I do. that's why I didn't buy the "deluxe alpha".
NMS was $20.00 cheaper, and had multiple commander save slots as well.
Am I the only person who is utterly unenthused right now about a generic FPS being shoehorned into my spaceship game?
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NMS was $20.00 cheaper, and had multiple commander save slots as well.
I do. that's why I didn't buy the "deluxe alpha".
NMS was $20.00 cheaper, and had multiple commander save slots as well.
That's nice I hope you enjoy it.
NMS is quite different, yet comparable. I think the world building does a better job in NMS, the spaceships on the other hand is ED's turf.
You Can Have Ships, Or You Can Have Legs, But Not Both.
I have. For several years, before the "deluxe alpha", I've been getting better ground-based play.
Deleted member 182079
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NMS is a pretty decent game, but not one I would replace Elite with. I gave it another go over the weekend (it's still and will remain installed on my PC), I do appreciate the constant updates the game receives, including much needed yet very subtle QoL stuff I noticed (related to inventory management). The UI feels responsive and snappy, the exploration system is well structured.
The problems I always end up with are the following:
This post is not to rubbish it by the way, NMS obviously appeals to many people, but I've been thinking about it quite often why I continue to bounce off NMS so hard, whereas I can't stop playing Elite despite ~4,000 hours in it - besides the obvious realism/audiovisual differences between the two. NMS has a lot of content now, but I just don't enjoy engaging with much of it - the often used 'mile wide inch deep' I find applies to NMS more than to Elite (I'm sure others disagree).
I did have a period of time where I spent about a dozen hours within a few days grinding through materials etc. to unlock new content, it was addictive at first but when I realised there's just another carrot waiting behind the one I'm currently trying to obtain, I burnt out rather quickly.
I know that this will not happen with Odyssey - I'm already struggling playing Horizons only because I can't wait to get going with the release version of EDO and all that that brings to the table. I think the key difference is that Elite's galaxy feels like an actual place, unlike NMS - and that allows me to forgive its shortcomings in other areas. Simply flying around, landing on planets or docking at stations is fun enough for me to keep engaged. I don't get this at all in NMS.
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The problems I always end up with are the following:
- The flight model really is utter, utter rubbish. There's no depth to it, and for someone like me who wants to enjoy flying a spaceship, that is a big problem. I actively try to run away from 'pirates pew pew' in NMS because the way it plays out and I don't enjoy it, at all.
- Planets seem diverse, until you realise they're just different variations of the same (but plentiful) sets of different elements mashed together randomly. You have your what, 3-4 weather types (which I think all end up having similar aspects, just affect your status bars differently), a set number of biomes, the gravity is always the same, the colours are pretty random (red grass with blue sky, blue grass with red sky, etc.), so is the landscape - including hills suspended mid air (if that's the price to pay for getting caves, I rather pass).
- Walking around is tedious, so is the driving model - WASD movement basically that's it (so pretty much in line with ship navigation). No intricate physics model involving gravity like we have with the SRV (which isn't perfect but it's much more fun and feels like driving a vehicle across a planet).
- Stations are all the same one model, same as the freighter (which you get for free and very early on - there's no build-up to obtaining one, and for me it's not satisfying as a major milestone in the game).
- I can't get used to the fact that space isn't black or at least dark. I don't really get the artistic decision behind this, maybe someone can explain it to me, beyond "cos it's colourful" that is.
- Everything is so full of everything both on planets and in systems in general, it's way too busy for my liking. I land on a planet in any location, and I see almost everything that planet has to offer, plus tons of loot lying around the place. As a result it feels like a themepark as opposed to a remote, desolate alien world that I'm 'exploring' as the first human being.
- A large part of the game appears to be about looting and inventory management. While I don't mind it per se, I feel I spend too much time in the relevant screens trying to combine stuff to make other stuff, that needs to be combined with other stuff to make new stuff. You get the idea. Busywork.
- The 'storyline' I don't really find very engaging, and I guessed the direction it'd be going early on. So have little motivation to progress through it, other than unlocking new gameplay elements. NMS isn't the only game that does that to be fair.
- The fact you can just restart a mission in the current system you are in might be convenient, but it feels super-gamey, as well as the portals - the problem with this is that any sense of place and distance is completely destroyed by it. Travel in Elite can be tedious and boring, but it does help convey the size & emptiness of the galaxy appropriately.
- The entire crafting/base building section - I find the entire gameplay loop really repetitive and boring; to the extent that I no longer bother with it, since most of the stuff is optional/already available elsewhere - which I suppose could be counted as a positive in equal measure.
This post is not to rubbish it by the way, NMS obviously appeals to many people, but I've been thinking about it quite often why I continue to bounce off NMS so hard, whereas I can't stop playing Elite despite ~4,000 hours in it - besides the obvious realism/audiovisual differences between the two. NMS has a lot of content now, but I just don't enjoy engaging with much of it - the often used 'mile wide inch deep' I find applies to NMS more than to Elite (I'm sure others disagree).
I did have a period of time where I spent about a dozen hours within a few days grinding through materials etc. to unlock new content, it was addictive at first but when I realised there's just another carrot waiting behind the one I'm currently trying to obtain, I burnt out rather quickly.
I know that this will not happen with Odyssey - I'm already struggling playing Horizons only because I can't wait to get going with the release version of EDO and all that that brings to the table. I think the key difference is that Elite's galaxy feels like an actual place, unlike NMS - and that allows me to forgive its shortcomings in other areas. Simply flying around, landing on planets or docking at stations is fun enough for me to keep engaged. I don't get this at all in NMS.
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You keep mentioning deluxe alpha does that hold some significance?
ED+EDO has a similar price tag as NMS - and it is valid to compare it from the perspective of playable content for that price.
That makes perfect sense, thanks.
theme park is a pretty good description for NMS, i guess - it is kind of a "disney world" and looks like it - Elite offers more realism, true, but let's face it - the real universe is pretty boring and mostly empty - so ED is realistic in this, but that doesn't make it an enjoyable game. To be entertaining it would need a bit of theme park atmosphere.
So it's said that the perfect game would be to have the generated planets, biosphere, and such from NMS, and flight and realism from Elite, but I think one more game would have to be included, Scrap Mechanic. Scrap Mechanic has the best base building and resource gathering. For me, EDO+NMS+SM = perfect space game.
plus EVE - EVE is nearly perfect, but it doesn't have the flight models and landable planets. I will buy EDO at some point in time, because i kind of like the on foot stuff - it is just not enough content to keep me playing for long. My main problem with ED is that i'm hitting a wall as soon as I try to do more than just scratching the surface of it - it is a shallow game and that is so sad, it could be so much more.
Deleted member 182079
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You could say that with Horizons planetary locations were grossly underused - this will change with EDO where not only do we have more settlements (in populated space at least) but also various POIs, some based on existing Horizons assets and some new. I posted in the Alpha forum a recent experience where I spent at least an hour on one single planet at various locations, half of them random POIs and the other mission related. There'll be more, and much needed, meat on the bone.
Whether the exploration side of things will enjoy the same level of additional content I'm not so sure, I'm dubious about the plant life we've been shown so far being sufficient enough but also I don't think we've seen everything as I reckon Frontier are holding back content.
Neither will stop someone who was happily exploring the galaxy the way it was in Horizons - they have more varied environments to look forward to at the very least, and being able to step outside the spaceship, even if it's just for a few meters and no real benefit, adds a lot to the sense of remoteness and isolation. Though I can see how players who prefer the busy NMS planets will not be impressed by that - but you can't please everyone anyways.
I’d been having a break from NMS because VR performance was pretty dire and I was hoping that buying a new graphics card would solve that (ha!). I let the game update today and had a looksee, still with my un-replaced GTX 1080 - I was still getting stutters planetside and was about to bin it again when I checked the settings; for some reason everything was set to Ultra when before I’d had it all Low/OffYou could talk to me about NMS all day though, I'm liking it more each time I play it
I dropped everything down a notch to High and things smoothed out reasonably well - there’s been some optimisation jiggery-pokery going on, apparently.
Space combat has had a bit of a change too - with a bit of throttle control I was able to get on the tails of pirate attackers and actually have a dogfight instead of the turret-in-space feeling I used to get from previous versions.
While it’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, I think it’s got a lot going for it (and has massively changed since the launch version I bought on day one). This may sound odd, but the gameplay feels very much like a modern day version of FE2 & FFE.
I think maybe that's part of why EDO isn't getting me excited at all. After playing NMS a lot in the past year I've already been enjoying Space Legs, only the NMS implementation is more robust and fully featured.
NMS has:
- Salvaging ship wrecks on foot
- Fleet Carrier interiors we can walk around
- Station interiors we can walk around
- Player Base Building (we can walk in and around them!)
- Planet surface mining
- Caves! Lots of caves to explore on foot!
- Space suit customizing
- Multiple ground vehicle types
- Atmospheric worlds
- Water worlds
- Lava worlds
- Hunting animals on foot
- Huge variety of proc gen surface plant life
I think I just expected a lot more out of EDO after all these years so focused on developing it.
I did but while ED is running dry for me NMS is adding new features and gameplay in regular updates.
EDO being centered around fps combat doesn't appeal to me at all and it's added exploration features based on a qte minigame is laughable at best imho.
ED used to be my number one game but it has been overtaken by NMS in a lot of ways except graphics fidelity and flight model.
And one thing to note is HG's excellent bug fixing, they release frequent patches while Fdev only fix the most apparent bugs just after a major update while others are totaly ignored.
And pets, don't forget pets.
Actually, one of the features that I appreciate most, above everything in NMS is that the missions don't have time constraints. I can pick up missions today, turn off game, pick it up again next month. The reason I like that is because I have a busy family and there's a lot of interruptions constantly. Elite is hard to play because I will for sure be forced to leave the keyboard now and then while playing, and it's not so great while you're in combat. Hence my preference to play alone, solo, exploring far out in the galaxy. I can always park in space and come back later.
I was playing NMS a couple of weeks ago and its come a long way from its release.
It has. I have good memories from both Elite and NMS. They're both good games, but for different reasons. I played NMS to the point that I got bored of it too. When they came with the pet update, I played it for a week or two and got a bunch of pets and gene-spliced them and such, and then I was done again. What I would like to see there is some better base building. More brick and mortar kind'a building instead of finished blocks of things. There are times I wanted to do something, and you can't because there isn't the kind of asset you want, and one way is to use glitch-building sometimes, but I don't like doing that either.
Not too sure why I'm bothering with this on page 13x, but I'll tell you this. I never wanted space legs, you won't have to go far through my post history to find me begging the devs to use the resources to make a better spaceSHIP game.
Having said that, I did buy the alpha, cos, you know, I wanted to know if it was going to be worth it.
It will be. The shooting mechanics are good enough, not awful, nor spectacular. The feel of the bases, both abandoned and populated is excellent, they really feel alive if you don't get gripey about the janky animations that will surely get fixed. The number of ways to approach certain mission objectives is in true ED style and reminds me of some of the best games of this genre (thief, splinter cell, hitman), however, I do worry that some of the patrols are a bit too cut and pastey, e.g. There's a level 3 clearance person doing a specific walk past a specific window on a specific schedule at every base of that type, it is now trivaial for me to obtain level 3 access at any base without detection.
tl;dr It's surprisingly promising, if a little detached from the 'spaceship' part of the game, but what's there is impressive for an alpha and broad enough in concept to justify the marketing to date. I could still easily live without it, but it will provide an occasional interesting distraction and probably some funny pvp moments, which is really all I could ask for.
Having said that, I did buy the alpha, cos, you know, I wanted to know if it was going to be worth it.
It will be. The shooting mechanics are good enough, not awful, nor spectacular. The feel of the bases, both abandoned and populated is excellent, they really feel alive if you don't get gripey about the janky animations that will surely get fixed. The number of ways to approach certain mission objectives is in true ED style and reminds me of some of the best games of this genre (thief, splinter cell, hitman), however, I do worry that some of the patrols are a bit too cut and pastey, e.g. There's a level 3 clearance person doing a specific walk past a specific window on a specific schedule at every base of that type, it is now trivaial for me to obtain level 3 access at any base without detection.
tl;dr It's surprisingly promising, if a little detached from the 'spaceship' part of the game, but what's there is impressive for an alpha and broad enough in concept to justify the marketing to date. I could still easily live without it, but it will provide an occasional interesting distraction and probably some funny pvp moments, which is really all I could ask for.
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