No Man's Sky Catch-All 2.0

These types of games live or die by their crafting system. NMS forgo the interesting crafting stuff in lieu of the utilitarian. I still had fun with the 30 hrs I put into it though.

The other problem with the resource collection was that most planets have 90% of what you need, with only a slight divergence beyond that for the more rare/scarce materials.

It's difficult to balance resource scarcity in a procedurally generated universe without ending up with bad outcomes (eg, making it impossible to progress if you start from certain locations) but this is where the poor Trade mechanics hurts the system further. It feels like they tried this with the Atlas passes, which only created greater frustration, and abandoned it in favor of random chance.

There could be entire discussions on just the terrible economic distribution of the game, but considering I just traded my copy of NMS in for credit towards the new Pokemon game, it doesn't really bother me anymore.

TheGameguru wrote:

Sheesh I remember some die hards literally believing this was going to be the only game they would ever play for the foreseeable future. Which apparently turned out to be 6 weeks

Elite: Dangerous players heard for months on end how no one was going to play Elite again once No Man's Sky came out.

No Man's Sky released and died in the space between two of Elite: Dangerous's quarterly updates.

*Legion* wrote:

No Man's Sky released and died in the space between two of Elite: Dangerous's quarterly updates.

Indeed, Elite has about 10x the concurrent players (4900) than NMS has right now (490).

*Legion* wrote:

No Man's Sky released and died in the space between two of Elite: Dangerous's quarterly updates.

And yet, I played No Man's Sky a lot longer than I ever played Elite: Dangerous.

woops.

*Legion* wrote:

Elite: Dangerous players heard for months on end how no one was going to play Elite again once No Man's Sky came out.

*snort* They don't play remotely the same either, nor did I ever get the impression they would. E:D is much more sim-heavy. So much so, I haven't got back into it in over six months because of the increased learning curve over the last several patches. I doubt I would survive 10 minutes in my Asp Explorer now, and i don't have the credits to deal with the many deaths it would take to learn twitch combat skills of that caliber. Good game while it lasted, though.

NMS was more a Zen exploring thing. I enjoyed what time I put in, but the community reaction to it kind of poisoned it for me, not so much the game-play itself.

Tyops wrote:
*Legion* wrote:

No Man's Sky released and died in the space between two of Elite: Dangerous's quarterly updates.

Indeed, Elite has about 10x the concurrent players (4900) than NMS has right now (490).

And that's just Steam numbers. A large portion of the E:D player base buys the game direct from Frontier's store. It was out for a long time before it had a Steam release at all.

E:D numbers got a significant boost in the weeks after NMS' release, too.

I may have said this in this thread already, but It seems like NMS was created by people who loved the empty planet exploration in ME1 -- which, to be clear, was a system so reviled that Bioware ditched it entirely for the two sequels. And then they just let the hype get completely out of control. Probably not entirely the fault of a small developer without an actual PR department, but they should have done something to temper the ridiculous expectations rather than fan the flames themselves.

That said, as someone who loved the planet exploration in ME1, I really enjoyed my time with the game. I may or may not go back if they put out some updates, but even if I don't I have no complaints about my purchase.

*Legion* wrote:

The final update to the Forbes story is just so... typical.

Now I honestly don’t know what happened, since Hello Games hasn’t responded to any of my emails or tweets and requests for further explanation

How do you just throw "servers hacked" out there and run off without another word? To say nothing of the Twitter and email "hacks", but those at least don't affect players directly. Were the game servers compromised? Other servers? What data was exposed? Customer data?

My initial guess was that it really was Murray who made that tweet, and everything since has been desperate backpedaling. I don't think the initial confusion was game journalists at fault, it was the studio not having its story straight. You may be thinking along similar lines, with the scare quotes you're using.

If that's an accurate guess, that's why they don't feel any particular need to follow up: there was no actual hack.

I picked this up on Friday used from GameStop. I started playing and was not whisked away into a glorious reverie. "Of course not," you say. "We've been writing about that for months." But I think that's at least as much the state of my headspace as the game.

The PS4 visuals are lamentable. I'm thinking it's graphically on-par with early PS3 games. The LoD rendering, the floating grass-like objects that are clumsily implemented 2D surfaces that rotate to stay orthogonal to the camera angle. I was so on Hello Games' side when I was ignorant of the game but this is painfully half-baked.

But I like it and it's growing on me. I had played for quite a few hours and was disappointed with the systems but when I tried something a little different I found another layer or two I'd been ignoring. I'm still in the poke-and-prod state and not looking up any FAQs so I'll need to be patient.

What I'm hoping, like practically the whole fanbase I'm sure, is that some time in the next few months there's a release that makes the game look like a PS4 game. Or even as good as RDR was on lesser hardware. Something. Until then, though, I'll still be poking and prodding.

I'm waiting for their next feature-patch before I dive in again, but sounds like you're at least having some fun with it.

At least two main devs have moved on to other work. I would be shocked if that mythical patch were coming.

Tyops wrote:

At least two main devs have moved on to other work. I would be shocked if that mythical patch were coming.

We'll see, I guess. They have been updating the internal builds on Steam, so there may at least be a bugfix patch.

PS4 trade in value now £4. I'll be hanging onto my copy and hoping.

I already traded mine in to Gamestop - with the 40% bonus for putting it towards Pokemon Sun & Moon, I think I got $7

Bubblefuzz wrote:

PS4 trade in value now £4. I'll be hanging onto my copy and hoping.

IMAGE(http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/80/80b7cb38e4de0f0423105f453eeae4bc1dbed6280fc80f9ed4a61823ac55c8e1.jpg)

NMS is the most expensive new release I have purchased in quite some time. I also passed on Paper Mario: Color Splash as finances allowed for only one. I wouldn't say that I regret the decision, but I haven't played NMS since the launch buzz, only scratching the surface before dropping out, with next to no desire to return. Color Splash looks to be good fun. In this regard NMS is a huge miss. Nevertheless, I simply had to experience it for myself, and, albeit briefly, it did deliver something unique and enticing.

It has left me more wary of jumping the gun with a pre-order. I could have waited a little while and paid a whole lot less to try it for myself. I did want to support the development team, though. I'm less sure of that decision now seeing as a few of the team are out, washing their hands of the game. I don't blame them due to the backlash, but it's still disappointing to consider that the game may now simply stand still.

*Legion* wrote:
Bubblefuzz wrote:

PS4 trade in value now £4. I'll be hanging onto my copy and hoping.

IMAGE(http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/80/80b7cb38e4de0f0423105f453eeae4bc1dbed6280fc80f9ed4a61823ac55c8e1.jpg)

It might if it was a magical sci-fi sandwich that received freshness boosts + additonal ingredients updates

Though hanging on in the hope NMS gets a game changing patch, I realise there may be more chance of a magic sandwich, but still at £4...

Base building seems like the wrong way to go at this point (though I think there was some discussion before release that they might look at that soon after release) ... but I guess that is incoming.

I have to give them credit, is seems they recognized that any talking they would do at this point would probably do more harm than good regardless of what they said, so they decided to shut up and do work on an actual update.
That said, I don't think that NMS is in any way salvageable, if their goal is even just a half-decent game they'd have to throw out everything and make something from scratch.

This week has at most 36hrs left.

Yeah, I recall SeanM talking about adding base building in one of his blogs on release day.

This game is all about the places you visit being ephemeral. Not sure I understand how building something permanent makes any sense. I'll check it out and see what they came up with.

absurddoctor wrote:

Base building seems like the wrong way to go at this point (though I think there was some discussion before release that they might look at that soon after release) ... but I guess that is incoming.

Is base building really going to have any point? It seems like a feature people wanted when the game was still supposed to be multiplayer, and that there would need to be some fundamental changes to the game's progression for stopping and building a base to make any kind of sense.

The cynic in me (also known simply as "me") thinks it will boil down to building a piece of base in order to facilitate building the next piece of the base, without any of the pieces actually impacting the gameplay loop in any way, a la Joseph Anderson's "You find and collect things in No Man’s Sky in order to make it easier for you to find and collect things in No Man’s Sky."

I'm curious on what they come up with, I'll definatelly hop back in once this hits live.

Starbound-style where your ship is your base could work.

Now that everyone knows going to the centre or following the Atlas path is pointless, they could build in better waypointing and let you plant your flag somewhere exploring outward from there.

Your base could have portals, so that all the other bases you build are connected. Think multi-world houses from Hyperion books. Where each room in your house is on another planet.

Hopefully the bases you build will be easy to head back to and marked on the map. I gave up on giving custom names to things when I realized I'd probably never see that planet again.

MoonDragon wrote:

Your base could have portals, so that all the other bases you build are connected. Think multi-world houses from Hyperion books. Where each room in your house is on another planet.

This would be hawt. I might should reread those books.

I'm onboard. I bought the game a week ago and have found myself on the spectrum from really enthralled to dismally disappointed, skewing from the latter toward the former the more I play. I'll be looking into the release notes with enthusiasm.

That said, I expect base building is primarily another storage mechanic. I'm at the point where I'm oscillating between 300-400K units and finally have a warp-capable ship. It's only got 16 slots, though, and to get something substantial (e.g., ~25 slots) is on the order of 1.7M units. Unless I dedicate myself to some serious asteroid mining, that's going to take forever. Of course I know I'm preaching to the choir. Also: please don't give me any tips. I'll figure it out.

I'm only a week in so the loops haven't worn down my interest. I've just returned to the planet on which I started and now knowing what's up am enjoying it. The snowy forested world with harsh night temperatures, the first world with a few hostile creatures. It's nice, for now.