Game Discussions The No Man's Sky Thread

So it looks like lots of people got themselves hyped up for NMS and (as is always the case) disappointed.

The metacritic scores look hilarious, it's either the worst game ever or the best thing that ever happened. Barely anyone thinks it's average or even 7/8 out of 10!

Looking at this thread though, it seems to have offered some hours of enjoyment, which is, as good as one can expect from a game really isn't it?

Precisely. I'm actually oddly more excited about it now than I was a month ago.
 
The metacritic scores look hilarious, it's either the worst game ever or the best thing that ever happened. Barely anyone thinks it's average or even 7/8 out of 10!
Precisely. I'm actually oddly more excited about it now than I was a month ago.

Yeah, well, it's just a small sample of people that actually take the time to post their views on Metacritic so you should take it with a grain of salt. It will be more interesting to look at it (and official reviews) after a few months or so.
 
I was just wondering if anyone here made it to the centre of it's Universe yet? Or anyone at all for that matter?

I haven't left my starting system yet, out of three planets I have one 'dead', one 'lifeless', and one 'barren'.

Perhaps I should find somewhere a tad more interesting! , I did just build my warp drive.

I just spent some time on a landing pad checking out lots of different ships and seeing how much the owners wanted for them, saw some nice big trade ships , something to aim for.
 
This is kind of where I find myself with Elite today. I have been playing less and less Elite lately and more of other games. With Elite I explore 90% of the time, maybe more, but Dear Lord exploration hasn’t changed since release, and it truly needs some updating and new content added. Horizons gave me hope in the beginning, with planetary landings I surely expected for there to be SOMETHING for deep space explorers to do on surfaces, but alas, other than hunt jumponium there is not. Nothing, nada, zilch. There is so much incredible potential for exploration in Elite yet they have completely ignored it so far, and there are no signs of that changing anytime soon.

This frustrates me greatly, and I find myself wanting to play Elite less and less because of it.

I find exploring great fun in Starbound, so lately I’ve been playing that instead of Elite, mixed with a bit of good old Minecraft exploration too. And I’ll most likely be buying NMS next week because it looks like exploration is a huge part of the game, and rewarding. I’m not giving up on Elite or anything, but it may be sitting untouched for a while, and unless Season 3 promises some love for exploration I just might skip it entirely, and not buy another season until they spend some development time on the aspect of the game that I like to play: exploration.

Yes but *what* are you exploring? And *why*?

I've been playing ED since XBOX Public Preview. In that appx. 1 year time, they have added a LOT to exploration:
- planetary landings, which is technically, extremely well done but needs much better random encounters for explorers (the existing random encounters are super lame)
- jumponium
- the various UA and UP stuff, if you could say it's for explorers
- lots of new proc-gen nebulae

But more importantly ED has a galaxy (the Milky Way) that is a much more interesting subject to explore IMHO because I have learned so much about real life science and astronomy from this game. It is not just that I want to explore any old randomly generated space which feels generic. In ED I can explore my home! It is transcendental in a way that I could never feel from NMS, which is more like a fun acid trip than space exploration.

Why I enjoy exploration in ED is to discover something that might actually exist in our galaxy here. Game developers inevitably have no idea what kind of weird stuff I will enjoy doing in their game. Like how I really enjoyed organizing bookshelves in Oblivion, or how in Titanfall I particularly enjoyed luring people into an enclosed space where I would be clinging to the upper corner of the room with a shotgun. The devs just build an awesome playground and we choose our own adventure.

NMS got a lot of things right, like how you can uncover an alien language, catalog new species, name things, etc. There is plenty to geek out on. However you are getting hit with a big old crafting baseball bat in the face the entire time. It sucks, royally, to have the crap inventory space. There needs to be hundreds of slots. But these developers are so quintessentially British.. everything must have its little bin, we must micromanage the player, etc. Frontier did a similar thing with only 1000 capacity for crafting materials. Whyyyyy?! I know a modern computer can have a 64-bit integer. Do something with that so I can play the dang game!

But the thing about NMS is just the overall lack of quality it has. Textures on water = bad. The music may be random but it usually sucks and is just annoying as a result. I have seen the same exact plant fifty times now but it's a different species every time, due to what.. the color changed? Can't even tell. The ships may be random but most look like badly rendered garbage transport ships with some hoses sticking off random places. The ship handles not much different from Sega Afterburner II. Every time I find an alien civilization they have the same kind of obelisks... it's always an obelisk... I don't even have to look for it, it just autofinds it for me.

Cool but... I get the same feeling about NMS's procgen as I did about the proc-gen guns in Borderlands. Yeah, they said there were a bajillion possible guns, but really, there were far fewer, and mostly, they were exactly the same as each other. Then they give you crap for inventory space so you spend 90% of your time agonizing over what to sell or what to keep. For awhile there was novely and then before too long you'd basically seen it all. Now time will tell if NMS manages to keep the proc-gen surprising people or not.

Frankly what you will see with NMS once it hits PC, is that this was a game invented for the sole purpose (whether the devs knew it or not) of being hacked to all oblivion. Bethesda always left ways for players to get infinite inventory and they never patched it because LET THE PLAYERS PLAY. Come on. But these new British space games use online connectivity to police how we play games, even in solo mode, probably because in Britain, every 10 feet there is a CCTV camera and your domestic spying program puts NSA's PRISM to shame. So it's just how you roll: 1984 style. So they use online play in NMS not to let people play together but just to monitor, track, and control what everyone does and how much stuff everyone can have in their inventory.

But so far I have not been nearly as impressed with planetary exploration in NMS, despite all its bells and whistles, because ED feels REAL. I feel like I am actually on another planet with ED. I believe that the strength of British people is that they hate being shown up and they believe in never letting your opponent get the better of you from any angle. So NMS will force FD to buckle down and kick out the best updates we have ever seen, to the degree that exploration will be in for a huge boost. The UA/UP and barnacles stuff was just a taste of what is coming.
 
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I'd agree that Elite may have drifted too far in the other direction... but I also see that improving as we go along.
I'm not pooping on NMS - I'm sure it's great for those that are into it. I'd just find my sense of wonder wearing off pretty quickly.

The scale of this game is literally mind blowing.

OMG - Are you okay?!? How did the doctor put your brain back together?
 
I can't help but chuckle a bit at the outrage going on, NMS is still exactly what I was expecting it to be, and I've pre ordered it for PC, and am likely going to be playing it when I need breaks from Elite, I absolutely love space games, Elite: Dangerous is the best of what is available and very solid in my book, NMS is more a relaxing game,and that is entirely alright to me.
Yes, sure they mentioned that people could meet and some people tried and it didn't work, but here can be a lot of reasons for that, but do you buy a game for the 1% of it? especially when they were marketing so heavy towards it being single player?
People hyped themselves up soo soo much, uncontrolled hype just ends with massive disappointment, controlled hype is much better. Hopefully though people will stop using NMS as something to try to hit Elite over the head with that "It is better" e.t.c.
NMS is exactly what I came to believe it would be so far, and not comparable to Elite: Dangerous, they are entirely different approaches.

All the rage about there supposedly being no multiplayer functions at all because of a single instance where 2 people couldn't see each other when the servers were having major issues that the devs tweeted about is just ridiculous.

I'm looking forward to playing it this Friday evening or Saturday morning. It'll be a nice break from Elite, something a bit more casual and laid back! Not expecting the greatest gaming experience ever, just a fun simple game where I can get lost exploring some cartoony worlds and get my head eaten by a mutant alpaca or something.
 
Actually, the problem is that ED is realistic only in some parts and arcadey in others. For example, if I'm exploring I would find it realistic to take a while to get to that ringed gas giant, but when I got there I would expect to fire specialized probes into its atmosphere and get some readings, all to fulfill some contract from the faction that financed my trip. Instead, I suffer the realism of the long boring trip just to point my ship at the planet for 30s and sell the data at the nearest outpost, who pays the exact same as any other outpost.

That's why I said exploration needs a lot of love and filling out, something we all hope comes sooner rather than later.
 
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The metacritic scores look hilarious, it's either the worst game ever or the best thing that ever happened. Barely anyone thinks it's average or even 7/8 out of 10!.
Thats user reviews for you. The distribution is as absurd as ever.

It makes sense if you think about it. The person who posts something is either:

1) Loving the game and wants the world to know
2) Hating the game and wants the world to know

The person who is on the fence and thinks the game is just Ok isn't going to bother.

Of course, I'm generalising and I think the results are kind of irrelevant anyway.
 
It makes sense if you think about it. The person who posts something is either:

1) Loving the game and wants the world to know
2) Hating the game and wants the world to know

The person who is on the fence and thinks the game is just Ok isn't going to bother.

Of course, I'm generalising and I think the results are kind of irrelevant anyway.

Oh, absolutely. But it does suggest it may be wiser to go by professional reviews in general.
 
Oh, absolutely. But it does suggest it may be wiser to go by professional reviews in general.

Sure. That.. and watch other people playing it on twitch / youtube first. All games will have an appeal to someone and not someone else. It was great in the old days when every game had a playable demo you could download and try for yourself.
 
Alright, looks like I could sink some hours into it. I'll grab it on sale.

My sentiment exactly. Mind you, I never buy games at full price ... because they will be on sale at some stage if you're willing to wait (or shop around).
 
I'm holding off. Lots of reviewers are saying game is extremely repetitive, has little focus and is not much fun once you realise you have to repeat the same gameplay on each planet to move to the next.

Interested to see if the poor textures reported and Lego brick PG issues exist in the PC version.
 
But these new British space games use online connectivity to police how we play games, even in solo mode, probably because in Britain, every 10 feet there is a CCTV camera and your domestic spying program puts NSA's PRISM to shame. So it's just how you roll: 1984 style. So they use online play in NMS not to let people play together but just to monitor, track, and control what everyone does and how much stuff everyone can have in their inventory.

Where's my tinfoil hat ... I am sure I left it somewhere around here.
 
Where's my tinfoil hat ... I am sure I left it somewhere around here.

Never pick up a tinfoil hat you forgot! They'll have put a brain-reading RFID amoeba in it. It's true - I read it in some paper I found on a London bus in Antartica. Interesting article about WW2 bombers that Scientists found on the Moon though.
 
Back to No Man's Sky though - just watched Obsidians latest video on it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF-ACzwUWOg

Nice, as always. OA is one of the few reviewers/commentators to whom I pay any attention. I noted that he also singled out the small inventory issue for particular comment, which means it's a genuine thing. I wonder, however, if it's just planned that way and later ships/suits/enhancements alleviate the problem significantly.

I'll be interested to see what Scott Manley makes of NMS, and of course Yahtzee.
 
Reddit really doesn't swing. People feel disappointed. Lot of them are really angry. Overhyped. I don't think pro critics scores will be any higher too.

One could say the same about Elite, look at the Reddit after 2.1 dropped, and look at the Steam reviews. I think niche games will always be polarising, that doesn't make them bad though :)
 
As this is a solo player game,

No Man's Sky - Inventory Exploit

[video=youtube;AxYqLnwW36o]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxYqLnwW36o[/video]
 
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