f13.net

The trailer was shown just now on the video game awards showthingamabob. Fuck everything else except this game, for reals. It's about time we got a real procedural universe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SamVg64gvOk

edit: slightly better quality video now.

I'm not sure what sort of game I'm looking at here. I can't even tell if its PC, console, or what.

Sadly I have to agree with random Youtube commenter dude:

(http://i.imgur.com/ovk806z.png)

Also no more video.

Google to the resque! http://www.polygon.com/2013/12/7/5186774/exploration-sim-no-mans-sky-coming-from-hello-games (http://www.polygon.com/2013/12/7/5186774/exploration-sim-no-mans-sky-coming-from-hello-games)

Unfortunately no mention of when and where you'll be able to start buying ships  :rimshot:

No PC?!  :oh_i_see:

As neat as exploration can be, is there an actual game here?  I can imagine myself playing something like this non-stop for about 10 hours full of oohs and ahhs, and then never firing it up again.

Man you guys are cynical (except those who paid Chris Roberts money, you can't say anything)! That said I have no idea what this game will be, but my dreams have it as a mix of Starbound and Elite.

Also, fuck the PC!

I think the video is very promising and exciting. I am just really bummed about the no PC thing. Some games make really no sense to me on a console.

Where are we again?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRpDn5qPp3s&feature=youtu.be

And obviously, they're now hiring.   :oh_i_see:
http://www.hellogames.org/

FUCK YO COUCH

This right here.

Wait, something like this is coming out on a platform that ISN'T PC?

How are they going to mod it?


Also I look forward to their procedurally generated character/vehicle/ship controls and the procedurally generated fun.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/gerard-streator-pleads-guilty-couch-sex_n_3504825.html (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/gerard-streator-pleads-guilty-couch-sex_n_3504825.html)

There's nothing that categorically says it's not going to be on PC at all and I first read about it on RockPaperShotgun which is generally a good sign that it's going to be.

I'm more impressed that this has been developed by four guys in Guildford and the trailer was one of them recording himself playing it and then editing it together just for the VGX. Here's an interview with (http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/x8pp1o/no-man-s-sky-vgx-2013--sean-murray-interview) the same guy (who seems quite jetlagged) Will be an interesting project to keep an eye on. 

RPS takes a good long look. Now I know what the game is.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/12/09/first-look-no-mans-sky/

Space sandbox.

They said it was going to be on the PC AND a next-gen console. I'm all over it, the trailer was fantastic.

Why can't we just have single player games without letting people fuck things up for others? While this would also be a great candidate for private servers, having The Internet affect people's games is #retarded.

But multiplayer is the future and everyone who plays games wants it in everything, because it automatically makes every game better just by virtue of existing, and if you don't want it lol, go sit in the backyard and bang sticks together, loser.

Also, The Cloud.

So you're saying Dark Souls' MP system was dumb, Notch was on bathsalts with his (now defunct) design, and Wil Wright was spot on releasing Spore b4 the MP component was finished?   :oh_i_see:

I'll toss in my gripe though; I see no indication of any kind of crew RPG elements.  Would be nice to have a crewed ship ala Starflight w/a rover and so forth.  Being a single player-character in one small fighter-sized ship, traversing the galaxy, seems kind dumb.  (unless I'm missing something)

The new Miner Wars Engineering game shows more promise so far, but those guys have been nothing but cockteasers.

Dark Souls's* MP system is hardly universally appealing, so nobody should be surprised if someone doesn't like the sound of that. Notch's model is entirely different - you play with just the people you want to.

*It takes the 's because you are talking about a single thing named "Dark Souls" not something that belongs to multiple Dark Souls.

 :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

People aren't dicks to each other online because of some arbitrary in-game value, they're dicks to each other because there are no consequences! This is Internet Multiplayer Remedial 049 stuff. Did these guys just log into the internet for the first time? I look forward to the tears as their starry-eyed faith in other human beings is dashed upon the cold sands of their space sandbox.

 :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

I didn't watch the video but reading the article, it sounds grandiose like Spore was. And I was so enthusiastic about Spore and then it was just a colossal letdown.

I see no evidence that this will be any different.

I'm not going to get all excited about this, though I hope it turns out well. I think the one chance it has where Spore was doomed is that it's not a bajilllion dollar Will Wright joint for EA, where suits don't understand science and exploration and general awesome stuff. So the space RTS that got glommed on to the point of pushing out so much stuff later on (and eventually reduced in patches after nobody cared anymore, I think).

Anyway. Yes, Dark Soulses's MP is dumb, notch's initial vision was dumb and Spore only needed the background seeding parts as released. So yes. Spot on.

Also, when getting all starry-eyed about the great stories coming out of Day Z, one seems to gloss over what a complete unfun stab in the earhole the game was for the most part.

There will be dedicated groups of people who's only goal is to blow up and/or cause the extinction of anything and everything cool they might find.  4chan and Something Awful will probably have a contest to see who can eradicate the most species.

Good, I wasn't the only one that read that and thought, DUDE HAVE YOU USED THE INTERNET?

I had fun in DayZ solely due to playing with Slay and Surly. So this.

Those mofos are crazy.

I see. Then I shall spread every vile rumor ever possible to ruin this pile of shit's potential regardless whether it's true or not.
To arms!

I liked the homage to Skyfox.

Oh rk...

Sure, he wishes, but when the author says stuff like


on top of showing a trailer like that, how can you not be interested?

(http://i.minus.com/izDVUYdHtR2Cl.jpg)

Where does it say it's not on PC?

As I said before, it's been reported that it WILL be on the PC as well as at least one "next-gen" platform.

That's what I found, but then everyone was losing their shit here.  I should have known better.

NO, PANIC! DANCE THE DANCE OF LIFE!

(http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view/408388/dance-the-dance-of-life-o.gif)

No one's posted the link to part two of the RPS interview yet? Do I have to turn this thread around and drive home?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/12/10/interview-no-mans-sky-and-procedural-generation/

I think that after the "other spaceships game", nothing is safe.

They talk all pretty like.  I wanna do bad things with their imaginations. 

Words.  Words written on water.

I'm writing a book, it's like LotR without the crap bits, like Neal Stephenson and Borges got married and had a child who was more brilliant than either and wrote my book for me, with the energy of Lee Child, the brain of Eco and the style of Nabokov.

Quick, pre-order while your imagination and love of those things outweighs my track record of having done nothing of the sort ever to date!

No, sir!  I won't fall for that!  I already know everything you touch is horrible!

I'm doing a radicalthon, but I lack the funds to complete my glorious work. It's not that I hate doing it but I lack the time cause I gotta juggle RL work with my hobbies.

If you guys can actually put in some money and help me get over my daily expenses so I don't have to earn an income to continue doing what I love most, maybe I can improve the quality and frequency of my updates.

Love,
RK47

 :why_so_serious:

PS: I can do adult games like hentais, eroge, visual novels, even cutesy shit like princess maker 2, or even popular fantasy football game that people here worship called Blood Bowl. I can be as immature or mature as required for these projects and willing to undertake the bullshit level to over 9,000. For $20 I can name a rookie player in my team after you. And maybe turn you into a star player.

PS: If you're a girl, please PM me your pic for special mention and description.
PPS: I play Dawn of War too.
PPPS: But no XCOM multiplayer please.

I touched your mum (or mom, for y'all Americans).

This game should one up Star Citizen by pre-selling planets instead of just ships.

Shouldn't it be Dark Souls' instead of the s's, which I seem to remember from grade school and from my nine-year-old's current grammar lessons on plurals and possessives?

Technically I should have italicized Dark Souls, which would probably make it clearer why it takes the 's.

Hmm, yes that may be.  I'm out of my grammatical depth now.

When in doubt add multiple s's'ss's's-es and pretend it's ironic.

Actually had to use Google to even find this thread.

No Man's Sky has been delayed. Excuse me while I weep.

Did they ever confirm a PC release?

Yes, it was supposed to be out next month about this time. Now it's not.

I think we discussed this around here somewhere since the last post in here.

But yeah, there's no way this one will deliver a top notch experience, going to be very 'procedural', ie generic. It looks like a good engine and good generation platform, but the question is will it survive a launch with very little custom content?

I'm interested in it, but not sure I'm full retail price interested. I am 1000% Steam Sale price interested.

Damn it... saw the thread pop back up and got a little excited.  :oh_i_see:

Are they taking the time to patch a game into their tech demo?

I hope not. That would probably fuck it up.

It killed off Spore, which was another fun procedural toy that they bolted a totally shitty endgame to that utterly ruined it.

Officially delayed to August 9th. http://blog.us.playstation.com/2016/05/27/no-mans-sky-coming-to-ps4-in-august/

Kinda bummed, I was hoping to play this over the summer. It launches right as I go on a 2wk vacation, and our work starts to ramp back up in the autumn. I mean, I'll survive and all... just disappointed.

Fuck.

I'm in exactly the same place as you with this Sky. I strongly doubt it'll live up to 10% of the hype - a hype that has been entirely driven by disappointment with the other attempts to revive the space explorer genre in recent years, namely E:D and Star Citizen. E:D has shown us that looking pretty but with dull content makes a dull game, and SC has shown us that if you promise the moon on a stick you can fleece the fuck out of 1000s of people.

I predict that NMS will be closer to E:D, i.e. very pretty but ultimately shallow. Unless modding support is very good of course, which the jury is out on (http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2014/12/26/an-assortment-of-lesser-known-no-man-s-sky-facts.aspx) for now.

I don't really see the hype. It looks nice, the space-to-planet looks well done, but there's not much else there. Now, maybe they're being coy with the meat and potatoes, but maybe I wear the Queen's knickers.

They sure look comfy on you.

Looks like they need a few more months to let it hopefully generate the fun.

Problem is, they might not last "a few more months"  :ye_gods:

http://www.pcgamer.com/no-mans-sky-team-has-received-loads-of-death-threats-following-delay/

What the actual fuck is wrong with people?

Are people that desperate to name a species "Buttmuncher69"?

I wasn't but I am now.

Man. I haven't been this hyped for a game since vanilla WoW

I've been following it for months but I'm not confident that it's going to be any actual fun.

Been following this since the first teaser, expect it to be bland and generic like most 'procedural' games. Also expect adding 'game' will work about as well as it did for  Spore.

I am still sure that there is a way to do procedural content right. I think it's about using it in a limited fashion within an otherwise written/created game. Say, to have some NPCs who have procedurally-generated objectives or interests inside a game that's otherwise directly crafted by designers.

This launch is going to be very interesting, because it's already gone through the hype/disappointment cycle for a lot of people. 6 months ago the hype was intense, but like all highs it can't last forever, and coupled with the delays has led to a lot of the hype turning to an expectation of disappointment.

I've moved from "buy at launch if initial reviews are good" to "buy 6 months after launch if reviews are still good and continued dev support has been good".

It's pretty hilarious watching all the people so sure that this game is going to be absolutely amazing already get into defensive mode, and talking about how reviewers and youtubers won't be reviewing it "the right way".

This game is going to be breathtaking and awesome... for one evening at best.

I dunno, Elite didn't even last an evening for me, but maybe that's because I could barely figure out the controls and didn't even get to see too much of the awesome.

If I can audio record, "captain's log, stardate 2729.4. Landing on planet Gethafugoph III, I have encountered what appear to be native insects," then I might give this a whirl.

The problem with procedural generation is that it's largely meaningless without hand-crafted content. If you could put in rogue-like 'dungeon' creation, maybe. But in reality it seems to work out to 'this planet has purple trees and the last one had orange trees'. Look for npcs for generic kill/deliver/x quests. Look for obelisks to unlock tech.

Doesn't seem like much to do, outside of busy work and looking at different shuffles of the randomizer.

Yep. That's precisely why I said it'll be great for about one evening. It'll be fantastic when you don't have a sense of the kinds of things that are in the game. For the first few planets you're likely to find new stuff that feels genuinely different. But you're going to notice the patterns pretty quickly. You'll get a sense for the kinds of things available to the randomizer, and then it's all downhill from there.

So far the only game that's really done a passable job to me is Minecraft.

I admit that I don't grok why a new, fresh Minecraft world is so exciting.  I'm not the guy who is going to invent the next big procedural game.

A few mods have really improved both worldgen and explorability. Unfortunately, being home-brew java, you were lucky to try it when it was a thing and not crash. The village system of Millenaire was a start, Better Dungeons added in a ton of (buggy) great content creation/config. I'm always looking for stuff that adds reasons to explore the world, and, you know, find interesting stuff.

I agree with all this. But I think procedural content *could* be the secret sauce in an otherwise hand-crafted open-world game setting.

Think about how certain kinds of random spawns in a game like Skyrim sometimes create a special kind of fun--the first time you see a dragon fighting with necromancers while you just watch the whole thing. But when procedural generation is the only thing going on, there's an unfocused, purposeless feeling to it all.

Procedural generation can't create any stories that are more than one layer deep. Random fights between random NPCs that don't like each other can be entertaining, sure, but there's nowhere further for them to go.

Compare that to a simple side-quest in The Witcher 3 where something as innocuous as a haunted well can reveal a take of love, betrayal, rape, murder, revenge. It's hard to generate any emotional involvement in a procedurally generated world.

What could work is a combination of hand-crafted content and over-arching story that uses proc.gen to 'fill in the gaps' but that's really just padding. The reason Minecraft works is because of the creative element - the player creates their own 'story' of sorts by virtue of the things they make within the world.

If NMS gives the player any ways in which to change the world it creates, then it'll maybe have some longevity. Otherwise it'll be Steam sale material that'll provide an entertaining distraction for a day or two.

Going back to Elite, which Khaldun mentioned up the thread a few posts, I will say that some of the factional stuff and news feed does at least create SOME kind involvement. I think Frontier is doing a combination of procedural generation and manual nudging of the "story" in certain directions, which has been effective so far. It seems like thats a game that is really divisive. People either love it or think it's boring after 5 minutes. I'm somewhere between. I do get bored with it every so often, but I find myself wanting to dive back in every so often. It's done a good job filling my space sim needs since it came out.

Well, theoretically there is.  Procedurally generated doesn't mean "random" it means that the computer writes it according to certain rules.  If you have decent writers / coders who can put together decent rules for creating a story, then you could theoretically generate a lot of procedural content.  In the same way that you can procedurally generate terrain by modeling erosion and weather patterns, you could hypothetically procedurally generate social situations (meaning, stories) by modeling characters with actual motivations and abilities and so on.

blah blah

I'm more hyped for this than nearly anything in the last 5 years.

This just in, schild vaping salts now.

I am always excited for someone to do this right because I believe it can be.

But I am always ready for someone to fuck it up because I believe they almost certainly will.

We just named another reason why the latter is likely: because procedural generation depends on the quality of the imagination going into generating the procedural ruleset. If it's a bunch of dumb coders trying to save themselves some trouble or suits trying to save on people making art assets, etc., you end up with a dull failure at best. A great procedural design would have to arise out of a sophisticated and complex vision of the world and character and story generation you're trying to pull off. Anybody remember the random tables in Dungeons and Dragons for generating a quick dungeon or adventure? The worst of them made you something like Daggerfall--the same fucking thing you'd done a million times. The best of them made you something only marginally better than that, *unless* the person interpreting it made something unusual out of it.

I'd really love for someone to succeed at that, it could be awesome. I suspect that really good AI may be a missing piece, and AI in games seems to have stagnated over the last 10 years.

I thought of another reason why procedural generation in Minecraft works so much better than in, for example, Elite Dangerous. The scale of the variation in terrain in Minecraft perfectly matches the scale at which you play the game. The shapes of hills, caves, plains directly affects how and what you build, how you interact with mobs, etc. Large builds require actual terraforming, sculpting of those randomly generated areas. The scale of E:D randomisation is meaningless. A system has more or less planets, which are of varying colours with various minerals on them. You still warp from jump-in point to station in exactly the same way, engage with pirates in exactly the same way, hand in missions in exactly the same way. The procedural generation is purely cosmetic.

If planets and systems in NMS vary in such a way that the actual gameplay is affected by it then it'll be better than E:D.

The aesthetics sold me from the start. I've thrown $60 at some really shitty games, so I won't feel too burned if it's bad.

I'm really interested to see how they handle the "quest" stuff; there's an overarching quest at least to get from x to y. I'm also very interested to see how they push this out with only a 6gig master.

Cautiously hyped and I figure I'll get at least a few weeks of fun exploring.

I've been saying this since the days of Lum's old site. It's not 10 years. It's been a red-headed step child of the gaming industry. Not just 'good' AI, but convincingly inept AI as well. It's a laughable joke, with games just cheating or making damage soaks in place of 'difficulty' or making things a walk through the park in place of 'easy'. No ability to use advanced strategies or make newb mistakes. Just a simple AI that can barely do what it's supposed to do, while all the money is dumped into graphics and management.

Every time I mention it, nobody from the dev side ever seems to think there's an issue and everything's hunky fucking dory.

It's also one of the reasons many of us have been attracted to sandbox PvP games, in spite of the fact that they've been consistently pretty terrible.

This game is a win/win for me. Either I'm going to get a lot of enjoyment out of the reviews and the buzz around the game, or I'm going to get enjoyment out of a good game.

Can't go wrong. Proceed.

That is a powerful base on which to build your life, Paul Muad'dib.

This!

I think the problem is two-fold.
The 90% don't want good AI because they are shit at playing against bad AI.
Good AI doesn't sell or make for flashy screenshots.

Sadly, for me, bad AI kills a game just as quickly as bad gameplay does.

There's also the issue that it's hugely dependent on the actual game.  What "good AI" even means changes a lot from title to title.  In Dota it probably means a program that can react strategically to what the other team is doing and cooperate with it's teammates, in Skyrim it probably means a program that can react like a real person would to someone doing things like running though town naked and throwing cheeses at everybody.  It's not something you can transfer from one program into another, like a new rendering method or chat system.  It's a problem every team has to solve from scratch, almost.

When "the 10%" say they want good AI, they really mean something that will exclusively chase the guy with the highest toughness and who will ignore the healers.  :grin:

Remember WoWs Faction Champions fight in Trial of the Crusader? It wasn't exactly amazing AI, but the NPCs absolutely targeted healers and squishy DPS, and maaaaaan did people bitch about that fight and fuck it up over and over again.

You misunderstand what I mean by 'good AI'. It's the most common response I've seen over the years, so you're in good company.

Good AI doesn't just mean killbotX destructo mode, know all the tricks and use them. That's there at the top end for the players who can easily destroy any paltry AI routines and want a challenge. Pawning this off on other customers is the preferred cop-out ("multiplayer"). Not a dig against multiplayer, but folks should play against others because they want to, not because your game's AI sucks.

The other side of good AI is 'good bad AI'. This is for the people that either suck against current primitive AI or (like me) just want to play to relax and not necessarily be challenged (I like AC 3 more for the setting than the crappy combat, for instance). "Good bad AI" makes believable mistakes, as if you're playing against another novice human or even a talented human who could probably play good but doesn't (like me :p). By the latter, I mean an AI that doesn't exploit full knowledge of the map and character build/itemization, but otherwise plays fairly competently. Also to react humanistically: sure, it may make sense to follow that healer you're targeting, but when a dps blasts you, maybe you turn to fight them instead. AI needs to believably make mistakes as a difficulty scale, removing mistake conditions as you increase difficulty.

I agree with this, though probably at a genre level there are enough commonalities to make a start and then tailor it, as you would an off-the-shelf engine. Heck, maybe that's what it needs.

AI that has a range of personalities and playstyles and is thus actually kind of hard to interpret--that's the Holy Grail. The problem with even a "good AI" is that once you dope out what it's been programmed to do, it becomes easy to beat, in relative terms, except in games like chess. Think Civ V: you want an AI that occasionally does impulsive, weird, or surprising things, not just one that methodically uses the game's ruleset to maximum advantage.

Right. You have to model it to do a ton of things. I wouldn't worry about people who play at the hardcore end, they'll always abuse AI, just the nature of the sperg.

I would think there are such huge volumes of data being generated by multiplayer games across multiple genres, just farm that and use it to feed the AI. It would most likely be slanted to people already drawn to multiplayer, of course. Maybe pull data from single player games?

Skynet isn't that smart yet.

Plus you don't actually want, say, your Skyrim dungeon baddies acting as smart as a PvPer in online RPG because those games have you, or you and a small party, basically able to kill any threat. This is not realistic. A "smart" dungeon full of guys would just get 35 people together and all attack at once, in which case the enemies need to be trivially weak, or you need to have an equally powerful group on your side.

Oh man, did I just imply people in online games actually use teammwork. Maybe I have this all wrong. Maybe realistic AI will just result in everyone running around like an idiot and rage quitting.

At least half of my games in League of Legends makes me wish my teammates were bad AI as opposed to presumably (but not provably) thinking human beings.

Well, think of your average Skyrim dungeon. Say a crypt with those ancient Norse zombies and so on in it.

There's in-world reasons why they don't methodically cooperate to cut you down. They're tied to their burial site, so they arise as you violate the immediate area you're in.

There was an old D&D module series that's now called "Against the Giants". One of the things I really loved about it when I was young and being the game master for my group of friends was that the first one advised the GM, "If players leave the hill giant fortress to heal up, resupply and be in better shape for the next attack, be sure to move some of the guards from their current posts and establish new well-defended positions, put in some new traps in the entry hall, and so on: the giants should be ready for the players to renew their attack."  If you had agent-based AI and you specified that in some cases, the AI would actively adapt to player activity, then you'd get experiences that feel "right" for the kind of enemy you're facing. Intelligent enemies that work together should intelligently work together; brute monsters or supernatural foes might not actually adapt or be intelligent in that way.

My players burnt the hill giant fort down. Accidentally.

And again, good AI doesn't mean all npcs are as smart as an online pvper. More like Khaldun says. They'll have morale checks, secret agendas, different levels of training, etc.

Then again, I want npcs that react more realistically. "Oh my god no, I have orclings at home, why"

That too! I want NPCs who run like mad if they know they're in a hopeless situation. The Gunners in Fallout 4, for example, should be smart enough to know that you're overrunning their defenses. It would be interesting even if they'd send a delegation to you suing for a truce or something, whereas Raiders never would because they're mad dogs. That's really what I'd love to see--agent-based AI that had different motivation hierarchies for different NPCs where they'd change behavior dynamically over the course of a game.

But why spend all that time creating human facsimile game opponents when instead we could just keep amping up connectivity with human opponents?

I think partly because in something like a role-playing game, human players actually don't fit the immersive fiction well at all. In fact, in an odd way, human beings tend to converge into a single mass more than AI characters do--they focus on the competitive and/or griefing aspects of the game they're playing. If you want to be immersed in another world, you don't actually want other people in it unless they completely share that objective.

Because you could then tailor make player "opponents" to act however you want.  Enjoy League of Legends but don't want to be called a gayfag for thirty minutes because you missed a skillshot once?  Spawn a bot that will play the game without the grade school dick waving.

Because multiplayer only games with lower player bases would then still be playable, even in ten, twenty years when nobody remembers them but a tiny niche of old people.

Because nobody wants to play Brahmin Farmer number 103 but you might still want some Brahmin Farmers in your Fallout game which can do more than stand around and say "what do you want" when you click on them.

Because some people still exist who do not have reliable high speed internet and some of them might buy your game if they had some way to actually play it.

Because you might want to establish some kind of setting or atmosphere for your game, and no human player is going to go around spouting exposition about the Crimson Veil or whatever your backstory is when they could be spamming "LF2M 4 DM run 1 healer and 1 DPS pls" in the trade channel instead.

Because some people feel nervous or anxious around other people (even anonymous internet people) and jumping in to a very competitive multiplayer only game with garbage tutorials is very intimidating if you stand a good chance of humiliating yourself in front of another actual person, rather than a bot who doesn't care if you know what you're doing or not.

Because you might want some level of agency for some enemies that's higher than you get with a modern AI script, but also not at "can become the most powerful thing in the world" level that every human player exists at.

Do you want some more?

What Kail said. I want better single player games; I don't want all my single player games to turn into multiplayer games. The biggest reason for me is that, with a family, I need a pause button if I'm playing when anyone else is around.

Ok this makes sense.

But some of what you're saying doesn't justify the investment when so much has already been made from broadband allowing the players being the content. I mean, LoL is not a jillion dollar business because players want to play a fun game. It's that because it's super competitive and for a lot less cost than developing scores of believably performing AI.

For RPGs though, I'm right with you. Games we're you're the hero get screwed up by everyone else proving you're not.

Games designed to be competitive by nature seem to me better off as multiplayer. It's the more economical approach to producing matches with ever changing conditions. More universally buff tutorials would be nice. I remember wishing strongly for that in Planetside 1, and when I had to make critical class decisions in EQ2.

In my opinion, Overwatch would be perfect if they'd add a sub-class of match type called "no chat, no voice, just lemme join people looking for a good time". Lots of matches I've been in have zero communication anyway. The practice mode against AI is believable for newbies and gives you that positive feedback of a high likelihood of winning. It's the kind of game you don't need to give a shit about but enough there for those who do (and which will pay all the money).

But would a significant base of players playing singleplayer buy accroutrements for their Overwatch characters enough to pay the investment in AI? I doubt that doesn't fit their strategy (eSport!) or maybe it would if they thought it feasible.

I would love that "no chat, no voice" mode in basically every online game ever. Unless I'm queuing with my friends I rarely want to interact with the mooks on either team.

Oh, sure.  I'm not trying to argue that it's always the best idea financially.  But as a consumer, it's very worrying to me that a company would depend on something as unreliable as farming random people on the internet for the BASIC FUNCTIONALITY of the game.  There are a lot of indie games on Steam working on the exact same thing you're saying: multiplayer only games are way easier, we don't need to write AI since we can rely on other players, we don't need to add single player stuff like stories or progression, we only need a few maps and people will play that over and over forever.  Then they launch and the instant the player count dips, wait times rise.  And as wait times rise, people stop playing, and wait times get higher and soon the game just dies.  Nobody can play it, no matter how much they want to, because there aren't enough people online to start a match.  People who bought the game are out of luck.  If the game does something interesting or impressive, nobody will ever be able to see it.  People who made the game and want to use it for their demo reel have to hack test footage out of the client or something.

It's not always an issue for the publisher, because the company just throws the game on the market and dumps it the instant it gets unprofitable, no regrets.  But as someone who wants to PLAY the game, it's a significant long term problem.  People in fifty years will still probably be able to watch every episode of Knight Rider, but they won't be able to play Team Fortress 2 to any degree more complex than wandering around an empty 2fort map.

I deal with the public all day at work. I don't want to deal with them at home while I'm relaxing. I don't play multiplayer games, I'm over them (as someone who played BF1942 competitively).

Do you buy the cheapest food possible at walmart, too? Why spend the time going to the butcher and getting a hand-cut slice of cow when you can get a frozen burger for the microwave, right? Could we maybe aspire to more than 'hey, this is cheap and easy'?

And hey, nobody is saying stop making competitive (or even cooperative) multiplayer games. Just saying maybe there could be, you know, better single player games. And we're talking about No Man's Sky, specifically, which is not a multiplayer game.

Sadly, no one wants to dump money into developing fabulous single player games anymore. Not with the market chasing the COD/Battlefield dragon. This is the age of the bubble... get in on it before it bursts or get left in the dust.

Maybe a company will rekindle the single player genre, but it won't be for awhile... at least not a good offering.

Warframe has been successful with a "Teams versus AI" model.

Multiplayer games that can continue to sell new cosmetic content a la skins is going to last longer than single-player game with an ending, even with a significant DLC pipeline (though games like Crusader Kings II might disagree with that).

Meanwhile Witcher 3 is the best CRPG ever released.

Fair enough, but does it hit on all the notes? I have no reference as I, 1) hate coming into a series in the middle, 2) never played it or heard anyone outside of here talk about it. I'll gladly take your word for it though.

/squint

Not sure if serious.

I barely played the first two and gave up on both because of not liking the combat. You don't really to have played the previous to get the story and characters. Here and there it improves the game some to know the background.

Anyway.

Still oddly tempted to want to play this stupid game, despite knowing it's probably shallow and repetitive.  :oh_i_see:

I will play it. I am an optimist on this stuff. There's always something to learn even when it doesn't work right.

I think the only procedural-content game I skipped because it was obvious bullshit by a team that just didn't bother to actually develop the game was the SimCity debacle that was supposed to be agent-based AI, procedural content.

This is the kind of thing I've been known to say I won't buy and then impulse buy it on release because I'm bored that day. I don't really believe this thing has legs, but if I get to wistfully explore the galaxy for a week before it gets old it might still be worth it. Eh, my birthday is between now and release anyway, so why not treat myself. See, I'm talking myself into it even as I'm typing this.

Fight trailer up (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dOk2uBTYAE&feature=youtu.be)

Hmm, looking at the UI's on show there it seems like there's very, very little information on them. Weapon with heat/ammo, distance to (something), shield... and that's about it. On the FPS UI there's... ammo count. Nothing else. So I'm inferring from that that the combat and space flight are extremely simplified and arcadey.

Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen, it's just an observation.

If the fighting requires actual hand-eye coordination then I'm out. I just can't do that stuff at all anymore.

They may have some legal troubles over their procedural generation, which it turns out isn't exactly their own work:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-07-21-why-no-mans-sky-fans-are-worried-about-a-patented-superformula (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-07-21-why-no-mans-sky-fans-are-worried-about-a-patented-superformula)

My stepbrother is a patent lawyer. And a giant scumbag douche.

I think you're being redundant.

I happen to know a patent lawyer who is a pretty cool dude, but I also know a rich artist and a hillbilly that loves Nikki Minaj, so ....  nevermind.

Just wanted to be clear  :grin:

He takes douchebag to such a legendary status, I feel bad for my father. We don't ask about him, but secretly relish in the stories of his moronic exploits (last one is his dodging student debt by going to do contract work in Saudi Arabia for three years, which he was fired from almost immediately and hid out in Belize to avoid arrest on tax fraud, I think he's finally back in the states now). Best part is, we hear the optimistic filtered version from his mom, so you just know it's way worse than the version we get.

As far as I can tell, he tries to patent other people's unpatented research so he can profit from licensing.

Belize is a pretty good place to hide, so he's not a complete moron. :why_so_serious:

I didn't think you could patent a formula, so I went digging.  Apparently you can, but wikipedia has this to say, "The formula was obtained by generalizing the superellipse, named and popularized by Piet Hein, a Danish mathematician. Currently, the superformula is patented by Gielis, [2] but the patent was withdrawn in 2006 because of the patent fees not being paid.[3]", which I found hysterical.


Edit: it does seems to be withdrawn in European Patent Registrar, here  (https://register.epo.org/application?number=EP05100648&lng=en&tab=main)- Status   The application is deemed to be withdrawn.  Database last updated on 20.07.2016

Hello Games is a British video game developer and publisher based in Guildford, England.

Laughing more now

See the claims here. (https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/claims?CC=EP&NR=1531427A1&KC=A1&FT=D&ND=&date=20050518&DB=&locale=en_EP)

Thanks Hat, an ars article here  (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/07/no-mans-sky-faces-potential-patent-fight-over-use-of-superformula/)is saying the same thing - you can't patent (or copyright) a formula, but you can patent methods of use of the formula, which I take to be the same as a concept patent which I fucking hate.  Hey, dickhead, instead of providing no value to anyone anywhere (and actually stifling innovation), how bout you write a library that makes the use of your formula that people can then license and just avoid the whole patent-troll lifestyle?  Oh yeah, because that requires actual work, fucking cocks.

Good news. Apparently it's a real game after all. It's got menus and all.

http://imgur.com/a/n7hpc

It's essentially Destiny's UI.  

Also trade video (I think where most of those are from) is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=S_Oaf6Ol8U4

The formula is pretty cool:

http://paulbourke.net/geometry/supershape/

(Scroll down for pictures)

They are claiming now that they don't use the formula at all, but previously they gave interviews claiming that they did. At some point someone is probably going to have to look at actual code. (Or settle)

Well, I got some Steam cards as gifts, so I it made the decision to buy this thing easy. We'll see how it turns out. I'm such a sucker.

For those of you on the fence but leaning to buy, Apparently the PC release is several days after the PS4 release so if you pre-order you will still have time to cancel after reviews come out.

Eh, they're both August 9th.

It got pushed back until the 12th on PC.

FUCKING SERIOUSLY?

BUT THE FDA SHIT WRECKS MY JOB ON AUGUST 8TH

EVERYTHING WAS SO PERFECT

*ENTERS RAGE SPIRAL*

Steam store still says available August 9.

"Survive" trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jpHldhY_V0

Some random guy got a PS4 copy early and sold it to some random dude for $1,200.  Random dude made a video of the intro (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4mew4e_opening-credits-intro_videogames).

Apparently he was streaming on twitch but it only took 7 minutes for him to get banned for life.

Since when does daily motion remove videos?

I'm not sure how much I want to give away in case people here do care about the game, but doesn't care about getting spoiled about some things here are some notes from the guy who bought the leaked copy: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4vgxaf/the_chap_who_got_no_mans_sky_early_has_discovered/

What a shitty person to get the game early though, he gives absolute garbage answers.

I *think* he "voluntarily" removed it himself. I could be misinterpreting an article I quickly scanned however (I'm actually trying to avoid spoilers -- go figure).

https://www.twitch.tv/kengi01

More leaks incoming, apparently.

This texture pop in is nextgen as fuck.

14092982987234986234986234 planets and this guy won't fly somewhere that isn't brown.

This is like an mmo that skipped the launch and jumped straight to the part where every zone is empty.

thesonofbrock : CROOKED SEAN MURRAY TRIED TO SELL THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AN INDIE GAME FOR $60. NOT WHEN I'M PRESIDENT! - @realDonaldTrump

Preordered on PC.  Hopefully I won't be travellng for work when it launches.

no man's sky gets to beat star citizen to the market for crushing space sim disappointment

So will actual space flight.  :why_so_serious:

I can't understand why people get so disappointed by games when they're so often mediocre. I just go in expecting to get my usual 8-10 hours out of it. If I get more, it's a good game. But if I get less, it's not necessarily a bad game. Once in a while a Witcher 3 happens and I remember that games can actually be awesome.

I'm just looking forward to flying a space ship around and goofing off for a while. It's procedural, it's bound to be shallow. People should read f13 more.

I admit I've been reading the Steam discussions because they're hilarious. I'm not sure I could expose my mind to what's going on at reddit.

I'm just baffled on this one in particular, since they've been pretty clear on what it is and is not for the most part.  I do not get the hype, and I'm someone that likes minecraft and exploring.  This game is basically just 3D Starflight, for better or worse.

Lots of people are going to be doing this with No Man's Sky:

(http://i.imgur.com/p6QUajW.gif)

It's completely their fault.

Ohnoes every planet isn't packed with handcrafted content at the level of Witcher 3 etc FAIL WORST GAME EVAR

I think a problem I would have with NMS is one I have with starbound.  I loved games such as minecraft Minecraft and Terraria for not just the survival but the building and creating. With NMS afaik you explore a world, mine some shit to pay for upgrades and move on, no real building but exploration is fun right? Except since everything is generated on the fly there is often a blandness to it, starbound is the same with it's near infinite worlds and random civilizations but every time you get to one it just feels like a hollow cut and paste. 

Minecraft and Terraria were also very cut and paste with the randomly generated stuff but because it was one map you end up mplanting roots, creating your own mark on that world.  With Starbound and NMS there's no mark, you see a neat planet and move on. I know in starbound you can create your own home base but you are disconnected from the greater universe, just as you are in NMS when you see some awesome planet and just, fly away.

I am one of the people who cannot figure out what people expect from this game. It is clearly a procedural game, about exploration, with an end goal of making it to the center of the galaxy. There are people I know in real life who literally thought this was going to be some space opera, choose your own adventure type thing.

My game plan is going to be to explore towards the center, while upgrading my stuff along the way.

For me, the real question has become will the dashing of false hopes -- and the screaming attendant there unto -- lead to cutting the price to a point I can get interested in this?

when people realize it is an indie game they were tricked into a full box price sale on, it will only be a matter of time until it's like 20 buxks

and you won't have to worry about missing out on the multiplayer aspect because the game is a stripped-down shell of their failure to make it multiplayer

Supposedly many review sites claim they are not being given copies for review (https://twitter.com/Open_Critic/status/760174294978605056)

Also if anyone is interested in a VOD made by a streamer streaming earlier today (though it's potato quality) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8Em1ySZY5q7LXExNE9OaDNEVXc/view

My views on this haven't changed since 3 months ago. It's been entertaining, and slightly bemusing, to watch the ridiculous hopes invested in this and the frothy dashing of those hopes before it's even released, but it remains for me very much a 'wait & see' game.

Unless there's some major revelations in the next 10 days it's probably going to be a Steam winter sale game.

I don't get what people want out of a space exploration sim.

It's planets, space, and some life.

Real space is more boring.

This entire planet is going to be let down by literally everything forever. Can't we just enjoy nice colors and elements with bullshit names? Damn.

Still haven't bought a PS4, glad this one's coming out to PC. The price is a bit shitty.

The thing about procedural game worlds is, IMO, that you need to put in significant hand made chunks. What everyone wants is mysterious alien ruins and such, which requires actual storytelling.
 

Yep. I do agree with jak on the price, would be nice if it were cheaper, but that's capitalism for you. I want more games like this, and it's a couple months before the next couple games I want to play, so tada (with apologies to Mantic for likely using the money they'd have gotten for Dreadball 2).

And I hope it does well enough that once the moronic tide washes out they can continue to update it, or at least work on another, more awesome, version. Because we need more games like this, and ironically the unwashed Internet shoots themselves in the foot by continually shitting on every attempt because it doesn't meet their perfect fantasy of what a space exploration game should be.

The question is did this game need to be priced at $60 to be profitable or are they just trying to capitalize on hype? I bought minecraft when it was $5 and you know, that was a thing.  I think NMS could have become wildly successful at a lower price point and grown a huge following.  My instinct is telling me it's gonna burn a lot of goodwill at $60 and word of mouth will not be as forgiving as it could be for an indie space sim.

I don't disagree with that.

It's entirely possible that this will deliver an experience worth $60, but my guess is the pricing is purely opportunistic. If it's bad it's going to add the sinking of space sims to things accomplished before Star Citizen can do it.
  

A team of 20 people has worked five years on that game and we're nevertheless debating whether or not $60 is an "opportunistic" cash grab. Instead of, you know, a perfectly adequate price for a game that took five years and 20 people to make and won't sell all that well. Don't confuse a very small overhyped group of psychotic fanboys waiting for the second coming of gaming Jesus with mass appeal.

Secondly none of the insane hype around the game was ever driven or encouraged by Hello games (nor Sony for that matter). What should they do. Tell everyone not to buy the game because a small group has forgone all rhyme and reason?

The developer's/publisher's ROI is entirely their problem and the pricing is their prerogative. I'm just guessing it was the hype that convinced them to try out the high price point.

I always figured it was the fact that the game was on consoles that set the $60 price point.

You can't compare time and manpower to market worth, they are two entirely separate things.  Rise of the tomb raider was in development what, four years? I am willing to bet the team on that was bigger than twenty people, should that game have been $80? $99?

I get they worked hard but people have an expectation content, playtime and depth at $60 that NMS is VERY likely not to deliver on.  They can charge whatever they want but I firmly believe they are going for the quick cash and the word of mouth once released is going to be a resounding "meh, wait till steam sale"

Will they make money? Hell yes they already have.  Will their reputation suffer as a developer? Of course it will.  It's their choice to make but I think it's short-sighted.

Yeah I think I am waiting for a Steam discount.

+1

When I first heard about NMS I was sort of surprised they wanted $60 for what sounded like a high end Minecraft mod.

Plenty of really good (and some deep) games come out (even on consoles) at the $20 mark these days, and $60 is definitely reserved for AAA games due to the huge number of games out these days. 

We'll see how well (or not) it sells but I would honestly pay $15-20 for the game because everything I have seen makes me feel like the shiny will wear off relatively quick.  I have too much other stuff I can play in the meantime that is much more likely to give me more fun until then.

Officially confirmed August 12th on pc (https://twitter.com/NoMansSky/status/761694858562207744)

Details of the day 1 patch and ideas of stuff they plan to add post-launch (http://www.no-mans-sky.com/2016/08/update-1-03/)

From those patch notes:

That sounds like a pretty substantial shift in the user experience.

I like it.

Of course, I just (finally) started Fallout 4 and am stick in the build-my-house mode. But if you'll all report this is awesome later this week, I'll jump over. Fallout's not going anywhere.

I love that so much. There was so much gnashing of teeth over this. Just...don't do it?

Then again, I guess if people had self-control, capitalism would collapse. So ok.

Find myself a little bummed over the date slip to the 12th, but only because I was actually looking forward to playing. I should go have a melt-down on social media or something. Or maybe just go back to listening to incidental dialogue in GTAV for a couple more days.

http://www.no-mans-sky.com/2016/08/update-1-03/

St Bloodworth's Day comes earlier every year.

http://www.no-mans-sky.com/2016/08/what-do-you-do-in-no-mans-sky/

Apparently they didn't send any review copies out to anyone.  I'd be a little worried because of that.  It doesn't always mean the game will suck (Doom 2016 did the same and it turned out to be great) but it increases the probability that it will, esp. for a game like this coming from a brand new indie company.  Unless it turns out to be awesome, it looks more like a Steam Christmas sale purchase rather than a day 1 purchase.

So far so good. It's the "space sim" I wanted, but I'm not a hardcore Elite or Star Citizen type of person.

Not sure how anal we're being about spoilers so I'll err on the side of caution.


I can't tell if the feeling will last 20+ hours, but I'm in so far.

Very on the fence about this game... Looks cool enough and does some things I really like, but hate to drop the cash on it only to fall short.

A fairly balanced sounding first impressions (http://arstechnica.co.uk/gaming/2016/08/no-mans-sky-first-impressions/) based on ~12 hours of play.

Feeling more and more like it's very unlikely I'm going to be interested in paying full price for this.

I always thought we had a fairly easy rule regarding hype that was earned through decades of hype cycle bullshit ("The Molynreul"). I just don't understand how anyone can be disappointed by games anymore.

People don't like to follow advice they dole out.

My own advice is horseshit.  But I'm sure it applies to you.

If that's aimed at me then I think I've been pretty consistently cautiously reserved about this particular game from day 1. Nothing's changed in that regard.

If it's a general comment aimed at any of the frothing fans currently shitting up places like Reddit with their gnashing of teeth and outrage that NMS apparently isn't robot Jesus, well, yeah. I dunno, people are easy marks for hype and some pretty screenshots. The space sim type game has been a bit of a barren wasteland for ages, which encourages unrealistic hopes.

I keep seeing people proclaiming 'no more preorders!' but still the orders get pre'd. Either people are optimistic or stupid. Take your pick.

I am optimistic that people are incredibly stupid. As for screenshots and videos building pre-orders, you do all realize that the entire ad industry is built on the premise of stimulating human beings' idiot centers to get them excited for products since the first ad was added by Addy McAdderson?

So who here owns this and what's your opinion so far? Price worthy, or save it till Xmas special? Of course, I realize I might be early given you lot play on PCs.

Waiting for the Steam version. Excited to putz around in a pretty sandbox for a while, but (like apoc) I've been pretty low on expectations for this.

I'm way more stoked for Mafia 3, but that series is one of my favorites. And though I have ardently vowed to not pre-order, I've pre-ordered NMS, Mafia 3 and Civ 6 (though with decent discounts for those two).

No big whup for NMS, I cancelled a $90 KS for Dreadball 2, so I came out ahead :p

Picked up the ps4 version for my wife. We both think it is pretty awesome. We like exploration survival games though. I am also buying the steam version.

Bought it on PS4. I like it but it's not for everyone. It's beautiful and empty and huge. If you're looking for instant action, this isn't the game for you. If you you're the explorer type? It's awesome. It keeps edging me on to discover new shit.

Murray did an AMA, they're still working on pc-specific stuff. I'm sure Sony kicked them in the nuts to get the PS4 version out to the exclusion of working on not Sony parts.

So FOV is going in, and Murray mentions working on ATI opengl compatibility. Pins his best guess on release for 6pm GMT on Friday, so sounds like there may be some room for slip, but with good reason (ie not just exclusivity/region nonsense).

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4wsra2/i_quit_my_job_at_ea_where_i_worked_on_burnout/

Basically this should be the exact review of the game.

I like it a lot and I'm going to play it slowly over the next few months. However, it simply won't live up to everyone's expectations.

I enjoyed my time with it last night.  I purposely went into it only having seen that original video.  Expectations exceeded.

Along those lines, I tried to explain to my wife why I try to not get excited about games anymore.  Naturally she thinks I'm not interested, which is understandable, but I did tell her to preorder it.  Then I forgot to enter the PSN bonus code because:
1. Rebel Galaxy is free on PSN.
2. NMS consumed the rest of my evening.

My son likes it as well, which I'm attempting to avoid taking as a negative.  Wife declared it boring, as expected.

Sean Murray:

It's OK Sean, it means you are still alive on the inside.

I've watched a bit of footage now. Is everything in the game really CGA palette 0 or 1?

50 planets in 7 minutes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdJnpf7uXaw)

I've had a chance to play a few hours now. It's definitely not the game I think a lot of people were expecting, but I think at the same time it's interesting and enjoyable for what it is. I think the nice thing is that this game is much easier to pick up and put down than other titles, and it's definitely more relaxing to play. It may be something I play while listening to podcasts or shows, but that's not intended to be a knock, the overall feel of the game is very relaxing.

My only faults off the bat are that the game explains pretty much nothing, from simple stuff like what the different icons mean and how to gather stuff, to more hidden mechanics like discovery. There's also a cripplingly limited amount of inventory space, which I assume is a design decision to encourage you to sell everything you find. Also some of these critters seem to be unkillable while entirely capable of killing me. Lastly there are a ton of gated containers and doors which need something called an Alpha Pass which I have no idea how to find, so that's a tad annoying.

Tips so far:

1) If you can zap it you can scan it. To scan stuff hold down L2 on the PS4 (no idea about PC sorry) and wait a few moments and you'll get an entry in the discovery menu. These discoveries can be uploaded for small amounts of credits, but there's tons of stuff to discover (plants, rocks, animals, and locations) and the income seems to add up in the early game. The only thing you can't scan are the big stacks of minerals such as nickel or aluminium. There seems to be a list of 10 entries called "Records" which are revealed by scanning animals as far as I can tell. If you get all 10 you get a substantial amount of credits. So this system encourages you to explore and document planets

2) You can go underwater, your ship cannot. This seems a bit buggy at the moment though since surfacing doesn't refill your oxygen meter. The only way to refill your air is to jectpack out of the water and then fall back in.

3) Look for alien monuments/relics. They look like big purple-grey cylinders an each one teaches you a word in alien and raises your standing with that species. This helps solve puzzles

4) When scanning the blue cogs you sometimes see as a result are blueprints, these should be a priority for you. You can also do a wider scan while flying in your ship which will reveal points of interest nearby

5) Your multitool doesn't come with a gun by default, you need to craft one using an empty slot in the multitool menu (you may need to find a blueprint for this).

6) Sell everything, so far in the first 3-4 hours I haven't seen anything particularly rare across the first two planets I've explored. You need the credits to buy bigger ships (the only way to increase ship inventory) and you need the inventory space.

7) Don't bother carrying carbon, it's everywhere and it's pretty useless. It's worth farming some plutonium and the Thalium9 (or whatever it's called) since you need these to fuel your ship. They can also be used to recharge all your other gear - at least of the gear I have found or crafted so far. Likewise only harvest iron when you need it.

8) Resources stack to 250 in your personal inventory but 500 in your ship inventory, so it's probably better to transfer them over while you're out farming.

All in all the experience has been pleasant and interesting do far. It remains to be seen if it has legs, but I suspect I'll get a good 20 hours or so out of it minmum, which is enough for me to be happy with the money spent

Don't carry a lot of carbon, but have some to trade with the Gek.

Is the game as brown and purple as that video indicates? Why do designers pick such crappy colours like this (Beyond Earth was worse...)?

It's all sorts of colors but the majority I've seen have been ridiculous oranges so far.

It's all subjective as usual. I think the designers picked those colours because they thought they were beautiful, and I tend to agree: the colour palette of No Man's Sky is one of the reasons I got interested in the game to begin with, and I have a feeling I am not alone.

The colors are random, as far as I can tell.

On the topic of hoarding things, I found a crashed ship and I really want it since it has one whole extra cargo slot (and it looks better) but I'm out of zinc.  Worse, there isn't any zinc nearby and possibly nowhere on this god-forsaken moon I am on.  So, that's actually sort of interesting.  I should be able to possess my old ship, find some zinc, and come back, but ... ?

I know 20 alien words.  I'm excited about that.  Good thing the grammatical structures are the same.

So I caved in and decided to take a chance on it since I have not really bought any games this year other than The Division (and since I am still milking GTA 5).

Downloaded and installed while the gf and I had dinner, fired it up after we got done watching Jeopardy about 7:30p. Next thing I know, she's asleep and it is 11pm. Game definitely doesn't hold your hand or give you much direction other than a few vague tips, but it's not that hard to put the pieces together after some trial and error. So far so good. Been awhile since I let time get away from me while playing a game. First night honeymoon period maybe, but the sheer size and amount of crap to mess around with makes it seem like it has legs.

I'm sorry, but people still watch this? Are they new airings or are you watching reruns?

New airings. Jeopardy is new almost every day and it's still Alex Trebek.

The gf loves trivia of all types and it gives us something to watch for 30 minutes while we finish dinner and clean up - if she makes it home from work before it starts.

I should have started streaming this.  My original flying tub is gone.  I have a crippled pulse engine, four zinc, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses.  Also, this planet is a geographical oddity: no zinc anywhere.  No fauna at all and few flora means I'm basically trudging around a crazy planet, surviving on plutonium, trying not to fall into the subterranean warrens, and finding ruins and abandoned outposts.  No Dapper Dan, either.  It's a god-damned geographical oddity.

Edit: Forgot to mention it has a rarefied atmosphere and my life support eats through plutonium at an incredible rate.

The writing in this game is fucking horrible  :why_so_serious:

Writing in games being good is such an outlier that I'll go ahead and say "writing in games is fucking horrible."

You're probably right. I'll try and get a screenshot of some of it, but it reads like low-grade trek fan fiction.

The Witcher 3 has warped my expectations.

I keep hearing how rare its supposed to be for people to meet in this game, but if everyone is heading to the centre of the universe wouldn't that area eventually become full of people?

They claim there are 5 billion stars or something like that. Which is a number human minds can't even try to picture. So considering the centre of the galaxy is probably not just one-star-sized, I think it's fair to say that players might really not meet ever. But yes, I am curious too about what the statistics about that will be after some time.

You won't meet anyone because no one is there. (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=213089454#post213089454)

And two players have already been at the same place at the same time (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/08/10/just-one-mans-sky-really/) (coordinated out of game) and didn't see any sign of each other. So "meeting" another player seems to involve going to a planet only to find it's already been named DickButt114124.

More than two set of users have publicly gone to the same spot on the same exact planet at the same time, not just one set. 

Each new generation needs to learn some of these lessons for themselves.

Generation? I see these proclamations every 6 months. Just how fast are y'all breeding!?  :uhrr:

*runs off to buy the game*

I'm debating whether I should finish my story or let you guys figure out for yourselves what can be done.  I can tell you that I gave a little consideration to restarting, but I'm glad I didn't.

Finish it.

I think everyone's story is different. I spent two days running through a hostile blockade trying to find materials to build a warp cell to get out of a shitty system.

My corpses litter that system like a shitty GPS network over Earth.

I came to the conclusion that I wouldn't be able to hold out for a steam sale, as my curiosity is to great.  So pre-ordered it for the bonus 4 hours before it launches.   :awesome_for_real:

I preordered it last night, and since I had to be up at 5:30am I'm glad it didn't unlock at midnight.

Supposedly it unlocks in two hours here in Europe. No pre-load. 4 hours bonus? What?

See... I was following the tooltips that said build some warp cells so I spent my time on my second planet just making 4 of them as I thought that would be enough (given it never said how many). Took a few hours and I mined the crap outta all the gold deposits I found so after a suit upgrade and a new multitool, I'm sitting about 800k with a full warp engine. Now I am trying to figure out what's next... Do the atlas stuff or just keep exploring and farming and making coin.

I hope it does actually unlock in two hours...I can "preload" it this afternoon while I'm at work :)

Thank god the gymnastics are more or less over (with no events today), so I can actually get some tv time to play tonight!

Pffsh no events today but not over at all. They are back Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.  :heart: I had to buy a StrongVPN account and a DirectTV account just to have full coverage of it.

I picked the Atlas path for some reason.  There is another path which I guess is now off limits.

So, this planet.  I presciently named it Death Mine due to the description of plentiful resources and crappy atmosphere.  Maybe ironically, I didn't die.  I kept at least 350 plutonium in my exosuit at all times and knew I'd at least be able to grow old in a cave somewhere.  Or everywhere since the planet was holier than the Pope.

Some of the green-questionmark locations on my so-called HUD have scanners, and that seemed like a good idea since so far wandering from site to site was only revealing more abandoned outposts or caches of platinum.  The silicate kind, not the metallic kind :uhrr:.  I had plenty of iron and plutonium so crafting bypass keys was no issue.  I searched for Colonial Outposts and walked several minutes to a few of them, only to find that they were abandoned.  Manufacturing facility?  Abandoned.  It was about this point that I considered simply lying down and letting the planet win.  Not sure what propelled me forward.

Maybe it was the enormous looming Other Planet that surely had zinc, a reasonable atmosphere, and dancing girls.  I guess Korvax might have dancing girls.  I had already figured out that my HUD only shows travel time up to one hour, since the two ruins and one beacon I had on visor all showed that.  Depressing.  Still, either the other planets were rising or I was making progress around this fucking shitball that called itself a planet.

It wasn't all monotony as I hiked toward the beacon.  I didn't really know what "beacon" meant but it had a better chance of salvation than alien ruins.  I did stop in caves quite a bit... at first.  I got pretty good at identifying the four types of plants from afar.  All of the floating boulders were copper.  All of the yellow surface boulders were emeril.  All of the blue columns were heridium.  Not one bit of hisridium anywhere.

There were also many abandoned outposts along the way.  I did always stop in, and found quite a lot of technology blueprints.  There were a few drop zones as well, and so my suit gradually became able to contain more and more plutonium, and Geknip.  Yummy Geknip.  No zinc.  Occasionally one of the outposts would have a machine that let me summon my ship!  It flew in, landed gracefully, then made horrible noises when I tried to take off.  Fucker.  At least I could retrieve the Geknip from it.

It was indeed over one real-world hour to the beacon.  I had upgraded my crap a bit, tweaked the mods on my mining laser such that it worked great on Sentinels, and perhaps gone native a bit.  Still, no hesitation in activating the beacon, which promptly revealed an outpost containing a landing pad and a real live occupant.  Sixteen minutes later, I had access to the Galactic Net and purchased 44 zinc (all they had) and got to work repairing my ship.

The crazy thing is that I spent the rest of the evening flying around this same fucking rock.  I wanted to hit the ruins that taunted me for so long, and I found quite a few others unmarked.  Currently I know about fifty words of Korvax and three Atlas words.

Not sure where I will go next.

Your skill in Skim Over Post has increased! (+1)

This game just screams for The f13 Radicalthon write up treatment. Wish I had the chops to try one.

Feat. DJ Prt Scn

1.5 hours until Steam's install servers explode. No preload? Yikes.

No preload but it's also only 2.6Gb at least (According to Sean Murray)

Unlocks in 15 minutes here in Europe (I'm an hopeless GOG fanboy so I purchased it there :D).

PC video options look encouraging:
http://www.pcgamer.com/no-mans-sky-graphics-settings/

http://imgur.com/gallery/pV9Yl

Live on Steam!

2.5 GiBs it seems. Currently sitting at 0% for me on remote install. At least I can monitor it, no point in leaving work early until it actually installs.

That is how I talk in real life, too, so best to avoid me altogether.

Apparently the PC version is a complete shit-show. Unsurprising given the odd delay.  

Might want to delay purchasing this until it's fixed (and a more reasonable price..).

edit: I guess it's running great for some and and a lag riddled crash fest for others.  It seems completely divorced from how powerful your PC is.

Seemed to work fine for me. Couldn't change resolution though and the field of view is garbage.

Framerate is surprisingly low on PC. Other than that, I am having a blast.

Go Go Master Race.  One of you is going to go full-VR on this, yes?

I'm planning on getting this for the PS4 this weekend, I trust it's not FPS-twitchy-y enough that the lack of KB+M will hamper me?

Getting a few laggy spots but mostly running fine. Schild, did you mess with FoV controls? 90 seems cool for on foot.

Sam, not sure about twitchy, but you do look around a lot, so that may bother you depending on your tolerance for that. I hate using thumbsticks to look, so I'm playing with kbm. PC supported the 360 wireless pad fine, though.

(Yeg, I was talking about content, I'm trying to avoid any game info. Your style is fine :))

Not in the least.

I'm assuming it has to do with this (http://www.no-mans-sky.com/2016/08/issues/):

CTD after Hello Games splash screen. Been a long time since a game did that.

I take it back. The PC version is 'not that great'.

Other than that, the first few hours of the game are simply fantastic if you were born in the 70s and grew up gaming in the 80s and the early 90s. No idea if it has longevity, but so far it's well deserved honeymoon time. I love that it does not hold your hand too much (it still does), it feels like the crossover between Starflight and Elite that we used to dream of back in the days, plus Terraria/Starbound.

Even fighting those flying sentinels, it's pretty forgiving.  I spend 69% of my time exploring, 29% of my time in my inventory, and the rest of the time hiding in my cockpit.  Apparently you don't permanently die, anyway.

What's harder than shooting things is scanning flying creatures.

My issue is that the game for some reason requires SSE 4.1 support from the processor which mine doesn't have, being an old Phenom II. Refund time!

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1262187

I've been told to go to a space station and I've taken off and spent the last hour in my pulse drive hoping to eventually arrive. I'm having to mine asteroids just to refuel. Am I doing something stupid or am I eventually going to arrive at the damned place?

I am not an expert yet, but I think you are doing something wrong. If you are in pulse drive (activated with A+D) you get to that station in a few seconds. If we are talking about the very first station you are supposed to visit.

Yeah I must have zoomed by and not noticed. I reloaded my previous save and found the place right away. Oh well at least I learned how easy it is to mine Thamium from asteroids rather than picking it up over hours wandering on a planet surface.

Touch of Captain Blood in there too.

First impressions - space travel is fun, running around the planet is less fun.

Glitchy interface, can't use mouse and kb because the custom controls screen is totally broken (I'm a leftie).

I'm having fun exploring but the game seems to run like ass while on a planet on a rig that's maybe a year old.

Go Go muh PC master race indeed.

So true. Well spotted. Loved that game.

 :Love_Letters: :Love_Letters: :Love_Letters:

Well I've managed to get my exosuit up to 17 slots, so I guess it can grow beyond the original 4x4 square, and I also found a couple of multitool upgrades (they're available from red boxes on the walls of some outposts). So now I feel a bit better equipped. Grenades are the business too, definitely try to get the grenade launcher upgrade as soon as possible.

I had a fun time wandering about this evening. The game is definitely more fun in certain ways if you get out your ship and go walking for a while. You're fairly safe to find an outpost or something that will let you recall it to you, and you see and find more stuff than if you just sightsee from point to point using your ship.

There's still some stuff that's not entirely clear to me. I found a Korvax who would give me an unlimited number of words or other gifts in return for 20 carbon a go. I got my dictionary up to 50 before I decided to go do something else. I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature though.

As far as resources go the only worth carrying around with you in the early game (as far as I can see) are Plutonium (you need it for launch jets, and it can refuel everything else other than your ships pulse/hyper drive), Zinc (to recharge your exosuit, if you don't happen to find any shielding shards) and a little iron (used to make bypass keys along with Plutonium).

If you need carbon go shoot plants, if you need Thalium9 go shoot asteroids. Plutonium is the only isotope which actually takes a little searching for, and it's the one you arguably need the most of, so it's worth keeping a stock on you.

As for the other elements, I'd argue that saving a stack each of Chrysonium, Copper and Erbium on your ship since you need those for some Multitool upgrades and they're not the easiest things to find (at least in my experience). But really you can just sell everything since all the elements seem pretty readily available early on. I don't know about later in the game, but for now I'd sell stuff and try to get into a bigger and better ship.

The crafting/blueprint system could be a lot more interesting too.

Oh, and when you find one of those scanners (with the yellow beam of light rising out of them) you can use them as many times as you have bypass keys. I initially assumed that they were one-shot, but this enables you to find a lot more points of interest quicker.

So, anyone have any clue how one gets "Atlas access" or whatever it is?

Looks like I am one of the lucky ones who got a game-breaking bug. Can't craft Warp Cells even though the game keeps telling me to do so. And no, I have not redeemed the pre order ship. Rage.

I was being dumb and whiny. Fixed.

You have to run into some anomalous benefactors for the Atlas access. At least that's what got me my blueprint for one.

Word of warning. If you're thinking of buying that sweet new ship, don't charge up your warp drive in the current one. You can't move your charged warp core into the new one. I wasted a fully charged warp core in a system with almost no zinc. I spent hours scavenging up enough mats to charge my new engine.

Okay, downloaded.

I have a flight halfway across the world in the AM. I was expecting this to be a problem; I was expecting something like Stellaris where I'd stay up until dawn drowned out my desklamp, stagger through TXL Terminal C to my godforsaken economy-class butt-space, then groggily awake in Abu Dhabi and be forcibly mingled with the great unwashed at the security checkpoint before my connection. I was expecting to spend the next two weeks gnawing at my return ticket and struggling to avoid spoilers.

I played for four hours. Now I'm going to bed, and neither of the above will be problems. They made a nice technology toy and then couldn't figure out a game, so they slapped a (very inventory-limited) crafting/survival veneer on it and called it a day. I didn't have a bad time, but I don't feel compelled to pick it back up.

This is the totality of my review.

(Also, fuck the sentinels. Terrible idea.)

I think Dunkey sums up the game nicely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgfxo3CLdNM

The reviews on GOG are tearing it apart, almost all talking about performance issues. I think I'll pass till its optimised better. Looks nice though.

It's getting shit on with the Metacritic and Steam reviews, too.  Glad I held off purchasing it.  I'll wait for it to be $15 or less during a Steam sale a year from now.

I would suggest that rarity of something depends on where you are, at times.

Pro tip: go into options and rename everything. Every system you have encountered, every planet and every creature you have discovered. It gives you money if you do. It also feel pretty great, but that's maybe just me. I love that every planet has its own list of achievements basically.

I requested a refund. The technical problems made it literally unplayable for me. 3 crashes in the first hour and even on lowest settings the framerate would often totally tank despite the fact that I exceed all the minimum requirements without a problem.

A shame, really.

You can also just "upload" the data and get the reward.

This game is basically a more fleshed-out Rodina, but still not worth three times the price.

I would also like to say the entire QA team should be fired for not refusing to play after seeing those goddamn UI-skullfucking achievements ad nauseum. That's a mistake I wouldn't expect my grandma to make, and she can barely eat soup.

Plays perfectly fine for me on a 970.

Its one of those games that is impossible not to immediately think "I wish it just had this and this and this..."

Plays like the super easy casual mode of Elite Dangerous: Horizons. Every bit of "realism" is not in this.

The Milestones are a right pain in the ass. "Yay, you walked another km! Lets interrupt what you were doing for a musical queue and widescreen cinematic, just like the one we did five minutes ago."
Still no idea what combat's like, only time I pissed off a sentinel was five minutes in, so I just ran. Haven't encountered pirates yet.

Slowly starting to figure out languages is kinda neat. So was finding a crashed ship to repair. I have the constant dilemma of wanting to go find better planets, but wanting to completely explore the crappy ones I'm on first.

I see no real purpose to the game overall, but I've put 5 hours of fiddling in to it today according to Steam. Halfway to what I consider bare minimum time spent to justify a purchase.

Oh, you're alive! This is good.

Ain't no games worth posting about, most of the time.

Well, given the performance issues on PC people are talking about, I guess I will wait until they fix them, or I upgrade my 870M laptop to something beefier. Might be time to dust off the old boat anchor and do the whole "gut it and start over" thing.

--Dave

Well, my flight's delayed and there's nothing worth having for breakfast in this shithole, so y'all get some more NMS bile filtered through five hours of sleeping-on-it. Two things immediately stick out in my mind.

First, the UI is refried gopher ass. 99% of the time, the "push and hold" interact mechanic needs to get killed, it's just a waste of time. The inventory screens need a complete ground-up redesign; the icons are gigantic and yet show nothing. Access to the inventory is uneven. I can zap things freely between my suit and my ship if it's nearby, except if I missed the landing pad, at which point I can do it if and only if I'm not using the market or talking to someone -- that is, exactly when I want to be able to zap things around freely.

And I miss the landing pad often, because the camera is locked in a position that makes my fat bastard of a ship take up the bottom third of the screen, and you can't stop or freely pitch down, so precision landing is combination of luck and counting down a few seconds after my target disappears beneath the camera. Which has, by the way, the same sort of field-of-view I'd get when peering out a window at ADX Florence.

Subrant: the recharging mechanic. I kind of understand the need for something to supplant "hunger" in a survival game, but there's an umptillion things that need recharging and the UI for doing it is hideously bad. Recharging life support? Tab+Mouseover+Hit E+Mouseover Fuel+Click+Tab. Recharging my mining drill? Same deal. Takeoff thrusters? Same deal. My fucking shields?! Same deal. (And do it in combat!) And things need to be recharged every few minutes; apparently the future runs on iPhone batteries.

Second, half of the "experience" is obviously designed with pretty show-floor demos and promo reels in mind. The giant achievement stinger first and foremost, but almost every other interaction has some kind of slow-pan built into it: interacting with terminals, with aliens... using a fucking savepoint pans your view up to look at the landscape for half a goddamn minute. If any other game added a thirty-second save animation, people would be throwing their keyboards at the wall.

And none of this is going over the core problem with the gamespace itself. It's cool at first, but after three or four planets the patterns become apparent and you suddenly realize that this anonymous nowhere planet is basically the same as any other anonymous nowhere planet. They all have the same six or seven setpiece POIs scattered at the same rough distances (~2-3 minutes walk or 30 seconds flight apart), which all have the same "challenges" and offer the same "rewards". But maybe the sky is purple and there's a cow that prances around with its butt stuck out. (Which I managed to name, despite the profanity filter's best efforts, as "Bottsekks Bovine".)

You will never find anywhere special, because each place is just as special as all the others. It is procedurally generic. Welcome to Harrison Bergeron's Sky.

Ok so I obviously haven't played this, but it seems they made a procedural universe from an extremely limited set of variables and then normalized it to make sure nothing actually extreme spawns. When the actual fun part of procedural is the chance to encounter the extreme end. Like ten mile deep canyons and aliens who shoot plasma from their ass into space.

I don't know how much some of you think they have seen of the game. I have no evidence to prove that there is so much more to be surprised by, but there seem to be a light plot, there seem to be an end goal (with different endings), there seem to be languages that you can learn that will potentially open up more conversations and options, and there seem to be areas that are locked that eventually you open later not to mention the traditional powering yourself up to become bigger better and stronger. I am not fooling myself into thinking that there is so much more to come, but I am really not sure what everyone was expecting. As I said I helped myself by keeping expectations low, but in what is certainly a cute box there seem to be more to aim for than I would have thought. It pains me to say so but that's something Elite Dangerous couldn't do, which is provide a reason to continue.

I'd certainly be playing and enjoying what's there if the game would run on my PC.

There seem to be two situations here. Mine, where I like what the game was offering, I just can't play it.  It might be that I came to this rather late (in the last month basically), so I think I had a rather fair view of what the game actually was. A low-key exploration/survival game.

On the other hand, there seems to be a segment of the disappointed playerbase who was expecting this to be something closer to what Star Citizen is promising, without quite so many absurdly promised features. This seems to be the population that is angry.

I would hope that the PC teething issues will be resolved, that patches will fix the worst of the performance & UI troubles, in time. It's day 1, this is the norm now, I don't get why anyone would be surprised by this. Similarly, bad PC ports and common. Good PC ports seem to be the exception. Why would anyone be surprised by this?

I do think there are a couple of issues beyond the current technical ones on the PC port though.

Firstly, while it may not be entirely Hello Games fault that this got over-hyped, it is entirely their fault that the hype was allowed to continue unchecked for so long. Sean Murray in particular has been saying things and answering questions in an extremely vague fashion for a long time now. It is only in the last few weeks that he's tried to back pedal on expectations a bit and he has on several occasions outright claimed that certain things would be in the game that it's clear now aren't, e.g. multiplayer. Yes, features get cut, things change, but being vague about them when you're under such scrutiny and the focus of so many hopes is unprofessional and the resulting backlash is, IMO, entirely deserved.

Secondly, they allowed the hype (and probably pressure from Sony, although that's entirely guesswork) to make them think the game was more than it is and set a price point that doesn't feel right for many people. If this had been released at a typical small studio, independent company price point of $20-40 or even if it had had a lower-priced early access period then I suspect that a lot of the current ire would have been dissipated.

F13 posters are, I suspect, generally unrepresentative of the general game buying population. I have nothing to back this up but my vague knowledge of what many of you do, your family situations, etc, but I'd be very surprised if as a group our average disposable income wasn't considerably higher than game buying populations as a whole. $60/£40 isn't a lot of money to many people here, but to large swathes of people in low income jobs or who's salaries have been stagnant for a long time now, full price games feel expensive. In the last 5 years I've probably bought 3 full priced games, and one of them was Minecraft at £15. And actually, one of them was Fallout 4 which I pre-ordered with a 20% discount!

Hello Games didn't dispel the undeserved hype their game was the focus of. That led to a lot of people paying full price for a game that they probably wouldn't have done if they'd had more honest information about it. I am guessing (lots of that in this post, I know) that they're getting a lot of Steam refund requests right now. I could add another overly wordy paragraph about the gaming presses part in all of this, but frankly I stopped caring about those shitclowns years ago.

18 months ago, Sean Murray answered 70 questions. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0uYnwqlslU)

For the record, I haven't rewatched it but I think he said here that you wouldn't be able to play with your friends. He even said the game wouldn't be fun. HEH.

Fake add: with that said, I think there's a lot of fair criticism towards the game (Multiplayer vagueness for once!), but I disagree with the part about hype: I do not think Murray and Hello Games really did much to hype up the game. That's entirely on the players if you ask me, and Sony in this case. And I certainly don't think a company should spend any energy in trying to reduce the hype surrounding their game. Seriously, what? GUYS GUYS! STOP BEING EXCITED WE SUCK! Yeah sure. In fact, I am pretty sure they would have failed even if they tried because sometimes people just WANT to dream. Backlash or not, I am convinced they are for good reasons proud of the game they have made, and they are also filthy rich now on top of that.

I think it's a cool but imperfect game. I'm sure everyone at f13 would make an absolutely perfect game. Yoru excepted from this sarcasm, because he, you know, has actually made arguably the best minecraft mod :)

Speaking of Yoru's rant...you can refuel by 'moving' fuel onto the item, so I keep a stack of plutonium next to my suit. Still not an eloquent solution, but it's not too bad. Shield, on the other hand, should be rechargable same as a gun, because you'll need that in combat. Could be chalked up as a design choice to ramp up difficulty, so I give that a pass.

Honestly the only thing that has bugged me is another thing Y picks out: landing. Definitely needs a better landing mechanic. And possibly another pass on hitboxes, hiding behind/under structures while fighting sentinels can get a bit loose at times. Again, not a huge problem, but it needs another pass.

It's easier to write about the bad stuff, though. For the most part I'm enjoying it quite a bit and glad I got it. Right game at the right time kinda thing.

Very chill, relax and don't worry about gaming it too much. Wish I still smoked pot, would be perfect.

edit: I don't ever remember hearing anyone say it was multiplayer other than shared data ala Spore. Ever. It was one of the more entertaining things in the hype train, because if it had multiplayer it would've been the primary selling point and hammered over and over in press. That it wasn't puts the onus on morons who just want to believe something is true, and fuck those guys. Maybe now they can make America great again.

At 0:59 he says explicitly says 'Yes' you can play with your friends and then follows up by saying you can play competitively.

I don't mind the lack of multiplayer myself, but the awful GUI and laggy framerate on a high end PC have induced me to request a refund and feel a little sad at the same time.

3 hours in and I'm on the fence about the game. A lot of the problems I have with it are UI related; the consolitis is very strong.

I'm not sure how to recharge my personal shields. Also, how does one get off the Atlas path? I'm interested in going a different route but I keep getting quest popups from Atlas.

I would imagine this is how Peter Molyneux became who he is: the discovery that you can make up all sorts of promises without having to keep them, and be rewarded for it.

Yeah, this game is a big hit and miss.  Granted, I haven't had any of the technical issues you guys have.  Game runs great on my 1.5 year old system, almost no lag, near max settings.

You fight with the UI a ton, which is annoying.  Almost all of that is due to consolities though, so I can just blame that part on filthy console gamers again.   :awesome_for_real:

The planets are varied and pretty neat.  Jumping up and down between systems is really cool.  I love finding all the random bits of technology, and slowly learning the words of the various alien races is neat.  I've always been an explorer at heart though, so ymmv.

Having said that....  there seems to be a criminally small amount of encounters.  Like, literally about 7 to 10 unique special events/features you can discover on a planet (there are hundreds of them, but they are just carbon copies of each other).  Unless it picks up as I progress, that is just mind boggling.  Maybe they just ran out of time, but a ton of their resources should have been devoted to the different special spawns that can happen on a planet.  Seriously needs over a 100 or something for a game like this.  That is also why I'm shocked at their hesitant support for modding.  Much like Minecraft, if you opened this game up to modders, the possibilities would be endless.  I'll hesitantly blame this on their decision to develop heavily for consoles as well.

No regrets so far, and I'm sure I can wring a few more hours out of it.  But unless they do a big post release content push, they desperately need to make this game as modable as possible to fill it with content.

Teleku, I do blame Sony for a LOT of stuff here.

That said, as an explorer and casual gamer, I'm really digging this one. I mean to sit down for a half hour this morning and 3 hours later had to pry myself away. Love the settings and style and there's just enough between the cracks to keep pulling me along.

edit: 8 hours into the game and I'm still in my first solar system (8 planets). Just having fun poking around mostly aimlessly.

I'm sorry for anyone having tech difficulties and I can understand the outrage around that, but I have been blessed with a virtually glitchless game. Also, all those bitching about how its a casual exploration game without a plot or a 'real' goal...did you even WATCH any of the available gameplay footage and massive advertising campaign? I went in with my eyes wide open and so far it has delivered on every single expectation that I had, and has even surprised me with some things I had overlooked upon first viewing. The language discovery for one.

I do see how it can turn into a grind, so I'll see how I feel in a week, but the pearl clutching mario cart gamers out there should just sftu already. The game wasn't meant for you in the first place, and you're just upset that a game got hyped that didn't fit your populist expectations.

Glad I waited. Going to give it another week to see if they can work out the PC glitches. I'm very interested in it, but don't want to have a crappy tech issue that ruins it.

Too busy playing it on PC and PS4 to complain...

argle bargle


Edit:  waiting on a new GPU card today to try on my 3 yr old PC.

Ugh, really?

I've watched this entire shit show from the sidelines, well aware from the start that it wasn't going to live up to the hype. But having misgivings about a developer/publisher claiming their game had features which it ended up not having, and not coming clean about that until the last minute is 'pearl clutching'?

If you're liking this game, then that's great, awesome. But a lot of people (I stress again, not me, this isn't self-interest, I've not bought it) feel that they've been misled by the devs and the gaming press, and that's not good for the industry in the long term.

The line between what you've said there Falc and "It's OK to lie about your product in order to generate sales" is vanishingly small.

I've said this many times before, but games are no different from any other product. They exist to sell copies and make money. As consumers we should be afforded protection from deceptive business practices and gaming is not exempt from that. It's too easy to blame consumers for the failings of marketing and it's not a position I have any sympathy for.

This kind of shit is exactly why I've bought only three full price games in 5 years. I'm not sure engendering that attitude is sustainable for the gaming industry, unless all we want is more Pokemon Go clones.

I wish you could see what the reward was for certain things before accepting. I chose a gift instead of a black hole location from someone, only to get a duplicate schematic. :oh_i_see:

Fucking pirates....  :oh_i_see:

So found the station where I can choose to stay on atlas path, or find black holes to the center (or "free explore").  Stayed with atlas for now.  What changes with the other two ways?

I took one black hole, but the Atlas waypoint still shows up. I didn't get a new one either.

Took the black hole, traveled roughly 170k light years and broke part of my ship in the process.

The anomaly showed up two systems later and said, "Are you sure you don't want to mess with the Atlas?" And now I'm back on that path.

I guess it's time to take a vacation from the thread for those of us taking our time?

 :grin:

Probably so Sky.


May I ask, other than multiplayer, what features were mentioned that did not make it in? And as for Multiplayer, I never got from anything I watched that there was a multiplayer element. Just that there was a common database for naming, but to be honest, chances of overlapping are so vanishingly small that I bet a player could play this without once running into another player's named planets/systems/animals/flora.

Have a look at screenshots from E3 footage, all the trailers released over the last couple of years, etc. There was a lot more diversity of flora & fauna than people say there is now. Giant animals, miles-long flying snakes, towering forests, huge structures to explore, etc. As I said, I totally understand how things change during game development but these changes were very poorly communicated.

And as for the multiplayer, "At 0:59 he says explicitly says 'Yes' you can play with your friends and then follows up by saying you can play competitively" like, 5 posts up. This was not retracted at any point. Loads of the physical box copies (special edition or something?) have had a sticker placed on them (http://imgur.com/a/rSDQn) to cover up the "online multiplayer" feature label. Players have already, while streaming, been in the exact same place at the same time and been unable to see each other. Sean Murray *still* wouldn't fess up at that point to the multiplayer having been pulled at the last minute.
Edit: https://youtu.be/AE0nuW-mQ8A - this was an oft repeated claim.

Like I say, I'm glad that some of you are enjoying it, I'm also glad that I didn't buy it and I'm also disappointed that yet again deception and shrewd/aggressive marketing have succeeded in lieu of just making a really good game.

I'll be interested to see if anyone here is still playing this in a month.

I have to be careful that I don't conflate disappointment in the shoddy port with game content, but the lead dev has let out some real bangers.

(https://puu.sh/qAm3u/4215f9247a.PNG)

AFAIK, you can't fly into the sun in NMS because every system is inside a skybox.

No Man's Skybox


 :why_so_serious:

Anyone know what exactly the "Records" are, when looking at the Discoveries screen? I've found a few on some planets but I'm not exactly sure how, nor how I might go about finding the rest of the for the credit bonus.

It's 2016. Except Minecraft, no one is still playing the same game a month after purchse. Any game.

For the 200k bonus? You need to scan each unique species on the planet. Also, if you spot Emeril (bright green crystal) each stack is worth about 150k.

The 200k isn't fixed, it varies with the number of things. Is it just animals or plants too?

And Rocket League.


On NMS: I understand there are no load times? I don't mind pop-in but I'm not picking anything up no PS4 that has load times.

pearl and vortex cubes have a quicker return... if you have the inventory.

Wish you could sell ships... I love salvaging wrecks.

The only load times are when warping between systems, and it doesn't cut to a loading screen; you just sit there with stuff blurring past for a while.

And GTAV.

And Civ V.

And Rocksmith.

And Starbound.

I don't even play games much, and those are all 'old' games I've played since I installed Win 10 a couple months ago.

Anyway. Apoc, Murray may have had his fun with the marketing, but it was pretty clear to me exactly what the game was going to be, and I got exactly what I expected. And it's awesome. And honestly, I enjoyed how much Murray fucked with the hype train, because most of the people on it were fucking morons.

That does seem odd. Either they had it in development, and the bean counters screeched it to a halt due to the cost of the backend server infrastructure cost it would take, or it was a swindle. It seems hard to believe it was a swindle, since there's a lot of care and work in the rest of the game. I suspect that there's an overworked dev in that company that threw up his arms in frustration and walked away from the multiplayer code, and then the company 'forgot' to inform the public.

Yeah I don't for a second think the omission of multiplayer was a swindle from the start, it just had to get cut due to time/money constraints, that's fine. But all it would have taken was one tweet from Murray, the week it went gold, saying "Sorry folks, we've had to cut multiplayer for now, hoping to get it back in sometime in the future". But he didn't, and he still continues to evade the issue and dissemble to this day. That's deception.

Ah. Just animals so far for me, but there seem to be subspecies that still show up as red scan dots without counting towards the bonus.

Same with waypoints. There is room for six in the UI for each planet and I thought that was all you were supposed to find, but no there are many many more than six. Weird UI.

Am I a bad person for not wanting to obsessively track down each and every plant, animal and way point? I'm having much more fun plundering resources and shooting down sentinels. Oh, and is there any reason to bother with a boltcaster when you have a plasma grenade launcher? Slots in my multitool are at a premium right now.

I kitted my multi-tool with all the offensive mining tool upgrades I have found. I don't even slot a boltcaster anymore.

Its tempting to find a nice planet and fully explore it, strip it down, etc - but what;s the point? You can't actually accumulate anything in the game other than credits. At first I got exited when a ridiculous looking animal pointed out a little blob of rare minerals to me, and then I realized all it meant was either selling then for a few thousand credits, or permanently loosing an inventory slot on the hopes of finding more some indefinite time in the future.

Didn't they say in the day one patch that they upped inventory by 5x and 10x on ships? I assume that means stack sizes, seeing as my ship only has 17 slots as is. Doesn't help much when trade goods take up a slot each. This game totally satisfies my explorer's itch, but it makes my hoarder tendencies cry.

Has the PC one been patched yet? I don't even want to play it til it is.

Looks like Steam installed an 18 MB patch on mine last night.

Looks like the main "issue" patch is next week.

That said, I've had no significant issues. One CTD in 7 hours, no performance issues.

I was going to wait for a sale on this game but decided its just the sort of game I am in the mood for right now so I caved.

Started on a planet that has already been discovered, later on while i check the discoveries I see a new waypoint has been found by this other player, so there definitely seems to be someone else running around in my system.

The game is what I expected but fuck the inventory management is worse than anyone has put words too, its the fucking worst of any game.  Fill a world with resources you have no idea what you actually need or not, the desire to keep a good stockpile of all the fuels you need and throw in non stacking trade items and it is the worst thing in the game hands down.

I understand why they wanted to put an inventory limit, but sadly it's the biggest bottleneck to fun at the moment. You are constantly thinking about what you are collecting and how it will impact you or limit you. It takes the fun out of exploring too. It is just too damn tight.

Its the little details. Just discovered that if I have all the slots in my multitool full, I can't actually see what upgrades I know (or what I need to build them) without removing an upgrade from my tool.
The only way to remove anything in the game is to destroy it.

I do keep finding new things though, just discovered I could talk to a ship that landed at the little outpost I was at. He offered to sell me his 23 slot ship. I was excited until I realized I was 2 million short. Guess there is a reason to grind credits.

Nah, everyone's story is different depending on what path they choose and even if they choose the same path, RNJesus still decides how you encounter shit.

Just started tonight. The inventory limits are a bit too tight. That's the main thing that's crimping my sense of fun at this point.

Once I got my suit to 16 I find it's a decent balance of space vs decision making.

Mostly still just poking around planets. Learned a lot of the Gek language in the original system, which was chock full of planets. The second system, new aliens, one small moon and small planet...and one huge planet filled with rabid psychotic giant ticks. Seriously fuck that place!

The lack of inventory is really annoying me too, combined with the fact that the game doesn't store useful information about the planets you visit. I don't give a fuck what the names of the monsters are; why doesn't it catalog what minerals you've found? I need a bunch of Iridium for a warp drive upgrade, and I know I found some like 3 system ago but I vendored it because it wasn't useful. Now I need it and have no fucking idea where it is. Combine that with the fact that the rare minerals all look the same (tall blue pillar, gold-ish sphere, floating coppery sphere) and actually getting the material you want is a tedious RNG process.

I really want an infinite inventory mod.

Can you look at a map? That part is frustrating me so far--I want to see a view from above of where the POIs are in relation to my landing site on the first planet.

You cannot and that too, makes me stabby. I want to be able to go back to the outpost near the cave of infinite void cubes because, shit, that's how I made my first million and bought my current badass ship.

Is there a way to mark a particular POI, then? I would love to mark the place where I met the alien who would buy shit. Pretty tough to remember which that was.

No markers that I can see...at least ones you can mark yourself. I am currently on a planet with grav orbs which is pretty sweet, but they are only up on the surface and this planet has KOS sentinels and picking up the orbs summons the dog and walker ones. It is a pita to loot and run but actually kinda fun. Now to figure out where a trading post is.

I don't get how you can have a procedurally generated exploration game with no map.  And yes I know minecraft... This really needs an overhead mod.  I can suffer the inventory micro Mgmt if I can see where I can fly back to to sell stuff.  And makes me not want to go to space since I can't find previously explored points.

Grouchy edit:  and why populate every POI including your original spawn point with Atlas lock boxes? WTF?  It's really frustrating since there's zero info about what they are without spoilers.  If you only get a pass later in the game why show them everywhere on your starting planet.

Seriously, this game is love letter to golden age blah blah. In short, it wants you to take notes in a notebook as we used to do. Admittedly, that works.

Vanilla (unmodded) Minecraft has had craftable maps since beta (2011-ish), not to mention lots of other ways to keep track of where you've been (signs, persistent terrain alteration, etc).

I know that the first thing I want to do if I'm gaming from a couch is to drag over a table for pencil and paper note-taking.

I was so close to breaking out the notebook earlier today...I don't see that as a bad thing.

Except I don't see any indication of any sort of coordinate system, so once you fly off a planet, good luck ever landing on the same continent again.

So, played the last 4 hours. Figured out the problem.

They forgot the game.

Pretty much. Been bumming around free space and after about 8 hours got my first suggestion of what the hell I'm supposed to do about Atlas. And its about 6 systems away... Bow glad they gave me one warp core for the mission.

I see some potential here, and its not quite as bad as it first appeared (the first three hours gives you the idea that there are only like five setpieces). Game got a little more fun to explore on foot when I got a jetpack upgrade.

And yes, I've broken out the notebook. Asimovia System has a nice barren moon - with a pleasant atmosphere, and a crap ton of Aluminum and Nickel.


Also, for anyone who doesn't know: THIS IS IMPORTANT FOR YOUR SANITY:  Hit "Melee" and then immediately hold down jetpack. You sort of do a jetpack run forward that's considerably faster than sprinting.

How can you take notes without coords?  And yes, without being able to add buildings like minecraft it's a fetch and explore game.  I worry it's going to get old fast when there's no map and easy way to bring 1M for a better ship.  So yeah, not much game.  Please patch in the fun.

Stealth edit:  this popping of PoIs and mobs for harvesting makes see a lot of SWG. 

Downloaded the experimental patch and it seems to have fixed the issues I was having. The GUI screen is still borked so I have resigned to using the controller. Enjoying it now.

I think they believe that incredibly limited inventory and constantly deteriorating or needing-to-be-refueled items *is* the game.

So much hate for such a cool game. Oh, f13. Never change.

For finding a spot on a planet, you can leave a POI discovered in a facility in the region where you want to return to. It will be visible in that system from space.

Seriously Sky, back up a bit. The game has so much potential to be boundless fun, but the inventory minigame has to be addressed. Not being even able to see what upgrades you have available without clearing a slot in your ship/tool/pack is wft levels of stupid. Having to spend your entire fortune on a ship upgrade which, other than new slots comes with no other visible benefits other than a dubious aesthetic upgrade is  :uhrr:

New slots = better weapons and more carrying space, that seems pretty beneficial. And if you're finding flying a cool new ship to be dubious, the game probably isn't for you.

Actually, it's not for most of f13, it's not really a big achiever/killer kinda game. It's just tool around looking at cool stuff and naming things appropriately silly names "Derpasaurus" or "Slightly-Less-Derpysaurus". I find that entertaining and if I need some guided, hand-crafted gameplay I have several games on my list to fill that niche (GTAV, Witcher 3). What I don't have is anything like this. And it's awesome.

Not going to back it up. While it's not perfect, I'm really digging it for what it is. Nobody is backing up the hate, either.

I am very confused about this game.  I don't "hate" but I am not having great fun.  I wonder if the design of this game is maybe flawed because it seems that there's "nothing special" about exploration (AKA Schild: "no game in it").  Bear with me while I explain.

While I was wondering why they shipped an exploration game without a map, or a coordinate system, or personal markers, or a notepad, or any kind of (public console) logging it occurred to me that this was deliberate.  Possibly these features weren't launch blockers, but maybe because of the emphasis on SPACE they do NOT want us to stay on planets.  Making exploration suck on planets is another drive to get players into SPACE to check out the eleventy-billion stars&planets they auto-generated.  The same way you have ever-diminishing inventory that forces you to go out and survey and mine and explore, they also don't want players to stay too long on one planet.  diminishing fun?  Go to another planet.

Another reason are the mob, resource and POI spawns.  First it seems remarkable, then it's ridiculous once you start flying.  You can't fly more than a few seconds without encountering another shelter/observatory/opscenter/tradecenter/camp/etc. and similarly for ruins/monoliths/etc.  They are EVERYWHERE.  The spawns are tuned for foot travel and once airborne there's nothing mysterious -- they are not hard to find.  This availability was probably designed to make it easier for players to advance, in the same way you can find isotopes/fuel/etc everywhere.  But once you realize there's nothing special about any of the buildings or ruins you encounter, it feels like another drive to go offworld.  Why stay on the same planet when it's a stripmall of ruins and buildings with single-word rewards and tech plans?  Tired of the same?  Try another planet with new-same.

So, not having any tools to manage your planetside explorations + eliminating the feeling that there's something special to discover (i.e. buildings&ruins everywhere) = a drive to push people off planet... to encounter the same thing on another world?  Once I started thinking like this the criticisms that it's "just a tech demo" started to resonate.  With no narrative campaign or progression mechanic except monies, and undercutting the freedom for players to stay on a world and really explore it and personalize (i.e. no personal buildings, no multiplayer) the game is feeling disappointing.  Am I doing it wrong?

You pretty much hit the nail on the head.  Sean Murray has stated several times pre-release that they didn't want base building and other things in the game because they didn't want people to be encouraged to stay on one planet, but instead he wanted to encourage people to keep moving around and explore all the different planets.

This of course puts things at odds with them saying base building is coming a few days before that shouldn't confuse anyone who has been watching him give mixed signals over and over again.

Oh god.

https://twitter.com/Britbongreturns/status/765190830894317568

The Derpasuarus Rex is pretty awesome, I must admit.

The problem with encouraging people to explore "space" is that while the planets in the game can be pretty cool, space itself is overly meh.  I've yet to see any sort of nebula, or planetary rings, or anything new really in a given system. All the planets look like earth until you get close to them, all of them have the same asteroid fields surrounding them. Space is one area Elite blew them out of the water in, just on a visual level alone.

I stopped doing the head to the center of the galaxy thing, because it felt like I would just stop on a planet, get enough resources for a warp core, and head off to the next system. I guess my made up goal right now is to just find a planet with a nice atmosphere, interesting plants and animals, and then um, I dunno, do something...?

None of the planets I've seen look like Earth.  But I've never been to Edmonton...?

Close, but off by a Province.

What I mean, is that from a distance all I see is blue and white swirly planets. Then I fly close and its a barren purple rock.

I was really spoiled by Elite.

They've obviously been hard at work for the past two years. No wonder a delay was needed.

I like it for what it is but it does frustrate me because I think it's another case of using procedural generation to skip having to make content rather than because it makes for a better game. Two basic things would make this a really great experience:

a) less smoothing of the generation--allow for a few extreme/unusual outcomes. I can see the smoothing on every planet I visit, and it contributes to the sameness of feel. Minecraft is a good example of how to avoid this--every Minecraft world ends up having a few weird/extreme spots that are very memorable for some reason.

b) There should be something on the order of 300-500 memorably unique hand-crafted POIs/encounters scattered across planets, maybe 2-3 per planet.

I've totally backed off, I'm done here. Said my piece, won't be saying anything else without major developments.

i like the game for what it is, too: an extended tech demo that they tricked people into buying for full price

I've only been on an even dozen planets (ok, one was a moon) and I've seen one (really awesome) POI that wasn't on any of the others. It did show up a couple times on that planet, but nowhere else. Different art/music/text.

Of course it would be cool to have more hand-crafted content. I'm guessing the system allows for them to plug more in over time. If they do that, it will elevate the game in my opinion to a truly great game, with new content to find on my stumbling through the galaxy naming rocks 'A Red Rock' 'A Slightly Off-Red Rock' 'Allmanbrotherscis Cubensis' 'Joe's Landing Pad' 'Phil's Landing Pad, Joe Sucks' I'm just that easily entertained and ok with that fact.

All for letting the RNG off teh chain now and again, a Derpasaurus that just kinda drags it's giant head around or something. Yep.

fake edit for Sam: I don't feel tricked, I like it better than many games I've bought recently. At Steam Sale prices, everyone should buy it for sure. But we did kinda know what the game was going to be, even with the hype train and Murray's trolling of said train. I actively avoided any gameplay footage and it's pretty much exactly what I expected.

i mean i'm liking it okay too but i just know that nearly all of us, even the ones who definitely like it now, are going to get fatigued out by the grind rather quickly. there needs to be more going on with this game, for sure.

They've been sanding away for the past two years without even considering going to Harbor Freight and buying a $50 tool that will work at least once and save them 98% of the labor effort.

I don't understand why you feel the need to white knight this so much.  For the most part the conversation hasn't had much hate except when you try to tease it out of people.  There's actually been quite a lot of constructive criticism by people about some of the real flaws of the game.  

Yeah, I think people are being pretty proportionate, all things considering. I like the feel and the mood and the experience of the game flow, but it's kind of like the Wizard of Oz--I see too quickly through how the game is doing its tricks and it spoils some of the fun. And then I start dreaming up some pretty reasonable, doable ways that I think it could be better.

 

It's the name... :why_so_serious: :why_so_serious:

Eh come on, there's always a white knight here for something. Maybe it's just Sky's turn? :-)

People have mentioned Minecraft. Minecraft is one part an exploration game and yes it has coordinates. I always found the craftable maps basically useless, but that's just me. Nah, the comparison breaks down because a) Minecraft isn't pushing you to constantly consume what you find as a springboard into finding the next planet/server; and, b) the whole "planet" is deformable to your heart's content. Then there's a the second order but as-important element of the biomes and how that deformability drives resources discovery all in service of building stuff specifically to stay in place.

Also the idea of developed content for NMS is kind of anathema to the premise and the promise. The more content they created, the more UI they'd need, the more task/goals they'd have to put in, the more it's just a regular game on an indie budget, the kind of thing you see promoted once on Steam and then forgotten. This needed to be high concept and stay that way just to get the attention.

Bah. I feel cheated. Being a bit obsessive compulsive I decided to explore this moon to the point of 100% completion in order to get a 325k Unit bonus and feel good about myself. I never completed a planet before so I assumed that all I had to do was to discover all the lifeforms marked as ? ? ? ? ? ? ? in the UI. There were 12 entries there so, again, I assumed there could be only 12 species on every planet -or at least on that one planet-. And I was wrong. When I was down to only two left (and that took me a LONG time), I finally found a new one that I hadn't recorded before, only to analyse it and find out that IT DID NOT COUNT towards the 12 species limit. In short, the remaining two ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? entries were still there even after scanning a new (red dot) unseen before species. I thought I was confused and tired, but when two hours later I found some never seen before aggro beetle down in a cave the same damn thing happened. For all I know the game might be expecting for me to find two pig-ants that are hidden in some procedural parallel dimension, or it's a bug. Regardless, the UI doesn't know what it wants from the players, and one of the "feature" I decided was entertaining to me is broken and doesn't make any sense. Fuck this bullshit?

I want to add that I don't think the game is not good or bad based on this, but it's a matter of fact that there are issues that start to become apparent after the first few hours of honeymoon are gone. In this context of creeping disappointment I just picked one of the goals and challenge that the game seem to invite players to take on, but to find out that it's basically a scammy feature doesn't help the cause of this game and, in a way, it is starting to symbolize pretty well the whole experience.

Yeah it needed more testing and polish.  It's not finished by the extreme feedback it's getting.  I'm not put out by missing dinosaur-sized mobs or multiplayer.  But I'm quitting until they add new exploration tools and/or a real questing-like mechanic or anything to make gameplay more interesting. Patch in the fun.

edit: sarcasm highlighted

I noticed early that each species seems to have variants that have the same name but some different colouring or feature.

What games have successfully patched in the fun?

1. Diablo 3
2.

It's not so much that D3 patched in fun, it's that they removed unfun with a patch. Deleting an enormous feature that turned out to not work for the benefit of the game.

I know I'm digging the game and I guess I am filling the white knight role around here, but that comment was a reply to someone telling me to back off, so I was replying in kind.

Falc, did you check the popup at the lower right that tells you if it already belongs to a discovered species? Different genders/ages will scan as different entries in the lower list and can be named differently, but the ?? list will only count the species as a whole.

2. Marvel Heroes

City of Heroes if we're actually doing this.

Different genders and ages show up as new species in the scanner but don't count towards the discovery counter. Need to be completely unique, a tad annoying.

I've only managed to complete one planet so far. I had 14/15 on the first one, but the last creature was not coming out to play, so I gave up.
Whoever gave that tip to use melee + jetpack has really helped, thank you! To boot; I just discovered a jetpack upgrade so whizzing around now.

But that's after they patched out the fun, multiple times.

Nah, they make other games.  Just do something else.

Sometimes alternate genders of the same species do count for discovery.

And then there was the planet covered with gigantic rectangular donuts.

If you cut a hole in a resource, you can hide from radiation in there.

Also remember, if you get lost deep within a cave system and can't remember the way out, you can just tunnel your way up and out via grenade launcher.   :awesome_for_real:

With all of it's faults the concurrent player base on steam alone is pretty massive (http://steamcharts.com/).  It's also the 5th highest concurrent count ever on steam.

Ship upgrade slots only go in increments of 1-2 (mainly 1) if you are just salvaging. Sad panda, I am. I was so looking to score some 42 slot ship on a salvage run only to find out I can only get to 30 at the moment since my bucket is 29. At least I have a full suit and multi-tool.

Yeah, I've seen those :) I forgot to rename the planet Dunkin.

Still in the pre-order ship, haven't wanted to do the repairs on the crashed ones and saving up for a decent jump in slots to buy from a trader (you can talk to landed ships at bases or stations). Those can range up to +10 slots from my current one.

I've blown some dough on the multitool and have it pretty decent right now. I get a little too into the style of it and like to change it up.

Suit I've just been slowly adding slots via the downed pods, should've stayed on the planet that it seemed easier to find those on!

And I can complain, too: seems tough to locate enemies in a dogfight. Had my first death when a distress signal went up. Took the first guy out fine, but figuring out who was good guys or bad guys and then trying to dogfight was a bit confusing. Not really a huge complaint, because my ship has zero point zero combat upgrades, so I don't feel comfortable complaining about getting shot down in combat under those circumstances. :)

Yeah I have come across a few 40-44 slot ships at the bases. Those will run you 17-36m units. Granted, I could take a day and visit my Vortex Cube plant for a day or two, but I am really liking the salvaging ships aspect. Most of the ships are complete shit looking, but occasionally I get a gem. I like that - that's my slot machine itch.

Space combat is horrible first starting out, but upgrading the shield and getting phase beams with an upgrade or two... yeah no issues anymore.

Ok, but let's face it, the game's dogfight mechanic makes Tie Fighter look like a modern game.

Okay, so I havent bought Elite nor this yet.  Which one is the purchase?
And if I were to splurge on a ps4, which is the better couch game?

Lastly, are there any helper apps out for NMS yet?  Seems a forgone conclusion there will be, if there aren't yet.

Maybe I'm enjoying it because I have had no pre-existing ideas of what the game could/should have been. I just looked at it last week and decided to blind faith leap. So you have to keep that in mind when reading my comments.

That and I don't have a wide span of gaming by any means, so I lack a lot of comparison chatter. Perhaps ignorance is bliss?

For those interested: http://nomansskymods.com/mods/

That mod site is groaning under the weight of the userbase trying to fix mod the game.

So at first I was on board the hype train and now I just post links to angry videos:

edit: I think this spoils the ending though so be careful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8P2CZg3sJQ&feature=youtu.be

LOL. That was pretty great. I got my ship wing stuck on a floating piece of copper yesterday so I can relate to that snippet.

Found a system that was already discovered, shame they didnt take time to name the creatures and all the planets.

Time is money friend.

I haven't named anything... well save for my money making planet. Maybe once I get a ship I really like. But really, it is just planet 12389865 with tree 2325 and animal 98964. Holy shit, I should just go to work on one entire system and use all binary in the names. Shame there is almost 0% anyone would ever come across it though.

Is there even a way to name your Ship? I couldn't find one.

Even just hovering over each one to upload it feels tedious.  I can't imagine ever wanting to name any of this shit given that there's no reason to stay on a planet for any length of time.

The thing that makes this game so much less sticky than Minecraft is the lack of any kind of real creative tools.  In Minecraft you tend to pick a location and build it up and fortify it and decorate it and use it as your home base for a very long period, so you have a chance to build familiarity with the world around you.  If there were an option in Minecraft to name the mountain ranges and lakes around my home base I'd probably use it.  In NMS I see no reason to give any fucks because none of it is memorable and I have no reason to go back to any of it.

Nope. At least no way that anyone is aware of.

I've played Elite on Oculus, and NMS on PC. Elite requires the Horizons expansion to give you the same type of stuff as NMS - space and planetary.

Elite is stunningly gorgeous, and for an old guy like me - pretty dam hard. I have lost ever space battle I've been in  :awesome_for_real:
It tries heavy for "realism" and can be played single or multiplayer.

NMS is colorful and occasionally funny in its looks. And it's ridonculously easy. I have not lost a battle in it yet - closest I've come to dying was from falling in to a hole.
It's purely single player.

Neither has any distinct story to guide it, they are both very sand boxy. Very different experiences though.

Heh true, I took the the time to name the first bunch of creatures I discovered but have stopped recently. I may start again though, in the knowledge that someone may get a chuckle.

I'm glad the game is making so much money on the paid beta.  When I give steam my $20 in a year or so it's gonna be a really fun and polished experience.

Looks like some people compiled a pretty extensive list (with citations) of a lot of game systems promised that were never delivered on:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4y046e/wheres_the_nms_we_were_sold_on_heres_a_big_list/

I name every system and planet, but don't bother with creatures or plants. I only scan stuff by accident, when zooming to look for minerals on the horizon.

I've started naming more as I go. I named everything at first, then got a bit impatient towards the end of the first star system (8 planets), but for me it's way more fun just to be laid back and take it slow. Including naming stuff.

I'm pretty much down to just fucking around 1 planet per system.  I've jumped probably about 20-30 systems worth, and I can tell there is a hell of a lot left to go for the story.  Thankfully I've upgraded my hyperdrive engine, so I can jump several star systems in one go.

This reminds me very much of the difference between Terraria and Starbound. I enjoyed Terraria a lot more because you felt like the base you built mattered, whereas in Starbound everything was just another temporary dump en-route to a never-ending somewhere.

That list is pretty comprehensive. Though, I have on many plants watched animals chase down and kill other animals. Other than that... yeah. Can't argue... but I'll still play.

That is EXACTLY what happened to me. That is, so far, my one and only death in the game and happened in the same identical circumstances. I didn't know who to shoot, and when I finally did, tryint to protect the big ship, I aggroed 12 fighters that killed me in four seconds.

Hehe, my favourite bit from that reddit criticism thread:


I think the guy is obviously crazy. Either that or he just likes lying to people.

Here's my favorite line:
Still, very good article.

I have not played Elite, but I have recently started Rebel Galaxy and that is pretty fun and casual enough for me.

the game is a lofty project involving procedural generation that obviously hit a brick wall during development where they had to give it enough of a gameplay pastiche to make it more than a tech demo. the more i play, the more it seems profoundly evident that the whole game was scaled tremendously back to account for gameplay quality concerns so that they could slap survival gameplay elements on top and get it out the door.

in particular:

1. the procedural world generation has obviously gone through several tragic defanging and sterilization passes to make sure that there weren't things like inescapable pits the player could fall into. now the worlds all seem samey.

2. since they didn't really know how to manage space being a place where you could run out of fuel, they seem to have opted to make all space the same, choked with asteroids made of spaceship fuel. this is super disappointing.

3. since i guess people might get their feelings hurt if they flew their craft full speed into the ground and then it blew up and killed them, your ship now can never really interface with the terrain or do anything but hover at a set altitude, that the world generation appears to have been neutered even further still to accommodate (capping the severity of any terrain altitude change). again making the worlds look more boring so that the game can play more boringer.

4. the shallowness of the game's inventory management and crafting system requires a constant available presence of inventory management options such as always needing merchants to sell to. as a compensation by the developers, every single planet you "DISCOVER" has literally thousands of buildings on it full of spacefarers who live there or are constantly taking off and touching down all day all apparently sitting around with their thumbs in their asses waiting for you to name the planet you have "DISCOVERED" — if there is ever an actually uncharted actual wilderness systems, I have not found them. everywhere you go is populated and has a space station.

in short this game is Sporecraft 2016.

I think the issue people have with this game, setting aside all the hype, is the very vague and evasive responses given by the developers when asked even basic questions.  If they had been more straightforward and honest then we wouldn't be seeing the controversies surrounding NMS.  It's not a good way for a brand new indie studio to start off with their first game and no one is going to trust them if/when they make another one.

They've probably made enough money off NMS that they can leave the industry and never make another game.

Probably.  They can go all Phil Fish and say "Fuck you guys, we're out!".

Honestly, reading down through this thread, I have a feeling that if this was half the price people would be 4 times less pissed off. That and if they had just said "sorry guys, problems with network code, had to pull multi-player at the last minute. Hope to Iron the thing out soon."

$66 is a large percentage of my weekly income which is why I honestly baulked at this, and I think they aimed it too high. People pay that and they want a fleshed out experience, whereas if they pay $30 they are far more forgiving.

If it didn't come out (also) on PS4 they could have just labeled it "early access" like so many other games that seem to be failing to deliver all that was promised.  :why_so_serious:

For the record, this is my plan if I make a game or am elected president.

I agree with all you are saying here extremely valid points, but I seem to be enjoying it anyway.

Maybe I'm just determined to get my moneys worth, but to be honest I think the whole is greater than the sum here. There's actually a pretty funexperience going on here that is severely lacking in other games of this genre. In fact there's a real dearth in quality in this genre as far as I'm concerned and at least this is step in the right direction. Even if it is a bit of a mis-step.

As others have said, if this were a $30 early access title I wouldn't be so annoyed with it. Right now I think I'm done though, until they patch in the fun.

This is why I don't look at prices on things.

I'm wondering if there's wiggle room for a class action lawsuit at this stage. I had no idea that the dev team was so obviously duplicitous about the game's nature as documented in that reddit thread.

As far as my experience goes, the bloom is off the rose and I see an endless quest before me involving one or two more slots in my ship's inventory so I can hoard the otherwise useless rarer elements needed for shield boost 4 or whatever.

As far as the comparison to Elite and NMS, my most immediate, albeit superficial observation is that ED goes for a 'realistic' depiction of planets, both in terms of art and physics, whereas NMS is more akin to World of Warcraft, both artistically and their concern for 'realism'.

elite, for all its problems, has a rock solid space flight experience. most of the value of the game is in using it as a lern 2 spayschip sim, as you slowly get more and more adept at six-dimensionally navigating landings and transit and navigating spaceteroids

Oh for fuck's sake.

Red Bull got sued for not giving people wings. The bar is low.

Because others are cunts is not reason to advocate acting like a cunt.

Oh I'm not advocating it, just wondering if its bound to happen considering the uproar and not unsubstantial evidence of consumers being misled. I personally can't pretend to be an aggrieved party, since my purchase was based on a few clips from a talk show and a youtube video here and there that did not 'lie' to me or lead me astray, as these other interviews/videos did. I do however, wish I had seen those videos because I would have immediately smelled a rat and known they couldn't possibly deliver on the things stated.

Warning! Penny-Arcade trigger:


https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/08/17/infinite-and-infinitesimal


As for me, this game is just what I was thinking it would be, and honestly just what I would enjoy -- at a twenty dollar price point. So waiting on that Steam sale, and wondering where I'm going to budget the hundred hours or so I'm probably going to spend on this game from...

Okeedoke, sorry, then  :grin:

Just so much avoidable angst if people just waited until, oh, a day after release to watch a couple videos or streams.

If you're into this kind of casual exploration kinda thing, it's a great game and there are lots of people enjoying it. Seems most who aren't were looking for something the game is not. I don't bitch (much) about Terraria/Starbound being platformers, because despite that I got a lot of enjoyment out of them (even if I had paid console retail like NMS). But they ultimately aren't good games (for me) because of the platformy console/boss encounter gameplay. Know thyself. Those looking for more game I think are misguided, putting in more 'game' is what killed Spore. If Spore had been just a toy as WW intended (and much how NMS is), it would've been a much better game.

I fully agree on Spore - more game killed that.

With NMS, it feels like a Sandbox Survival Exploration game, but doesn't have one of the key features we expect in Sandbox Survival - building things.

I know they have said base building is coming, but I think its something they needed from the get go. What's the point in discovering your own world and naming your own stuff if there's never a reason to go back?

I actually don't think base building is the nirvana of this game. I think it's a big uptick in hand-crafted POIs. There should be a reason to keep going over the next hill/system. The possibility of something extreme, unexpected, unseen. I feel that Minecraft actually provided that in various ways. This is missing that sense that tomorrow might be WOW, look at that.

Agreed base building would definitely go against the essence of the game. Although you could use the plasma launcher to build some underground caverns, if you want to have a Terraria like experience.

Are there any mods available that can give me a frickin' compass or some other method for identifying which direction I'm going in? -_-

Why? There's no point in going anywhere in particular on a planet other than the next waypoint.

To clarify on the base building - I think that could have worked had the game been built around that. It obviously wasn't though - so its just going to feel tacked on. Why build a base on a planet in a game designed to encourage you to leave and never return to said planet?

I like aspects of it, but my biggest problem is that the game's only real driver is discovering something new - and it doesn't seem like they put enough interesting things in there to actually discover.

I agree base building would be very starboundish, and not in the good way.

My 2c would be just continuing work on what's already here. Not going to gain the audience of people complaining about the game, but you can enhance the audience that likes it. More content for the procedural engines across the board would be job 1 (and I'm fine with where it is now, just what I think it a priority focus to improve things). Then craft in more POIs to feed into it.

Then work on more deep space mystery stuff, long term. Hell, hide it all over and just obfuscate stuff. As long as the procedural stuff continues to be expanded upon, I don't think many carrots are needed, so long as there are some.

Actually, a way base building could work and use the current format in an improved way would be some kind of larger ship for hyperspace jumps. Like the big cargo ships, but you can slot it up with defensive gear (for pirates), and it has an inventory. Upgraded similar to normal ships (buy/salvage), also opens up another layer to space combat by letting the AI use them, too.

Then you have a persistent 'base' that travels with you. Dock your fighter/trader/explorer and walk around inside. Decorate etc. Make hyperspace jumps from the helm.

I don't mind if the base building feels tacked on.  At the moment its a sandbox game but with an extremely narrow focus of gameplay, they created a huge universe for a small game.  I just want some extra things to do, even if they don't further the main goal of the game.

There are two things I want most from a base.  Local storage so I can create a nice stockpile, knowing full well I may be abandoning it when I move on.  Secondly a fixed reference point on the planet.  Lets say they limit you to one base per planet but then, in the absence of implementing a coordinate system, they at least make that base a fixed point like the systems space station, then that will satisfy me.  I can use the base a point of reference for the rest of my exploring.  The main issue I have with the exploring in the game is how directionless it feels.

This. Also, because I've had crashed ship beacons vanish on me (possibly a bug), and would at least like to know which direction of the world they were in so I can go explore for it manually if need be.

Discovering special locations on planets should be more difficult and far more rewarding.  Scanning birds or shooting them down is annoying,  that needs to be fixed. Some of them seem impervious to laser damage.

I think it is more that they are out of range, the beam only shoots so far.

Nah I can see the hit markers when I hit them, Ive shot plenty down that way.  Theres just some species that refuse to die. Annoying.

So you know I said I was done with the hate? Yeah, I Sean Murray'ed.

No Man's Sky creator walks back "no paid DLC" statement. (http://www.pcgamer.com/no-mans-sky-creator-walks-back-no-paid-dlc-statement/?utm_content=bufferaebef&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=buffer-pcgamertw)

And apparently these suspiciously similar Metacritic reviews have been traced to Guildford:
(https://i.imgur.com/bcbXyql.jpg)

And let's not forget that in that list of things promised posted earlier just how many of those quotes were from less than 4 months ago, with footage that looked nothing like the released game being used 1 month ago.

Regardless of whether or not you like the game, is anyone still prepared to defend the marketing?

Defend marketing? Can you actually defend any types of marketing? And who is defending it here? There are some of us that are enjoying the game for what it is. Yeah there are little things that are a pain in the ass, but other than a very small list, that is the same with every game. Game is great if you didn't pay attention to what was said about it prior to release.

Yeah, I actually enjoyed watching Murray troll the fuck out of gamers.

I'm over the herd gamer mentality, they're a bunch of fuckwaddled manbabies who need to find real problems to worry about.

They had to wait LITRALLY less than the release day to see exactly what the game was. Which is pretty much what anyone actually watching objectively and not erecting a giant boner of wish fulfillment was doing (and is now considered white knighting, apparently).

Every time he slyly smiled and was intentionally vague about things that were clearly not in the game, I laughed. He's not the dev people want, he's the dev people deserve.

And he also made a cool game.

The flipside is that one should not be expected to become internet detective for every big release lest the game tells you to get fucked.

Which brings me to my favorite gaming thing this year: Steam refund.

I am having fun with it, but also acknowledge the game is more shallow than I was led to believe during the 3-year marketing cycle. I noticed it while playing the first few days but couldn't really put my finger on the problem. Once I read through that list with all the sources it all started to make sense.

On one hand, I didn't expect much from the game so I'm not super disappointed. On the other hand, I can't justify giving them money for dlc when they didn't even come close to providing what they promised. Really it's a shame for what it did for gamers; HG/SM seemed above this level of shenanigans.

As I said in Useless Convo, I research most things I buy. And I'm rarely disappointed. I don't feel bad for people not willing to do a minimal amount of research and then get outraged when what they bought isn't what some marketing told them it was going to be.

By that metric I want a refund for every Whopper I've ever choked down. I suspect chicken nuggets might not be the highest grade breast meat, too.

Why would a company spend more money on making a satisfied audience more satisfied? The satisfied audience has already given their money to Hello Games, and it's not like they'll buy a second copy or something.

Fake edit: Ah, I see that they've now decided there may be paid DLC after all, even though before launch they said there wouldn't be any.

Being able to build a larger ship that you could customize as your base as you travelled from system to system would probably scratch that building itch. You could launch your fighter from it and go down to the planet, etc.

This is all purely academic. I don't expect that kind of thing.

I think I've put my finger on the main flaw with this game: the pacing is super uneven, because it doesn't know what kind of game it wants to be.

Sandbox games can go in two basic directions, I figure.  Minecraft goes in one direction, where you build stuff up, and it's kinda slow and methodical and peaceful, like raking a Zen garden.  And something like, say, GTA goes in an entirely different direction, where you tear around the sandbox and explore and blow stuff up.

For a Minecraft-style game, you need to have creative tools so the player can slowly build the world themselves and take pride in admiring the world they've built.  For a GTA-style game, you need to have lots of content and fast-paced gameplay so the player can take pride in discovering/conquering the world you've built.

NMS does neither of these well.  It has Minecraft's slow methodical resource collection but with none of the creative tools to make it exciting to collect those resources, and it has GTA's vast space to explore but with none of the content or gameplay to make it exciting to explore that space.  Shit, in Minecraft even when you're collecting resources you're creating, because as you mine you're carving out a tunnel and you're making choices about how to keep it lit and navigable and how high you're going to make it and all this stuff, and the upper levels of your mine wind up being an area you're constantly walking back and forth through as you work on the lower levels, so you feel this strong incentive to make it a pleasant area to be in as you're carving it out -- in NMS you just walk around a planet shooting rocks and then you leave, never to return.

I used GTA as my fast-paced sandbox example but FTL is maybe a better comparison even though it's not something we necessarily think of as a sandbox -- it's somewhat open-ended and randomized, with lots of player freedom, but the focus is on exploring and conquering rather than creating, and the game has a certain urgency and excitement where you're always going forward.  NMS would be better off trying to make itself more like FTL than trying to make itself more like Minecraft IMO.  

Streamline the really tedious bits away (e.g. add tech upgrades that let you strip-mine a planet from the comfort of your ship, because after a few hours in I got really tired of walking around shooting rocks) and put some resources into making the dogfighting more fun (like having a better FOV and not making you navigate a horribly shitty interface to repair your shields mid-fight, just for starters) and I think you'd have a pretty good space adventure game.

(fakeedit) Also what Malakili said, if there's a building/creative aspect, it should be in your ship, again using FTL as an example of a game where you get to customize your ship pretty heavily.

I was grumpy this morning.  :pedobear:

I still think my idea of ship bases is the single best thing that could happen in the short term for this game.

Well shit. After playing a couple of hours, I just now had several crashed ship markers, outposts and monoliths to visit. After interacting with some debris to get a blueprint I already knew, suddenly ALL my markers are gone. *sigh* Lesson learned from this: If get crashed ship marker, go directly there immediately, do not get distracted by question marks or outposts or observatories or big piles of gold.Quit game, wait for patch to fix bugs. Too annoying.

I heard Volkswagen made cool cars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLaKe5gwvLA

I would love to play poker with him.

Edit: play

New patch to help stability issues on the PS4 have me freeze crashing after 10-15min... time to go for a long walk

I like this game. But I requested a refund nonetheless. Guaranteed to be on sale 50% off+ within 2 steam sales, and on top of that, they might figure out they need to handmake content by then.

Same-o.

The game's hype was too Molyneuxan for me to pre-order it. And the $60 price point severely discouraged any idle curiosity. Hopefully they work out what they're doing, and patch in the fun because the concept is kind of cool.

My refund was approved, which is cool, as my preorder was more than 14 hours ago and I had like 4 hours played. Probably helped that I asked for it to go back to my steam wallet since they couldn't do a Paypal refund.

Or, possibly, they're allowing any refunds on this particular title because Reasons.

I'm waiting for the sale too.  I have deliberately not followed this game since it was announced way back, but even then it felt like a $19.99 winter sale game.  My 11 year-old son the other day mentions how he wished he had No Man's Sky, and I stared back at him like I had no idea what he was talking about.

I would like to build something like a station that I could insta-warp to where representatives of different species came. I feel stupid having moved to a second system because now I'm talking to a second set of guys and wondering if all the words I learned of the first species' language will ever be used again.

The painful part is really just how lacking in flavor it is. The next alien race doesn't seem to have an appreciatively different personality or aesthetic sense from the last one. The planets themselves look interestingly different and yet they're also built up out of same-ness. Again, Minecraft is the thing to look at for a contrast--its procedural generation manages somehow to create environments that feel distinctive or individual. I can think of 10-20 Minecraft landscapes I've seen where I thought, "That is so weird!" or "That is really cool looking" or "That is beautiful", and it was often just because six or seven familiar compositional elements were in proximity to each other in a new way.

Minecraft's proceduralism is like language in that respect--give me a vocabulary of 100 words and I can find enough ways to combine them to seem fresh and interesting, to create a sense of surprise, for a long time. No Man's Sky feels like it has a vocabulary of 20 words and all the words are almost the same. So you can say, "Give me the donut or I will eat the bagel instead" or you can say, "Give me the bagel and I will also eat the donut" or "The bagel and the donut are both very edible" or "The donut is here, but where's the bagel"?

Instead of "I brought some chicken, where is the oven?", "The room is as hot as an oven, I'm sweating", "Feathers and skin and bone do not a chicken make", "Don't sweat it, and don't chicken out". Minecraft is expressive, and not just because you can build things in the environment--it tricks you into forgetting, at least for a while, how it does its tricks. NMS so far has almost never managed to trick me into investing, into forgetting. I think the closest it's come is the first planet when I was figuring out what stuff did and when I went into some caves. That felt immersive, I could for a moment talk myself into the situation of my character. But when I'd hit my second Operations Center or my third Manufacturing Facility or the tenth pod with an incremental technology, I couldn't get back in that mindset. And honestly, the combinations of shapes and so on with creatures and objects rarely makes you giggle with delight or surprise--there are no beautiful accidents or strange failures. I think also one thing that's really troubled about the game is the damned smoothness of the groundforms. Everything looks like it's covered with Play-Doh.

Well, they could patch out the Space Combat part for all I care. Wing Commander this ain't, and pretending it is hurts my insides (and my Titanium reserves).

Apart from that this is a nice sandbox. Maybe they will patch in some toys, because for a week or two playing with sand is fun, but I approach the point where I realize a shovel and a bucket would be preferable.

Now see, I find each of the species completely different in personality. Maybe it is because I am pretty far into the game in terms of maxing my character out and I been warping around pretty frequently. And you do encounter each race multiple times throughout the journey so language is lost on your first encounter.

There is this part you need to create/repair your warp drive.  You buy it from the supermarket during the "tutorial" or the story bit where you are supposed to leave the planet.  So far, I haven't been able to find another one, nor a blueprint to make one.

The game should've handheld you the blueprints. Iirc, there are two subcomponents you have to craft first, but I had all the blueprints needed. Of course, my first system was huge and I spent half the time I've played so far there, so...

And yeah...the aliens are quite different and I've already found some surprising twists to them and I've hardly traveled at all.

Dynamic Resonator? Those are sold at most every space station. You only need your launcher and pulse drive to get off planet. The blueprint for it will come eventually, but the resources to make it is kinda ridiculous.

I found some antimatter for sale and bought it, made a warp cell and left my starting system before I was supposed to. Eventually, I went back to the starting system did the stuff I missed and picked up the antimatter recipe I needed. The game really needs to do a better job handholding people at the start of the game.

Recipes show up repeatedly down the line so if you miss one, you will get another one (or 50). I think I have them all at this point as I have received nothing new for 3 days.

Well, I didn't check there.  I hit a few trade hubs and lots of aliens.

Does anyone else feel like their avatar is permanently crouched or really short? The perspective feels really strange sometimes.

I sort of wish there was a teeny bit more flavor text/narrative around my character (maybe there is later?) Like, if I am this dumb about interstellar travel, how did I get to my crash site in the first place? Is this a Farscape kind of thing where I got sucked through a wormhole?

Belt camera. And no... there is no FoV setting on PS4.

I didn't think my avatar was short until you mentioned it.

I do think I'm playing some sort of space white trash.  Can't read, can't understand furiners, don't have a smartphone or a home, just a space-jalopy and no job.

I have 59.99 Steam Wallet Space Duckets.

Space hobo simulator could have been a fitting title.

Makes a lot of sense also because I apparently go around just ripping off shit of some actual value that people have left sitting around in crates all over planets.

For angry.bob:  ;D

http://jezebel.com/why-isnt-it-called-no-womans-sky-1785411230


 :uhrr:

So what massive invasion/disaster/rapture has happened that all these people have crashed/vanished/generally died and left all this crap lying around?

And yeah I saw that Jezebel thing a few days back and I couldn't repost becasue I was in agony, due to the strain on my optic nerves from rolling my eyes so hard.

lol

get a fucking life

To boldly go...

If the sky belongs to no man, it must belong to woman.  This is the most pro-feminist game of the last decade.

So binary. What about LGBTQIDJWNAMSIDKA?

I'm not clicking on that link but please tell me that article wasn't fucking serious. I mean, seriously?

Well, I didn't see any punchline or humour tag.

Jezebel has never made a joke during it's entire rancid infestation of the web.

If you write articles called "Do the Olsen Twins Have a Type?" you aren't a feminist. Now I get why schild wants to nuke them from orbit.

But Calapine left out the best part immediately following (which contained a link to Kotaku):



"No we aren't going to review this misogynistic game! But another site in our network did, so please go there and check it out!"

Comment section is half people saying it's obviously a joke, and other half engaging in the ideological warfare you'd expect.

Why is it even called "No Man's Sky" if it takes place in a universe where every single planet is apparently crammed full of intelligent life, and where players run into evidence of other players with surprising frequency given the dev's claims? (the birthday "paradox" suggests that there may be vastly fewer planets than claimed, or perhaps more likely the game doesn't distribute players uniformly at random)

Its hinting that no man/one owns the sky. So, you can go anywhere. Or something.

I just assume it was supposed to be Norman's Sky, but they dropped a letter. We may never discover who Norman is.

The answer is obvious for everyone who grew up with psychedelic "Learn English" shows of the 80s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzy_in_Gondoland):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFmf4FkoCXY

My IQ dropped 50 points just from knowing now this jezebel.com site exists. That fucking abortion of a website should be reclassified as grief link!

I'm actually following that storyline.  I think?  Anyway, I feel like I understand some of that.

It's no Ika i Rutan, but that's pretty odd. Definitely explains who Norman is. My old roommate got a steam refund on this well after the normal time lapse, as I guess they're getting so many.

I been so busy maxing out my inventory, tool, and ship that I haven't even been paying attention to the story. Hell, at the moment I am just shopping around crash sites for "the" ship I want. I don't even look around anymore - not until I finish my quest for the almost perfect ship.

That said, they need to add in at some point the ability to construct your own ship. They are all modular so I can't see how hard it would be, and it would give the game a money sink.

I do feel as I travel along that I'm getting some sense that there's a reason why the bases look the same--you're kind of looking at an era of past galactic civilization/expansion that current races are degenerated or declined descendents from. That's cool.

I wish though that the fauna had a few really genuinely weird or variant body forms or shapes. After about ten planets, I think I've seen about all the basic combinations I'm likely to see. The last really amusing new thing I saw was basically a Gek head (cute!) with a lizard frill and koala body (stretched out) that was about four stories tall. That was three planets ago.

I did have a crazy planet recently where there was a series of caves near the first trading base that I came to that were absolutely full of these little boxes that sold for 30k a pop. I did about ten runs of loading up my exosuit with nothing but those until I got tired of it, and there were still more to be had. It was also a reasonably nice planet climate wise.

I also enjoyed though the insane radioactive planet where storms came every ten minutes or so. Full of great minerals include those rare little goopy things that burst when you mine them, but even with the Tau-level radioactive protection and plenty of shields to replace it when it ran down, I couldn't afford to get more than thirty seconds from the ship.

It's a weird game in the end. I both love it and find it frustrating. I can see simple things that could make it better, but I also can see how it could be much worse if they had tried too hard to add certain kinds of conventional "game" structures to it. It's a sort of hypnotic way to spend an hour or so.

I bought a boxy old clunker that was a huge upgrade for me a few days back. Not sure if it's a glitch, but I got called away before buying a ship and had stripped out all the upgrades from my old ship. When I logged back on, waited until I found a good ship, it was significantly cheaper. Could be RNG, but I think it tries to give you options loaded out like yours, so by stripping mine down it gave me stripped down options. Which was actually better because the AI doesn't do the puzzle game bonus thing with components. Initially my options were 4M-8M units, stripped down they were 2M-4M. After I loaded it up, my options are in the 12M-18M range.

I do need to find a new tool, I was on a vykreen world that had a ton of great upgrade options and got spoiled with my giant dirty harry pistol.

Still really digging it, have to tear myself away every time. Just get into a nice mellow groove. I was going to turn off the music, but it's quite well done (said as someone who doesn't care for electronic music).

I tore through ships left and right getting that last upgrade to 48 slots. I took every slot upgrade crashed ship I found. I'd break down everything from mine own ship, transfer all the mats and stuff, then break the stuff down on the new ship and star fresh each time. Mats were never really an issue save for one planet where I could not find Heridium for the life of me. Spent an hour walking around and finally spotted a tower of it in the distance. Frustrating but really defined the game. I've had my tool at 24 slots now since last week and my suit at 48 since Friday. Now to find the model ship I want and then start getting into fleshing out some solar systems.

I just bought a 26-slot ship, was a bit sorry to give up my old ship just because it looked like a Viper from Battlestar Galactica. This one guy kept landing with a really fugly ship painted green and pink that was the right price and slotting but I was like nope, nope no ain't gonna. Also the weird ship model that has one wing out and one up kept landing and I almost went for that. The exteriors do not always accurately convey the slotting--some big looking ships have dinky interiors and some little ones have big interiors and yeah, it does seem to change depending on what it thinks is an upgrade for you--I had the same experience of stripping my ship and then not being offered big ones. Kind of annoying. The stripping should really happen on sale or it should be part of the pricing of the deal itself.

Does anybody understand the little stock-market money dispenser? The amount of money it gives me is variable, though always small. It would be kind of fun if you could actually buy stock or invest in some fashion.

Also the price differentials on commodities from planet to planet are somewhat stupid in that this is a serious incentive to clutter your inventories, which the game otherwise is sort of trying to keep you from doing.

I mostly stick to what sells gold star on stations, and then only when I'm wrapping up a planet. I hit the stock dispensers, but will begin ignoring them like I'm starting to with the tech upgrade dispensers, I think I have all they'll dispense at this point.

I have the boxy green dumpy looking ship and I love it, my hoopty. I do like the internal boxy frame of it, though. Feels industrial. I think it's around 26 slots or so. Definitely traded sleek for functional.

I grave glitched my way to 50mil. And I refuse to buy a ship.... rather just dumpster dive.

The 'ending' of this game is the biggest middle finger I've gotten from a game in a long time. Possibly ever. I give it ten out of ten Molyneauxes.

What is it? There's no story, so there's nothing to spoil.

Basically you start over.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39720/smilies/1202640754874.png)

(http://i.imgur.com/1NJNyLY.gif)

It's turtles all the way down.

You don't even GO to the center. You just hit the button to fly there and the camera pulls back until you leave the galaxy and you reach a 'new' one.  The new one is just the same random generation, nothing truly new.  Someone has gone through 11 galaxies so far and they have not seen and ending besides the new game +++++++++++

lol

Epic troll.

A++, would laugh again.

Fer God's sake Murray how far behind in fitting the "game" part into your porcedrurdl gurgugerger were you that you couldn't be fucked to actually put an ending in

Wait, why would anyone expect an ending in a game about limitless exploration?  I thought the whole point would be that there isn't an end.

Angry Joe's review (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTTPlqK8AnY) is pretty on point (where I also learned about the "ending").

edit: 11 galaxies and they're all the same (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuUjz4iJVSQ)

Yeah but he was waffling in interviews that there was a great mystery at the centre of the galaxy that players should discover, and people should be striving to get closer to the centre to increase the discoveries that they have loaded the game with...

They should just have you fly into a giant dark tower, ascend to the top floor, and then enter a door.  Yeesh. 

And on the other side of that door... is Steve. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doyaw8ipQpk)

If you want to see the the NMS Producer Molyneuxing his ass off about the Center, skip to 17 mins of the Angry Joe review, and then sit back for Joes meltdown.

Oh, lol.  That's amazing.  Shouldn't there be a rule about not buying any game where you've seen the developer interviewed by Colbert?

Hang on... if I am reading video that right, not only do you get thrown into another galaxy, you get effectively put back to the start of the game, with a broken down ship and with everything broken and needing repair? Holy christmass, I hope you get to keep your precious inventory slots.  :uhrr:

People keep saying it's NG+, but it's not. 

NG+ usually means something has changed from your previous playthrough (like harder difficulty). There's no change, it's literally just New Game (but you get to keep your stuff).

This guy gets it.

It's not an achiever's game (despite having achievements). I've said I spend a lot of my time in GTA just hanging out looking around neighborhoods or listening to random NPCs talk to each other. I'm probably 20 hours into my current playthrough of GTA and just got to Trevor's opening chapter. This is a game for folks like me :p

You expect to discover something, though maybe not an ending exactly, cause they told us there was something there.

Edit: r

Perhaps you have to run through 100 times to get to the center of a tootsie roll tootsie pop?   :why_so_serious:

In a way it makes sense... pass through the rabbit hole only to find yourself where you started only everything is a bit off. It would have made sense to make things noticeably different... but I am not shocked with the result. I just found my ship last night to complete my set. Now I am kitting it out and about to start playing and exploring. I got my money's worth.

Angry Joe review was fairly spot on, what a game it could have been. If you can get your jetpack upgraded, then whizzing around the planets exploring is the most fun thing in the game. The design choice to put everything, everywhere, at all times, was completely braindead. There's no unique items or places anywhere in the game, idiotic.

I just kind of wish it was more like Vernor Vinge's big space opera in that there were regions of space where shit was really different. Or something. I always feel in Minecraft that just over the hill is going to be some different combination of things, some unique landscape or challenge or draw, and also that when I want to stop travelling for a while, I can work on a project or a base. If I feel like it, I can go backwards to where I came. This is just travelling and everything blurs together after a while. It's like driving on an interstate through west Texas--sort of hypnotic and after a while even minor variations in the landscape seem notable but also in a way hellishly vacant, especially if you're never really going to leave.

I think that's a factor of rounding down the extremes. If you normalise everything it turns into sameness. 200 mile hight trees and valleys that go down to the earth core might be silly but they are memorable.

The sheer amount and scope of Murray's lies is so big I actually think he's outdone even Molyneux.

You can't put down roots or build up anything anywhere. In Minecraft you pick a home and build it up and make it something. In no man's sky you are perpetually without a way to attach to anything. I'm exploring a green star system full of very interesting planets, trying to take screenshots now because I know that once I stray further than a couple of jumps away, the garbage navigation system will cause me to lose the system forever.

Exactly. Whatever you build really has to go with you throughout your journey, which means a customizable ship - which I doubt would be that hard to do.

I hear there's a game where you can buy these for a few hundred dollars.

You guys are not cut out for the hobo life.  Your possessions own you.

Welcome back from the break, I'm Ira Glass, for national public radio, and now we move on to act two in our special This American Life.

In act one, we watched No Man's Sky implode into a mess of mediocrity and broken dreams. But here we move to another studio, where, at the same time No Man's Sky was coming out, another man was making another space sim.

"So they would be buying these ships for thousands of dollars?"

"No, we haven't made the ships yet. We would make a picture of the ship."

"A picture of the ship?"

"Yes. They would pay us thousands of dollars because we would say that this picture would be a spaceship."

"A virtual spaceship."

"That's right. A virtual spaceship. For thousands of dollars!" [laughs] "They were buying a promise of a future virtual spaceship."

"So you never had to to stop releasing pictures, and you just got millions of dollars."

"We were installing ten thousand dollar espresso machines in our staff kitchen. Every week we'd invent a new type of picture of spaceship and come up with some bullshit about what you could supposedly do in this ship. Boom, another few million dollars."

"Did anyone ever start asking, like, 'hey, is this all coming together, are our ships ready yet?' — when did you start really having concerns?"

"Well, about the time Sean Murray had to flee to Barbados, we started hiring private security ..."

The own you thing cuts genuinely close. I spent more time on a boring planet than I liked because there were Vortex doodads in all the caves and I could make millions and millions of moolah if I just kept doing it. And then I was like, and why? So I could store more shit from more generic planets later while I broke down doors trying to get the formula for Atlas Passes v. 2 and v.3 so I could break down more doors to see more planets that I could see anyway? The planets are not themselves sufficiently interesting. They just aren't. And that's where I opened up another game.

I never even got past the intro to GTA V. I just went straight to Online and did exactly what you do, ran around Los Santos, sometimes just eavesdropping on the locals. I think it's part of the reason I still play the Division too. The side stories and the snippets of conversation you hear wandering through the city and picking up dropped cellphones is a bigger character than any of the NPCs you encounter.

No Man's Sky isn't quite up to that for me yet because the only interactions have been with random aliens and I've only seen snippets of the galactic political landscape and how the various races fit in together so far.

You can't compare NMS to GTA in the slightest because GTA actually has a shitton of content in it to explore.  Entire cities hand-modeled down to fine levels of detail, hours and hours and hours of character dialog, music, quests, etc.  NMS has the same four or five buildings cookie-cuttered randomly around, some ugly spaceships to buy, and a small handful of textual dialog trees.  I've been playing the game here and there but I don't think I've seen anything new in the last couple of hours of farting around; it's all repetition, unless you count subtly different combinations of rock colors and stitched-together animal parts "new".  Even the stupid number puzzles you use on some of the computer terminals repeat verbatim; they apparently couldn't be bothered to procedurallly generate those.

The Hype, An Act In One Play Repeated Over And Over Again

INTERVIEWER: So, will players be excited when they get to do [thing that was removed several builds ago]?

SEAN MURRAY: Ahh, uh, [fidgets with hair and face] uh, yeh, it'll, we hope players, uh, will enjoy that, uh, ... [nervously picks at own body some more] .. seventeen quintillion

INTERVIEWER: Cool

The breadth of an ocean, the depth of a puddle.

I need the barest notion of context in order to make all the exploration worthwhile.  GTA gives you a defined coherent playground, if they then populated the world with infinite cities, all rearranging the same elements and re-skinning the citizens but keeping the same stories you would probably feel little motivation to keep exploring these 'new' places.  Up until I heard about the seemingly endless cycle of new galaxies the fact that this was a shared galaxy that we were all slowly filling up with our discoveries was enough for me.  Now that I hear we leave all this shit behind and start again somewhere new when we get to the middle that has been removed for me.

I having trouble caring now, the whole point seems to be to jump from planet to planet to see how good their procedural generation is.  They might as well have removed the space shit and given you a button to press when you want a new world and just let you remake it over and over and ah and oo at their formula.

I've just finished the Atlas stuff, its stupid crap.  Every long term goal they have offered is shit, The character progression is shallow, I've had all the recipes for a long time and they only pad out the tedium with the fact you can't transfer/move mods and have to remake most of them with every upgrade.  Growing my inventory has taken a bit longer but that is hardly exciting after the game teaches you so strongly to anti-hoard early on.  The main thing I cherish is my growing vocabulary but the aliens are all so monotonous now they are just another fixture like a trade station.

I've had a fair bit of fun with this game, and yet it leaves a pretty bitter aftertaste for some reason.

Looking at the assets, there doesn't seem to be enough variation to justify procedural generation. They basically lied about that too.

Guys, please, you just don't get the game, why don't you stop giving it a hard time and let Sky enjoy it in peace?

I feel somewhat obsessed with it not because I had fantasies that it would be the One True Space Game but because I can see even within the limits of the design aspirations and resources available to the developers some missed opportunities that frustrate me. I like these kinds of games, I wish these guys well, but dammit, they should have done better.

I should mention that did end up re-purchasing the game and have like 15 hours in. I just had to see it for myself. The true tragedy is how little they did in the end, and how much better it would've been with just a little bit more effort. A little bit more stuff in the procedural generator, a little bit more thought into gameplay systems and encounters.

I think I probably would have gotten a fair amount of fun out of the game had it run well on my machine, but the biggest thing this game has done for me is get me back into Elite: Dangerous, which I've been having fun with again.

I'm having fun with it, for all it is. I'll probably try for a 100% solar system with 3 or more planets, farm some freighters, do some distress calls, then finish the atlas story and hit the center of the galaxy/universe (or more appropriately, reset said universe). Then I'll probably move on to something else. I got $60 worth out of it, but it is not worth that amount.

(http://puu.sh/qMIxP/01c2087717.jpg)

Most amusing was the defense I saw someone trying to post of a headline proclaiming 90% player loss.

"You're comparing peaks to valleys! Compare peak time of day to peak and it's only 80%"  :why_so_serious:

How does the drop rate compare to the first 2 weeks of other AAA-priced titles?

Are the ownership stats just for Steam, or for all PC, or for all platforms? Do they include refunds?

Even if it's just Steam, if refunds aren't included, it looks like Hello Games deceived their way to $40M+ gross on that alone...probably $5-10M net.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/4zcsve/no_mans_sky_has_lost_90_of_its_players/d6upgai


So, yeah, pretty big for only 2 weeks.

I have a feeling this game is now abandoned. No Murray tweets for a week either.

Well, he had 2 options:

1. Suicide, like he just committed with his personal career.
2. Or drain the bank accounts and move to a non-extradition country (from wherever he was from).

I'd go with 2.

"Collect shit with your shit collecting gun"
"hours of entertainment for you and your wife's son"
 :awesome_for_real:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mz5YPkThOU

I've been curiously nibbling the bait, but the target stream sale price to reel me in is down in the vicinity of $10 now.  I wonder though if all 999 bazillionwtflol planets will have been named by then?  :why_so_serious:

I have a Super Long Comprehensive No Man's Sky primer that I cribbed together as I powered through to max inventory, which is essentially the 'endgame.'

I could post it here. If you like it it can be a featurette or something. The game is so shallow I effectively have it entirely, uh, 'solved.'

I've been suspecting something like this. Discoveries might not get saved:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4zlqpw/went_back_to_my_starting_planet_and_every/

perhaps they made interstellar navigation / mapping as terrible as it was because they had to make sure players couldn't be able to retrace back to their old systems. This from knowing that their system was not and could not actually store all the naming.

That's exactly why I felt something was off. If your game in actual fact has a huge, re-nameable universe with a gazillion individual planets, why wouldn't you show them off by using effective mapping? The map is so bad it can't be an accident.

i can kind of see that being an effective cause to predict this, because even while every other interface in the game is also bad, the universe travel interface is uniquely horrible and frustrating and seems designed to keep you lost. before, i hadn't given it much thought beyond 'wow ok i guess this part of the game sucks too' but it fits with the theme of everything else in this game being padded with slapdash mechanics that cover for a lot of shallowness and bad design.

I have noticed on many occasions that when you go to upload your discoveries, on the bottom of the screen it will say whether the online services are active or not. I found that odd, but now it makes perfect sense.

I listened to a TotalBuiscuit Vid a few days ago that I think as done before this released. And he was talking about a simple thing - why did the hype for this game get so huge? His argument is that there is a deep hunger out there for a certain tye of game, that the game industry for whatever reason is not fulfilling

Its basically 2 types of game -

Survival. He gave the example of Day Z, which went huge when it was first launched and spawned a ton of imitators, all of whom are not finished.

Space Sandbox and discovery.

Now some games HAVE scratched on the edges of this and suceeded in some elements - Eve, the X series, Starlancer, Elite D, etc. But somehow none of them have satisfied this gaming itch. Star citizen is anpther game i would think is succeeding in not having a pitchfork waving mob at its door simply because it has the hope of satisfying this itch.

Anyway the vid is here if you want to have a listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCG9YLeIB98

Hmm. What were those old BBS games? Trade Wars? Solar Empire? I keep feeling that itch. To explore, to get rich, to get better, to build an empire. To make a mark.

Call it a mix of exploration, empire building, crafting, and freedom. But also multiplayer. With good PvP, but not bad PvP.

You could make a pretty good game from some of those, but to scratch all those itches at once?

I think the problem is game makers can't figure out a way to make it all harmonize, so they sort of...try a mix of some of them, and it doesn't work out. It's like a bunch of half-good games thrown into a blender.

I suspect there's going to be a lot of failed attempts before someone manages to find something that really works AND does it with skill.

The shitshow ending gets even more trollish than that.

So people can collect Atlas stones which as a mechanic sort of act as an achievement system that guides your progress towards the center of the universe. Each stone comes with flavor text explaining the history of the Galaxy and the alien race that has reached all parts of it.

The last stone which goes on a short diatribe about your journey to getting to the center has this has this little gem in it.



[edit]



(http://kawarthanow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/interstellar-3.jpg)



You won't find that type of planet in No Man's Sky.

ah, the edgiest of existentialist cop-outs

"there is no ending .. because nothing is real lol"

This world is an illusion, Exile.

I suspect it's partly because it's a wide open genre that hasn't been well defined yet, so the devs can promise everything and we don't have a reference point to know how it's going to play.  Like MMOs back in the UO/EQ days, the devs can promise whatever they want and our minds can go "WOAH, it's like the ultimate virtual world, they're saying all this amazing shit is going to be there" or whatever because there isn't context for how it's going to play.

When Wildstar was released, we all knew it was going to be WoW in space, so when they said "it'll have XYZ" or "there will be this feature" we kind of knew that it would be sandwiched in around the same gameplay that 90% of the rest of the genre had and nobody flipped out about how revolutionary it was.  So when No Man's Sky talks about having factions or something, people are imagining these huge, deep complex societies and cultures and architecture and so on, because who knows, that might be what it turns out to be.  But if Wildstar talked about it, we all knew it was going to be a bunch of NPCs standing around with exclamation marks over their heads so we could grind up a "reputation" bar, and that no matter what the "factions" did most of the gameplay was still going to just be standing in a field pushing skill buttons on a hotbar.

Like, with No Man's Sky, when the devs say "it's got trading" or "it's got crafting" people don't know how the game plays so they are imagining how it would play out in real life, or look at something like Star Trek or Firefly, and that would be pretty awesome.  But if I announced a new MMO today and said it had trading and crafting, people would imagine a bar filling up while a "shff shff" sound effect plays.

Nevermind, "shocking interview" with Sean Murray already posted above  :why_so_serious:

But seriously, plz try adding a game to whatever you have now  :oh_i_see:

Someone pm me when this game is cheaper than a happy hour bud light.

Drinking Bud Lights? You already like to waste money on things that don't work as advertised. Pull the trigger now.

It seems that discoveries may not be getting wiped after all. there is a counter thread and the original guy has removed his post (it was up 18 hours ago and he was complaining about getting flames and attacked via his email for asking a question)

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4zsyx5/psa_your_discoveries_are_not_getting_wiped_after/

Who the hell knows at this point. What a cluster fuck over what is at best a mediocre gather and explore game.

Who said I was drinking it?

Steam is now officially accepting refunds regardless of playtime for this. I almost feel like it was worth $60 for the lulz I've gotten from it.

I've played 56 hours, I don't know how or why, but I think I'll try look for a refund anyway for a giggle. I actually think I left the game on pause for half of that.

Yeah my initial refund request was denied, but I'm trying again.

Holy god. regardless of playtime? That is insane to me.

Mine was too, with 20ish hours logged. Guess I'll try again.

It's an interesting situation because I think you could argue that it would take longer than 2 hours of playtime to fully realise the extent of the fraud involved in the marketing of NMS. And Steam may be recognizing the shit storm of bad publicity surrounding this game and has decided that they don't want to end up lumped into the 'bad guys' category here.

The game just really showed its best: I randomly decided to attack a three ship formation in atmosphere. After a few shots only one of them aggroed and the rest continued on their way. The AI ship immediately started flying in circles really close to the ground, sometimes clipping through mountains. I had trouble targeting it because of your ship's minimum altitude. I finally killed it and it exploded on the ground but left no wreckage or other mark. During the whole combat there was a sentinel warning going and threats about sentinel interceptors being deployed, but nothing ever happened. I don't know if those things are even implemented.

It's so...underwhelming. Literally like an early access game on the first week or something.

I tried for a refund as well... denied. People on the reddit thread are saying you have to actually open a support ticket to have it done, but I do not see the option for that. Just their support request interface.

Denied again here too. Opening a support ticket requires a separate Steam Support account. Ugh.

They are actually, but you need to be off planet for them to appear.

Refund denied heh, wasn't holding out any great hope.

I don't know why this game makes me sad and Star Citizen makes me laugh.

Because we all want this game.

And we all know Star Citizen is a con.

No Man's Sky got closer than anyone has.

(http://i.imgur.com/2z3JtQ3.jpg)

Is that somewhere on the store page or something? Mine literally got denied again today, despite reddit claims to the contrary.

Make it clear in the refund reason that they falsely advertised the game and that you're gonna love to see a class action lawsuit.

And everyone is doing their damnedest to make sure nobody tries to make another game like this for a looong time. Keep getting those refunds, especially if you played it a long time. I'm sure no suits are taking notes. I'm sure this will in no way set a horrible precedent for future releases because every game is exactly as advertised on release.

Meanwhile, I'm still enjoying the game. *shrug* And I will keep my money where my mouth is. I want more, better, games like this in the future. So I support people making them, even if it's imperfect (and still a fun game).

The suits are not very rational if they conclude that the reason for this drama is that it's a space game, and not developer dishonesty.

I'm not going to ask for a refund either, I'd feel like an idiot for getting one already and then coming back for seconds. Instead I'll just happily be an idiot and play this trainwreck some more.  :why_so_serious:

Yeah, I wouldn't ask for a refund. I got my money's worth. Just sad that the things that I realistically think could have been done to improve the game weren't done.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cq6_dY3UsAAVESp.jpg)

I really hope nobody makes another game like this: an indie early access title with a AAA price tag that's overhyped and underdelivered.

The worst thing is how good the frame of this game is. Everything that was promised is easily doable and then some.

You don't have a grip on reality.

The fallout this game is getting is similar to Alien Colonial Marines. Randy Pitchford deserved the lawsuit he received and lost from the EU.

Ubisoft got smacked around for their advertising about graphics for Watch Dogs but never had to deal with a lawsuit.

The big difference is the extent of the lies and how much they matter. Ubisoft continues making the same type of games while Pitchford and now Hello Games are learning their lessons and not going back to that level of malicious stupidity again.

And thats the way it should be. Gamers shouldnt have to bend over and take it in the ass, cause of dreams.

This is the mentality that made me enjoy Murray's trolling during the hype train. It's like he raped your daughter or something, when all he did was make a game. You didn't even have to wait until release to see it streamed and see exactly what it was. You have nobody but yourselves to blame for anything. Stop blaming Murray, stop blaming the industry, stop the dramatic rhetoric of hate and take some personal responsibility for your actions and gain at least a modicum of self-control.

This is f13, for fuck's sake, you can't get away with 'this game sucked at launch and I wasn't informed!' If you're a member here, I think you should lose your privilege of buying a game without waiting to hear whether it's good or not. Several of us bought it as a pre-order, you know you would hear the straight dope one way or another if both schild and I buy a game, as we're about as opposite on the spectrum of gaming as you can get. When did f13 turn into a bunch of whiny, self-entitled man-babies who made the age-old mistake of buying into a stupid hype train?

Holy shit, guys. It's a game that only cost the price of a fucking decent dinner. You got your refunds, now go play the next insipid entry into whatever mega AAA series was just shoved down your throat with a spoonfull of sugar, if that's what we've become.

While I am definitely enjoying the game, I'm also really, really enjoying the tears of clowns.

Your beret is showing, Sky.

Yes, some of the hate is over the top and anyone who asked for a refund after 20+ hours in the game should probably be shot out of a cannon. But seriously, come on - the amount of straight up blatant bullshit spun about this product is pretty bad. The level of hate may not be justified, but the actual reasons for the hate are valid. Developer says thing will do this and not only does it not do it, it takes great pains to obfuscate that this is not being done. It's very much an early access, indie-level game that is charging about 3x what it should be.

Which is why I did not buy it or pre-order it. I'm all for indie development but execution is way more important than "indie street cred."

I asked for a steam refund. I think that is okay because I still have a ps4 copy. The game barely ran on my computer.

The straight dope?

No Man's Sky was a hollow piece of shit tech demo that was built on lies.

They've created the idea of a game but not an actual game.

The fact you're enjoying it shows what a low bar is required to please you with a sci-fi game.

If I'd played 100 hours I still would've demanded a refund just to stick it to Murray's stupid face.

This is one of the reasons I had to play the game myself. It even gets f13 all hot and bothered.

But I know I'm also an easy mark for scifi shit just like Sky.

Not even that. The long dark for instance, at that level and still promises a story and an ending. This is the thing that pisses me off more than anything after my 20+ hours of playtime I still expected, naievely perhaps, to see a story develop.

I agree that if you've got like 25-50 hours, or more, play time out of this then asking for a refund is a dick move.  However, some of the technical issues made it so you had to fiddle around with the game for more than 2 hours to get it work and once you left the 1st planet, many people discovered NMS was not as advertised.  The developer has clearly been shown to have, at the very least, mislead consumers as to what they can actually do in game.  How would you feel if that brand new Volkswagen you bought was advertised to have a certain level of emissions when in reality it didn't and the company deliberately mislead and lied to you about it?  There is no difference between an "indie" game company lying to its customers and a major auto maker.  None.  Get it now?

nope

if these devs are worth a shit they're watching this event and they're thinking 'jesus, gamers are so fucking hungry for the new space sim experience they've wanted for so long that they line up to buy this shit and help hype it into the stratosphere'

like we now have ample proof that the hunger is real and the void is present, a genre desperately seeking fulfillment, dollars first

You are comparing a presentation of a game months before launch with data specs on a car when you buy it, its not an appropriate comparison. However, it would be healthy if people viewed game developer doing a presentation of their upcoming game in the same way they view someone that's selling them a used car, trust your eyes more than your ears.

See, there you go. If you align along schild's tastes and didn't wait to hear that and bought into the hype, you deserve what you got. And for the record, I find that a valid review from that perspective (which is why the whole white knight thing is funny, btw).

I admit my tastes are weird and I'm ok with that, if you align with my weird tastes you may enjoy it. I'm recommending people wait for a steam sale, like I do for 99% of games, and I like it. So still, if you had waited for an f13 verdict (knowing we had preorders in), you could've avoided disappointment or at least waited for a deal.

Nope. You stupid fucks believed video game hype. I like the game and didn't believe the hype, and said so before every watching gameplay footage.

I have zero pity and find the whining hilarious. Devs can say their new game will shit rainbows and cure cancer, who gives a shit? What next, outrage when game journalists don't stand up to journalistic standards? This isn't about whether NMS is good or bad, you can blame it on Murray et al all you want, but at the end of the day, you should know better. Shame on you all.

"Will it have multiplayer?"
"Yes"


Look I get that maybe 15 years ago some clueless sales guy might confuse the concept of multiplayer but you do not get to use that excuse today.  The dude flat out lied about his game both in interviews and visually with demo shit that's not even in the game.    There is no way consumers can be "Savvy" about a product when they are lied to every step of the way about it.  Sure you can opt out of preordering but everything has to have first adopters and those people ahould rightfully be upset.

Likewise they will also be looking at this thinking they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. I'm sure all the stuff Murray talked about was supposed to be there but all the sudden they have deadlines and pressure coming to release the game and more pressure after delays. Development of a game gamers are yearning for seems like a worthy goal till you realize the more hype it gets, the more those goalposts move into fantasy.

I didn't buy into the hype. It's just a bland experience with no game. I didn't even know half the hype until after I played it. I had a press blackout on it because I wanted to go in mostly blind.

I wasn't on the hype train but I was expecting a sweet exploration game. I got an over-normalized turd for the price of three. My bad entirely, but it's still a shitty game and wah wah fart.

man i legitimately don't know where you're trying to come from on this one. your position grates close to "if they con you into buying a game through misrepresentation and hype, then caveat emptor" and your criticism of how the other posters are approaching it hardly applies to any of us.

despite my cynicism, i like it when games do good and accomplish good things. i wasn't ever going to buy this game (and didn't). i sort of expected that it would fall short in a lot of ways and there would be some grousing, but for all my deep and abiding cynicism I was not expecting the game to fall short in pretty much every regard; the worlds are samey, the interactivity of the universe is limited and so much of it is static and repetitive, and the ending will DESERVE to go down in history as one of the biggest anger-generating letdowns of all time.

even if you find the whining and anger hilarious (which I don't think you do, i think it irritates you if your responses here are any indication) the mendacity and mediocrity of hello games' offering has directly empowered it. this game is a golden gem to people who like to get angry. it's red meat and validation for them. the real winners here are spastic grousers who get paid to shit on a game for two solid hours in youtube, like angry joe.

you can find the whining hilarious, but the whining cynics win this day because they are right about NMS. and that's about the most depressing thing about NMS, outside of just how it's a really underwhelming repetitive game with a bad grind mechanic.

Nobody would mind the "ending" if the procedural generation made more varied, surprising, unusual worlds. I wouldn't mind a Minecraft 'ending' that put me back into a new Minecraft world because it really would be different feeling.

yeah like individually the ending would not suck if it was New Game Plus. like in each subsequent ieteration of galaxy, the procedural generation starts to go more and more off the rails and the worlds become more extreme and alien and potentially unnavigable.

but it's just a straight reset without prompting.

anyway i superdumped my primer on NMS elsewhere to not drown the page.

Link us to it?

I deserve to read it as someone who invested $0.00 into it!!

That's pretty normal for AAA games, though.  Every year at every E3 we get previews of games and, without doing anything that sounds like actual research or math, I'd guess that well over half of them show or promise something that's not in the actual final game.  Cut modes or scaled back graphics or dropped features are not something that NMS has a monopoly on, it's not even something that's particularly rare or unusual.  That's the whole reason why people were saying "maybe it's not a good idea to preorder games in general" even before NMS was a thing.

Though the outrage is probably nothing compared to what's on the horizon for Star Citizen.  Chris Roberts must be building an escape rocket in his secret volcano lair as we speak.

as we can expect from them, NMS takes it a step further.

the webpage and all associated studio media still only has "generated in real time" videos from years ago as promotion of the game

This is rich.

News flash, I didn't buy the game. The moment I heard there wouldn't be any prerelease reviews my standard reaction is to wait.

Unlike you, I'm not amoral, unethical and devoid of empathy. Hello Games continue to lie right now with their steam page showing off content you won't find. Their endgame content is a sham and an insult.


I actually think the level of lies are serious enough for a class action lawsuit.


Hello Games are responsible for misrepresenting what would be available in the game.

 :awesome_for_real: :oh_i_see: :facepalm:

You could've posted this when I said this is on the same level as Colonial Marines though it was Sega and not Gearbox that ended up having to deal with the fallout of that game. The level of dishonesty is quite similar were a tech demo falsely represents the state of the game and continues to be used as advertising material after the game is released. The biggest differences were that the quality of CM's demo was far beyond what the game delivered while Hello Games used more verbal lies to sell the game and Hello Games actually made the game unlike Gearbox who passed most of the work to a 3rd party.

I just want to point out that the E3 2013 trailer (which has now been proven to be faked since the game released with the presentation assets) is still the initial trailer on the NMS steam page, even with it blatenly showing quite a lot of things that are provably not in the game.

Stop taking this personally you numpties.

This isn't about who enjoys the game and who doesn't, that's irrelevant, nor whether gamers are entitled whiners or not, again irrelevant. It's about whether it's ok for companies to falsely advertise a product or not.

Comparisons have already been made with Volkswagen and their falsification of emissions tests and I think they're valid comparisons. Hello Games are still advertising NMS on their website with the E3 footage which is unrepresentative of the game that is being sold. Sky, if you can't accept that that's fraudulent then I'll say again that I think you're taking this personally and that it's clouding your judgment.

Calls for class action lawsuits are silly, but trying to make sure that Sony and other publishers and developers take away the message that outright false advertising isn't acceptable is not silly, especially in the context of a gaming press that has demonstrated, yet again, that their interests lie with those publishers and developers rather than the consumers who read them.

People have just gotten so used to game devs bullshit that they forget lying about products is really fucking unethical and sometimes illegal.

You can speak about it being unethical but anyone who watched the video, knew it was an indie studio with little experience on making games and thought rationally about it knew that it was never going to be remotely close to what it was hyped to be. The game had disappointment of the year written all over it.

If you want to make a stance that this behaviour isn't alright make sure to wait a few days until you buy all the games that has been presented by Sony on E3. Problem is that people will keep on preordering hyped up games, making empty threats about lawsuits just to be fooled again next time.

Stop preordering games.

Somebody has to buy it, so whether it's preordered or not is irrelevant. You may aswell say, people 'stop buying games'. Which could actually be sage advice.

You're still blaming the customer for the deception of the company.

And, funnily enough, the more closely you followed the development of the game, the more lies you were exposed to. Right up until the leaked footage, which Murray specifically advised people not to watch so that they didn't spoil the experience for themselves. And yes, to many of us it was obvious that the hype was just that, there were many warning signs, not least of which was the review embargo. But it's not acceptable to expect all potential customer for any product ro be experts in order to not get ripped off.

That is why there are consumer protection laws. And you're advocating the idea that games should be exempt from consumer protection laws. Which is ridiculous.

Nailed it!

I guess I take the 'buyer beware' thing too personally because if I buy something that turns out to be shit, that's on me for making the decision to buy the product. Then again, I don't ever believe sales pitches - ever. Fool me once and all that stuff. But we are in an age of shirking personal responsibility at every slight. That's not to say there was no deception by Sean, there was - used car dealer type shit. But again, my upbringing taught me to look at things differently from most people it seems.

So it's "kids these days" when a product lies about its abilities then?

Let's apply that logic to ANYTHING else.

You should have known those snow tires wouldn't let you drive on ice even though the mfr said they would. So the wreck that destroyed your car is your problem.
You should have known that those cookies contained peanuts when they were made by nabisco, , but they said it was in a nut free factory. so the dead kids on you. 
You should have researched that hair dryer. Sure it had a UL label but EVERYONE knows stuff from China is lying. Clearly the fire was your fault.


Stop giving games a pass to be shitty companies

TIL Sean Murray killed children in a car fire.

Definitely the same thing there.

C'mon, straw man. Consumer protection laws can't just be ignored on a product-by-product basis.

Sky/Gimfain, the assertion is that Sony/Hello Games have deliberately mis-sold NMS, that they have, and still are, advertising it as having features that it does not have. Examples: the repeated claim of multiplayer capabilities and the continuing use of the E3 footage that is substantially different from the product being sold.

In your opinions is that correct? Do you agree or disagree that the product being sold is substantially different from the one advertised?

If you agree, in your opinions is that acceptable business practice for any company, any product?

Statistically a certain amount of people will always fall for false marketing, thus transforming the "it's your own fault" argument into "it's ok to con dumb people". Which is a ridiculous argument to make.

It's exactly this but you can even use less severe examples.

Tshirt designs melting after one wash? Should have researched every hot topic product first.
New Bluray player won't play old dvds even though the box says it does? Should have looked more carefully online.
Box of fruity pebbles actually contains corn flakes? You needed to wait until someone else bought fruity pebbles first to see how their experience was.  That's on you.

I think there is a difference between Buyer Beware and Deception for Profit.  For one thing, they can both exist at the same time.

I don't even know how I got on the side defending this game, maybe its because I was never hyped up to begin with. I thought the E3 trailer looked mediocre and I couldn't find one video that showed interesting gameplay. It feels like all this disappointment could have been avoided if gamers would think rationally about this game but instead they filled every blank with their imagination and that always gets you disappointed.

As far as consumer protection laws goes, if the product that you bought doesn't have what it claims to have you should try get a refund. Problem is that most of the complaint about this game isn't about money, its outrage about him lying about the game.

On multiplayer "multiplayer is not a thing people should be thinking about, going into the game". "multiplayer for the game, we've always said, is not really a big focus". He went on about it even more in some interviews. You do have his mention where you could possibly see each other and also some other stuff which was bullshit. Problem is that gamers chose to ignore the negative mentions on multiplayer and kept focusing on what could possibly be there.

Yes, but I wanted to go for the extreme as something you can't ignore. I expected the, "yes, it's just like klling kids" thing. It's the exact sign of someone who knows they don't have a leg to stand on.

Like pointing out spelling errors in an otherwise convincing argument then declaring you won.

I completely defend the game. And I'm completely against refunds. And I think it's an embarassing piece of shit that Sean Murray and Hello Games should feel bad about and be hounded for.

These are not inconsistent. This is what people who are connoisseurs of a given cultural form should think. I order a wine. It's genuinely spoiled--I mean, it should be good, but this one bottle is corked or contaminated?--I sent it back. I order a wine. It's not what I thought it was--it's kind of shitty. That's on me. I decided to try it. I either thought it was good even though people said otherwise, or I thought it was good because some people loved it or some critics esteemed it. Or the sommelier said great things. In all those case, it's on me. Maybe even if people said, "Hey, I dunno, it's pretty fucking weird, but if  you're into this kind of wine, try it". All on me. It's only when it's genuinely spoiled: non-working, seriously shit, broken, full of bacteria, that's it is on someone else. Every other time, it's on me. I pay. I can be mad about it later: that's completely legit. I can say, "Your wine should have been better" or "Robert Parker is shitty motherfucker who is on the take". All ok. But I can't say, "I didn't know, give me my money back". Unless I also want to say, "I'm a dumb motherfucker and take my credit card away from me, because I'm too dumb to have it."

All new NMS discussion goes here: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=25379.0