that's also my feeling after playing it for a bit.
Game Discussions The No Man's Sky Thread
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that's also my feeling after playing it for a bit.
Well, giant companies like Sony who need to leverage everything possible to sell their products and influence word of mouth definitely pay for reputation management -- it's such a booming, incredibly greasy business these days! Just googling around at the firms that do it will make you vaguely nauseous.
Speaking of!
The game.
Ok, right off the bat I was hit by all the tech issues people are moaning about. When coupled with no main menu and being forced to sit through that intro, tearing and juddering all over the screen repeatedly - ick. You can tell the control scheme for mouse/keyboard was an afterthought, several bits aren't finished or consistent. Don't like the UI. After tweaking the settings as suggested I got in the game which seemed a little better but i'd still get microfreezes, the first game to run so badly on my new 1070... no wonder they tacked on a desperate additional few day delay for the PC version! Phew, should've taken all of August.
The first planet had a pleasing color scheme and I enjoyed jetpacking about around figuring out the game, I haven't watched many streams or paid close attention to the moment to moment "actual gameplay" so wanted to work it out for myself. And oh, how the "chilled back vibe" this is supposed to have is hampered by the constant whining for resources and inventory management, two tasks I find utterly joyless with this UI. Click. Click. Click. It needs a balance tweak to let people stretch their space legs and explore a bit without being hectored constantly to make small numbers into bigger numbers.
Space legs, speaking of: very clumsy stuff. Incorporating both FPS and ship modes at once means neither are very good or too polished. It isn't satisfying, especially the flight. Sure, set aside the HOTAS -- this is a controller game. Sub Star Fox with combat 1/4th as crunchy and fun. Walking around on foot is awful. We've been so spoiled by those fun SRVs, I sure hope Frontier are paying attention and put off walking about until they damn well get it right as well as the flight and driving models.
I enjoyed the various critters I saw but imagine how much nicer if they had a real twisted genius working on the AI for them coding some intricate stuff that would lead to variations and surprises. Just after two hours of play I'm pretty confident the fauna in this game won't ever get up to much like they'd show in the early trailers or pie in the sky to reporters about. A pity.
After repairing everything and flying off into space and the next two planets for some hollow npc encounters, I clicked through a few awfully stilted scripted sequences seemingly tacked on at the end of development that clash a bit with the tone of the rest of the game.
I'd be quite content if this were 19.99 or 29.99 but the price seems a bit much for the poverty of content. I'll give it another go this weekend... but my initial experience more than sated my appetite for er, this sort of thing.
One thing is very great indeed, the soundtrack: lovely stuff. Save money, buy their albums and skip the game until HG lower the price and release this bases/freighters update maybe.
6/10
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So, 5 hours later and I'm making my way along the Atlas path 
Have found some gorgeous planets, weird animals (what looked like a jumping pineapple came running at me at one point!), and generally had a fair bit of fun!
Technical stuff
- Framerate is good, locked to 60fps almost everywhere except for the odd stutter (much like Elite, could be some loading occuring?), this is with a GTX1080, at 2560x1600, with everything on max.
- Responsiveness is great, no input lag, easy to target sentinels and generally a very good feeling of interaction while walking
- Switching between using an XBoxOne controller and mouse/keyboard is no issue, even with all my HOTAS equipment plugged in. Default controls are fine
Game stuff
Pros:
- Planets are great, lore seems cool
- Crafting tech seems fun, there are a lot of mods and additions available even after just 5 hours
- Finding materials is fairly straight forward, and they are grouped sensibly so multiple materials can fulfill a single purpose
- Following the Atlas story works well as a tutorial, although it isn't always obvious what your next step is to activate the next part of the story
- Fun, in a strange way, and a nice feeling of progression
Cons:
- Too much to discover, meaning it doesn't feel very special. Pretty much every planet has whatever you need
- You don't get any connection to where you are. I don't even think I could find my way back to the previous star system I was in, everything is a bit of a blur navigationally. Just follow the line to the center and don't think too hard about it
- Flight mechanic is eaaaally simple, and not very fun
- Space combat is not great
- Inventory management is a pain, although as stuff is easy to find this can be alliviated by not hoarding everything you come across
All in all I think I will enjoy his for many many hours It is a cool single player RPG, set in a brilliant sci-fi universe, with polished controls and good performance. It isn't, however, in any way a competitor to Elite.
Have found some gorgeous planets, weird animals (what looked like a jumping pineapple came running at me at one point!), and generally had a fair bit of fun!Technical stuff
- Framerate is good, locked to 60fps almost everywhere except for the odd stutter (much like Elite, could be some loading occuring?), this is with a GTX1080, at 2560x1600, with everything on max.
- Responsiveness is great, no input lag, easy to target sentinels and generally a very good feeling of interaction while walking
- Switching between using an XBoxOne controller and mouse/keyboard is no issue, even with all my HOTAS equipment plugged in. Default controls are fine
Game stuff
Pros:
- Planets are great, lore seems cool
- Crafting tech seems fun, there are a lot of mods and additions available even after just 5 hours
- Finding materials is fairly straight forward, and they are grouped sensibly so multiple materials can fulfill a single purpose
- Following the Atlas story works well as a tutorial, although it isn't always obvious what your next step is to activate the next part of the story
- Fun, in a strange way, and a nice feeling of progression
Cons:
- Too much to discover, meaning it doesn't feel very special. Pretty much every planet has whatever you need
- You don't get any connection to where you are. I don't even think I could find my way back to the previous star system I was in, everything is a bit of a blur navigationally. Just follow the line to the center and don't think too hard about it
- Flight mechanic is eaaaally simple, and not very fun
- Space combat is not great
- Inventory management is a pain, although as stuff is easy to find this can be alliviated by not hoarding everything you come across
All in all I think I will enjoy his for many many hours
It is a cool single player RPG, set in a brilliant sci-fi universe, with polished controls and good performance. It isn't, however, in any way a competitor to Elite.
I played a couple of hours this evening, and here's my 2p for anyone who can be bothered wading through it:
It is an oddity, isn't it? The world it creates, albeit more fantasy than SF, drew me in almost immediately and as someone who loves the Jim Burns / Chris Foss look the visuals are lush. But the crafting system feels very clunky, even without the RNG results of ED's Engineers. I'm hoping that as the game progresses and the scope widens the need to micro-manage resources will be pushed further and further into the background. Because the idea of travelling hundreds of thousands of light years and having to craft Warp Cells for every jump makes Engineers seem like Pac-Man.
I was initially dismayed to realise that the game supports neither HOTAS nor TrackIR for the flight phase, but once I actually got into space and saw that it's closer to something like Freelancer or Galaxy On Fire than to Elite, I realised the custom controllers would probably be overkill. I still find myself panning my head while in the cockpit but I'm sure that's something I'll get used to. But for a game that transitions regularly between cockpit and first-person it makes sense to keep mouse/KB or joypad control for both.
I was trying to think of which other games parts of it reminded me of, but I realised after about an hour that it's less about the individual games it resembles (although there are a number) and more about the overall aesthetic. Then the penny dropped. I'll tell you exactly what No Man's Sky looks and feels like to me: if there was a parallel universe out there in which the Commodore Amiga had got a 2000% performance boost sometime around 1993, NMS is exactly the sort of game that would have come out for it. It's like a fantasy 16bit experience rendered on 64bit hardware.
As for performance, I had some stuttering early on that I assumed was graphical but over time it's died away to a bare minimum, so I'm wondering whether that initial phase was more to do with client-server communication than with actual graphic rendering. The game was locked to 30 FPS by default and I've upped that to 60, but without an on-screen FPS counter I can't quantify exactly how smooth it is. It certainly feels nice and responsive, considering the amount of stuff being rendered. I've had one crash as a result of running out of RAM (probably my own fault as I run with no paging file and hadn't rebooted the machine since this morning).
My PC's specifications are in my signature, and have been unchanged since late 2013 so it's not a cutting edge machine by any stretch. I'm wondering if some (not all, obviously) of the people seeing performance issues and crashes are doing so because they've immediately gone in and cranked all the settings up to Ultra before starting the game proper. It's a trap I used to fall into a lot, especially with first person shooters, but over time I've learned to trust the auto performance detection of most software. It's there to maintain acceptable performance, not to make you feel inadequate...
I'll give No Man's Sky a proper workout tomorrow if I get the chance. For now I'm impressed, but not blown away. Just like the early incarnations of ED (some might say even the current incarnation) it sometimes feels more like a technical demo with a game tacked on rather than a product that's built around the gameplay, but it's original and unique enough that it should keep my interest for a while.
I certainly don't think it deserves the panning it's had on Steam and social media, but then perhaps it's easy to say that when I've had two hours of play out of it. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I couldn't even get it to run...
It is an oddity, isn't it? The world it creates, albeit more fantasy than SF, drew me in almost immediately and as someone who loves the Jim Burns / Chris Foss look the visuals are lush. But the crafting system feels very clunky, even without the RNG results of ED's Engineers. I'm hoping that as the game progresses and the scope widens the need to micro-manage resources will be pushed further and further into the background. Because the idea of travelling hundreds of thousands of light years and having to craft Warp Cells for every jump makes Engineers seem like Pac-Man.
I was initially dismayed to realise that the game supports neither HOTAS nor TrackIR for the flight phase, but once I actually got into space and saw that it's closer to something like Freelancer or Galaxy On Fire than to Elite, I realised the custom controllers would probably be overkill. I still find myself panning my head while in the cockpit but I'm sure that's something I'll get used to. But for a game that transitions regularly between cockpit and first-person it makes sense to keep mouse/KB or joypad control for both.
I was trying to think of which other games parts of it reminded me of, but I realised after about an hour that it's less about the individual games it resembles (although there are a number) and more about the overall aesthetic. Then the penny dropped. I'll tell you exactly what No Man's Sky looks and feels like to me: if there was a parallel universe out there in which the Commodore Amiga had got a 2000% performance boost sometime around 1993, NMS is exactly the sort of game that would have come out for it. It's like a fantasy 16bit experience rendered on 64bit hardware.
As for performance, I had some stuttering early on that I assumed was graphical but over time it's died away to a bare minimum, so I'm wondering whether that initial phase was more to do with client-server communication than with actual graphic rendering. The game was locked to 30 FPS by default and I've upped that to 60, but without an on-screen FPS counter I can't quantify exactly how smooth it is. It certainly feels nice and responsive, considering the amount of stuff being rendered. I've had one crash as a result of running out of RAM (probably my own fault as I run with no paging file and hadn't rebooted the machine since this morning).
My PC's specifications are in my signature, and have been unchanged since late 2013 so it's not a cutting edge machine by any stretch. I'm wondering if some (not all, obviously) of the people seeing performance issues and crashes are doing so because they've immediately gone in and cranked all the settings up to Ultra before starting the game proper. It's a trap I used to fall into a lot, especially with first person shooters, but over time I've learned to trust the auto performance detection of most software. It's there to maintain acceptable performance, not to make you feel inadequate...
I'll give No Man's Sky a proper workout tomorrow if I get the chance. For now I'm impressed, but not blown away. Just like the early incarnations of ED (some might say even the current incarnation) it sometimes feels more like a technical demo with a game tacked on rather than a product that's built around the gameplay, but it's original and unique enough that it should keep my interest for a while.
I certainly don't think it deserves the panning it's had on Steam and social media, but then perhaps it's easy to say that when I've had two hours of play out of it. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I couldn't even get it to run...
You say that, but current PS4 (& XB1) technology isn't that far removed from an AMD APU. A shoddy port from either of these systems shouldn't happen, they both use the same PC architecture, the same that is used in a lot of AMD APU's, which should also be able to run it.
If an AMD APU can run it in an XB1 or PS4, any modern PC should be able to run it. There really isn't that much of a port to do, yet it seems to have been cocked up...
Turns out I cant run NMS at all due to SSE, so both the CPU and GPU min specs are officially false. Will see if they fixed it during the winter sale.
Will see if they fixed it during the winter sale.Sony is not even publishing the PC version. Only the PS4 version is published by Sony. Hello Games is the publisher for the PC version.
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Who still remembers the game Virus?
[video=youtube;1S6GqqKgEIM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S6GqqKgEIM[/video]
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I downloaded at 1 PM Est. Played for about 2 and a half hours - promptly asked for a refund. It's been the only game I've ever asked for a refund on. I got my money back about an hour later.
This.
Viking84 said:
Also this.
I've played for about 2 hours. It's the Fisher Price space game. Flying is just a means to an end, rather than an enjoyable activity in itself. Not sure I like it.
Given SC has devolved into a scam at this point, E
is the undisputed king of the space games. By the time atmospheric planets and walking in ships are added, it'll be a juggernaut.Nope. NMS is not a sim. Most of the time is spent in FPS mode on planets.
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I remember seeing Zarch on the Acorn Archimedes and being blown away, utterly mesmerised.
P.S I did not know that it was made by David Braben until now when I searched in on youtube
Anyway, No Man Sky reminds me of that game a bit.
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There we have it boys,
No Man's Sky is the biggest Steam launch of the year:
http://www.pcgamer.com/no-mans-sky-sales/?
No Man's Sky is the biggest Steam launch of the year:
http://www.pcgamer.com/no-mans-sky-sales/?
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Didnt know that, but seems Sony is run by smart people! They get the good press of a decent PS4 release and HG gets scorned for the PC version...
2Gb GTX770 running 1920x1080 - nice smooth at 60 FPS synched - some minor judders now and again, but nothing close to 10 FPS.
As I said before, I didn't get, so don't run, my copy via steam. I can't honestly see why this would be 'the issue', but it is what it is. No crashes nor hangs yet either - now 4-5 hours of gameplay.
It sounds like something odd's going on... <shrugs>...
Edit: I set my FoV to 100, makes the walking about feel a lot better. Flying not so much - this game really needs head-tracking...
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Its multiple things, really. Dont forget that with such masive sales, a 'small number' of problems can lead to tens of thousands of angry people. I suspect part is AMD CPU: with SSE not set as requirement and no AMD cpu mentioned on steam, I suspect they didnt thoroughly test AMD CPUs much. There are many other solutions reported, a major one being that the default FPS limiter in-game seems borked. Normally you reduce it to get a lower maximum FPS at the increase of framerate stability, but here it does something wonky. Many people reported much better framerates with the FPS limiter increased, which shouldnt happen. Somewhat reminds me of classic Bethesda releases, and I wouldnt be surprised to see a flurry of patches the coming weeks that'll fix most major problems. Wouldnt even surprise me if they worked on bypassing the SSE requirement as you *can* already run it through a SSE simulator. Although with horrible FPS obviously.
Congratulations are in order, good job HG.