No Man's Sky - Procedural space game

[Phixsator]

Its easy to throw up a list of games saying they are all simply in what you have to do in a poor attempt to justify NMS current implementation. But the real matter is not what you have to do but how you have to do it. Do you also go around saying life is boring because all you have to do is stay alive? you know one "simple" objective right? or is it more about how you choose to live that makes every walk of life so different? and this is where NMS falls flat on its face compared to what was promised imho. The current implementation is so basic its mind blowing. Now if some of you are enjoying yourselves then that is great at least not everyone is disappointing but why certain people are not angry about being lied to is beyond me.

 

[francky]

NMS, for me, is a bright ray of hope. Personally I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole, life's just too short, but it represents a type of game that I, as well as many others, are yearning for.
Although NMS has fallen flat on its face, it does show that the principle of it can be done, if only it were in capable hands. And this is going to happen.
Sometime soon, soneone is going to make their own version of the principle of NMS and this time do it right. It's bound to be on its way.
Just look at the sales figures, everyone and his mum are going to jump on the bandwagon, and I bet a number of those games are going to be what I've been waiting for.
So thank you NMS for opening the gates.

They are...its called Star Citizen. Chris Roberts.....don't let me down!

 

[Malevolence]

Hmmm..

Spoiler

 

[Defiant306]

So much for the physics engine in the game, those planets lol

 

[TheVoice]

It is a perfectly fair and sensible assumption. There are numerous examples of this behaviour throughout the industry.

There are also numerous examples of Sony being patient with devs, allowing them extra time to get the game right and providing all the support indie devs need.

Frankly I think you're doing the developers a bit of a disservice by suggesting they weren't even in control of their own self-published project.

 

[lafemmefatale]

Nearly 60 hours in and been enjoying the heck out of this. Probably my best view so far.

Spoiler

 

[Spacedeck]

Love the criticism of the fact that the game has ' no depth' and how you have to '' Grind to get more ****, to get better **** then rinse and repeat'

Are people even complaining about this? I thought the bigger issue was about being lied to and not receiving the game they promised?

 

[Brizzles]

Its easy to throw up a list of games saying they are all simply in what you have to do in a poor attempt to justify NMS current implementation. But the real matter is not what you have to do but how you have to do it. Do you also go around saying life is boring because all you have to do is stay alive? you know one "simple" objective right? or is it more about how you choose to live that makes every walk of life so different? and this is where NMS falls flat on its face compared to what was promised imho. The current implementation is so basic its mind blowing. Now if some of you are enjoying yourselves then that is great at least not everyone is disappointing but why certain people are not angry about being lied to is beyond me.

I've only listed games that i have played, so have experience with.

I love Battlefield, which i mentioned, and will buy BF1, and countless sink 100s' of hours into it

But i don't expect BF to have any 'depth' to it . Kill the enemy / Win / Repeat .

Every game comes out with 'cinematic ' processed, selected cut scene, glimpses of the game.

NMS has done the same, and whilst i am not blind to certain 'dubious' statements made by the devs - the legality of them will be decided no doubt.

I bought in expecting nothing more than my common sense imagined, and my purchase has been justified.

If you bought in expecting the game to be more than you imagined, then blame your own hype.

If something is too good to be true - Then it is

 

[Boycey0211]

Are people even complaining about this? I thought the bigger issue was about being lied to and not receiving the game they promised?

Yup, I've got more issues with the fact that its 'not as advertised' rather than repetitiveness.

I'VE JUST CHECKED, THE SAME ****ING E3 TRAILER IS ON THE STEAM STORE PAGE!! HOW IS THIS EVEN LEGAL!

Lol I mean I enjoy it but this is just wrong. Oh incase anybody wasn't already annoyed enough:

You may have heard recently that all future updates to No Man's Sky will be absolutely free. “We do want to add a ton of features, like we've just discussed: Freighters, bases, these type of things. But we want to do it for free,” Hello Games boss Sean Murray told Red Bull last week. “You've paid for the game, so you should get this stuff without paying even more money. So no, there will be no paid DLC, just patches."

Yesterday, however, Murray walked back those remarks very slightly in an interview with the Daily Star. He told the site that he was “perhaps naive” when he ruled paid DLC out completely, adding that it could happen if “maybe in the future there’s some reason why we just couldn’t possibly afford to do a certain feature without charging for it.”

 

[Drollic]

Isn't there something about stickers on console cases covering up the multiplayer info?

 

[Combat squirrel]

Yup, I've got more issues with the fact that its 'not as advertised' rather than repetitiveness.

I'VE JUST CHECKED, THE SAME ****ING E3 TRAILER IS ON THE STEAM STORE PAGE!! HOW IS THIS EVEN LEGAL!

Lol I mean I enjoy it but this is just wrong. Oh incase anybody wasn't already annoyed enough:

Looking at the creators quote he states he might not be able to do a free dlc.... Hahahahaha they just earned 100's of millions! Of course they can! Each of the team is set for life now!

 

[drunkenmaster]

The sad thing is that even if you forget all of the lies by Hello Games and how they completely misrepresented the game and continue to do so (just look at their Steam page, it still shows the E3 videos which are nothing like the game) and even if you knew nothing about the game and expected only a relaxing space exploration/survival game, it still fails miserably.

There are no actual solar systems. The planets don't rotate around a sun but are stationary, sitting together in a blob.

There are no stars, they're just part of the skybox but you can't fly to them.

The 18 quintillion planets that was so heavily marketed isn't impressive when you realize what that actually means: if you took 11 things and come up with 50 variations for each, that is close to 18 quintillion combinations. Most planets are entirely the same but with different bumps and colors, they have the same objects on them and largely the same resources. Once you've seen the first dozen planets, you've seen them all.

There is no actual differences between the ships, except the number of inventory slots. There are no ships specializing for say speed or combat.

You don't have a sense of scope / scale to your journey. In the galactic map you can see other stars but there's no sense of where you are in relation to the center of the universe. Likewise you don't have a way to track where you were. No mapping or history, waypoints or other ways of tracking your progress. There needs to be a way to see how you're progressing and also give some meaning to how far you've gone.

You can't actually fly between these systems or go into say the dark space or outer asteroid belt. The only way to travel between them is to open up the map and click warp, which initiates a loading screen animation and loads up the new planets. There is no deep space. The moons don't even go around the planets. All of the various wonders of the universe (neutron stars, supernovas...etc) are entirely absent. You never actually feel like you're flying in a real universe, you feel like you're in a skybox with 3 or 4 planets that are mostly the same, then you load up a new skybox with a new set of similar planets. It's nothing like say Space Engine, where you actually do get a true sense that you're in a real universe.

You can't even fly your ship. You can't fly low across a planet as there is an invisible boundary and you can't crash your ship. The controls are terrible, it has none of the complexity of other space flight sims.

You can't manually land your ship, you simply press a button for it to autoland. Tons of other maneuvers (like entering a space station) are entirely autopilot.

The asteroids which are everywhere have insane pop-in issues, they only show up like 50 meters in front of you.

The freight ships don't move, they just sit there passively forever. They add zero gameplay depth.

The space stations are all basically the same.

The planets are littered with outposts, all identical and with a single NPC alien standing still and staring into the wall.

The NPCs are entirely shallow, there is literally no point to even talking to them since they never say anything interesting and simply give you something random you likely don't need. Even the automated quest giving NPCs in Bethesda games that hand out those Radiant AI quests would be a massive improvement.

All of the monoliths are the same, it's nothing but a chore to chase them down. The words you learn don't add any depth to your interactions with the aliens, since they never have anything interesting to say anyway.

There are no actual biomes on each planet. Each planet is the same no matter where you land.

The animals are build on 14 different skeleton designs, with a bunch of random animal parts scrapped on top of each section to maximize the number of permutations and there is no attempt to make the animal make any sense in it's environment or have anything unique in it's behavior. The animals have no evolutionary history and their behavior is incrediby shallow.

There are no tall trees like were shows in E3, they're all saplings. There are no large forests, no large creatures. There are no large valleys, huge mountain peaks, no giant volcanos, all terrain is uniformly similar across planets.

The grinding which makes up most of the game is not only boring, but frustrating due to the completely messed up inventory management.

The interface is absolutely atrocious. It's amazing that it can be messed up this bad, the fact that we need a mod just to remove the requirement that you have to hold each click for a second speaks volumes. You need to load up a menu to do anything, and the menus are terribly designed and completely unintuitative.

The game is a technical mess. It looks like ass yet runs with all sorts of framerate issues.

The traveling on foot is insanely slow and tedious. There should have been a buggy or car, or at least some sort of fast jet pack like in Tribes.

It fails as a survival game since nothing in the game leaves you threatened. Each planet is seeded with abundant resources, and the few things that do attack you are easily defeated. Compare to minecraft where there's a very definite risk / reward system to exploring a deep cave system. Nothing really threatens you in a meaningful way.

The different minerals and resources don't really matter. Since most of the upgrades to explore the universe are yours within the first hour / two hours all the rest are kind of nice add ons.

There's no challenge to exploring. There's very little combat and what combat there is is very boring.

Inside a solar system there's no way to decide if a planet is interesting or not without actually visiting it. There should be some 'classification' of the planets e.g. class M, class X, etc that allows you to say a certain type of planet might be safe vs unsafe.

All planets are accessible right from the start of the game. I was excited about the idea of acid planets, radioactive planets, cold planets ... I was thinking that in order to explore a radioactive planet you'd need to craft some special gear. There was a pretty obviously gameplay loop where the dangerous planets had better minerals / ruins / whatever but were very hard to explore. Instead every planet is basically just a copy of the others.

The constant need to recharge things, which don't really serve a purpose. It makes the game very grindy without any positive feedback. Instead of feeling free to explore the world around me I feel annoyed that if I see something cool it means 30 seconds of tedium while I mine the abundant plutonium. I end up not landing and exploring because of how annoying it is that to take off again I have to enter a menu and recharge my ship.

None of the aliens interact with each other or have any sort of AI other than 'walk around a bit'. There's nothing to sit and watch. An occasional ship will fly overhead but they don't do anything. You never really see a battle take place or the ships acting in any sort of interesting manner.

A good summary I saw on reddit.

Some of the key things that are ridiculous oversights are, no majorly different planets, no big mountains, everything I've seen in countless videos feels insanely similar. No gravity changes which could effect gameplay, none.

The skyboxes and effective loading screens between sky boxes.... in a game hyped for being able to fly out of a planet and to other solar systems for full scale exploration is simply not being looked at.

These aren't solar systems, the systems feel, generic, stupid, fake, empty and devoid of life. Both ships you come across not moving like freighters, identical space stations, random asteroid being between planets rather than in belts or the odd rare one. No full system, no star, no planets orbiting, no multiple planets in a realistic orbit pattern and an asteroid belt(or 2 or 3) again in a realistic orbit.

For a universe(wait, forgot just a galaxy) with the entire premise being realistic travel around a realistic uni-galaxy, the sky boxes and effective loading between systems kills the single most talked about features.

These aren't remotely realistic systems, it doesn't feel like space, it feels like multiple nearly identical levels, where each sky box is a level with unrealistic (small and same all around) planets, sitting static in a random bit of dead space without any real features. No stars, no other cosmic features and ridiculous lack in difference between planets.

Then you get to the horrible ship, everyone hates the space combat and most seem to just run away from it, the fake non crashable ships that you can't really land but just press a button.

 

[ThePirateHulk]

My first concern is the performance issues are worrying, the porting of it was shocking from the comments on the reviews for the PC version. Hell it runs at 15fps on the PS4 at times, I would be up in arms if I had bought this on the PS4.

I'm actually quite happy with the performance of the PS4 version. The PC version however is a complete pigs ear. Runs at about 20fps at 720p with all settings on low on my gaming laptop (i7-4710HQ with an 860m which happily runs most games at 1080p on medium and many on high).

 

[Digital X]

Anyone else getting these sort of marks on screen? I'm worried it's a mod because every planet I've been too it has been different: http://i.imgur.com/m2gT9pL.jpg

 

[Wrinkly]

Green Man Gaming has it at 15% off. That was enough to tempt me so I grabbed a copy and set Steam up for the beta patches. Game runs great at 1440p with everything maxed on my 980Ti / [email protected]. Enjoying it so far though I wish it had a bit more of a threat factor as 99% of all lifeforms I have met have been passive. Even something along the lines of Minecraft Creepers. Most disappointing part for me is that you don't get to fly low or land your spaceship on planets / space stations manually.

 

[itchy]

I don't see where the is a game in NMS?

The is nothing to do except mine, minecraft on acid is all I come up with.

This is why I like the high waves and set sail, you not taking my money for nothing.

Elite dangerous is just about keeping me interested, but NMS is no more than a £20 now and again game.

The is nothing under the surface at all, land, mine, take off, land, mine etc ad infinitum.

 

[Digital X]

http://i.imgur.com/gFiMkSb.jpg Oh my. Luckily this planet has life, 50% complete already

 

[Boycey0211]

I don't see where the is a game in NMS?

The is nothing to do except mine, minecraft on acid is all I come up with.

This is why I like the high waves and set sail, you not taking my money for nothing.

Elite dangerous is just about keeping me interested, but NMS is no more than a £20 now and again game.

The is nothing under the surface at all, land, mine, take off, land, mine etc ad infinitum.

TBH there is a storyline if you choose to follow it, although that's very repetitive too.

You can get away without mining, it just makes it a bit more difficult, and when you've got you're guns upgraded mining takes 1/10th of the time.

I definitely couldn't recommend it for £40 though even after 20 hours played.

 

[Digital X]

Right, found the issue. Whenever I scan a plant or creature, an out line of it appears in the middle of the screen. It's moving if it's a creature, not moving if it's a plant.

What on earth would cause THIS..?

 

[Malevolence]

I'm still waiting for the video of someone playing this game without gathering any resources. After all, didn't Sean Murray himself state that it was entirely feasible to play and progress in the game without collecting anything if collecting resources wasn't your thing?