No Man's Sky

[01101010]

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.

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.

[Sky]

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!

[Falconeer]

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

[Yegolev]

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 .  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.

[Sky]

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

[01101010]

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

[lesion]

Feat. DJ Prt Scn

[Bunk]

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

[KallDrexx]

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)

[Lucas]

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/

[Sky]

http://imgur.com/gallery/pV9Yl

[Falconeer]

Live on Steam!

[Bunk]

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.

[Yegolev]

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

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

[Rasix]

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.

[schild]

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

[Falconeer]

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

[Yegolev]

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

[Samwise]

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?

[Sky]

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 :))

[01101010]

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?

Not in the least.

[KallDrexx]

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.

I'm assuming it has to do with this:

Here are some things to be aware of:
* We’ve brought a new QA team on board today (larger than the entire Hello Games team!). This will complement the existing Sony QA team

[jakonovski]

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

[Falconeer]

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.

[Yegolev]

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.

[jakonovski]

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

[Reg]

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?

[Falconeer]

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.

[Reg]

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.

[Amarr HM]

It feels like the crossover between Starflight and Elite that we used to dream of back in the days.

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).

[Mac]

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.

[Falconeer]

It feels like the crossover between Starflight and Elite that we used to dream of back in the days.

Touch of Captain Blood in there too.

So true. Well spotted. Loved that game.

[Lucas]

It feels like the crossover between Starflight and Elite that we used to dream of back in the days.

Touch of Captain Blood in there too.

 

[K9]

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.

[K9]

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.