Certis wrote:This is the catch-all for No Man's Sky to discuss the game itself. Discussions about the developers of the game or controversies surrounding them can go to their own thread.
Is this the go forward rule from here on out for all games? For example some controversy springs up around the new DX for their "All Aug Lives Matter"
It's not the controversy, it's the sheer volume it took up on the overall thread. The NMS discussion around how big a liar the lead developer was has been ongoing since before launch and taking up a lot of space. When that happens we often split side topics on to their own threads or (in this case) make a new one with a slightly tighter focus so things remain readable. Anyone who wanted to make a thread to continue to discuss the Sean Murray issues was (is) welcome to do so.
I made it to the 3rd planet in my starting system over the long weekend. What a treat!! It's a cold Ocean Moon orbiting around the much larger mineral-rich planet that I had been mining for the last few weeks. The experience of going from a rocky desert-like giant of a planet to the ocean was awesome! There's just a few small ridges and plateaus of land, most of which have a small shelter of some kind on them, and the rest is water. Honestly, I've been kind of disappointed in the scenery on the first two barren planets that I explored, but the ocean is a joy! I love moving quickly through the water with the Jet Pack, and seeing the schools of sea-horse like alien fish go swimming off as I approach. Really, my only complaint is that there's so much water I constantly have to manage my exo-suit.
Survival tips!
As each environment can vary drastically they likely require different exo-suit upgrades and protection mechanisms. Don't be afraid to dismantle old protections to replace them with new ones for your specific environment! I've stripped all my shield upgrades and radiation upgrades from the last planet to replace them with a cold protection upgrade and double down on the breathing apparatus for longer trips underwater.
Also, keeping those exo-suit upgrades charged generally takes a healthy amount of Zinc or Tritanium, which I've found to be very rare on the planets I've visited so far. However, building up those shielding plates takes only Iron, which is generally widely available. A full shielding plate will give you a 100% charge on any suit upgrade and only takes 75 Iron, compared to needing 50 Zinc.
I was getting pretty burned out on this game. I was trying to max out my ship storage by repeatedly finding and fixing crashed ships, but that got tedious real fast. So I decided I'd just focus on having fun instead. I found a ship I liked (only 26 slots but I liked the way it looked), and threw a bunch of upgrades on it. Upgraded the beam weapon and shields to make ship battles easier, and built all the hyperdrive upgrades so I could get around faster.
Warning, rant ahead:
I heard the Atlas path was pretty underwhelming so I figured I'd just focus on getting to the center of the galaxy. Every time I ran into Nada and Polo I asked for directions to the nearest black hole so I could get there faster.
But every time I flew through a black hole one of my hyperdrive upgrades would break. And every time it cost 500 Emeril, 500 Gold, and 2 Dynamic Resonators to fix. Gold and Emeril are both pretty easy to find, but it seems like each planet will only ever have one or the other (or neither), so I'd need to visit at least two planets and fly around looking for big shiny lumps. Plus, it takes a while to mine 500 gold/emeril so I spend a lot of time mining. I have the recipe for dynamic resonators, but it takes chrysonite which is pretty rare so I usually just had to fly around looking for somewhere to buy them instead.
But once I fixed my hyperdrive again I could continue on my fun journey to the center of the galaxy! For fun!
Except of course I need to keep fueling my hyperdrive. The necessary resources are easy to acquire, so that's not a big deal, but I do need to craft four different things just to make 1 warp cell and the crafting UI is incredibly tedious.But I can jump so much further now! I'm traveling so fast! Why I must be near the center of the galaxy already. Let's check. Hmm, distance to the center: either 1.6 million light years or 160,000 ly (I forget which, I just remember it started with 16). Well that makes sense, space is pretty big after all. Good thing my ship is so fast now! How far can I jump? Hmm, looks to be about 500 light years.
Wait.
What.
That's a LOT of jumps to get to the center. I can probably speed that up by finding more black holes, but then I'll need to mine even more gold and emeril to keep fixing my stupid hyperdrive. I'm not having fun. All the things I want to do are obstructed by a ton of tedious f*cking chores. This is turning into homework. This is the opposite of fun.
I'm done.
I was getting pretty burned out on this game. I was trying to max out my ship storage by repeatedly finding and fixing crashed ships, but that got tedious real fast. So I decided I'd just focus on having fun instead. I found a ship I liked (only 26 slots but I liked the way it looked), and threw a bunch of upgrades on it. Upgraded the beam weapon and shields to make ship battles easier, and built all the hyperdrive upgrades so I could get around faster.
Warning, rant ahead:
Spoiler:I heard the Atlas path was pretty underwhelming so I figured I'd just focus on getting to the center of the galaxy. Every time I ran into Nada and Polo I asked for directions to the nearest black hole so I could get there faster.
But every time I flew through a black hole one of my hyperdrive upgrades would break. And every time it cost 500 Emeril, 500 Gold, and 2 Dynamic Resonators to fix. Gold and Emeril are both pretty easy to find, but it seems like each planet will only ever have one or the other (or neither), so I'd need to visit at least two planets and fly around looking for big shiny lumps. Plus, it takes a while to mine 500 gold/emeril so I spend a lot of time mining. I have the recipe for dynamic resonators, but it takes chrysonite which is pretty rare so I usually just had to fly around looking for somewhere to buy them instead.
But once I fixed my hyperdrive again I could continue on my fun journey to the center of the galaxy! For fun!
Except of course I need to keep fueling my hyperdrive. The necessary resources are easy to acquire, so that's not a big deal, but I do need to craft four different things just to make 1 warp cell and the crafting UI is incredibly tedious.But I can jump so much further now! I'm traveling so fast! Why I must be near the center of the galaxy already. Let's check. Hmm, distance to the center: either 1.6 million light years or 160,000 ly (I forget which, I just remember it started with 16). Well that makes sense, space is pretty big after all. Good thing my ship is so fast now! How far can I jump? Hmm, looks to be about 500 light years.
Wait.
What.
That's a LOT of jumps to get to the center. I can probably speed that up by finding more black holes, but then I'll need to mine even more gold and emeril to keep fixing my stupid hyperdrive. I'm not having fun. All the things I want to do are obstructed by a ton of tedious f*cking chores. This is turning into homework. This is the opposite of fun.
I'm done.
Your rant is totally valid. I get it.
For me, NMS is my Zen space. When I play this game, I am in a state of continuous calm and happy. I'm somehow wired to like that homework. I honestly enjoy the mining and crafting and the mystery around navigation. I squealed like a little girl last night when I somehow managed to find the one trading post on the tiny ocean moon I'm currently exploring. I think the reason I'm enjoying it so much is that I have no goals. I'm not focusing on ship or exo suit upgrades. I'm not following the Atlas Path nor journeying to the center. I'm just playing. And I'm smiling like a crazy person the whole way. 
The game does seem a bit bipolar at times... it both wants you to explore the incredibly massive universe it has generated but it also forces you to slow down the rate at which you can explore. As much as you want to do deep space exploration, you have to take the time to do a fair amount of exploration of individual planets.
What I find interesting about the game design is that really speaking it doesn't matter which you are doing, you'll likely have roughly the same experience. Solar systems don't seem to be generated with themes; planets don't seem to have attributes based on size/mass/distance from the sun/etc. Really speaking you are just as likely to find something cool on that other planet in the solar system as you are in the next one over. At least that's been my experience.
I do think it's possible the "goals" of the game have made it a more frustrating experience for some people, which is unfortunate. Resource collection and depletion are in direct odds against deep space exploration. Survival games work because staying alive is a very relatable goal and has the permanence of death looming over your shoulder. No Man's Sky applies elements of survival games to a game where exploration is the goal, not survival, and I think it may have detracted from what the game seems to do really well.
I haven't played in a couple of weeks but I'll likely dive back in from time to time. There really are some cool sights to see, you just need to be patient enough to work through the game's mechanics to find them
Your rant is totally valid. I get it.
For me, NMS is my Zen space. When I play this game, I am in a state of continuous calm and happy. I'm somehow wired to like that homework. I honestly enjoy the mining and crafting and the mystery around navigation. I squealed like a little girl last night when I somehow managed to find the one trading post on the tiny ocean moon I'm currently exploring. I think the reason I'm enjoying it so much is that I have no goals. I'm not focusing on ship or exo suit upgrades. I'm not following the Atlas Path nor journeying to the center. I'm just playing. And I'm smiling like a crazy person the whole way. :)
I get that, and that's totally how I started out too. The problem for me is that it starts to get old really quickly.
The first time you find a crazy acid rain planet or a giant hopping pineapple it's really cool. The fourth time? Not so much. The first time you encounter a big space battle it's really exciting! Until you find out that unless you have like 5 stacks of oxides to recharge your shield there's really no point. And even when you do kill all the attacking ships the most you're going to get is a small handful of resources and an approval gain from one of the alien factions. Not that approval matters, since you can max it out super quick and it really doesn't do anything significant anyways.
And sure, you still occasionally stumble across something new and interesting, maybe a really goofy looking animal or something, but those moments become fewer and fewer as time goes on. That's where I start to need a goal to motivate me, and the problem is that most of the goals built into the game are really, really tedious.
Rant trimmed for brevity
Dude, I'm going to level with you. Based on what you're finding frustrating, you do not want to make your goal "reach the center of the galaxy". Spoilering for obvious reasons.
It's even more dissatisfying than the Atlas path completion. Now, in fairness, I actually completed the Atlas path, but only watched a video of the center of the galaxy.
You issue the command to jump to the center of the galaxy, and then the camera zooms back at increasing speed away from the center of the galaxy until everything fades to darkness. After a bit, the game starts over with you crashed at a planet; you retain all your unlocked slots and installed equipment, but everything is broken. Everything.
Have fun!
So yeah... if you pursue that goal you're going to end up disappointed and probably pissed off. The game is about exploring these randomly generated planets. If that in and of itself is not enough for you to enjoy, do yourself a favor and shelve it.
Fortunately it's great for me to just chill out and explore with little to no purpose, but I understand that I'm a bit different in that regard.
Oh, I've already given up on that goal. I was just looking for something to motivate me to keep going.
I'm done playing for now. Maybe I'll hop back in if/when the game receives a major content update.
I'm not even really that dissatisfied with the game. I had fun with it. I just think that if the game is going to have any long-term appeal there either needs to be more stuff to do, or the stuff already in the game needs to be less frustrating. Preferably both.
Tom Chick giving this 1 star was enough for me to finally pick it up, and since I've still never seen any of the pre-release videos/screenshots/whatever, I'm able to enjoy it for what it is rather than being upset about what it isn't. And I am. This will probably end up making my end-of-year top 10.
That said, I have no idea why Hello Games thought there was a market for a game that's almost entirely the empty planet exploration from Mass Effect -- a game system that was so unpopular with the people-who-buy-sci-fi-games crowd that it was removed from the sequel and replaced with a system of moving the mouse back and forth across the screen for a few minutes at a time. Then Hello Games went and lessened the appeal even more by layering a terrible inventory grind on top of it.
I've joined some of you in naming something Starbucks. I've also added Dunks, and Tully or Gloria Jean to the places I've explored.
How long did it take you to get the first Atlas Pass? Is it after the hyperdrive?
ThatGuy42 wrote:Your rant is totally valid. I get it.
For me, NMS is my Zen space. When I play this game, I am in a state of continuous calm and happy. I'm somehow wired to like that homework. I honestly enjoy the mining and crafting and the mystery around navigation. I squealed like a little girl last night when I somehow managed to find the one trading post on the tiny ocean moon I'm currently exploring. I think the reason I'm enjoying it so much is that I have no goals. I'm not focusing on ship or exo suit upgrades. I'm not following the Atlas Path nor journeying to the center. I'm just playing. And I'm smiling like a crazy person the whole way. :)I get that, and that's totally how I started out too. The problem for me is that it starts to get old really quickly. ...
Quote lengthened for brevity. I really like Muttonchop. I'm pretty sure we have been on many of the same game catch-all forums together.
So, I have to ask.
Are you future me? Did you take the red pill and I'm the crazy peon who went blue and back into the Matrix? How long do I have until I reach these conclusions and lose my happy place?
my multi tool, exosuit and ship tech placement is all over the place, so I dont think I am getting the benefits of the upgrades.
I guess I am going to have to bite the bullet and dismantle everything to get the correct placements..could take a while.
Patch notes list something I think is a HUGE improvement, if only a small one:
Reduce Suit VO for life support warnings and only do life support VO on 25% and 50%.
Reddit has compiled a list of changes in patch 1.08 since the devs haven't put out patch notes for it yet. I'm interested to fire it up now as they're adding in some nice things for us:
Improved lens flare
Improved storm effects
New puzzles in transmission towers (thank gawd!)
Nerfed space combat lock on
I'm not sure what the last thing is as I've never bothered with whatever weapon(s) lock on.
Cool to see them adding things now instead of just bug fixes. I'll be bouncing in tonight to finish up the solar system I am in for sure.
Patch notes list something I think is a HUGE improvement, if only a small one:
Reduce Suit VO for life support warnings and only do life support VO on 25% and 50%.
I posted a suggestion to remove the warnings for 75% and 50%. I got an answer, presumably from a developer, that the warnings will be screen-only after a patch, i.e. no robot voice.
garion333 wrote:Patch notes list something I think is a HUGE improvement, if only a small one:
Reduce Suit VO for life support warnings and only do life support VO on 25% and 50%.I posted a suggestion to remove the warnings for 75% and 50%. I got an answer, presumably from a developer, that the warnings will be screen-only after a patch, i.e. no robot voice.
Ah, you really don't want to remove the 50% warning. On the average planet, sure, it doesn't matter. But there are planets that are damaging enough you really want that the warning. Particularly when the storms roll in.
A better solution would be to either let the player set the warning levels, or to automatically adjust the warning levels based on the lethality of the environment.
Last night's adventure: I spent a literal hour on the Ocean Moon underwater. Perhaps one of my favorite gaming adventures in recent history.
It started from a shelter found on a rocky outcropping. Using my Bypass Chip I was able to locate a Monolith that was a mere 3:30 minutes away, but it was straight out into the ocean with no land visible. I mined a literal ton of nearby iron, and nearly filled my inventory with shielding plates to keep my breathing aparatus powered. Then with a good running melee-jetpack lunge, I was off!
It's a serene journey underwater. The sound of my jetpack muted in the water as I glided along, the different ocean critters skittered this way and that as I passed by. The seaweed-like plants gently swayed back and forth with the current, and strange bioluminescent underwater trees lit the way. As I followed my HUD marker deeper and deeper into the water and further and further from land I kept scanning for anything of interest. But it was like a desert. No valuable resources, no broken machinery or cargo pods, and not a language stone to be seen. Suddenly looming out in the distance I could see the monolith. Immediately after I increased my knowledge of the Korvax Convergence, I pinged my scanner again to see what was around me. Low and behold 5 new locations sprung up on my HUD to investigate, all about 2 minutes away in roughly a 60 degree arc around, and all in this immense underwater canyon. I charged up the breathing apparatus again, and set off to each point in sequence, continuing my quest to learn more of the alien race that once settled this amazing world.
This is why I love this game. I only wish I had taken screenshots or recorded the video, because the journey was outstanding and ultimately the perfect escape for my night.
I'm a latecomer to the game and just started playing this week on the PS4. I've loved the initial experience having had my expectations tempered by the feedback it's received in the gaming community since launch and will enjoy the ride for now.
If anyone else is on PS4, are you still experiencing random crashes/freezeups? It's happened twice to me so far so I've gotten into the habit of saving constantly.
I've just left my starting planet and now feeling oddly nostalgic for its harsh, scorched climate. Has anyone ever returned to their first planet after some time?
If anyone else is on PS4, are you still experiencing random crashes/freezeups? It's happened twice to me so far so I've gotten into the habit of saving constantly.
I also play on the PS4, but haven't experienced any random crashes, but I'm on pretty infrequent because of my class schedule.
New patch is out. Reddit says this so far:
Stacking exploit removed. You can keep using any existing stacks you have however.Some reports of slightly improved graphics and sounds.
Reported that saves are quicker.
A report of finding the last missing fauna discovery quickly.
Can no longer hold down square while uploading multiple discoveries, nor triangle when moving multple pieces of inventory.
That last one stinks. It's already irritating to upload all your discoveries, having to hit the button over and over again stinks.
If the third point is true, I might have to go back (yet again) to the cool system--I have one last fauna that I just couldn't find.
Stacking exploit removed. You can keep using any existing stacks you have however....
Can no longer hold down square while uploading multiple discoveries, nor triangle when moving multiple pieces of inventory.
Glad to see they're working hard making things... less... user friendly...?
ffs.
That seems like a good way to burn bridges and sabotage your own future employment prospects.
Edit: I've seen this reported as attributed directly from Sean Murray, then as a disgruntled employee, and finally as a hack. Games journalism... man.
Edit: I've seen this reported as attributed directly from Sean Murray, then as a disgruntled employee, and finally as a hack. Games journalism... man.
In the same article that Legion linked.
This is coming from the horse's mouth. Or, at least, the horse's email account.
Clearly something weird is going on over there.
And yeah, if it was a rogue employee, games are a relatively close-knit industry and indie games are even smaller. People will talk.
Though the twitter accounts seem to be saying that it was a hack?
Clearly something weird is going on over there.
And yeah, if it was a rogue employee, games are a relatively close-knit industry and indie games are even smaller. People will talk.
Though the twitter accounts seem to be saying that it was a hack?
A hack certainly seems more likely than a really dumb, disgruntled employee I guess.
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