No Man's Sky just keeps getting better
polygon.com
polygon.com
Once I got at least one of every variety of ship in a B-class or higher, there didn't feel like much else to aim for. I'd send guys off on freighter stuff to do quests, and then just kill time until they got back, sell their loot, do some ship upgrades, rinse, and repeat.
Everything the game does is serviceable, but nothing that really makes me say "I've gotta pick this up again!" The space combat was not up to the level, of, say, Freelancer, nor were the scavenging missions terribly enjoyable. I never really got into the multiplayer/co-op aspect, other than encountering other players running around the hub area.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my time with the game. I just don't feel the need to go back and play it some more, even with all the (admirable) content they keep putting into it.
If I wanna keep sinking dozens of hours into a game that seemingly goes on forever, I'm only 90 hours into Tears of the Kingdom.
I also wonder what I would have learned or built in the time that I've played that game.
What does you having more hours have to do with it?
I’ve been playing Assassins Creed: Black Flag recently and find it incredibly relaxing, I hardly need to focus, I just cruise around, find anything I fancy from the minimap, battle other ships and explore cool locations.
I’d say the same mostly goes for NMS, but I get more invested in that as upgrades require specific components, which are available on certain planets etc, it takes a little more thought, but there’s no requirement to rush these upgrades, I might need some rare resource, I might jump 30 times exploring different planets as I go because it’s not something I _really_ need to get right now, it will arrive when it arrives and the journey and ‘choose your own pace’ type exploration mean the most to me.
The obsession with productivity is weird. The entire point of earning money is to be able do the things you love. The biggest reasonable concern I can see in life is people spending immense amounts of times doing things they don't really enjoy, but somehow feel compelled towards nonetheless - like social media. I've put something like 2000 hours into Crusader Kings 2, and if I knew beforehand what I was getting into, I'd still do it again every single time. Just such an enjoyable and rewarding experience.
- Unreal Tournament (instagib)
- Stardew Valley
- Age of Empires 2
They all have one thing in common; they're extremely relaxing to play. Yes, even UT - I just turn my brain off and I stop thinking about life.
For all its complexity, it's actually pretty much relaxing and autopilot once you've crossed a few hundred hours.
m1 = Mouse button 1, "fire", in case of the pyro, the flamethrower
1000 years ago, in the original TF, I was a conc jumping medic, but pyro suits me better now that Medic conc grenades are gone. End of an era, imo.
Im more then happy at the cost/reward. Would seriously follow a new game by the same developer [1] the engoodening of No Man's Sky is a entertaining mini-doc on the game.
I can hear the cry of a thousand gamers if I tell them that I’ve crossed ~85 hours, longer than any other game so far, playing Super Mario 3D All Stars. The package the internet loves to hate. Oh well. :)
I am one example, I suppose, of how diverse gaming is.
I’d love to talk to one of the developers of that game. It’s so… strange; undercooked; odd.
Then again, I wouldn't compare playtime of Stairway to Heaven to an entire video game. Maybe Metallica's black album?
More of a "disagree on the premise of the article" than "game didn't have enough content".
1763.4 hours on record
I hate Destiny 2, it’s my favorite game.
There is so much cool content but they hide it behind time-wasting grind
I've started to figure out the language, karma and trade subsystems (and crafting), and have mostly mastered mining, long term survival in hostile environments and interplanetary travel. I ignored the personal and spacecraft combat stuff, because I haven't needed yet (running away has worked so far).
Anyway, I just got teleportation and interstellar travel, and suspect a lot more stuff is going to open up soon.
This is all in the initial mission, which I think is a tutorial.
It quickly became obvious that it was a fairly small amount of actual content basically painted different colors at random. Once the illusion fails, it failed HARD, at least for me.
How about, for the next update, they add tons and tons of new buildings, POI, and activities? Maybe a bit more variety to the enemies? Or maybe a bit of lorebuilding on why nearly every fucking planet in the universe is populated by the mechanized equivalent of PETA? (Like, seriously, there has to be at least one core world producing these things, and the energy requirements for universe-scale manufacturing would be literally off-the-charts.... hmm it would be cool to visit a hostile alien dyson sphere... where are the transports and logistics supplying them?)
Context: Arma is a milsim, and Epoch is a mod with basebuilding, where one can place a "frequency jammer" that creates a sphere around it where its owner can build a base (walls, doors, safes, etc), while others (non-owners) are prevented from building anything in the area.
A few friends and I played it for a while. Picked a server, built a base there, did some missions or just random squabbles with other folks, eventually got bored (or distracted by life events), abandoned it all, then repeated on some new server after a few weeks.
One day we were on a server where someone had managed to glitch the jammer underwater - easy to reach but it was considered impossible to destruct as it was out of reach of available firearms and explosives. We realized there was only one in-game weapon that was capable of firing underwater (SDAR), and it had very small damage numbers. Being really stubborn and persistent, we spent over 24+ hours straight, working in shifts, shooting at that jammer, while watching out for the base owners to ensure they can't get anywhere close to open the repair menu.
Upon the destruction of said jammer and announcing the victory, we all univocally decided that enough is enough and we've fully completed the game. Haven't played Arma ever since.
I used to be very into Dayz Mod and over the years it devolved into holding FOBs and just maintaining, maintaining, maintaining. Once we held the FOB and fortified it, it was night on impossible to raid if we were online, short of finding and fixing a Chinook with the 4000rpm miniguns on with a great pilot/gunner combo and some ground support.
It's quasi-social -- you can play with friends or go on missions with randos if you want -- but fundamentally a mellow, solitary sandbox to play in however you'd like. I like to collect neat looking spaceships, some people build amazing bases, and others basically use it as an outer space dog fighting game.
It's absolutely worth picking up if you want to putter around for a hundred or so hours in outer space.
At the galactic level, well, first, I never know where I am or what direction I'm going. In NMS, you don't see some oddly bright splotch of light slowly resolve into huge nebula as you slowly jump toward it, like you might in Elite. NMS doesn't seem to render much of the surrounding galaxy when it generates the skybox. There's definitely no sense of galactic orientation because there isn't anything like the Magellanic Clouds or distant galaxies off in the far distance. Your only views of the galaxy are either of the immediate vicinity or a tiny thumbnail.
But hey, without getting too far into spoilers, the whole "obviously procedurally generated" thing is part of the NMS universe's conceit, right? And out of universe, it's clear that Hello Games explicitly set out to *not* create a sim like KSP or Elite: Dangerous but rather something with a unique story and a different player experience entirely. I respect that. The game's a lot of fun, and the story it tells is deeply engaging, if that's what you want.
Also they're moving away from VR support rather than towards like NMS.
I used to love E:D but it's really gone to shit sadly and all the promises are moot. No atmospheric planets, no ship interiors, no VR when walking around.
It's a shame because it was building up to be great. Then frontier lost interest and started pulling resources away towards their rollercoaster and dino games :(
I think it's peak was when the deep core mining came out. And the decline with Odyssey which I never really played because they dropped VR.
I still have to try NMS. But at least the planets are more interesting.
I'm well aware of how Elite: Dangerous's procedural generation works. Frankly, I think it's is even more impressive than NMS's, since the Stellar Forge-generated galaxy has real structure to it: the spiral arms, areas of greater and lesser density, and so on.
> they seem to have given up on [planets with atmospheres]
Odyssey planets do have atmospheres, so I'm not sure what you mean.
> Also they're moving away from VR support rather than towards like NMS... [Frontier] dropped VR.
Well, first of all, FDev didn't drop VR. It works fine in Elite: Dangerous Odyssey. The way they implemented on-foot VR as theater mode instead of attempting to hack some kind of room-scale VR system into their engine—which has great support for seated VR—seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Contrast that with how NMS implements vehicle controls in VR. They do room-scale VR, so there's no transition to seated VR when entering a vehicle, which is controlled—and I use that term loosely—by basically waving your fists around in the air to work controls you can't feel. It's pretty awful.
Second of all, VR in NMS was very badly broken as of August, the last time I tried it out. And I'm running a brand new 5700X and 4070 Ti that can play Elite: Dangerous Odyssey on VR ULTRA at 45 fps worst case.
As far as the current direction of Elite: Dangerous? Sure, there's plenty to criticize, but after over 10k hours, I'm still really enjoying it. I'm still learning new things. I'm still following the story. I'm still engaging with other players. I'm still buying ARX. With NMS, after 367 hours every system, every planet, every station, every alien has started to feel the same. I no longer enjoy it. But hell, you might really, really love NMS. If you can pick it up on sale, you should get it.
Only light atmospheres where you have to wear a spacesuit. The real atmospheric planets with cities and roads etc never came despite being promised.
> Well, first of all, FDev didn't drop VR. It works fine in Elite: Dangerous Odyssey. The way they implemented on-foot VR as theater mode instead of attempting to hack some kind of room-scale VR system into their engine—which has great support for seated VR—seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Contrast that with how NMS implements vehicle controls in VR. They do room-scale VR, so there's no transition to seated VR when entering a vehicle, which is controlled—and I use that term loosely—by basically waving your fists around in the air to work controls you can't feel. It's pretty awful.
To me it breaks immersion completely which is the whole point of VR. Controls can be adjusted with the controllers, I play msfs2020 like that all the time. Projecting a virtual screen is not VR. Just a cheap shortcut.
I'm very disappointed with Elite Dangerous :( and the Devs totally disregarding the community doesn't help. But anyway maybe NMS will be nicer. I haven't played E:D since Odyssey came out. Without real VR there's no point anymore.
As far as I understood from the forum they're locked into this engine but all the people who knew how it worked internally have left so they can't build new features into it anymore.
And regarding the direction of development, there just isn't really any anymore. It's just stopped. It's like maintenance mode.
Could you give spoilers and/or elaborate? I'll probably not going to play this
It's like Elite: Dangerous or Minecraft. There are all kinds of loading screens, but they're all pretty cleverly hidden. On planetary surfaces, you can see chunks load as you drive or fly towards surface features. Every teleport is a loading screen. So is entering and exiting a vehicle, landings and takeoffs, entering/dropping from NMS's equivalent of supercruise, or warping to other systems.
My one big gameplay complaint is how lost and directionless I feel in NMS compared to Elite: Dangerous. Like, in Elite I can see a nebula or some other galactic destination and plot a course toward it, settle in and explore an area, and so on. But I never quite feel like I can know where I am or see—at the galactic level—where I'm going. I'm not a huge fan of the spaceflight mechanics, either. And VR in NMS seems completely broken on my brand new gaming machine, which ultimately got me to uninstall it.
I feel like I got a lot of entertainment out of my $6 NMS purchase, so none of these criticisms are to say the game is bad. If you've never played it and think you might enjoy a hybrid of Minecraft and Elite: Dangerous, it's the game for you! And I'm very glad to hear the game and the player base are still lively. Great community there, especially with player groups like that taxi service, or various colonies, or resources like the Glyph Exchange.
P.S. I have to second the "simultaneously too small and too big" feeling of NMS. Space in both KSP and Elite feels scaled well. Then again, I came to NMS late, so maybe how KSP and Elite do things only feels natural because I played those first.
KSP uses [1] (scaled down solar system) and [2] (user-controlled time passage), although [1] can be modded away by using a realistic solar system mod. Elite:Dangerous uses [3] (warp drives). I've never played NMS but it sounds like they use [1] and maybe [3]?
They may have also used [1] for NMS. I don't think it really matters, given the game play, to be honest.
So a Minecraft competitor, basically? I can see that. I have played it and enjoyed it, I think Minecraft does it better overall but some variation is nice.
The gameplay loop is fun and the combat is incredible.
My starfield experience has been great. The metagame with newgame+ doesnt interest me at all however.
It seems like crafting has gone downhill in terms of UX since Fallout4, but that would be easy for them to fix.
Unless you like playing hello kitty :)
Instead you're Buck Rogers
God what i would give for a modern reimagining of Freelancer 2...
I wish that game the best, and I so so wish for it to actually shape into something great, but at the same time I have given up all hope on it, and I still cant imagine investing a single dollar into it (I think they got more than enough money to make a solid game already).
I wouldn't suggest people go sign up or anything because of that but as someone who has followed dev pretty closely, they look to be in the end phases for the singleplayer and probably like 50% into the open world game mechanics. I would bet on a singleplayer release in the next two years, and I would not place a bet on the open world because who knows. Their biggest risk is just running out if money and needing a publisher.
I did give it an honest try, and even enjoyed the first 30 hours or so. This was about a year ago, though I did buy the game at launch and promptly give up on it, like many others.
A true mile-wide-inch-deep game. Once that initial spark fizzles out the idea of picking the game up again is painful. Bit of a shame really, because the actual game parts do work well enough.
Just a long way of saying “I hate to say it, but I completely agree”
NMS's planets are enormous and completely devoid of any content. They're just an endlessly repeating pattern of the same outposts, resources, etc. They couldn't even be bothered to add a map feature so you can see where you've been, probably to hide the fact that it's just a bunch of identical tiles. No landmarks, no biomes, no reason to venture past a 5 minute radius from your landing area because everything on the planet can be found everywhere.
This is a hype article for people who think No Man's Sky is already a great game. Seems like a fluff piece to me. There's nothing in it that suggests any sort of fundamental change in the quality of the game.
(The Switch version is single player, and I consider that a feature.)
https://www.nomanssky.com/echoes-update/
https://www.nomanssky.com/2023/06/expedition-ten-singularity...
https://www.nomanssky.com/interceptor-update/
https://www.nomanssky.com/fractal-update/
Each is pretty packed with quality of life, gameplay, and content improvements.
I no longer regret my original launch purchase. The game is pretty amazing now, and the rate of change and improvement indicates to me it’s not close to topping out. If you have it and haven’t picked it up again, then, I would actually say wait another year and try it again then. Not that it needs another year, but that in that time it’ll likely be even better than it is now by a substantial margin.
If you look at today’s NMS and think, “ooh, that looks like it could be fun!” you’ll probably have a great time. If you look at it and think, “Enh, is it good enough yet?” then you’ll probably have a bad time.
It is what you see and they’ve fixed the incredibly shallow game loop. But it’s one of those games where if it’s not for you, it’s not going to win you over.
I enjoyed it as a “podcast game” where I’m just focused on a tv show or podcast while mucking about, planet to planet.
Planets:
- Different gravity
- Tidally locked;
- Localized weather (it's global on a given planet or moon);
- Different biomes on a planet (eg polar ice caps). Having a world be a single biome seems limited for no real reason;
- Rivers
As for general features:
1. Top of any feature wishlist should be better base building. What they have now isn't bad but it could be so much better. Some things are just annoying (eg certain parts don't snap to other parts) but as we've seen from the Sims, Minecraft and similar games, people will happily spend hours just building a base to their liking;
2. They added a feature (resource nodes) and in 4.0 basically nerfed it into irrelevance, to the point that it may as well not even be there. What did it do? It allowed you to build activated indium farms for essentially infinite money. Money doesn't really matter in this game and there are other infinite money glitches. I had fun (pre-4.0) building my activated indium farm. Now there's absolutely no reason to go through the effort;
3. Race tracks, preferably player-built. Have a mode where you have to stay on the track. Players do this anyway;
4. Also in 4.0 (IIRC) they nerfed technology modules for really no reason. Like a ship could have 6 S-class Hyperdrive modules, 3 in the inventory and 3 in the technology slots. So you were trading storage for jump range (which you could get to 2500+ light years). They just decided to remove inventory modules so you didn't get this choice anymore. Your ship had random supercharged slots so you could almost get up to that same range with 3 modules but honestly it felt like a worse version of what they had.
5. The core story isn't really the point but it probably needs some attention. Last time I did it there was a mix between the new story and some of hte old features like finding people to man consoles on your base.
It’s a fun game, but definitely much more breadth than depth. Still greatly enjoyed the exploration, especially when playing coop.
Hello Games just keeps shipping things that make the game better.
Go play Outer Wilds and Subnautica then tell me about the it’s all bad practices.
There are gems, but they’re rare… like gems.
In Subnautica maybe by bug a leviathan was in the shallows… where I had thought I was safe. If it was a bug it was an excellently timed one.
In Outer Wilds, the whole coming together point when you realize the time scale, the reason it’s 22 minutes, every single nerve racking time in the bramble, so good!
One example is https://youtu.be/Dh4XVB24Dt8?si=D1jXyBYFgC4xwFtZ
I went to about 10 different planets and nothing interesting ever happened. The wildlife on every planet all just looked like Bison with a random number of legs, and nothing I came across looks anything close to the screenshots in the article?
I was under the impression when I bought it that the developers were continually improving it, but I did not realize that this did not include Switch, so I feel a bit cheated about that.
What I can't get over is how dull, lifeless, and copy and paste each planet feels. You explore a small square for a bit, and the rest of the planet is basically the same. There is no real variation in landscape, fauna, and flora across the planet. And the vast majority of planets are fairly barren rocks.
Somehow it makes money and is popular. I want to achieve that.
But soon it becomes obvious that while there is even too many things at one time all of them are pretty simple and then you come across the same thing, but in different place... So depth seems somewhat lacking.