No Man's Sky

I don't want art, I want a game. So I much prefer a procedurally generated universe. I don't want to be guessing what a designer thought; I want to be experiencing the unknown in a situation where no one has decided what the answers should be. This is likely to be a common feeling among CFC members (that's why we like the Civilization games; they are procedurally generated too.) Similarly, the real world is not scripted.

The music is very atmospheric, but the rest looks fairly repetitive. Grinding space elements into other space elements.

Fortunately, I always turn the music off.

I have been looking at this game the whole day now. Reviews, plays on YouTube etc.
I really wanted this game to be great, but honestly, it looks repetitive and boring as hell. :-(
No objectives, no real difference between the planets other than visual. Shooting/combat part looks like a joke. Gathering is meh, done with a laser mining gun and vacuumed into ? with the same gun, which also is the same gun for combat.
No interactions with other players and interactions with AI looked like something from a 90's RPG merchant.
UI looks horrible, like beta horrible, and from what I read, is really cumbersome to use.
No option for building anything on the planets, which is most likely only visited once anyway, and if first to visit can give them names, even though it looked like there are some sort of primitive bases on all the planets, so they are already colonized?
Reading the metacritics player reviews, the top rated reviews looks very fishy with very similar wording, while the negatives are summing up what my above impression is.

To bad really. Could have been an amazing game.

I only get to play Friday because no reason, but right now the game seems pretty divisive. This is kind of what the developer expected. It's clearly kind of a contemplative game with some simple game elements added to it. I mean I enjoyed a game like Proteus, which was entirely contemplative, so I'm sure I'll enjoy No Man's Sky for a while at least. The sound design and music in No Man's Sky seems amazing, and combining that with the crazy landscapes you can drift through on a lazy night, I'm sure I'll get some value out of the game. I'm an explorer at heart when it comes to games. I don't mind if there is no complex combat and such. The only concern I have right now is inventory juggling which is always a fun killer for me.

I've been reading comments from people who had horrible experiences, and comments from people who've had awesome experiences. I'm hoping I have fun. The thing with this game was that it's always hard to keep expectations in check when the aim of the game is to provide a universe. Some of what people expected was ridiculous.

(PS: They've said they're going to implement base building at some point later. I'm not sure why since the point seems to be to move around. Maybe they'll have a quick way to teleport to base, I don't know).

I think they should have cut down on the scale and worked on the mechanics and content a bit more. Maybe it can be fixed with time, but asking 60$ for this at launch seems a bit much.

Kozmos said:

I think they should have cut down on the scale and worked on the mechanics and content a bit more. Maybe it can be fixed with time, but asking 60$ for this at launch seems a bit much.

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And yet it has been the top seller on steam for that price for days. Hype > substance.

Alternatively, "The customer is always right". People are pretty good at deciding for themselves what they want to spend their money on. It's not always what you would spend your money on, but that's ok.

Some people are willing to pay more just for the fun of getting something first and exploring it before they read a lot of reviews and have everyone else telling them what to think of it. I think that's pretty reasonable. I often avoid reading reviews before seeing movies.

I think it was the "randomly generated, you never know what you got" element that was referred to.
And that is definitely the pros of NMS. The cons, at least from what I've read and seen, is that while the planets are random, they follow the same line of randomness and all have carbon based life forms, platonium plants, iron everywhere and weird composite life forms that mostly doesn't make any sense, like a universe full of platypus.
So basically, for the gamey part of NMS, you can stay on one planet and gather all.

I'm a huge fan of procedurally generated content, but with this game it seems to me to miss an essential part of what makes procedural content fun, allowing the player to interact with and affect the procedural content. Have generated empires and factions and let me affect how they interact between eachother and the universe, or have the generated life on planets have some actual simulation and let me alter the environment for interesting results. If they had gotten in just one element like that in the game and it would have been super up my alley, but how it is now just seems way too static for my tastes, the game needs to have some sort of tangible simulation going on. How little sense the universe seems to make also kind of irks me, seems it's all full of life including spacefaring races, but none of it is fully colonized or even named.

Also the colors of many of the planets give me a headache within minutes.

Honestly, it's a large bite to chew for a small team of like 10 people. I think that if Sony hadn't picked up on them some way through, this game would probably be releasing today at half the price and with a giant "early access" tag on it. I think they are going to add many features in the coming months though, and I'm sure they haven't achieved half the things they wanted to do, but at some point, they had to release the game.

Still, even in this state, I can't wait to play it, as I am the guy who's quite content to stare at landscapes and wonder what view will be over the next hill, everything else is extra candy for me. Actually, even if the actual game mechanics are sparse in the game, I'm worried some of them will get in the way of my "chill gaming" wish... Like having to recharge your exosuit and gun all the time. Anyway, the next 30 hours are going to be very long. Time has stretched infinitely since they announced the North American PC delay last Friday... I thought I'd be playing this past Tuesday

It does seem to have a solid foundation to build something bigger and greater on. Lets hope its modable

Let us know how it plays out

I fully expect NMS to become pretty repetitive rather soon. But I like contemplative games. So I'm throwing dice and buying it - how long the discovery last will determines if it's a good investment or not.

Akka said:

I fully expect NMS to become pretty repetitive rather soon. But I like contemplative games. So I'm throwing dice and buying it - how long the discovery last will determines if it's a good investment or not.

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I've read reports that, in terms of visual diversity at least, some of the procedural generation of creatures and plants is built into the location "coordinates" of the galaxy. So there is a debate about whether or not people who complain about lack of diversity haven't travelled far enough yet. Lots of "get out of that star cluster and go far, you'll see a change!". One thing for sure, yes, there are pre-built body parts on life forms that you will probably see many times... But I think the formula can deform things quite a bit.

Having watched some gameplay and some reviews that are critical of No Man's Sky, I get a sort of Spore vibe from it. Obviously the game looks gorgeous, but it does look like it lacks depth. You guys have mentioned that you hope that this is just the foundation, and that other things will be added on later, but I also worry that these additions will become pricey DLC.

"No Man's Sky won't have paid DLC"

http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2016/08/09/hello-games-no-mans-sky-dlc-just-patches/

Although changes of heart from greedy publishers isn't a new concept

Ninja Dude said:

Having watched some gameplay and some reviews that are critical of No Man's Sky, I get a sort of Spore vibe from it. Obviously the game looks gorgeous, but it does look like it lacks depth. You guys have mentioned that you hope that this is just the foundation, and that other things will be added on later, but I also worry that these additions will become pricey DLC.

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For me, I dont think DLCs will be able to make me enjoy this game. I saw a lengthy replay today and I can see why some people enjoys it. Strangely enough I kinda like watching replays of it ;-)
However, what I meant was that NMS lays a foundation, or a benchmark, for what can be achieved with procedural generation.
I know its not the first, but I would still call NMS 1st gen of its kind, with seamless space to planetary landings. There are a couple others out there that could be interesting, but imho NMS have done more than Elite Dangerous for future space sims.

One game I had high hopes for was called Infinity or something like that, though it seemed to have died in production.

I really would like a mmo with trade and dogfights like ED, but planetary landings like NMS and basebuilding/shipcrafting, but afaik that only exists in my dreams...


Edit...
Seems like Infinity is alive and kicking.
https://www.inovaestudios.com/battlescape

well right now every single review on steam is game crashes and is unplayable.

vincentz said:

One game I had high hopes for was called Infinity or something like that, though it seemed to have died in production.

I really would like a mmo with trade and dogfights like ED, but planetary landings like NMS and basebuilding/shipcrafting, but afaik that only exists in my dreams...


Edit...
Seems like Infinity is alive and kicking.
https://www.inovaestudios.com/battlescape

Click to expand...

Ah, Infinity: The Quest For Earth! I was part of a player organization for that game back in 2006-ish when I could still get ridiculously hyped over in-development games. We thought there would be a playable universal scale MMO in just 1-3 years at that point... With mostly community development and an engine programmed by a single guy, of course, totally plausible.

Now they have Battlescape, which actually looks pretty cool. Originally it was billed as a kickstarter to fund a game that would fund the future MMO game (with possibly another round of crowdfunding at that point), which really seems pretty backwards to me.

I just wanted to be able to experience the seamless planetary flights they demoed which looked amazing back in 2005-2007.

From the user reviews, it seems that NMS is essentially unplayable on PC. The PS4 reviews are mediocre but they don't report the same performance problems as on PC. Seems like they should have delayed the PC launch until they could match the performance on PS4. I have both, so if I do get NMS I'll probably get it on PS4 (especially since I don't have a high-end gaming PC).