No Man's Sky

[Sir T]

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.

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...

[Rasix]

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

[Kail]

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.

[Sir T]

Angry Joe's review is pretty on point (where I also learned about the "ending").

edit: 11 galaxies and they're all the same

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.

[Phildo]

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?

[Sir T]

edit: 11 galaxies and they're all the same

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. 

[KallDrexx]

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).

[Sky]

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.

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

[Trippy]

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

Edit: r

[01101010]

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

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.

[Amarr HM]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Sir T]

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.

[jakonovski]

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

[Samprimary]

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.

[01101010]

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.

[Phildo]

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.

[Yegolev]

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

[Samprimary]

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 ..."

[Khaldun]

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.

[Surlyboi]

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.

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

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.

[Samwise]

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.

[Samprimary]

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

[Ginaz]

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

[Wasted]

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.

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

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.

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.

[jakonovski]

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

[lamaros]

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?

[Khaldun]

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.

[jakonovski]

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.

[Malakili]

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.

[01101010]

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.

[schild]

[Merusk]

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%" 

[Torinak]

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%" 

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.

[Merusk]

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

The division only lost 59% of its player base after a month.
Far Cry Primal dropped 76%.
Aliens: Colonial Marines lost 85% in 1 month.
No Mans Sky has been out for just over 2 weeks.
Sourced by a friendly redditor

So, yeah, pretty big for only 2 weeks.