No Man's Sky

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

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)