No Man's Sky

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...