No man's Sky will be released tomorrow (Tuesday, 8/9) I believe.
Has anyone preordered it? Apparently there is already a "massive" patch available such that the patched game is nothing like what it was originally supposed to be in the original release, ie.,more depth, much larger universe, more planets, more stuff to do...
Frankly, nothing I ever saw of all the development updates ever showed anything new. Just the same stuff over and over again and all with an odd color pallet.
It will be interesting to see what it is really finally like once the dust settles.
I'm just skeptical as to how much fun it would be to play in a "multiplayer" environment that is so huge (isn't it supposed to have literally billions of planets?) that it would seem that the chances of running across other players would be miniscule.
"In the vast library of socialist books, there’s not a single volume on how to create wealth, only how to take and “redistribute” it.” - David Horowitz
I started to be suspect of this one some time back. I was really excited about it but that all died when we saw it delay so that it could submit to Sony and a PS4 version and with all that videos as mentioned above that seem to show the same exact thing over and over again. If they compromised, especially if they know good and well they compromised for $$ reasons on their original concept then I hope that comes through with negative reviews and poor sales.
If it is actually entertaining for more than a month and substantive with the gameplay then I hope that comes through the reviews as well. I just got an odd feeling about how this one came down the line.
Here is what No Mans Sky definitely is: *Exploring a universe of pretty procedurally generated worlds, with beautiful creatures *Trading with NPCs *Combat against robots/mechs and cool space battles *Survival/crafting in a universe sized sandbox *An awesome procedural soundtrack from my genuine favourite band (check the NMS album out here) *For one small moment, you might feel like youve stepped into a sci-fi book cover
That means this maybe isnt the game you *imagined* from those trailers. If you hoped for things like pvp multiplayer or city building, piloting freighters, or building civilisations that isnt what NMS is. Over time it might become some of those things through updates.
For instance, freighters and building bases *are* coming! Read about updates coming here.
At launch though, its an infinite procedural sci-fi-space-survival-sandbox unlike anything you have ever played before. If you decide to play it, youll see just how closely it plays to those trailers, and to our original vision. Its a weird game, its a niche game and its a very very chill game.
I think most of the disappointment with the game will come from would be players that had envisioned a kind of space adventurer game, while this really is a pure exploration game. A game where you are not a conqueror, but just a visitor. As he says, a chill game.
Would that gameplay justify the price tag? I am not sure.
I did not pre-order, and I am waiting for PS4 reviews (want to buy on PC).
I'm waiting to see how it is different from Elite: Dangerous in terms of "what you can do." So far, the only cool thing I can see is the seamless space-to-surface bit, but that's about it.
Looks like yet another sandbox survival game. I'll wait until the price drops or if a bunch of compelling reviews come in. Otherwise I have plenty of other similar genre games to choose from.
I have a question about the planet transitions. Does anyone know or has seen a video of the player entering or exiting a cloudless, clear planet? I'm curious and concerned as the seamless transitions, which was one of their selling points, almost don't look seamless to me. It looks more like they are using a visual effect or a veil to simulate a transition instead of actually simulating a true transition. Like maybe it could be a buffering/loading screen dressed up to look like you are really fluidly moving from point A to point B but actually aren't. Just jumping from point A to point B and there really is no true space in between.
Looks like fun but I can't help but feel that this isn't worth 60 dollars and instant purchase. Maybe on sale on GOG as mentioned above. Maybe not. I just would like to know if there's more to the game play than resource gathering and that the other elements just don't feel tacked on.
I would love to dive in this one and name a planet ... but family life is just so demanding and I heard there are still a LOTS of bugs in the PC release...
I'm really enjoying it tbh and I've not even left the system I am in. You can interact with the fauna.If you 'feed' them certain elements they will prance around with a happy face and find things for you.
It does look weird with floating rocks but hey,you're on an alien planet,normality doesn't apply.
I really love flying over the planets looking for stuff,it's just a pity you don't have full control over your ship.By that I mean you can't fly too low so no zooming through canyons or caves.I really hope they relent on that.
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I've been watching a playthrough on youtube and it doesn't seem bad to me. Of course, I don't have a list of expectations to be dashed. Hate the color palette and an unfortunate graphical style IMO. The price is ridiculous. From what I've seen it's a solid game for $20, MAYBE $30.
A friend brought his GOG version over for a play on the weekend, and I was seriously not impressed. Very, very bad control schematics for one thing, bad performance for another on a PC that runs Witcher 3 and similar modern titles very fine.
From what Bip quoted off the developer's statements:
*Exploring a universe of pretty procedurally generated worlds, with beautiful creatures Seems creatures in the final release are quite different from the amazing ones seen in the trailers
*Trading with NPCs Trading by all player accounts is a very minimalistic, shallow mechanic currently
*Combat against robots/mechs and cool space battles Combat is also minimalistic and shallow
*Survival/crafting in a universe sized sandbox Crafting is very limited and more tedious than exciting
Some guy at Reddit did a huge list of promised/trailered/interviewed features, and it appears half of them are missing, reducing the title to a rather "sightseeing" like item with little depth or strategy to it.
As 20 or 30 buck early access release this might have been a good start; preorders at full 60 buck price certainly weren't indicative of the final quality.
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I know I will eventually get this. I had the finger on the trigger on release day, and decided that it was better to wait for a discount, but I love the concept of an infinitely generated universe, if maybe little too grindy. But as a chill game, I think it can work.
I followed this game for a while during development. Preordered it for PS4. Did not cancel preorder when all ghe reviews of it started leaking out. Have put some time in the game..I will tell anyone who has not purchased it to wait to see if it becomes worthwhile...or for the inevitable price drop.
I preordered it based on all those selling points. Procedure generated sandlot with infinite possibilities...but the bottom line is that the game just isn't fun to play.
The spaceship...this should have been your main home. It just isn't fun to fly. Not fun to control. No flying around the planet doing cool stuff. Not fun flying in space. No fun space battles.
Planet exploration...same boring thing over and over. Shoot a rock to with laser to mine iron. Shoot some plants to mine carbon. Shoot some rare metals for bigger amount of coin. Rinse and reat in another planet that looks the same...with maybe a different color.
You see the same stupid animals recycled. Oh hey its a lion with a hyena head...oh there is a turtle with an eagle head...some random animal part combined with another part. Some will attack if they are aggresive. Some you can feed and they follow you around.
Everything is getting more inventory space....get more inventory space so you can mine more stuff...so you can buy a ship with more storage space to mine more stuff...so you can buy more inventory space. You never move up to something more fun...just something to store more useless junk to sell after you shoot at things with your laser mining tool.
Its like the game designers got so vested in their procedure / formula of the universe creation that they forgot to ask the question whether the gamem is ANY fun to play? If you are supposed to keep wanting to play because you discover new planets (which just look like the previous 100 planets)...then they severely miscalculated. Granted...i did like ability to name stuff...you shoukd have seen Nipple Valley i discovered....it gets old damn fast...maybe 1 or 2 days fast...
Once Deus Ex and Madden come out Tuesday..i doubt i will even play this game again
It matters not,I'm still enjoying it. What does annoy me,after spending some considerable time in the toxic environment of the Steam forums is that people will bash it and they don't even own it.They just jump on the bandwagon of 'hate' and do their best to make sure that those of us that do own and enjoy it know about it.
It's a pity that Sean Murray wasn't upfront at the very beginning about what NMS would and wouldn't have at release.Maybe it was going to be MP,maybe for technical or other reasons it had to be removed,why else did the game box have labels stuck over the MP part? I'm not defending him,he did himself no favours in all those interviews and what with the botched release he's reaping the negativity from those things..
Hopefully they will add more content and now some mods are available who knows.
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Steam forums are just as bad as YouTube video comment threads. I stay away from both.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
I too often make the mistake that Steam reviews can be a reliable source. I guess for the more obscure genres it can, but I agree. NMS is getting a lot of unearned hate.
"They might look the same, but they don't taste the same."
I would say that it failed to meet the expectations of some players. Unfortunately those players,the haters,just like feminists and BLM have the loudest voices.
In this case, the game proably deserve the bashing.
Forums are akso filled with people posting how they love this game and calling anyone with any criticism of the game a hater...while not being able to explain what is enjoyable about the game.
For me, its Deus Ex time. If they made this game more enjoyable in the future i will give it a try again.
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I blame Sony's lack of control in the marketing. This was probably meant to be a very enjoyable and chill exploration and survival indie niche game, that wanted to make itself stand out by adding "procedurally generated" elements to the game.
Sony turned it around and probably put undue stress on the small development team to add features that would justify AAA game pricing. Probably Sony encouraged an earlier release and convinced the team on getting better revenue by adding all these extra features as DLC.
A small studio developing their second game (they had developed 2 previous releases, but were based on the same gameplay), offered millions of dollars by a major publisher/distributor... they probably became too ambitious. I became interested and hyped in the game, not by nothing I was expecting on my own, but by the developers own words over many videos and presentations. That record is still there to see, so if they missed on the promises, they have only themselves to blame. Even now, they tend to communicate very vaguely about any feedback on the current state of the game.
I saw a video with a great example of a similar thing happening with a different result.
Bioshock Infinite's E3 footage showed a lot of features that never made it into the final game. Did anyone thought they were scammed by 2K and Irrational Games? No. Why? Because even without those things, B:I was a very good game.
I'm sure if NMS had been released as originally planned, and priced accordingly, there would be no controversy regarding promised features.
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Originally Posted By: DM
So it sounds to me like the big mistake was taking Sony's shilling.
Yup.
If you want to retain full creative control over your own project then you don't take any money from a big third party. It's that simple.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
I'm hesitant to always put the blame on the big corporations. I haven't been following this game, but my impression is that the devs were unprepared for the attention that the PR machine would generate. It's easy to get carried away, particularly if you get invited to talk shows etc.; Sony's failing would be to not train the guys how to deal with that level of attention.
Despite the huge backlash,plus the current score on Steam (last time I looked it was near 50%) it doesn't seem to have dropped out of the top sellers list since day 1.
Figures show close to 800,000 owners on Steam,plus you have the other outlets,GoG,GMG etc and then you have PS4 sales. Those seem good figures to me for an Indie game with a AAA price tag.
Ssnake,you are more than likely right,Sony should have given SM some lessons on interviewing 101,he did not look at ease,almost like someone from Sony had a rifle trained on him from backstage.
I doubt Sony was the sole reasoning for this flop of a title. It's an average buggy procedural generation mining game in a market with a million of them.
Was Sony undoubtedly a part of blowing this game out of proportion? Sure. But the devs are quoted multiple times as saying things that were flat out lies, and they were intentionally ridiculously vague about anything whatsoever content wise to keep the hype train rolling. Combine that with the typical morons on the internet and you get a perfect storm of derp where a truckload of people buy into a mess of a game.
Frankly I wish I were working at Sony during all this, it's clear people are easily manipulated and foolish enough to preorder damn near anything they know nothing about.
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I was ready to chip in... but seeing all the reviews, I'll wait for big patches to get a full rounded game in few months. Dammm... what a pity... where is the game with planetary landing of NMS, Full ship design + FPS + crew of Star Citizen and The amazing gameplay of Elite Dangerous... probably never. I still dream to be a Firefly captain in the verse with a crew, a job and a cool ship.
Very very impressed by Star Citizen 3.0... the video that they displayed at the gamescon 2016 was a glimpse of all I want in a space sim.... Coop, FPS, Starship piloting, cool missions, full designed ships and facilities, complete open world.... the only problem is with their nearly unlimited budget, WHEN will they release the final game... this project seems so huge that I ask myself how long it will take to finish this dream space game!
I too was very hopeful for NMS but repeated trailers showing the same thing over and over and over made me suspicious and then suspicions have been confirmed. I am anxious for a space sim and made the mistake, yes fanboys, a big mistake of buying into E:D. Cannot stand it and really regret the lo$$.
Star Citizen has my attention but I absolutely do not want to get burned again with something I cannot get rid of once bought like E:D.
So my question is: how much different from E:D is SC. in the opinion of those of you who own both?
PS: Please don't attack me for disliking E:D. That's why they make chocolate and vanilla!
I bought SC last night (Aurora MR Star Citizen + Squadron 42 Combo).I'm not sure there is enough in there atm to keep me happy as a non-combat type of player but hopefully that will change soon.
Squadron 42 is supposedly separate from SC. By that I took it to mean "different programs." I also took it to mean that if you have no interest in MP there was no reason to bother with SC.
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I could imagine they release a frontend (client), and what you get to see in the client (universe, planets, ships etc.) - the content - then either comes from a public server, a private server or some kind of offline content database.
So I think it's not going to be truly separate programs; more like different modules you plug into the main client.