No Man's Sky

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)

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