame in that.

i am still getting started and i'm sure i'll get bored with it eventually but i'm enjoying this a lot right now. one of those games where when i was going to sleep last night my brain was conjuring images of me walking around on a NMS planet.

one thing that i really like is how you don't just jump from being in space to being on a planet, you can fly around in the atmosphere or in the clouds or anywhere in between if you want.

So theres been several major updates since this thread was last posted in, and this game is... actually really fucking good now!?

One has come out just today. Vocanoes! Tornadoes! Weather systems! GIANT SAND WORM MONSTERS.

The trading/spacefareing/multiplayer looks proper now too, in fact it looks all too much for me and I'm struggling to get my head round it all.

Well the previous update didn't improve anything so I'm not holding my breath on this either. I'll perhaps watch some review/footage before I consider re-installing.

All the updates ruined the weird zen planet exploration experience.

i went back/reinstalled for one of the earlier updates (the one that added vehicles and basebuilding), and hit the same critical obstacle: i reach a certain point, about 2 hours in, where i'm already exhausted with aiming at stuff and waiting for the gauge to build up. for a mechanic that is so central to the game, it feels so unsatisfying. even if they unlocked some sort of "perfect" extraction, like if you release the button at the top of the gauge you get 1.5x resources or something? i don't know.

i guess the obv larger thing is that it's not so much the bla aesthetic experience of the gauge, it's more that so much of the game revolved around doing it. there's a huge genre of games that have the same structure, i guess - try to build or buy something new, realize you're missing a resource, go get it and build the thing, repeat. at one extreme side of the spectrum you have idle games, then somewhere in the middle there's no man's sky, where you actually have to look for the thing...

i don't know, this whole response is hamfisted, sorry. no man's sky fucked me up for life

Astroneer is a much friendlier execution of that spacebase-building game idea, I think. The tasks I hated doing in NMS I love doing in that game.

Did anyone ever get good at space combat in this game? I always died whenever I encountered an attacking party.

oh i found Astroneer too messy, just all your machines lying around everywhere. But I don't like NMS building either, I just wanted to chill about and feel that "zen planet exploration experience"

The game has become something it was never supposed to be, with a new audience I guess.

I'm finding chill zen exploring fine so far? I dunno *shrug* I dont look to it to be a space battles game. Actually I am also enjoying the trading/communication with the other races, that part seems more expansive than when I last looked at least theyre not just samey things sititng at desks now that youhave the Space Anomaly MMO portal and all that

I must say I find space battles/flying impossible but it could be the ship I have, which is a clunker suited to freighting, but I dont know if more zippy ships handle better?

I'll probably give this another look this weekend. forget what i know etc.

Have they changed anything with the inventory mechanic, because gotta admit - it's an arse.

You mean the annoyingly limited slots on suit/ship? Nah thats still a PITA. I think things are more stackable. Oh, and I dont know how old/new this is (it was new to me) you can build big storage boxes at your bases now that hold 20 slots each. So with that and ship to shore teleporting upgrades its not so bad.

And the game is still frustratingly obtuse and wont explain much of what you're meant to do. I know thats the idea - youre lost in space with no memory and its meant to feel that way - but gah.

That said I'm enjoying it heaps. I found a "paradise planet" (biome v similar to a lush Earth) and have set up a nice little base there. Plus one on a giant ball of rock full of gold and copper, and one on a desert planet with loads of minerals, so I can hop about easily for supplies.

i am just becoming ~enraptured~ with this game, and boy i really don't need another expansive time suck rn

i think i love it? but everything i'd say about it is negative

the landscapes and built environments are repetitive, the alien races are charming but cultureless and placeless, the crafting and unlock chains are not fun, the inventory management is a headache

i do really like the odd elegiac tone to everything, whether accidental or not. the 3 alien races you meet must have been part of absolutely monstrous galactic empires, but that's all gone now, they just chill in space and hang in the same spaceport bars -- everywhere, across a billion systems -- grunting at each other. planets that you can't survive on for a night are littered with little kiosks that teach you a word. how nice!

for now i've abandoned the quest chains and base building in favor of cheesing the 'cobalt flipping' trick while listening to music. no worries!!

every once in a while i install this and just wander around in free explore mode, its a nice vibes game but the actual gameplay was fundamentally not that fun and their zillion updates haven't really changed that afaict

why are the exocraft so fucking slow

Bit obsessed by this game.

Also feel I may be playing it the rest of my life/until my daughter leaves home and takes her Switch with her

God I think I gave up on this game not long after my last post. I was following the subreddit for a lot longer so I was aware there was loads of new stuff with building towns and such but I never got back into it.

I only got into it at the end of the summer. I don't play videogames too often anymore, but if I have an evening to myself it's very easy to lose several hours to this, not have achieved much but still have had a very good time.

Yeah I got into the 'revised' edition of this game not long ago, was loving it. Other things got me distracted, will jump back on it soon I hope.

50% off sale on Steam right now. For $30 I'm going in...