No Man's Sky

[Cthulhu]

Probably similar to Spore, just with less gameplay or depth amirite

(don't get me wrong, I'd love to be proven wrong. But I hardly ever do. )

 

[Carlie]

What the shit have I been joking about all of the delays for this game for months and missed the release?

 

[Cthulhu]

There's still time, PS 4 release is today (I think) and PC on friday.

 

[Ami]

Sank in a good two hours of this tonight, quite enjoying it so far. It was very weird getting to grips with the controls and I spent half the time running around like a headless chicken, but I understood what I needed to do at the end (there's a tutorial... sort of?).

So far, I've discovered two planets, a space station and traded items with two aliens.

 

[Interslicery]

I've discovered about.. 10 planets, met 20 or so aliens and been to 4 systems.

I also found Geiger Ice Cream

 

[Cthulhu]

So, is it literally just flying around and discovering planets and shit? 'Cause I can do that in Elite too, and it's boring

 

[Tennyo]

Sometimes you have to fight stuff, too.

The game opened with me crash landing on a planet. I need to repair my ship before I can leave but I've just been running around collecting minerals. I have met two aliens so far. And there are these tiny flying robots that attack me if they catch me mining.

 

[Joe]

Played this for a few hours last night. I had no real expectations and must say I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It's got a little something for everyone. While I'm sure a lot of people would love to discover as many planets and systems as possible, I found myself revisiting my first after only finding a couple.

I spent about an hour trying to discover and catalogue all the flora and fauna on my initial planet. Discovering and uploading all the creatures from one planet nets you a sum of credits. I've seen a few very interesting ships coming in and out of a spaceport and want to rack up the credits to buy one.

 

[Claymore]

That sound awesome Joe. Will finally get a chance to try this out later today.

 

[Interslicery]

I will say, if you try to catalog all the fauna on planets, be prepared to spend some time. Ive spent like an hour trying to find the last species on multiple planets. Also, some flying creatures can be impossible to scan, but if you shoot them down, you can scan their corpse.

Travel to a couple more systems tho when you can, it'll unlock a new aspect to the game. Not really gameplay wise, more lore world building.

 

[Cat Rage Room]

So this game is getting absolutely ruined on Steam reviews. Apparently it's not a terrible game, but the expectations of it and what it ended up actually being seem to be quite different.

I haven't picked up the game, but I'm not sure if I'm too impressed with what I've heard. It seems to be huge, but it seems to have the depth of a puddle. This is the most telling review I've heard of it;

This is a game that should have been released for $20 since it's clearly unfinished and lacking depth, it's really one of those indie Steam Early Access titles that Sony took up and used their marketing muscle to hype into the moon.

Currently it's averaging a 68 on Metacritic with 21 professional reviews and getting destroyed by unhappy customers on both Steam reviews and GOG reviews. It seems people really want to like this game because of the ambition (and great story of rooting for the small indie developers), but there are simply far too many problems to ignore. Even extremely basic things like there being collisions detection when you jump on an animal or basic navigation features like waypoints are missing. The crashing and awful performance on even beastly PCs (while having textures so blurry that they look straight out of a 10 year old game) are indicative of development team that clearly didn't care to polish their game to modern $60 AAA standards.

But even so no amount of patches or mods can change the fundamental problem with this game: There is absolutely no depth at all to the procedurally generated content. This game proves that same thing we've known for a while now: that hand crafted worlds and characters will ALWAYS be better than those spat out by a recursive algorithm. It's why Elder Scrolls Arena (with its never insanely huge procedurally generated landmass) is completely forgotten, while we fondly remember the hand crafted world of Morrowind.

It doesn't matter that there is 15 quintillion planets, when they're all basically variations of a few terrain features reshuffled and recolored. Once you've seen the first dozen planets, you've seen them all. The animals too are random reshuffling of random body parts, without anything unique in their behavior and often their bodies break the laws of physics or basic biology. The exploration gets old incredibly quickly when its the same lego pieces over and over again rearranged into different random forms.
Some other problems:

-You don't have a sense of scope / scale to your journey. In the galactic map you can see other stars but there's no sense of where you are in relation to the center of the universe. Likewise you don't have a way to track where you were. No mapping or history, waypoints or other ways of tracking your progress. There needs to be a way to see how you're progressing and also give some meaning to how far you've gone.

-Every planet has all of the same things - procedurally generated ruins that you've already seen, trading posts that you've already seen, monoliths you've already seen. There isn't really any reason to visit one planet vs another besides some slightly different scenery in animals and trees.

-The NPCs are boring. Even a few fetch quests would liven them up a bit, even those Fallout 4 Radiant AI quests would be a massive improvement here. There are absolutely 0 reasons to talk to them other than to get an upgrade which you probably don't care about anyways.

The different minerals and resources don't really matter. Since most of the upgrades to explore the universe are yours within the first hour / two hours all the rest are kind of nice add ons. At best the only real worthwhile add on is cargo space .. .but that's just so you can mine a little bit more stuff that you never have something worthwhile to spend on.

-There's no challenge to exploring. There's very little combat and what combat there is is very boring. Compare to minecraft where there's a very definite risk / reward system to exploring a deep cave system. Nothing really threatens you in a meaningful way.

-Inside a solar system there's no way to decide if a planet is interesting or not without actually visiting it. There should be some 'classification' of the planets e.g. class M, class X, etc that allows you to say a certain type of planet might be safe vs unsafe.

-All planets are accessible right from the start of the game. I was excited about the idea of acid planets, radioactive planets, cold planets ... I was thinking that in order to explore a radioactive planet you'd need to craft some special gear. There was a pretty obviously gameplay loop where the dangerous planets had better minerals / ruins / whatever but were very hard to explore. Instead every planet is basically just a copy of the others.

-The CONSTANT need to recharge things, which don't really serve a purpose. There's no reason we should need fuel to get out of my spaceship on most planets. It makes the game very grindy without any positive feedback.

-Instead of feeling free to explore the world around me I feel annoyed that if I see something cool it means 30 seconds of tedium while I mine the abundant plutonium. I end up not landing and exploring because of how annoying it is that to take off again I have to enter a menu and recharge my ship.

-Exploring on foot is boring and slow. There's no reason to stray far from your ship.

-Extremely limited space to store things. Minecraft starts you off with a HUGH amount of space - very rarely do you get over encumbered and if you do there's a very simple way to craft chests to store things. Instead of being excited to see a mineral patch I am annoyed because it means I need to sort through my stuff to decide what I need to throw away to make room
Upgrades take up space in your suit/ship so you have less room to store things. It's annoying. It's not a fun trade off.

-Dying has very little consequence. Most of the stuff you have you can get back easily.

-None of the aliens interact with each other or have any sort of AI other than 'walk around a bit'. There's nothing to sit and watch. An occasional ship will fly overhead but they don't do anything. You never really see a battle take place or the ships acting in any sort of interesting manner.

Biggest disappointment of the year.

I dunno. It doesn't really seem to be my kind of thing if even half of this is accurate.

 

[Claymore]

Some people's expectations for this game were just never going to live up to the actual reality. That's just life really. I do think though that it is rather unfair that a lot of vocal people are trying to pin Hello Games as the new Peter Molyneux, spewing out one empty promise after another.

Yeah, some early ideas of theirs didn't make it into the game (i.e, play with friends, massively persistent mmo, etc..) but, for me personally, this game delivers exactly on the promise of its concept. I knew this the moment I first repaired and launched the starship and I spent a good half hour just marvelling at the beauty of the planet that I was on.

 

[Tennyo]

So I built a warp drive but now I need anti-matter to build the warp cell in order to fuel it. Where do I get anti-matter?

 

[Claymore]

So I built a warp drive but now I need anti-matter to build the warp cell in order to fuel it. Where do I get anti-matter?

I just reached this point.

Spoiler

I kept locating the undiscovered waypoints on the planet that I was on, and eventually a radio signal was discovered which led me to an outpost. In it, a trader gifted me the anti-matter.

 

[Interslicery]

I just bought the base components and crafted it. They should be up for sale.

 

[Flare]

Everyone that I've talked to that's played it already (couple family members and some of you folks) have said its a lot of fun, and after watching my dad start a new game on it at my sister's house after we'd all been out brewery hopping and there's five of us heckling him to get to his ship and then there's my uncle telling him to shoot everything...


More of us have decided we need to play this game

 

[Cat Rage Room]

Some people's expectations for this game were just never going to live up to the actual reality. That's just life really. I do think though that it is rather unfair that a lot of vocal people are trying to pin Hello Games as the new Peter Molyneux, spewing out one empty promise after another.

Yeah, some early ideas of theirs didn't make it into the game (i.e, play with friends, massively persistent mmo, etc..) but, for me personally, this game delivers exactly on the promise of its concept. I knew this the moment I first repaired and launched the starship and I spent a good half hour just marvelling at the beauty of the planet that I was on.

That's true; the game's hype and expectations are definitely doing it a real number; a lot of fans expected the game to be the next coming of Jesus, with lines such as "this game will change video games forever" and "this will change the industry" etc etc. A lot of the reviews are reflecting that expectation instead of the actual game.

Still though, I had/have no expectations about the game (I knew almost nothing about it until recently), but if what I read above is true...eh, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me. I'm glad others are enjoying it, tohugh.

 

[Cthulhu]

Of note is that the game's price (and eventually, scale / claimed scale) were only made public after it got hyped to shit with the tech demo / kickstarter thing (was it? iForgot). Ergo, price driven by hype.

Spore did it (and did it better) almost ten years ago. That one didn't do too well either though

 

[Claymore]

Ok ... need help. Shortly after getting the antimatter for free from the Trader and injecting it into my ship, I decided to do some exploring first before leaving the system. I came across a crashed ship and refurbished it - but this left behind the antimatter that was in the old ship. I didn't realise this until it was too late. Now I'm left with a new ship that can't use the hyperdrive as I don't have any antimatter!

I have read various things online. They say that you get a blueprint for antimatter when you first use the hyperdrive (which I didn't). Some say that you can buy it from some Traders or on the Space Station - but I haven't come across it yet. Some say that you can find it as a blueprint in some manufacturing facilities - but nothing yet. I'm worried I'm stuck, and I've improved my ship and evo suit too much to bare to lose it all.

... The obvious option is to try and track down where the old ship is - but I haven't got a clue where that might be. :/

 

[Lex]

So yeah, I think the game was definitely overhyped. I feel really bad for Hello Games (a team of 12 people) and Sean Murray in particular, who is unfortunately the face of it all. However, I don't think the complaints are without merit. The game isn't a AAA title and should never have been billed as such.

Some people love it and some people hate it.

This video kind of puts it all together in a cohesive way, but it makes Sean Murray look a whole lot worse than he really is XD. He's been quite open about what you can do in the game and whatnot from the beginning:

 

[Joe]

What I wanted was minecraft in space. What I got was minecraft in space, with pretty awesome graphics and a lot to discover. I am happy with the game and will continue to play it on/off for years.

 

[Claymore]

Decided to delete my save file and start afresh. The starting world I was on had a high heat level reading, and was occupied by a warrior race, but it was rich in gold deposits. Because of the warrior race, the colonists kept offering me upgraded multi-tools, which made mining even quicker. In no time I had saved up quite a lot of gold to sell ... but I decided to wait until I reached the space station...

... And an awesome thing too, because they were offering 3 Antimatters for sale! Grabbed them and made my first jump to a new system! In a much better position than I was before.

 

[Cthulhu]

 

[Ite]

Nothing really to add because I have yet to pick up the game but I'd like to just say:

-You don't have a sense of scope / scale to your journey. In the galactic map you can see other stars but there's no sense of where you are in relation to the center of the universe.

Uhm, I'm pretty sure everywhere is the Center of the Universe, that's kind of the point.

This game sounds interesting to me because I would only ever really use it to provide a colourful backdrop for my meditations on existentialism and the universe, which are in no small supply. USD $60 is pretty steep tho.

 

[Tennyo]

Patch coming