No Man's Sky: A COMPREHENSIVE PRIMER BY SAMPRIMARY.

[Samprimary]

the count of players in NMS approaches one eightyith of launch

[schild]

Eightyith sounds like a creature from the Pythagorean deep.

[Khaldun]

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

[Paelos]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Samprimary]

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.

[apocrypha]

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.

[Samprimary]

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

[Samprimary]

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'."

[01101010]

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. 

[Samprimary]

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?

[Samprimary]

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

[apocrypha]

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

[Samprimary]

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.

[apocrypha]

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.

[Kail]

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:

"'We don't have content, predefined things," explains Baillie. "People will be able to build whatever they want"

So, with all that out the way, let's ask that all-important question. What is you actually do in Dual Universe? Plenty, of course. It's a continuous single shard universe that blah blah game backstory blah blah nothing about what you actually do in Dual Universe blah blah PvP zone blah blah etc.

someone might need a large space station ... Perhaps you'll also need to employ people ... pirates that might be touring ... might become part of a guild ... maybe you ... possibly ... might ... maybe ... There are countless possibilities ...

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.

[01101010]

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

[Sky]

people wising up about crowdfunding is a good thing, in my book.

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.

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.

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.

[apocrypha]

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....

[Merusk]

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

[Sky]

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.

[Samprimary]

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

[Yegolev]

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

[Samprimary]

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.

[apocrypha]

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.

[Typhon]

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?

[01101010]

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

[Sir T]

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.

[apocrypha]

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.

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.

[Samprimary]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Cyrrex]

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.

[Samprimary]

I can only imagine what it would be like with an actual compelling story line.

[jakonovski]

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

[Samprimary]

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