If you haven't seen it, "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky" is a good review of the story. It's 5 years old now, and the engoodening hasn't stopped.
It's barely a game at all. It's still a walking simulator. The environment is great, and there is some variety. But there is no objective or opposition, not even a story (a little robot tells you to do stuff). It's a sandbox, an engine one could build a game in (and they might someday?)
They added some construction stuff, so the game will say "go and build a house" and you do that. Or "go build a blueprint machine" and now you have more blueprints. But what is any of it for? You can just sit in your cockpit.
It all seems so pointless. Like they have seen other survival games and copied some mechanics over without understanding what makes a survival game. It is a really puzzling experience, I can't understand what they were thinking.
I don't know how many different ways to say it. We all enjoy different types of games! You obviously aren't a fan of sandbox games, lots of people aren't either. Or maybe it's just this sandbox game. That's fine too.
But it is pretty objectively a great example of taking an absolutely abysmal launch and turning it into something that a decent amount of people (doesn't mean everyone!) still enjoy and talk favorably about. It still sells copies. It still keeps the lights on at Hello Games.
I cannot think of a single other game that had such an awful launch that has, 10 years later, enjoyed mostly positive reviews. Cyberpunk might be the closest.
Here it's "make a qreblz machine because the voice tells you to". And then you can craft a wewrkz. Why.
The endgame is mining lots of metals and making warp fuel and diving into black holes repeatedly to get to the center of the galaxy, after which you can traverse to the next galaxy, which has different distributions of types of stars and planets, and differently colored galactic nebula. There are 256 galaxies in total.
But I still think you've missed (or are just ignoring) the point of my original comment. I didn't claim it's an objectively good game that everyone enjoys.
It's an objectively good demonstration of taking a shit launch and turning it around into a success story.
In No Man' Sky, it's already all there. In fact 10 minutes into the game I was crafting a wooden shed right next to a busy alien base with constant spaceship traffic. Can I interact with them instead? Can there be any storyline involving the sci-fi base right next to me? No, like most of the game it is just for show. You are supposed to look at the pretty scenery and ignore it while do the most boring crafting game ever. Those two aspects are not connected at all.
It's worthy of the Final Fantasy name, and Hironobu Sakaguchi (creator of Final Fantasy) actually plays it as well.
I also don't enjoy simulators. Same as for films or book, I look for interesting story, that has a point. To be honest, quite hard to find it those days, but luckily we have plenty older games that I can still enjoy.
No Man's Sky feels devoid of any personality or interesting content in a particularly unique way. No amount of updates will ever fix for me what feels like a fundamental gameplay loop issue.
All of the layers of systems they've added with each new update still just feel __bad__. I'm glad so many have found a way to enjoy the game, but I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when none of them seem to address the issue of "collect arbitrary resources to build gear to collect other arbitrary resources ad nauseum" in a way that I just find fundamentally unsatisfying.
I still understand that reductive description can apply to many of the other games I actually enjoy (i.e. Minecraft, etc.) but that's what's so strange to me about NMS—by all means, I __should__ like the game. But I still think it's a miserable experience devoid of any real meaning. Even if the point is to find your own meaning in the systems it provides, I can't quite put my finger on it, but it just feels so much worse than any of the others.
Maybe someone else can better articulate why it feels so bad, but to me, despite all of the work they've put on the game, it still feels so devoid of meaning.
The exploration and building aspects are in opposition to each other so you can't really hop in between them when you get bored without starting over next time.
I've played plenty of open world games and enjoyed them. In fact, even in games like Morrowind or Starfield or Grand Theft Auto or the like, which have big worlds and specific objectives, I've always found myself ignoring the quests and preferring to explore on my own terms.
I remember hopping around in Morrowind as a kid, trying to become as powerful as possible, and seeking out baddies to best. Then in Grand Theft Auto I'd go on epic crime sprees to see how long I could elude the authorities. And in Starfield I built an incredible network of trading posts that spanned the galaxy to see how much I could enrich myself.
What made these games fun is that, despite not following any missions or objectives, I was able to do impressive and interesting things and have fun. Perhaps that's possible in No Man's Sky, but in my first couple hours of playing, it didn't seem like it. It seemed liked I'd be going around doing boring and uninteresting things, and that it wouldn't be fun.
So it's not that it was a sandbox that bothered me, but that it was a sandbox devoid of fun.
It's a game. It just might not be the game for you. Some people buy a Lego set, follow the instructions and make whatever the set is and that's it. That's fine. Other people will build out ideas with whatever pieces they have. Yet other people will buy specific pieces to build out some Lego vision they have, some of which are truly incredible.
It's also like Minecraft. Are you just playing survival mode? Or are you playing creatively to build out some vision of a city or a building or even a computer?
NMS is really self-directed play. The campaign is really just a tutorial. Are you going to go out and find and max out the best ships? Build an interesting base? Find a particular world to build your base on that has an aesthetic you want? That's up to you.
I've put hundreds of hours into NMS although not for a few years. I first got into it after the Next update IIRC, which was a massive improvement at the time.
What I'd like to see with one of these updates is way more attention on base building as I think that area is kinda weak. Flattening ground is awkward. Base components don't snap to wood/stone/metal components for some reason. They could do so much more with this.
I really think the deep lore of Minecraft does a lot of work. When you find a new and interesting random place to explore, it usually ties in with your view of the place you are in, and eventually you find your way to an ending of sorts.
Another similar game from my youth that was the same was Wing Commander: Privateer. It was a sandbox, where a game suddenly appears after you've been exploring for months, but it's not much more than some cut scenes within the sandbox.
I have no qualms with a sandbox game, but I'd prefer it were generally tied into a narrative, either in a lore narrative or with a direct story.
All video games are empty time sinks at the end of the day. It’s a matter of what people want their escape to look and sound like.
Anyone expecting real world prestige for 100 percenting the last Mario? It’s all still literally accomplishing sitting on the couch only barely rising above passive consumption of entertainment.
Asking “what does it all mean” to everything gets exhausting. Human existence is arbitrary; it happened because it could.
Most people are warming up to this game because they're delivering on the original game concept and still going the extra mile. No Man's Sky was criticized at launch because the gameplay was nothing like the trailer had suggested, and the updates since launch have really and truly fixed that complaint.
No, there isn't EVA in space or serious FPS combat or even well tuned space dogfights. But none of that was really part of the original promise, and looking at the utterly derelict state of games that try to thread all those needles (cough cough, Star Citizen), I'm glad No Man's Sky went it's own way.
I've found a very different experience. There seem to be several main story threads to follow, as well as the addition of a few interesting sidequests (I'm in the middle of the one about hacking and reverse engineering one of the sentinels). And that's not even counting the expeditions they come up with from time to time. I particularly enjoyed working through the one that had the Normandy from Mass Effect as the end prize.
Essentially you get a task list and set path to complete the event, mechanically just for some shiny cosmetic stuff and a really basic lore dump for the event. But the reality is that it feels like an MMO-lite due to the fact that everyone else is on the same handful of planets.
Maybe there's some sort of control-remapping or config file tweaks that can make it more tolerable.
I've enjoyed a good 60+ hours in it, it's good. But not great. I didn't pay for it, not sure I'd have been as happy would I have paid for it.
It's still very shallow. As a programmer you can see all the really basic algos underlying all the generation.
There are like 10 planet types, with a couple of extra wacky ones. All the stations are virtually identical inside. There are like 8 points of identical interest. And bizarrely they're everywhere. There are 3 alien races. You land on a planet and within seconds spaceships are over flying you. You enter a new system and 10 seconds later a fleet of "random" carriers will turn up within your sightline.
You arrived at a new planet and the creatures are all exactly the same as you've seen before, just more legs, or 4 wings instead of two.
The thing the really bugs me are the sentinels. I get the in game explanation, but it's boring that every planet has them. And the few that don't are weird ones.
Everything is different and yet, apart from a very few minor things, it's all the same.
And the randomness gets grating. Want a cool ship? Have fun trying to grind that out. Want a cool gun? Ditto. You have to resort to going to particular coords supplied by the internet, not in game play.
For me, never before has space felt so small. Elite dangerous suffers from similar shallowness problems, but at least it felt epic.
You don't have to enjoy the game, that's totally fine. But my comment is pretty reality-based.
The game completely bombed on launch and was dragged through the mud (mostly deservedly) in every review. Now has very positive reviews on Steam, people still talk about it, and people still buy it a decade later. It's sold enough copies to support the staff at Hello Games for that time.
If that isn't turning a shitty launch into a success, I have no idea what is.
A ton has been added to the game but I still play it for the same reason, it's a good ambient exploration game where you get to fly around space but I also still stop for the same reason, it's shallow and repetitive. That was my experience at launch and that was my experience last time I played.
Based on hours played (and I enjoyed them) it was well worth the money but I don't think it's really improved that much over time. There's definitely more to do but it's not much deeper.
And then randomness leads to issues like finding very nice looking end game planet. To make your own base. And even there the option to place it so that certain things refresh.... So game world is not even consistent...
EDIT: I also want to call out one particularly user-hostile thing they have done: pump up the visual quality and complexity so high that the game performs very poorly on the console generation on which it was released: the PS4/Xbox One generation. This is true even on performance mode. So if you bought the game at release, you will now suffer degraded performance if you are still using your original hardware. You don't hear too much about this because when it's mentioned the person usually gets console-shamed, e.g. "get with the times, time to upgrade you cheapskate!" It's not only low framerates and ambient pop-in; it's also extremely bad pop-in of hazardous plants and structures. And you often can't land your ship on the ground until the terrain has fully generated. This can take a minute or two sometimes. Or you could try to go harvest from one of your resource collectors and have to wait something like 10 seconds for it to finally appear in front of you. And once it did, the chances of it bugging out and having no resources inside of it are way too high.
I'm not sure how you can possibly say that with a straight face.
"shallow" is also /definitely/ your opinion here. it's okay to not like things, but that doesn't make them objectively bad. it's just not to your taste.
I've played NMS on and off since launch and it's a totally different game now in MY humble opinion
If it's true that not liking something doesn't make it bad, then liking something also doesn't make it good.
They didn't say it was good or that they liked it, they said it's a totally different game now from launch.
On launch it would crash every ten minutes. Last time I played you could go weeks without a glitch.
Some people think that they warrant forgiveness.
Not me, I got a good 20 hours out of it (not at once). Then I went checking for reviews... Ooof
I tend to start away from preview videos/etc, it does me well.
The game runs surprisingly well on a Nintendo Switch, I mean each time there is a major update I figure that's the one to do the Switch in (...and this one just may be it!). Then to my utter surprise, the Switch does not spontaneously combust and I can play without crashing (well, except for when they introduce bug that crash it, even then they get it patched pretty quick).
Watching the update video, I'm really not sure what's been added other than new graphic things, and the Switch is not a system for graphic things. At this point though, No Man's Sky seems to be a quasi-staging server for their upcoming game. The update was all about the new graphics and how they made it for the other game and added it to NMS. Some of the updates last year were pretty fun though.
Agreed. I think I was more wondering aloud about how they could make the Switch, of all platforms, run well and then also have the older ones degrade. Only that last part forgot to leave my inside voice.
As far as graphics, its one of the better looking Switch games imo--but it's still Switch. I did briefly open the game up on an old Xbox one after hours of updating and the game there looked much better than Switch, but since the save was from 2018 or something, my Freighter had new random walls blocking passage ways and rooms. It was mostly useless. I didn't want to start over so that was the end of that experiment.
If the game isn't for you that's fine. Not every game is for every person. But the game has absolutely been improved, in numerous ways, since launch.
I feel it is akin to saying FPS games haven't improved since DOOM (95), or simulation games haven't improved since Deus Ex. Are both excellent examples of their genre? Yes, absolutely. Are they still some of the most fun you can have in a game? Yes. Holy crap yes. But to ignore improvements made in the last 3 decades of game development and storytelling just because another game hasn't improved on every single aspect aspect of them is a wild perspective.
Denying the improvements Hello Games has made over the last 9 years feels as if it can only come from a perspective of "I don't like it, therefore it is bad". Which to be clear, again, it is fine if you don't like a game. I don't like WoW, haven't since before Cataclysm. I don't like Diablo III in the same way I liked D2 (and as a result haven't even played D4). But those are personal preferences to me, and both games contain numerous improvements over their predecessors. Just not my bag.
I believe it happened this way because when they were in danger of self-destructing after the terrible launch, they knew they could no longer afford to risk continuing to try for the vision they had and sold. They had to pivot to a adding shallow crowd-pleasing fluff, and the more the better. And it was a good business decision! Now people go gaga over the fact that you can summon a multiplayer social hub from your menu and do fortnite emotes with strangers.
Let me try to flip this and compliment NMS for what I think it is. It's a good light-hearted space-themed VR chat with some gamelike elements.
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Also, no worries about the earlier question. I wasn't offended or upset, but I think it was just a good opportunity to point out that the culture about discussing this game now has that kind of thing baked into it.
I never understood why people will keep playing games they don't like. It doesn't make any sense to me. If I don't like a game, I play something else.
Personally think the gameplay loop is shallow, modding helped me find more depth.
But I'd say one of the best experiences I had in the game was becoming self-reliant at the start of a new save. Struggling not to die evolves into having enough resources to survive indefinitely by manual resource harvesting, which evolves into setting up crude crafting pipelines, which then evolves into advanced harvesting and manufacturing, enabling easy interstellar travel and self-sufficient freighter bases. But that can only happen once per save. And it's only really satisfying on survival or permadeath. The other modes are essentially just a no-risk sandbox.
The game has had clearly observable and measurable improvements, in terms of features, like multi-player, but also in terms of overall content, game and storyline components, and substantial new and revised game mechanics.
It is abundantly clear from player feedback that your opinion is in the minority.
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Asking people if they've played the game (or "read the article") is also directly against the HN guidelines.