f13.net

Making this legible was a nightmare, so fucking read it.

http://f13.net/?p=363

Also, it's like 7500 words. What an asshole.

I love it.

Yes, races as Klingon, Ferengi and Daft Punk. Which is one more kind of disappointing thing about it all.

i'm not gonna read all that shit jesus christ

is there a tl;dr

yea I put one at the bottom

(http://i.imgur.com/1TEOdUT.png)

8/10, would read again.

Accurate. I laughed, I cried, it was not that much better than Cats. But dead on.

Was so waiting for this <3

I looked at the pictures. They were very good.

Long read, but I was entertained. 

I forgotten how good Sam was with his drawings.  Seriously man, do you have a collection of comics somewhere you can link to?  They are fucking hilarious.

A good read.

Best review of NMS I've read so far.

That's some Grade A absurdity right there, nice read.

I read half of it then got bored.

Awesome animaions though.

I read it... and was entertained.

Was about to add links to videos to the other thread, but I guess now I'll add them here..

Honest Trailers review of NMS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wsFhv_Kz38)

Zero Punctuation (Escapist) review link (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/116922-No-Mans-Sky-Review)

*adjusts glasses*

There are ocean planets, to make a slight correction to an othewise good piece of writing. My spider sense tells me that the game assigns some sort of general tendency to every player's planet rng at the start of the game, and it takes a certain amount of traveling until it starts changing. For some it seems to be "no ocean planets". Effectively it's an additional limiting factor. Rivers also exist on rare occasions, a bug I suspect.

edit: the ocean biome is just watery plants and animals underwater. Any places of interest are the same as above ground, excluding the ones with npcs I think.

I really enjoy the little x and y coordinates on every object in the animations.

The Minecraft pick icon is a nice touch  :why_so_serious:

This might be one of those games eventually salvaged by modders: http://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/mods/100/?

Speaks to the creative bankruptcy of Hello Games. Something really interesting must've happened during development.

My guess would be that they just plain ran out of time and didn't dare to postpone the release any further.

They really wanted to stay a small team but had Sony breathing down their necks. Not surprising. Would've been a much better game without the PS4, but probably would have released in 2018. Or endless Early Access like a lot of things do now.

They were caught up in a hype tornado. And if they had been in any way honest about stuff the backlash would have meant that all their preorder money would have immediately gotten sucked out of their company and Sony would have murdered them in court. Sony probably told him "just say "yes" to everything."

I should add I really enjoyed the read. A game so grindy it made Shild grind at the review.

i guess i am a person who used to do pretty fantastic grinds (I'm a Justicar in WoW) but i've turned that into a sort of lazy efficiency. Which is why this article is kind of like a hybrid gamefaqs primer thing.

the only thing it doesn't go into detail on is adjacency bonuses, which are the sort of 'cherry on top' way to break this game into pieces, but are explained nearly nowhere. Basically, the number value of things in the same general category of shit adjacent to something else in that category combine the + number value to create multiplied effects.

I want you to imagine what this multitool does.

(http://i.imgur.com/tm4cqp3.png)

Well, it doesn't make No Man's Sky a game, soooooooo

well, sure it is

an Early Access simulator

That sounds like a terrible multitool.

Sets off mah OCD (much out of orderness)? I don't like charging up the Boltcaster side of it. I just buff the laser and grenades.

it's actually fairly close to an optimum ordering. it could be tinkered with a bit but i especially like the damage getting: 5 + 5 + 3 + 2 + 4, 3 + 3 + 3, 2 + 4 + 1, and 1 + 2 + 2 + 5

then two rapidfires with 3 + 3 + 2 + 5 etc etc

From promises of cosmic wonder to optimizing your timer for breaking rocks.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/09/16/shuhei-yoshida-no-mans-sky-didnt-have-a-great-pr-strategy?abthid=57dbfc52cd5367c51b00000d


It's good for Sony to say this although somewhat surprising. Overall the NMS debacle won't hurt Sony's brand, but it did for me. Sony was hyping this shit like crazy but never reigned them in on the plan.

the current 24 hour peak for No Man's Sky on steam is 3,003 players. Beyond the occasional Sporefest of hate about the game, I never hear anything about it. Hello Games remains quiet and still as the ember waters.

The active playerbase collapsed so quickly that Sony may just actively disallow the franchise any sort of significant remedy in the form of expansions/DLC/major upgrades, if Hello Games was even really inclined to bother in the first place. Mods are probably also not really going to take off.

let's move on to the spate of Postmortem articles! I love those!

"WHAT WENT WRONG WITH NO MAN'S SKY: WE INTERVIEW AN ASSOCIATE DESIGNER, A QA TESTER, AND AN ARTIST" - Kotaku

We caught up with Sean Murray on his yacht, the Early Retirement, to ask him what went wrong with No Man's Sky.

"Nothing went wrong," he said, sipping on a coconut daiquiri. "Gamers decided what the fair market value of my promises was, and delivered it to me. My game then delivered them the promise of more content beyond the two hour time threshold for Steam returns. The system works."

"But what if they think that's unfair?"

"Then they are at liberty to not listen to any of my promises in the future. I am bored by the pedestrian whinging of gamers. If they did not want this, they would have learned a long time ago not to preorder games. I took their money, because I learned how to make them give me their money. They deserve their disappointment, because they are as disappointing as my game. This is their galaxy. It was made for them. No part of that was an accident."

"Do you ever intend to fix the game?"

"I don't know how to answer that question. Perhaps if you worded the question differently, perhaps if you said 'do you intend to promise to fix the game' then the answer is: only if a sufficient number of gamers believe I sincerely intend to. Now, if you'll excuse me, it's Autumn now, and East Sussex is not the Society Islands."

With that, he signaled for his pilot to gun the engines and head southward.

the count of players in NMS approaches one eightyith of launch

Eightyith sounds like a creature from the Pythagorean deep.

NEWS NEWS NEWS

Sean Murray, innovative lead designer of No Man's Sky, to partner with Peter Molyneux on innovative new game. "It will feature entire cities of richly interactive AI agents, all of which have evolved naturally from single-celled organisms over millions of in-game years," says Molyneux. "They will remember your character's name, generate fully interactive economies, and build procedurally-generated structures while also creating over 4 million unique systems of alien government". Molyneux continued, "The game universe will have over forty different ways to travel faster than light which players can discover, but players will also be able to invent as many as six hundred different styles of ground transport suited for aliens that crawl, run, swim, and roll." Murray enthusiastically noted, "Also there are at least ten different dimensions and over six thousand superpowers that characters can discover, and at least three different schools of magic."

Murray and Molyneux continued describing game systems for the next six hours without interruption. We hope to have a full video of the announcement at some point.

NEWS NEWS NEWS

I hope that designers fucking gamers with promises over and over would teach them something, but a new generation of gamers has risen up to fill the pockets of more these pyramid preorder schemes.

So basically if you preordered the game, I hope you learned this time. If not you're a dysfunctional lab rat.

I was ok being a lab rat on this one. It is an interesting failure rather than a purely cynical one. It was something that could have been a good deal more fun with some very small and I think plausible changes; and could have been less risible if Sean Murray had kept his fucking trap shut and the suits hadn't pushed it out there. Meaning there are things to be learned from this both in-game and outside of it, and the learning required giving it an honest go and not just relying on reddit frothing. I am still disappointed, mind you, not the least because I can see the things so clearly that could have made it much better that were (are, even) within plausible reach. There's a lot of stuff more cynical and less interesting out there on Steam right now.

Hello games is being investigated for deceptive advertising. I don't know what to expect about a UK commission or if it will go anywhere, but it did remind me that hello games is still advertising the game, post release, with completely fictional "in game footage" that has all those things we thought would be in the game, but weren't.

It's the Advertising Standards Agency, who don't have much power. At worst they can make them stop using specific adverts if they find them to be misleading. It's rare for them to investigate games and AFAIK they've only started this investigation because they've received several complaints.

Would be interesting if they ruled against NMS in as much as it might have some effect on blatant false advertising in the future.

Yeah I would not very they will do anything.

But it's very nice of hello games to have video footage of the game we didn't get helpfully right there all over the game's official site

Hell hath no fury like the internet conned

"E3 2015. Sean: "I'm gonna do something really stupid now. I'm gonna choose one of these planets at random, and we can go there"

A couple of days after release. The files are datamined. In them, there is a folder named 'E32015'. In that folder, are three folders named 'Planet1', 'Planet2', and 'Planet3'."

Well, he did choose one of those 3 randomly though.  :why_so_serious:

Some news sites have been talking about how the ASA's ability to make a case against NMS for false advertising may be categorically inhibited by the procedurally generated nature of the game as well as Sean's meek-and-meandering soft-claim style. I.E., it was easy to hit Killzone: Shadow Fall because of false promises on technical absolutes (they promised 1080p clearly, game did not have 1080p) but the claims against NMS (much less variance in worlds and animals than visually indicated in game press, much less variance in structures, no 'grand space') can always be hiding on one of those other seventeen hojillion planets. How can you say it isn't if you never checked? Hmm?

also there was a dust-up in the "No Man's Sky Gaming World" because the NMS subreddit shut down after the playerbase ended up having nothing to do except complain about the game

What other function could a NMS subreddit have now anyway? Post pretty pictures of interesting planets or fauna?

that's the saddest part though is that people still do, and when they do, the pictures they post are functionally identical to pictures already posted in the first few hours of the game being out. when i browsed through the subreddit, the occasional sincerely-excited-to-share post was there, of a planet or a creature someone discovered, which looks pretty much identical to multiple places i saw myself in my short window of playing.

there's nothing else really to share. If I wanted to update my game guide to include anything new to talk about since the short time i played it, I might be able to add two sentences. I would be able to mention that the occasional proto-stream has been located by gamers. I'd mention the sean murray 'amazing, there's so many of you' copypasta. And that the entire studio has been a ghost since launch. There's nothing else to really go through. Outside of one post where a person details the exact mechanics of Adjacency Bonuses for ships and multitools, I have covered essentially everything and there's nothing else there to discuss.

NMS is no longer a game, it's a drama reactor that slagged and is now slowly cooling down at the bottom of a cooling tank.

This is a saddening read: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-10-07-building-a-space-sim-in-a-post-no-mans-sky-world

Other people trying to make a space sim game but suddenly finding they can't raise the funding because people feel burned by NMS.

I dunno... I'm sure it sucks for the devs (though probably not too bad since this got funded anyway), but people wising up about crowdfunding is a good thing, in my book.

Honestly, there's a lot of very worrying stuff in that article:
All this tied up in a single shard, open world MMO with a monthly subscription fee that they're developing in two years for $500k?  I mean, good luck and all, but I'd argue that people would be RIGHT to be a bit skeptical of a developer pulling this off as his first title.

I'd have ventured a guess that this sounded a lot like Dmart, but not enough narcissism.  :why_so_serious:

Definitely. I do a fair bit of crowdfunding, but I also do my homework. When I'm just tossing my money at a long shot, I don't expect much.

It's like shitty traditional businesses blaming their failure on 'the economy' 8 years later. NMS is going to take a lot of heat for otherwise shitty games having problems.

Yeah fair points, but I suppose my point was that the comments they received had changed dramatically since NMS launched. Game development doesn't happen in a bubble and people like Sean Murray and Chris Roberts piss in the cornflakes for everyone in the long run.

Now if only the dickheads who keep throwing money at Roberts every time he doodles a new imaginary ship on the back of a napkin would start to wise up too....

You can't reason with cultists, which are exactly what Roberts legions are.

Well, I'm on record for enjoying NMS for the chill experience it was, and if Star Citizen can be a better game than that, I'm ok with it. I give zero shits about drama, I just like fun games (my definition may vary from the Internet's).

And it's a fair point that NMS's huge hype and fall (deserved or not) definitely plays into any space game featuring exploration.

i accidentally came across the least insightful game article ever

http://www.gamenguide.com/articles/54218/20161012/no-mans-sky-latest-news-update-hello-games-title-slowly-falling-sean-murray-busy-with-next-patch.htm

I thought you were linking an article but seems like it's just advertiser spooge.

I do think that because of NMS, anyone who really does want a groundbreaking major space sim title anytime in the forseeable future has to pin their hopes on chris roberts. If he fucks up his now unique window to suck inhuman quantities of money from crowdfunding on the promise he will slake the thirst of all us spaceboys, then the grounds will be well and truly razed and salted behind him.

The unholy triumvirate of E:D, NMS and SC all being failures or disappointments in one way or another will kill space sims forever, definitely.

Disagree.  Someone has to look at the ridiculous amount of money that SC has pulled in, without delivering anything and NMS has pulled in by delivering a tech-demo and say, "listen, if we delivery a tech-demo that also has a bit of a game in it, we'll be wearing money hats".

Ideally, Disney pays some independent to delivery X-Wing Versus Tie Fighter 2017...  2018?

Did Disney make much of anything on Star Wars Battlefront? That game lasted weeks and was completely forgotten about.

I wouldn't describe E:D as a failure on the level of NMS. People got a product on time and on budget and the game is continuously supported, and it has at least one expansion to its credit, AND the company did not lie about what was in it. You might as well call Eve Online a failure by that standard as the interesting stuff in that was not generated by the game mechanics. Hell, when I was exploring in that game I saw that some bored graphic designer had drawn the eye of Horus on the skybox of one system as nebula, and then found the same Eye of Horus Nebula on 2 other star systems on different sides of the Galaxy.

The real problem of the HOOOOOOGE universe is that a YUUUUGE universe is very hard to fill with interesting stuff to discover, and E:D hits this problem big time. A Planet is a Planet is a ball of rock and gas after all, and the time to CONSUME content is a magnitude less than the time it takes to CREATE content. So once you have seen 50 ring planets its kinda sameo.

You'll note the bit I highlighted. Words I chose very carefully specifically to apply to E:D. Absolutely E:D wasn't a failure on anything like the scale of NMS, but it was disappointing in many ways.

ED is at this point kind of a space-lab for prototype proofs of concept for other space sims. Anything ED does at least proves that you could build some good gameplay and content around it, even if ED won't.

Seriously, ED is essentially a fantastic engine ready for someone to create content. Makes me wish they'd sell it to someone who was willing to stick the money in to make some aliens and some life forms etc.

I have been playing ED in on my Vive for the past 10 days (having never played it before) and I already want to live the rest of my life in my pretend spaceship.  I can only imagine what it would be like with an actual compelling story line.

(http://i.imgur.com/8pTSVjV.gif)

Apparently Hello Games and Sean Murray got hacked. Or maybe a deranged Murray escaped detention and they're just trying to damage control.

http://www.polygon.com/2016/10/28/13453440/no-mans-sky-tweet-game-was-a-mistake

edit: oh and https://twitter.com/rickyberwick/status/792025210816004096

they set themselves up for this by just flat-out ghosting, honestly

i mean it's the first tweet in how long? since right after launch?

/e - 18th of august. jesus h christ, the microdrama over this game being a festering abandonturd has provided eight times the entertainment value the game itself could have possibly provided

I guess Sean Murray can be thanked for letting me find out about Ricky Berwick, so there's a silver lining.

Fortunately, Star Wars Battlefront 2 will be out next year, because we were running short on multiplayer shooters.

What? How did it warrant a sequel?

Star Wars.

Thread and Article worth coming back for.  10/10, would despair again.

So, most of you are probably already aware of it, but it looks like a big update, called "foundation", came out of the blue today, along with some communication from Hello Games:

http://www.no-mans-sky.com/news/
http://www.no-mans-sky.com/foundation-update/

Ahem, dear Hello Games, was it too difficult to post...I don't know, a couple months ago, something along the lines of "ok, we've just started creating content for this update we're going to call "foundation": our current plan is to give you bi-weekly updates about our progress", instead, you know, of the total silence that we  got. Doesn't seem rocket science to me.

You know, if their goal had been Minecraft, it probably would've been easier to just do that.

Yeah... building bases on planets that you can't go back to? WTF?

This is going to sell really well I'm sure. <-- green, obv.

You can go back to them now.

I think this is all too little, too late; I was far too angry at the game when I ragequit so it's going to take a lot to get me to reinstall.

I loaded it up last night, started building a base with all the shiny stuff. Attached one component and then realised to build a bigger base I needed to mine for more stuff, in order to mine I required a better mining laser, in order to upgrade my mining laser I required a better ship .. that's when I logged off.

Oh it's a free update, my mistake, I thought it was going to be DLC.

Well, good on them at least for trying to add something to the game, but yeah, it makes no sense that they didn't talk about this to anyone until now. They really have zero clue about PR do they?

I don't know why she swallowed the fly...  :why_so_serious:

Teleporters to get to and from. If you want to move it, you get all materials refunded (though it would've been nice for a structural storage ala AE2).

As far as radio silence from Hello Games, fuck the Internet. It's lost all right to anyone telling them anything, ever. They'll bitch either way, so no loss.

 :facepalm:

What I mean is, you're damned if you do or damned if you don't. So don't waste the time, just make the game you want to make and let it speak for itself. The only feedback metric that matters is profit.

Obviously they're doing well enough to continue to develop content for the game, so good for them.

That is the exact opposite of good marketing and a is a great way for an indie house to never be heard from again.

I want to give this another chance so I started a survival game. I spawned on an ice planet, over seven minutes away from my ship. I die from exposure in about three minutes.

Let's generate another start:

Even colder, 12 minutes away. So am I supposed to cockstab for hours trying to stockpile minerals to keep me alive to get to the ship, at which point I can cockstab again to fix it?

Reading the internet, this is indeed the case. You have to jump between shelters and caves, so that means reroll a new planet until you get one where survival is possible. Resource drain and rarity is an order of magnitude worse, so all you ever do is mine stuff to do even the smallest thing. Basically survival is an unplayable mode.

I tried survival mode as well, it pretty much highlights everything that is tedious and annoying about the game.

Couldn't you just tunnel over to your ship to stay out of the elements? Or at least tunnel to recharge then dash again? I dunno how it works though as I have not played it for a few months...busy with my black Friday purchases.

I don't think it's possible to tunnel with the basic gear, but I could be wrong. But even like that the shelter regeneration speed is so slow that you'll be spending an hour getting to your ship, most of it waiting.

I'm just happy that I managed to get to a planet that isn't dissolving my flesh at a rapid pace.  I also have a working ship, but nice planets don't seem to be overrun with plutonium, so I spend a lot of time looking for that just so I can fly around and hope to find a recipe for glass.  I can make antimatter; glass seem trivial by comparison.

http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/building-worlds-using-maths

Brave of him.

Shame it's not at AGDC or I'd crash it.

If he's doing a gig like that, does that mean he's not a gazillionaire?

Nah, speaker passes are free and nonremunerative. The hard part is just getting a talk approved, but being a "big name" helps a lot there.

It's free advertising. There'll be a lot of media coverage. Some of it will emphasize how NMS now has some new half-assed features that weren't in at launch so some people will be tricked into buying it.

ARISE !!!

After the launch dumpster fire, I had sworn off buying this till it dropped under $10, but since it's a Sony release, that'll never happen.

However ... patch 1.3 is out, and there is a Steam sale dropping the price to $24.  Is anyone still playing? If do, has Hello patched in enough game to make this worth pulling the trigger?

Any way, new features include

I bought it at release and just started a new game yesterday. I'm not far enough in to know if it's any fun yet. Maybe one of our more obsessive gamers can weigh in.

I'll have to play a bit more, but for now let me say that (at least in "normal mode") the first few hours are definitely more engaging and interesting with the addition of focused tutorial tooltips, story and gameplay features. Graphics have also improved.

Promising.

I fired it up today.  Restarted.  Seems smoother but still jarring to meet aliens just hanging out in abandoned places.  We'll see.

The game Elite: Dangerous now has a lot of refugees from No Man's Sky, especially on PS4. Their general reaction is "Why did I ever bother with No Man's Sky?". Just letting you know.

I had a friend mention that just yesterday. He picked up No Man's Sky on sale, played it for a while, and then tell me he was seriously thinking about returning it for refund and picking up Elite.

So apparently No Man's Sky is doing a great business in creating demand for Elite: Dangerous.

Is Elite: Dangerous any good in solo mode? I have zero desire to play another MMOG right now.

You can switch between Elite's solo, private group, and open (instanced MMO) modes at any time without penalty. It's all played on the same servers even if you choose to have no-one else be able to interact with you. You can relog and be in open again whenever you like. You continue playing the same character with the same progression no matter which mode you're in.

A Reddit survey the other day (young male-skewed site which gave some otherwise weird results) found that 51% mostly play in solo.

The big warning however is that Elite Dangerous has a massive learning curve. At first you struggle to even fly your ship or land it. And you do a lot of googling and reading wikis. People who get past the curve tend to go on to play hundreds or thousands of hours. I'm at 700 hours and having a blast.

I'm staying away from E:D because I'd end up with a Vive.

NMS is a good game for what it is, just a lot of people think it's something else.

I played Eve for years. I can't imagine Elite has a worse learning curve. Still, thanks for the warning. I'm not sure I'm ready to put that kind of energy into a new game right now. Maybe I'll pick it up at the Christmas Steam sale.

No. A lot of people were flat out told it was something else.

What schild said. No Mans Sky is False Advertising incarnate.

That's true, but it should be noted that if you have any experience with flight sims and you own a joystick you shouldn't have any real trouble. It's easier than any WWII aviation sim I've ever picked up, for instance.

That said, I own it and haven't played in a while. It is a colossal time sink, and you don't really build anything in it either.

So, just as a curiosity, the initial article that caused the thread is inaccessible.

yes, correct

we don't have a frontpage

NMS is much improved from before.  For one thing, I can transfer stuff from my current ship directly to a crashed ship.  You can also summon your ship to your location.  There is more gameplay; I restarted and there is at least more gameplay in the early parts.

As usual, I will say that I didn't read anything about this game before I bought it.

the best way i could describe the difference between NMS today and NMS at launch is that today's version is an actual game

You are being generous, but I agree in spirit.

well I mean I wouldn't say a particularly great game, but .. a game. like, with a release that wouldn't go down like the world's most oversold tech demo

I just bought it on sale. I like it.

I have not read much about it, including the first article in this thread that is inaccessible.

This is the correct way to play this game.  It really is alright, but it isn't what was advertised.

I have a friend that bought it when it was new, then put it aside (like everybody else did) when he experienced how much it sucked.

Lately he jumped in and gave it another try, and confirms that there is indeed a playable game there now, except that he has some sort of bug that suddenly and randomly catapults him out of a system at hyperlight speeds every once an a while. Apparently it can throw him so far as to be outside normal space and time.

So be advised.

I advise starting a new save.  Too much change in the program.

[Correct Thread]

Recentish review of NMS showing the state its in today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d13ZXtdFotE

[/Correct Thread]

480p? what a dick

Major update which claims to fulfil on a lot of the original promises - https://www.nomanssky.com/next-update/

Had a quick go, definitely looks prettier. Hard to say how improved it is, but there is multiplayer of some sort.

So yeh multiplayer works, and looks like you might be able to coop play. The graphics are even more stunning than before, but the core gameplay or lackof doesn't appear to have changed much.

Did they make it so the game remembers what materials were found on what planets?

Yes. They also added a scanner that lets you scope out the trade potential of a system before going there.

As a note if you do decide to try it again:

You will almost certainly have to restart. If you do, do the entire tutorial all the way up to learning the Antimatter recipe, without deviation! Many people, including myself, had to restart due to doing foolish things like claiming your pre-order ship before completing the tutorial. Completely borked the save. Fortunately the whole tutorial is under two hours if you focus on it.

I bought the game on GoG, there is no multiplayer on the GoG version.

I fell for their promise of multiplayer all over again :/

Lol

Link to article (https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/25/17612244/no-mans-sky-multiplayer-update-gog-delayed)

I have a buddy that bought it at launch, got burned like everybody else, and put it aside until now. Apparently, to him this patch not only makes the game playable, but patches the fun in.

Don't know if I'm going to try it now though. It's not like I don't have other time-wasters on deck, and I kinda hate to reward the whole debacle.

So I'll probably do what I always do and grab it on sale for a couple of bucks and then wait a few more years to mess with it after everybody else is done.

Multiiplayer is blessedly optional. Just create a new game and then go into options/network options and turn it off.

(https://i.imgur.com/X04GVV6.jpg)

Awesome.

I decided to start a fresh game on PS4, not having played significantly since the first month. Overall it seems to make more sense with the starting path they give and resource combination also seems logical. A lot of the fun is sucked out by the anxiety of running out of materials so quickly so most of the game is farming for mats and not exploring.

I'm guessing this part is scripted, but about my fifth jump in hyperspace I landed right into a dogfight and somehow won the battle. The reward was an entire damn freighter to use as a space base. It's a class C with only one science vessel for missions, but it was still fun to get to that part of the game so quickly.

Ditto, freighters seem pretty cool. You can build up a fleet and send them on random expeditions, which take play in real time. So far have yielded very little, but it's a nice touch.

My son watched me play this for about five minutes, and after a few questions he said "So, it's Starbound."

I'm having fun.  Had to start over, but that is the fun part anyway: stuck on a crap planet, scrounging for your bootstraps.

We have been playing it again. My daughter got a freighter and frigate. There is a bug with frigates that, once they get damaged on a mission, they may end up with damage that can't be repaired. It will say 0 stations damaged, but still be damaged. If you send it on another mission, it is destroyed. Not that big a deal when you have a Class C, but some folks online said that a Class A frigate is 8 million credits. It's a pretty shitty bug.

The only other issue I've seen is that when you accept quests from random NPCs, it shows the quest code like NPC_QUEST_COMBAT_START instead of actual quest text. When you finish, it does the same thing like NPC_QUEST_COMBAT_RES. You get the reward, but it's very lacking in polish.

I also had a quest to collect resources. Turned it in and got the reward. NPC didn't take the resources, though, so I sold them, as well.

It is very true that the general quality of the game is shit.  I started a new save but I still have help files from the previous versions, complete with nonexistant elements.

Yeh I had that bug happen to me since my last post :(

They've really improved so much, but still a bit of overall shoddiness that denies full absolution.

I started a fresh game, played for 15 hours or so, and then managed to lose my entire exosuit inventory due to the incredibly annoying savegame system. So I gave and reloaded an old save from last summer. I'd been through the tutorial on the first, scrapped game so I figured I should be OK. As soon as I loaded up I got an immediately call from Polo the Anomalous Gek so that worked out find. The first system I warped to had me rescue a freighter which was then given to me so that's cool too.

The best thing though is that I have my old ship back. I lucked into it early on and it has 47 inventory slots (about half are broken). My exosuit is a hell of a lot better too as is my multitool. I think the previous release was more generous in giving upgrades to newbies because I swear I only played 15 or 20 hours. Or perhaps I was just incredibly lucky. I was also able to scrap a lot of "old technology" from the ship which gave 20 of those handy technology upgrades you need to build anything decent.

The downside is that the majestic NastyStorm's Garbage Scow is as ugly a ship as I've ever seen in the new release. The poor old girl looks very out of place among her peers.

(https://i.imgur.com/SKJohQS.jpg?1)

The other problem with the poor old Scow is that when I teleport back to the NastyStorm Colony she lands inside the Construction Shed and annoys my Overseer. I'm early in the base tutorial. Hopefully I'll be able to build a proper landing pad for her and keep out of that crabby Gek's hair.

(https://i.imgur.com/Iq1qB7s.jpg?2)

How much of this is still accurate? Picked it up when it was on sale and just starting to get into it. Have managed to travel to another star system, but not much farther than that.

Was there an article attached to this at some point? I can't seem to get to it. Hey, you've already done the hardest part - surviving the first five minutes before dying of exposure because you can't find any sodium. :grin:

The early game is something I enjoy, but aside from that bias I still think it's worth it to start again simply because all of the elements have changed and many of the mechanics have been altered. Basically, I didn't know how to play the game anymore. The Internet didn't have any answers, either. My advice is to start over, stop worrying, and learn to love the radiation exposure.

I agree. I would never have reverted to an older save if I hadn't screwed up my inventory so badly. As it is, I did play a new game long enough to get through the early stages and the game I reverted to was at about the same level of progress.

I was just hoping for a "hey don't waste a bunch of time not doing these things (or doing these other things)" to make the early game run a bit smoother. Can I just mention how utterly fucking sick and tired I am of inventory micromanagement as gameplay? STABBY

Life will get easier once you have a portable refinery. A lot of bulky stuff has more advanced forms that take up half the space.

Drop Pods are your friend. They contain inventory upgrades.

You'll get a freighter pretty early on as well, and that's a huge boost for managing inventory.

Oh, and build a mini base with a portal on good planets and you can warp freely back and forth between them and the various stations you've visited.

Also: when upgrading your suit inventory, you have the option of opening up high capacity storage on a different "tab" in the suit UI. They only hold inventory, but can hold twice as much.

Also, also: On the stations there are merchants for upgrades. Get a decent boost for your running and jetpack installed as soon as you can. Can easily double the time they last. Also, learn how to "punch-thrust". Start running forward, then hit punch and jetpack at the same time and hold it down. It will launch you straight forward at high speed.

I'd actually advise that you throw out elemental resources you don't immediately need.  You can always find more, unlike in previous early versions where you could end up on a planet without something to keep yourself alive or to fuel your ship.

Of course, I'm only 5 planets in but so far so good. :why_so_serious:

For money making I've found mining cobalt is the easiest. There are planets with tons of it kicking around. Of course the best money I ever made was by finding the 3 artifact keys in an ancient ruin and opening up the treasure chest to get a fossilized dog paw that I sold for 1.5 million.

Shit, I opened one of those and only got a book worth 100k.

My best plentiful mineral for the buck so far is Chlorine at 600 per unit.

I didn't check the price on chlorine since salt -> chlorine and past experience with other resource showed price was effectively same between levels of refinement.

Cobalt's pretty good, but there we no caves nearby. Plenty of salt.

Moved on to the 3rd system finally.  Finding that last animal species is a bitch.  Anyway, found my first extreme world and it also has storms.  Can't see shit while flying around even without a blizzard raging, lost sight of the outpost I first landed on simply by flying a km or two away from it.  Decided I wasn't a bad enough dude yet, but will come back later.

Yeah I tried out salt/chlorine too. 2 salt refines to 1 chlorine and sells at twice the price. No point in refining it unless you're short of space.

They should at least have made it a tad bit more for refined goods, to reflect cost of fuel.

I somehow found a dupe bug, since I ended up with several duplicate placeable machines when I picked up most of the stuff from my first base to settle on a planet in the second system.

Overall some nice improvements to the game. Feels good coming back from launch (as one of the few people who really enjoyed it then). Upgrades are a bit dickier, and everything for purchase is in the millions and I'm a hundred-thousandaire. Having to craft unlocks for the drop pods is probably the most annoying new thing, though. Tempted to reload my old save with all my upgraded stuff...

I also found a nice hauler (my first distress signal). Got it space-worthy but it needs so much work to fix up enough to haul inventory or upgrade I abandoned it where I found it and went back to the newbie jet.

I mentioned chlorine, because I found a couple of planets that had large chlorine rocks all over the landscape that you could mine directly.

Hey Sky, if you know where you left that hauler you should go back once you get your freighter. That gives you the ability to own multiple ships.

I did have the freighter, and it's on the planet with my base. Not sure how to retrieve it, since I figured I couldn't use it for a while given the massive repairs it needs. I had already fixed the launch module, the regular thrusters, the hull and basic laser. It still needs something like 12 slots repaired...

I tried playing this game again, but I keep hitting random roadblocks. OK, beginner quest - go find a seal to repair your broken ship. Great, I go find the base, get the seal .. oh now install your analytical visor so you can find your ship. Ok great. Um .. 15 mins later, some googling .. well fuck me, I can't find *any* way to install that visor. Can I save and come back to see if that fixes it? or at least let me google some more tomorrow? Nope, last save was 40 mins ago. Well fuck, I guess I'll just die and never play again. -die- Appear back at broken ship, with a message that there's seal waiting for you right here, but that visor? haha still can't do that!

Did you try installing it into an empty slot? I think you have the blueprint for it from the beginning. If you just press E in one of your multi tool slots I think you can build one with easy to get materials. I know because I had to build one at the beginning of my game so I could scan for sodium.

Sky: The freighter I'm talking about is a fully functional one you are given the first time you respond to a distress call and kill some pirates. I didn't even know it was possible to repair a crashed freighter. The first one I went to was just a massive amount of work for crappy treasure.

I did try, it says (and shows) to press E to install in an empty slot but it just ignored the key press - which is why I was going to restart the game, but of course you can't save your spot manually so I would have had to redo that part of the "quest".

Is the choice for the visor in the list when you hit E? Is it highlighted or grey? If it's grey it means you don't have the carbon nanotube to build it. Hope I'm not missing the point. I'm not quite clear on what's happening to you.

Figured it out - apparently 'DELETE' is my E key for that screen and that screen only.

I suggest using a controller  :awesome_for_real:

That's so weird but I'm glad you got past it.

Sorry, sloppy writing on my part. I had the freighter in orbit, the hauler was on the surface, damaged. And I agree, the crashed freighters are a pita. I did get a bit of decent stuff, but it didn't seem to match the effort to find and dig it all up (and deal with gathering resources to open the locks, including having to set up and run the processor).

Ran into the frigate bug - 1 repair left with no icon and no visibly broken machinery. Even while I was grumbling about that, I was climbing a ladder on the frigate and watching the nearby fleet with a bit of pirate action through the asteroid field, framed by a couple nice looking planets...it's a pretty nicely visceral game at times.

I hate controllers for shooters, so unless there is lock-on for ground segments, I'm not interested. I also hate controllers in visually rich game, because it's so much worse looking around with one vs a mouse, especially while moving. But it's clearly tuned for controllers, in both the wacky menu layouts (from a keyboard perspective) and the clearly meant for thumbsticks reticles in space.

I'm about to hang it up. The sentinels are some of the most unfun parts of the game and they're always in my shit when I try to do anything.

Is there any point in the game where I won't be farming for carbon/ferrite/fuel as significantly as I am now? Farming/exploring for upgrades is one thing, but a lot of time I log in, decide I'm going to work towards an upgrade only to realize I'm low on fuel so I spend 10 minutes hunting that down, now I can actually play the game. Ooop no, now I'm out of some other thing and I need to get that before I can do what I want.

Also, the lack of gas giants bothers me.

The only time I have real trouble with the sentinels is on sentinel-aggressive planets where they just attack for no reason. If you just stop what you're doing as soon as they show up they'll leave after a few seconds. I've also learned not to worry too much about getting killed by them. As long as you remember to loot your grave and generate an autosave after it's not that big a deal. Another way to avoid them is to explore the local caves. A lot of the time digging up buried treasure will lead you down into a cave system that has better stuff than the surface and is 100% sentinel free. I don't know how far along you are but I've got enough starship and exosuit cargo slots now that I can carry and ton of condensed carbon, sodium nitrate, and ferrite. I don't need to replenish until I've gone though most of  it and hunting down carbon and ferrite is easy.

I'm spending more and more time on missions these days. It's easy to pick up 3 or 4 identical easy missions and satisfy them all at once. Sometimes I'll pick up a few "Kill 4 sentinel" quests and go do them all at once.

Low game is definitely grindy at times. I've yet to open a drop pod now that you have to unlock them (I had something like 50+ slots on my old save's exosuit). I thought I was going to open my first one last night, but the planet I was on had almost no chromatic metals, so I figured I'd leave my processor for the WP and also mark the WP for the drop pod and jump over to the neighboring planet where I have me base, that's abundant in copper and cobalt (which I also needed). Load on up both, head back to the other planet and no WPs at all, no idea where that was now.

So I guess I'm just going to avoid any low metal planets for a while...

I don't remember it being so grindy every time you need to do literally anything. At some point I hope things like needing launch fuel just to take off get some kind of upgrade to remove that low-level irritant. For a game about exploration, I spend most of my time grinding resources, and I'm 10 hours in and barely even have a base set up (not that I returned to it at all after building the shack). I think it's overall a better game not in many ways, but was more fun at release.

I realized last night that suit expansion can be purchased in what appears to be every space station. There is always the side of the station with three vendors: suit, ship, tool. The suit guy sells prints and upgrades, but right behind him is a floating backpack. Click and pay.

My biggest problem is getting multi-tool upgraded. I still have just 9 slots after 70ish hours played.

Edit: No longer a problem. My weapons master just gave me a 21 slotter. 8 or 9 were broken but I'm still better off.

Edit 2: Since I got the big multi-tool the weapons master has offered a half dozen more with 7-12 slots. I suspect that I was wildly lucky being offered the good one.

Ironically, I just found that last night, too. And I set up for doing pods on my home planet, which is set up perfectly for it as I have abundant Cobalt and many pods are right by cave systems (though it also has toxic gas formations...). So I'm up 3 slots from yesterday and feeling a bit better, though I did spend most of last night's session just grinding mats and feeding them into the machine.

Bought an 8 slot multitool for about 230k (I was up to 750k!), first I've seen that small (and affordable).

Today's patch fixed some very nasty bugs. My personal list of super annoying things rectified today:

• I couldn't figure out how to access my collection of ships. Today post-patch they all appeared in my freighter. So that makes a ton more sense now that I can visually see them on deck.
• They slightly reduced the sentinel aggro range and now it feels so much better. I was only bothered a few times while out on a mining run today.
• Storm frequency was reduced for my planet (I think). I have this great home base bountiful planet that has extreme fire storms, now they seem less frequent.
• Finally, there were a whole bunch of new items in the galactic trade that I had never seen before. Not sure if they're new or were hidden before.

If you care, you can read the notes here: https://www.nomanssky.com/release-log/

Well I finally got all the blueprints I need to build Cryo Pumps which sell for 1.5 million so that kinda solves any more money problems. I may repair one of my starship slots to celebrate! After Polo and Nada stop handing out the good stuff the Atlas Interfaces keep handing out rare and wonderful blueprints so the Atlas Path is definitely worth doing.

Btw, the patch from a day or two ago fixed frigate repairs, finally. Still looks wonky, I had the 1 repair spot not showing up bug, after the patch I was able to repair it and the frigate was good to go. But I noticed other repairable stations all would accept repair materials even though the ship said it was ok. Sent it on a mission (2 star frigate, 2 star mission), came back all beat up. So I haven't messed around with repairing it again to see if it's well and truly fixed (I don't really need any of the mats they've been bringing back from mining missions).

I've been kind of neglecting my freighter and frigates in this playthrough. Maybe in the next galaxy I'll spend more time on them. I definitely need to put more work into my base. It has all the rooms and specialists and equipment I need but it's pretty much a slum.

By the way, has anyone been able to get Access Ramps to work? I'm using cylindrical rooms on legs and for the life of me I can't get the regular access ramps to work. I have to use crappy wooden ramps that don't snap into place instead.

I found the whole base building setup pretty shitty. I thought it would be cool to do a little mountain top base overlooking a lake. The terrain manipulator needs a lot more love. I also wish I could pick up and move things other than the little machines. The game is pretty much coded for dumpster bases.

I haven't done much in my freighter because it looks like it doesn't have as much utility as the ground base, so why bother. I'd love to get a teleporter in there, it would make life easier. Also, better storage options, since a massive cube for 5 slots is a bit silly, and there's no unified interface for accessing a bank of them (easy to put in, pain to find to take out again). I've been storing stuff in unused spaceships.

Ohh storing stuff in unused ships is smart! You can call them down to wherever you happen to be and your freighter and the ships in it follow you to the next galaxy. I'm pretty sure that your base doesn't. I'm definitely going to be taking mine apart for the materials before I reset and using those ships for storage means I can take everything with me.

Yeah maybe I just don't understand the terrain manipulator. I can't seem to do much except dig holes. I'd like to be able to flatten land and fill in holes. The bigger I make my base the more likely it is that buildings are half buried or hanging in the middle of the air.

The alt-fire on it builds terrain, but it's limited to spheres and cubes...and the cubes are, ehm, special. Like sometimes they snap to each other, sometimes they don't. If you put a slab of ground down, it's lumpy. If you alt mode and remove it, it doesn't remove cleanly. If you try to fill it in again, it gets lumpier. So yeah.

I plan on keeping dumpster base for a long time, though. With the teleporter from any space station, it works well enough. Getting tired of working on it on my early planet, though.

Thanks for to terrain manipulater tips. You're right, it's total garbage but at least now I can fill in deep holes and let the structures flatten it out. Those damned access ramps are still driving me crazy though.

My last visit to an Atlas station told me that I was almost at the end. I have no idea what happens after that. Polo and Nada are expecting me to spend 20 days on extreme planets and at the rate I'm going it could take months. In the meantime my third quest has been nagging at me to get off my butt and reset the universe already. I refuse to do that while I still have a dozen sidequests wanting me to photograph an underwater creature dammit.

If anyone's still playing, I figured out a good way to flatten the land without using the terrain manipulator. Just place a wooden floor at the level you want to build your base. They flatten things beautifully and you can recover the old floor for free so you can do it until you have the area you want  at the level you like. For filling in holes the terrain manipulator is handy but inevitably you'll raise it a little too high and the floor trick can flatten it back down.

Ah, good idea!

I wish the base building wasn't so half-assed.

Building something that doesn't look like it was smashed together by a hyperactive toddler is almost impossible. No grids, no alignment tools no way to work with terrain except that weird manipulator.

I like my bases neat and structured and aligned on a grid with meticulous precision (that's my German-ness) and NMS drives me up the wall.

You can do this once per space station.

Also, if you check the tool guy, right next to him is a fold out that offers a tool for sale in every space station. Nothing from the ship guy though.

There is a guild rep in every space station that will give you free stuff once per space station as well. Usually just credits.

I thought that the found blueprints had been removed but turns out they are in the sealed factories where you anger the sentinels when you blast through the door.  I had been avoiding those buildings.

I keep going back to this and playing a goodly bit for a couple of weeks, then shelving it again for a while. It's really pretty fun now and close to what I thought it was going to be. The only thing I still dislike is ship combat.

I think I read somewhere there's a really big expansion coming soon, adding in the full multiplayer experience and other stuff.

My original character is practically a god now. i might start a new guy when the expansion comes out. Not thrilled about multiplayer at all though.

Not interested in MP. They have been pretty quiet and I had assumed it was to work on the VR version.

The update is three parts: Multiplayer, VR, and some unannounced content. I believe they feel they’re finally hitting the point where they’re releasing the game as it was intended.

https://www.nomanssky.com/2019/08/no-mans-sky-beyond-trailer/

I liked the game without the story arc, but hey. I got my dollars out of it already. Hopefully they won't completely invalidate my progress, like last time there was a huge update.

Is that trailer actual ingame footage? I don't think I've ever had graphics as colourful as those anywhere.

I am trying to contain myself from going bananas.  5 more days.

In-game footage, but I think there could have been some time-compression.

I could be wrong, but the game seemed more colorful before NEXT. In fact, some planets changed colors during an update. The planet I named Tennis Ball was no longer the correct color, which bothered me a lot as the planet's owner.

Edit to say that maybe the wild colors will return, not that I think the trailer is somehow more drab than I remember.

I've never played it, but that trailer is a MUCH less shade of day-glo color than any of the footage I've seen of the game before.

Hah someone should think about moving this thread down into Gaming. It's every bit as active as most of the games in there. :)

I don't know, it's pretty easy to find at the moment.

I think the dinosaur bones were removed. Still need to put more time in, but so far so good.

I don't want to start over again, but we will see.

Well I think I'll come back to this in a month or so. Currently I think it's just too buggy to waste time on.

Dinosaur bones are still in. I've found countless planets with the "ancient relics" resource type.

They were just removed from my main base planet, then. Oh, well.

A huge quality of life upgrade just went in, so I started yet another new character. I've only been playing a couple of hours and so far what I've noticed is that inventory stacks literally everywhere in starship, exosuit, and exosuit storage will now hold 9,999 items. I love this. I can finally stock up on enough Carbon and Ferrite dust to keep me basebuilding without interruption. Also, the Terrain Manipulator now has an actual "flatten" setting. So that it's easy to level all the space you need for your base. No more screwing around with placing floors to do it. There's a ton of other stuff in the patch notes too but these are what I've seen so far.

If they manage to do a solid, huge content update this may end up being one of the best iterative games ever made. Right now I get caught up in the upgrade treadmill and go sour after 20 hours. They need to make an actual deep story to go on top of the galaxy they created.

I think they're planning another new content patch for next time.

Badly needed, I may need to revisit this again.

Hey the next update is out and it's pretty cool. This will be the second time I've posted about it because of the annoying bug of "Not having permission to post Spoilers" that completely wipes out the lengthy message I just typed out. Not that I'm one to complain mind you. I'm sure the imminent arrival of the new forum software will fix all of that.  :uhrr:

Anyhow, they've added a new quest similar to the underwater base quest we got a couple of updates ago. This time the reward is a cool looking living ship. There are a few different types you can get but they're all S-Class(or maybe better I'm not sure.)

It's a long quest and will take a few days to complete (or longer if you don't have a lot of quicksilver). The way to get it started is to go to the Space Anomaly buy a Void Egg from the quicksilver merchant. It costs 3200 quicksilver which could take quite a while to collect if you haven't been doing space anomaly dailies.

Once you have the egg, warp around several times until the egg sends you a set of system coordinates to go to. (Minor spoiler: Take 250 Hexite and a Korvax Casing to build the item you need from the new blueprint you get.)

Thinking of returning to this. Wondering if I should start over, but I'd rather not unless there are bugs or other difficulties in progressing with my existing character.

I don't think there's any need to start over. They've been really good at keeping old saves viable. Depending on how long you've been gone your base may need a bit of rebuilding to bring it up to code. They added the need for power generators two or three releases ago.

They still haven't done a large story content patch. However, I think they've gotten very close to what they promised the game to be at launch. Large life was added today - with sandworms finally making the cut. This is a big enough patch I'm going to start another playthrough from scratch.

Notes: https://www.nomanssky.com/origins-update/

I just signed on with my game from the last update. The new graphics are amazing. I'm not sure yet but I think I they might have outgrown my old NVIDIA 970. So I may need to pull back a little on the quality.

I'll definitely start a new game to see what it's like from that perspective.

The 970 is handling everything just fine and the game is beautiful. I created a new game and started out in a horrible toxic wasteland. It wasn't a great spot so I had to travel some real distance to get what I needed. (Of course the fact that I thought the carbon plants were all monster eggs didn't help.)

Anyway, the place has actual sandworms and they are just awesome. I made a home on the Paradise planet next door and it wasn't quite so paradisaical when I discovered the enormous man eating dinosaurs that migrate through my back yard every day. I'll probably like them eventually but with just an unmodded boltcaster now is not the time.

it's amazing to me how much of a complete turnaround this entire game AND the entire studio was

Yeah I'm playing it now

Like, it's good

Is there a recent update to this?  I somehow always manage to forget I own this game for the Index.

Yup.

It's surprisingly fun, and pretty. And being on XGP, nearly free. I've been playing the hell out of it.

It's been a relaxing balm lately. Like, I keep landing on planets and going wow this is the same shit I've seen only not, it's really pretty or interesting. I landed on a planet a week ago and immediately made a base because it was a bunch of fauna designs I had never seen before with 50 plus planets under my belt, and they felt coherent/thematic. I found a quiet planet with no weather and the Sentinels are pretty chill and it has resources and ! it's got these towering stone platforms overlooking beautiful lakes. I made a base there right away. I found a ridiculously hard planet with Everest-high mountains falling into lake-filled valleys that had gigantic glowing flora and a fantastic color palette and made exquisite pictures at dawn halfway up a mountain.

I mean, it's really easy to play 15 minutes or four hours. And there's always relevant shit to do.

I just got into this one. I'll probably enjoy the hell out of it, but I have to say that the decision to have other spaceships constantly flying by at the starter planet, plus the revelation that a space station is just minutes away, changes the tone of the intro from "desperate survival" to "weekend camp out."

I guess I should go to that station and see if they have a hospital so I can get this amnesia checked out, then get back to my day job of being a space accountant or whatever...

I hear the latest update gives us actual taming and breeding of beasts. My dream of sandworm riding is one step closer.

Kinky

Jesus Christ am I going to have to re-download the game again? I learned to just keep Elite:Dangerous on my PS4, guess I am going to have to do the same for this.

I timed that perfectly, in that I started playing one day and then had a major update the next (my slow satellite connection took hours). And just today they did a patch of the patch that was larger than the original update...

 :oh_i_see:

But that said, the pet thing is pretty fun so far. So is the entire game really, even if it just works out to me noodling around building things and looking at scenery.

"Noodling around building things and looking at scenery" made Minecraft a perfect waste of time.