It’s pretty amusing that this game went from over hyped to an absolute dumpster fire to probably one of the best space games ever made. One hell of a comeback story.
Honestly to me it’s more promising to see a game studio stick behind their game like this rather than having the initial game be good. A good studio will still have bad games, but knowing that a studio will stand behind their bad game and work on it until it’s good means a lot.
It’s definitely cool, they could have pulled the rug and run away with the money.
we just have to do some work on the overhyping a game and preorder part, but its looking like i might pick up this game
I got it off GamePass back in November 2020 for my One S and played it a lot. Work has kept me busy so I’ve had less time but I have bought it twice since then - once for PS5 and then when I bought my Series X.
It’s been worth it. I don’t play multiplayer much and I’ve missed most of the Expeditions but I enjoy it a lot every time I play.
You can follow the quests or not. I honestly enjoy exploring the different planets. The graphics are good. On my PS5 save, my home base is on a planet where the grass glows when the wind sweeps across it at night.
I’ll sit and just watch it throughout the game night.
I don’t see why it’s suddenly the best space game… The core mechanic seems to be the same as the original. Mine materials that are the same on every planet, so you can build space ships and better miners that take more materials and do it over and over again.
When I was playing on launch day, I had a really good first impression but it turned into disappointment, since all the planets had the same minerals. May as well stay on the first planet forever.
That is pretty reductive. Like, it’s a sim. You could describe just about any sim the same way. “You just do this thing to do that thing”. How is this any different from any other game?
I’m not saying it’s the best space game, but I had fun when I played it and it definitely didn’t just feel like I was mining materials just to mine more materials.
The problem is that NMS is very repetitive and bland. Learning alien words takes for-fucking-ever, finding freighter upgrades is one of the worst time sinks in the game, combat feels more tedious and padded out than that of Everquest, looking for “that one cool ship” or “cool looking weapon” is pure RNG and lucking out on it not coming as a C class, upgrading inventory space is either a system jumping time sink or “planetary exploration” time sink.
Nearly nothing you do in the game gives you a sense of accomplishment and, after 4-8 hours or so after first starting playing, you’re unlikely to look forward to any specific activity because “it’s fun”. There’s a lot “to do” but very little motivation to, like why even bother being the mayor of a settlement?
Even on permadeath the game offers no real challenge once you’re off the starting planet.
Isn’t there a “journey to the centre” and interaction with other players?
Isn’t there a “journey to the centre”
Yes, though it’s a cheap “new game plus”, without even feeling like a “new game”. Once you manage to get to the center, you’re thrown in a new galaxy in a random planet and have to get back to your ship, only some upgrades you’ve installed on yourself and your ship might break. Yet you can immediately call your freighter and any exocraft.
There’s also Artemis’ questline, with an interesting concept but overall underwhelming delivery.
Story spoilers
Artemis is stuck in a simulation, just like you, player, are stuck in one. The whole universe is a failing simulation created by Atlas.
.
interaction with other players?
From my experience, which pretty much ended around 1 year ago with the game, player interaction could be summed up to:
- finding someone else’s buildings during a community expedition
- finding someone else’s buildings in a quicksilver quest
- someone giving you free stuff while you’re idling in the anomaly
Apparently there are guilds now? In any case, I never saw anyone looking for group, because the game has nothing that only a pair or trio can do, or do faster/better than a solo player, other than base building
From what I’ve found online, the “center” of your galaxy is just a portal that sends you to the edge of a different galaxy where it’s different but more of the same.
Kinda like Starfield actually.
The irony is how much Starfield copies from NMS, often the bad things and as a worse copy, like scanning stuff on the planet surface, jump range limitation, space “exploration”, shitty performance
I wouldn’t call it reductive as much as I would… accurate.
I think a lot of people are just very, very pleased with how well it’s being supported compared to its initial launch and how this game company has become an outlier in the industry. They conflate their love for the company’s business practices with the game’s mechanics. So while the game may be great, many subconsciously give it a boost because of its legacy.
Every planet doesn’t have every material you need for crafting everything. But a single solar system likely has most of it. There are key elements on every planet that are meant to make sure a player never gets stranded. I guess one could argue for that to be a game mode though if it isn’t already where you very well could end up on a planet and have no way to survive.
A lot of people like the gameplay loop from day one but the initial lies about how multiplayer worked was a driving force behind the unhappiness. Once that was fixed it was a shallow experience but a lot of people would have been content with it. Instead Hello Games keeps supporting it and putting out new content updates. There are still a lot of features and improvements people would like for the game and those very well may see the light of day with the passion Hello Games has shown for improving it. That’s why so many people think favorably of them. There are a ton of other bigger studios that would never show this level of dedication and community support.
I agree, they did the right thing and much more. But the game still doesn’t feel very fun. It’s missing a reason to do things beyond just exploration and seeing new randomly generated animals and colors.
I was hoping for it to have some Elite qualities where you would travel with rare cargo to make money, but it doesn’t even have any rare cargo or any demand for unique minerals on planets…
It’s not fun, which is the main problem. The devs have built a universe to explore but hasn’t accounted for that humans don’t think different shapes and colors are very interesting when it’s the same otherwise.
The popularity speaks to the contrary; a lot of people want to exist in a universe they get to see neat things. There are quest lines to help push players forward if they want, they just aren’t required and are easy to ignore. I don’t think resource scarcity is meant to be a major aspect of the game but I can see why someone might want it to be.
Yeah maybe you are right. It’s just not the game I want it to be, but they do have players and it’s going well for them, so… :)
It was genuinely fun when i started and had to hunt for materials and actually had the threat of death, i hid in a cave to recover heat protection and had to do that a few times before i entered space and then the game all but ended
What, like Minecraft, still possibly the most popular game on Earth? I mean, all you do in Minecraft is mine the a couple of minerals that are the same on every seed, and use them to make better tools to mine minerals faster, and grow the same crops so you don’t starve, and do it over and over again.
but in minecraft it’s enjoyable!
not trying to be cheeky—i wrote up a long part about modding capacity and level of sandbox freedom etc., but i am sure you’re already very aware of that lol
so taking it as just vanilla: at the end of the day mining in minecraft feels relaxing and satisfying to me while in NMS it feels like a chore. i absolutely hate mining out ore deposits with a mining laser.
(breaking plants and minerals is kinda fun though)
like minecraft really nailed game feel
obviously this all depends on personal preference anyway, but if players have to do the same thing over and over again, then it needs to be very enjoyable in and off itself to do so.
You said what I wanted to say, so yeah, can only agree with everything.
Theres no suddenly about it. They took the well deserved heat after launch very much to heart and spend the next 8 odd years crafting it into the best space game out there imo. Best VR game too.
Its version 4.61 and, essentially, at least its own sequal. Its nothing like the launch day game.
It’s the same shit game it was when it was released. It gained sprinkles though.
Meanwhile in Star Citizen.
And they’re all “in stock”. How lucky!
Whoa, false scarcity, virtual goods tied to an online service, and nosebleed prices? What’s not to like?
It’s not false, it’s artificial. Some ships are indeed only buyable for a limited time. Or for certain periods.
Semi interestingly to me, I literally created my reddit account to sell my ships nearly a decade ago. Do not regret that…
Fwiw, you can get deep discounts CCU chaining ships. Ships can also be unofficially “sold” and “bought” after the fact. It’s done through gifting. For example, you can get the Hammerhead at the impound for less then half the price. The impound is also one of the higher priced sites to. There are also unofficial ships sales on reddit to that have even lower prices.
Edit-Looks like a time limited sale, nevertheless, SC-trades on reddit has some Hammerheads for around 500.
Wow, only $400 for a thing in a videogame? What a goddamn bargain, sign me right the fuck up!
For the cost of that Hammerhead it had better also come with an entire computer to play the damn game on.
At least in Elite: Dangerous the only cost for ships is your time and/or sanity.
Right? That kind of money goes toward a component of a PC that would have multiple uses—or, hell, for some people, a whole-ass PC, jesus. Not just one part of a game (pronounced like a gun is in Wayne’s World)
Man the grind is rough in Elite Dangerous if you want to participate in PvP. Material grinding is so painful, i wish they never added engineering, or only had 2 levels of it instead of 5. Im still waiting for ship interiors too.
Ahh, reminds me of grinding for reputation so I can get the Cutter and Corvette. I still keep Elite installed and still waiting to get the will to start that game. Odyssey really left a bad taste on my mouth.
Yeah. I liked Odyssey for wandering around my carrier’s interior and really very little else. The combat is absolute dogshit, and that wouldn’t be half as bad if pretty much every on-foot mission type did not inevitably downright require pissing off some faction or another, which then forces you to get involved in combat. The gunplay is pants, and I can’t fathom why there are so few hitscan handheld weapons in a universe that’s all about laser beams and railguns and shit. And then when you’re done with the annoying combat you have a ton of bounties stacked up you have to deal with.
At least the mercenary missions let you just shoot people for the sake of shooting people. But if I wanted to bounce around in low-grav and shot guys with silly weapons I’d just play Borderlands.
That reminds me, I probably need to grind some cash to pay the upkeep on my damn carrier.
Great way to tell everybody you have no money.
way to say “im a prick” without saying it
Ha, sure thing, turbo. More like great way to tell everyone I’m better at managing my money than some o’ y’all, doing the bare minimum of not spending hundreds [with an ‘s’!] of dollars on a make-believe spaceship in an unfinished video game.
I really hope you forgot the /s there because, wa-how.
It’s dirt cheap compared to something like horseback riding, shooting sports, cars, or scuba diving.It’s just that this is easy to criticize as you can see the price tag easily vs looking at half a dozen receipts for the other hobbies.
Absolutely swimming in the kool aid
I mean sure, but at the end of the day it’s a pretend spaceship, that you don’t own in any meaningful way, in a videogame that could go offline forever at any point that they deem it unprofitable to continue.
I can’t be alone in finding even the “deeply discounted” prices to be somewhat unreasonable. This is horse armour with ideas above its station.
Fair enough. However, if you consider the entertainment value delivered over time, the costs can be very low. If you count it is as a 20$ a month movie ticket, you could pledge/buy a Hammerhead in around 2 years. The game and its users have been around much longer then that. It’s a game that can deliver hours and hours of entertainment each weekend. The price per hour would be low, and there are other hobbies much more expensive then this.
Even if the game were to shutter and you were to lose access to your ships, you’d still have that value delivered over time like a bunch of movie tickets. Also, you don’t buy ships. You pledge to support the development of the game. You can also buy a Hammerhead in game quickly if you know what game loops to target.
If you count it is as a 20$ a month movie ticket, you could pledge/buy a Hammerhead in around 2 years.
Jesus Christ lmao
Yeah man, I could enjoy a Blu-ray of my favorite movie for a comparable amount of time but that wouldn’t make me any less of a moron to buy a $400 Blu-ray.
A few hour Blu-ray won’t give you near the entertainment time that a game or comparable hobby will. You’ll watch it once, then maybe once again if you really liked it, then maybe you might watch it again a few years later.Then it’s mostly just collecting dust. In fact more so given the popularity of streaming.
Right. And a single ship in a single game of questionable status isnt gonna give you nearly the entertainment value that the 7-40 games you could buy for the same money are gonna give you.
Look, if you are happy with your purchase, thats cool. But to us this looks like a f-ton of wasted money.
Your comparison makes no sense. Watching a movie in a theater is much like watching a an actual play or a live concert, it’s a “group experience” that isn’t quite like watching a playback on your TV.
If you divide those 870 over 24 months (2 years), that’s 36 dollars a month. If you spent that money every month on games, you could get 1 or more each month and might luck out and get a HUGE “return of investment” if you calculate it entirely as
money / time played. Plus, it’d be hours and hours of entertainment any day of the week, not only “each weekend”. Buying on GOG would also mean you get to “own them forever”.You pledge to support the development of the game
Please act and reply like an investor instead of a fanboy, then. Just because you want to see the game come through doesn’t mean you have to defend everything RSI does to raise money.
beyond the issue of the price, this isnt comparable to a trip to the pictures once a month as movies change… and if someone spent stupid money on a ingame ship you dont think theyll buy another? these companies dont offer consumer friendly deals they instead hunt wales.
Among the best space games? What the heck are you comparing it to?
IMO it’s an okay giant sandbox but terrible as an actual game.
works in VR too
It is real purty in VR.
I can’t get it to work because my computer is too slow
Gotta upgrade them parts, ya friggin’ nutsack!
can I have $40
Sorry no can do. Also sorry for calling you by your name that way. I should have said “Mr. Nutsack”. My humblest apologies.
I am every type of nutsack do not worry
Just wait till star citizen releases. Anytime this century, just you wait.
probably one of the best space games ever made
Don’t stretch it. Maybe it could be #10 in a top 10, but when you have the likes of Elite Dangerous, Space Engineers, X4, Freelancer, plus little known indies like Empyrion Galactic Survival and Evochron Legends, it’ll hardly be anyone’s top choice.
I mean, I generally agree with your assessment, but elite dangerous? I love Elite, but it is not a good game. Best thing to come from Elite Dangerous is the community.
Armada for the Sega Dreamcast is also better than NMS.
Armada for the Sega Dreamcast is also better than NMS.
How so? Honestly asking.
Judging from a quick Lets Play watch, the game is a top down 2D space combat with 3D graphics. You can go down on planets, but it’s a small map and meant mostly to upgrade your ship and repair it. It’s a space game with big focus on combat, but with nothing remotely comparable to NMS, really. Despite the irritating sound effects, I’m actually curious to trying it out sometime in the future.
It had 4 player local co-op, ship to ship combat, and actual meaningful progression and it came out in 1999.
One of those games I’m glad I bought at launch, although I’ve fired it up 3-4 times and struggled with the mechanics… it’s nice to know it’s still evolving and I can always start fresh again with the new content. If I wasn’t so deep into Helldivers I’d give it another go right now… but Democracy can’t wait!
Same. I keep picking it up every now and again but it really needs me to put a bit of time into it to understand all the new mechanics since launch. I’ll get to it one day!
I felt this same way until I jumped into the Omega expedition. It was an excellent crash course for all the game offers and I now feel way more comfortable jumping into the base game and doing whatever I feel up to.
Can you still play it? Been a while since I’ve played but last I knew the expeditions were limited-time thingies.
FOMO-leveraging shit needs to stop. All it does is make me not want to touch the thing at all because I know I don’t have the time to do all the things in a season.
NMS isn’t so bad at it, but seriously FUCK the games that leverage it. Almost as bad as microtransactions.
FOMO-leveraging shit needs to stop.
but seriously FUCK the games that leverage it.
No one likes to be manipulated/tricked for someone else’s profit.
I tried the game two or three times sitting down with the “I want to play a space sim” mindset and could never get past the tutorial. Then the next time, it had clicked that it’s a survival crafter that just happens to have a space theme. When I sat down with that mindset and perspective on what I was in for, I suddenly throughly enjoyed the game.
The game just does a really bad job of showing you what it is trailers and other media. Sure, all the things it shows off are there, but they’re not the core of the game.
I waited to get involved until after the Echoes update last summer, and I truly enjoyed 100+ hours of the game.
It still does suffer from inevitably feeling really empty, with billions of copies of the same 4 different coloured/temperatured planets and 8 creature types, but it was still a heck of an experience.
and struggled with the mechanics…
Are you speaking towards the UI/UX, or the gameplay?
Similar to Glide said above, wanted a space sim and realize it’s more of a survival game. On the opposite end I played a little Elite Dangerous which was WAY TOO INVOLVED space sim!
NMS development is the best redemption arc story in a long time.
The whole situation just made me believe Sean Murray really wanted to make a cool game but he got overwhelmed by the media attention and started running his mouth. Maybe he felt like he had to overpromise and say yes to everything he was asked? Hello Games was still an indie studio before it got all that attention.
If he had done it in bad faith it would have been much easier to cut his losses and run away with the money. Nearly 10 years of expansions wouldn’t come out of it if not for legitimate passion.
It also made their next game announcement pretty funny.
I think the fans & press deserve equal blame for the initial hype. At some point I saw a supercut of things Sean Murray said, then the resulting headlines and Reddit posts.
In an interview, the journalist asks: “Will you be able to play with your friends in a shared universe?” The answer: “Well…we hope that eventually there will be at least some multiplayer functionality, though maybe not on day one…like maybe you could explore one another’s planets or share pictures or something.”
Headline: “NO MANS SKY WILL LAUNCH WITH MULTIPLAYER!”
Reddit comments: “I’m already forming a guild, we’re going to play as bounty hunters chasing down other players who are pirates in glorious multiplayer space battles!!”
There were tons of examples of that. Journalists would poke and prod for a soundbite, take it out of context and exaggerate it, and the community would just go batshit with their expectations.
it might just be me but I come back to this game about once a year, play for about 4 hours before feeling like it feels almost exactly the same? I see these huge update drops but they don’t ever feel like anything
Well, with ship customization this game is finished enough for me to play it again.
Common Hello Games W
As someone who wanted to love Elite Dangerous but couldn’t get behind the grind and monotony of it, would this game be worth getting now?
Ehhh, maybe. While the game is so much better than it was at launch, it’s still pretty sandboxy and repetitive. I found myself dropping it after I realized I was trying to build bases to get better at gathering resources to make money to buy bigger ships to make more money to… What exactly?
Yea Elite Dangeous is kind of the same, you have to make your own objectives or you’re just running missions to make money to buy ships to be more efficient at those runs and eventually even bigger ships to make more money.
There is at least a couple of core storyline loops that I think are fairly engaging, besides just setting your own goals.
I came to a realization a few years ago that I am too boring to play sandbox games. I need a tightly crafted narrative, I cannot be left to my own devices. After a long time of trying to get into every sandbox game that looked cool, it was such a relief to finally realize that about myself.
I’m the same way and I hate it.
I really really want to enjoy those games.
Isn’t that most games, though?
Yeah once I had a fleet and some bases mining resources for a ton of money , and a ship I liked, I kind of lost interest.
It’s a good game but it doesn’t go on forever.
Unrelated but this is why I stopped play BotW after the first boss temple thingy.
If you don’t like grindy monotony it is not the game for you.
So you’re saying it’s the perfect game to get for playing while AFKing redwoods in old school runescape
I would say I do to an extent, but elite dangerous solo is pretty egregious i just feel really confined even though you can get out of your ship now. If there were a few more things to do it would check all of the boxes such as things you could do in NMS like build bases, etc. And plus the ship customization is strictly internals and you don’t have the ability to change the overall look of your ship besides skins.
I’ve on/off played this game for way too long. If you can get past the initial slow start, and I’m talking at least two hours of gameplay, then you’ll find things begin opening up. This expanding of the gameplay applies to equipment, ships, battles, exploration, and mechanics in general. It’s a game that has become a fantastic experience and yet along the way sort of forgot about that initial experience, which could be expedited significantly without much loss.
That said, if you struggle to make challenges for yourself and often end up aimlessly wandering til you get bored without some direction, I would hesitate to grab NMS. Go watch a recent Let’s Play may be the best idea to get a handle on whether it fits your preferences.
I felt the same way about E:D, and I also enjoyed No Man’s Sky quite a bit.
One thing I loved about Elite was the collection of mini games. Navigating through the space station to your landing pad, finding a suitable patch of surface to touchdown on a planet, having to fight or yield to a supercruise interdiction, they all came together to make Elite feel like a driving game where your vehicle happens to be a spaceship.
In No Man’s Sky landing and takeoff are achieved with a singular button press. And the ship combat is there to check a box. The game is mostly about taking pics of flora and fauna and digging trenches in planets for minerals.
Yea, I would have to agree wholeheartedly that the ship flying is awesome in Elite. The ambiance is great, such as the creaking of the ship when in hyper drive. I guess the games are two different kind of space Sims. If what you’re telling me is accurate about NMS then Elite is probably better for me in the long run, I just wish I had a friend who would actually play it with me and make space a little less lonely - I guess I would have the same problem in either title come to think of it.
Each to their own. I’ve played both and I found elite to be very “space truck driver…ey”. Personally, I want to spend my time exploring solar systems and not decelerating to space stations. NMS also has rich and meaningful planetary exploration and not a hollow imitation afterthought.
Due to the depth of NMS, I wouldn’t even put them as comparable. One is an award winning best seller that’s having yet another huge free update just to make the fans happy, the other is free on playstation plus because no one will buy it.
Yea that’s kinda what I was getting at in my comments on here, maybe not necessarily this comment you replied to, but elite definitely had the ship aspect of the game down, it feels so good to fly around, bur you’re totally right in how you called it a space trucking feel. That’s where I get tired of it even if you can get out of your ship with the expansion now. With all of the comments here I think I’ll wind up buying it here soon and giving it a whirl.
Yeah, for the most part ship flying is better in Elite. Especially travelling long distances. But I still enjoy it in NMS for the most part.
There are a lot of things to do in nms now after years of updates. Right now it’s 50% off so I say it’s worth it
For me, yes. Its an award winning best seller. Its also dirt cheap and a labour of love for all the scifi they enjoy. They listened to what their players wanted and just … did it, like a bunch of psychopaths.
It also has one of the most meta storylines I’ve ever seen in a game. For me, its a very special game and as close as anyones come to the space game I always wanted growing up.
Its not for everyone of course. But, if its your kind of thing, it’ll really work for you. Honestly, if anyone choses to play it, id recommend getting a buzz going on whatever poison you’re into, don’t Google any of it fot a bit and let it unfold as you play. Part of the game is figuring out the game.
No. Every single gameplay mechanic in NMS is shallow and made by someone incompetent on game design.
The engine runs well and it’s a weird giant sandbox and it gets tons of grindy cosmetic content updates. But the actual game aspects are terrible.
EDIT: Disagree? Name one game mechanic that’s designed well compared to other games.
Yeah!
this game came out in 2016 btw
kudos HG! grah!
GRAH!!
…Interloper
Gave it a whirl. Basically, you can now scrap ships to get their components to create a new ship inside any station. Couldn’t find any merchant within the station selling pieces, so you have to go out and explore, or scrap some of your own ships.
Stations now look slightly different from one another and no longer have those semi-hidden rooms that nobody cared about. Alien vendors now give a discount if you’re at a good standing with their race. Guild “vendors” offer a list of stuff for free, but I don’t get why the prompt is red instead of white. Performance is still mostly CPU bound.
Overall decent update, but the new features don’t warrant playing more than 1 hour.
Wow finally!
My last foray into NMS ended when I found a little town and was promptly attacked by sentinels that could heal each other through walls.
I remember when this game was a dumpster fire. Is it actually a video game now?
Yes. But last time I played it (which was admittedly, idk, 2 years and something like 10 major updates ago now ? These guys just don’t stop), barring a few exceptions the gameplay was all breadth and no depth. You could do a ton of different things but after you had done a thing once, every other instances of the same activity would feel extremely samey
Edit: I should point out that I’m very much ok with repetition if the gameplay is deep enough to keep me interested. I have easily played various horde shooter games for a total of ~2500 hours. Not including the ~800 hours in Warframe, where the gameplay isn’t even that deep, but still interesting enough to make the grind for new toys bearable.
All breadth and no depth, still the same. Some 12 different planet types, a number of neat looking anomaly planets that exist only for sightseeing (one of my favorites was a planet where everything is covered in a metallic hexagonal mesh). As I said in another comment in this thread, the game is very repetitive with some activities being needlessly padded out to make you waste as much time as possible (learning alien words, going into derelict freighters to get upgrades)
some activities being needlessly padded out to make you waste as much time as possible (learning alien words, going into derelict freighters to get upgrades)
And now I remember why I stopped playing the last time. All the things I wanted to do (mostly, getting cooler/better ships and capital ships, and getting better weapons) required grinding insane amounts of money. Plus getting the exact ship you wanted was extremely random (and grindy, because good luck finding the ship with the looks you want and a good rating) but it looks like this update addresses this at least…
Getting money is pretty easy if you set up mines of rare resources. Give it some time and you’ll have all the money you need.
If you mean mining Active Indium, they nerfed the price hard some updates ago. Using Oxygen + Chlorine for infinite multiplication still works. Another easy-ish way to get money is with a huge plantation of cactus. There’s a recipe that turns 200 into a gel that sells for 50k each.
Hah, I think I figured out the cactus thing by myself right before I stopped playing. But I didn’t have the motivation to make a big enough farm to really start racking up the big bucks
Oh yeah I think I remember reading about that and going “that’s a thing ?” And promptly realizing that none of my bases were on a planet where the profits would be worth the time investment
The planets with big money kinda suck to make bases. They are usually the most hazardous ones. I basically only leave a landing pad and a portal besides the mining stuff to collect and take it to my main base from time to time.
You’re not wrong, but also the space that they would need on your hard drive to make the game really non-repetitive visually would be out of this world (pardon the pun). Also not so sure how that would work out on the consoles.
TLDR > A lot of the repetitiveness isn’t a problem of “Lack of disk space”, it’s just a matter of not making good use of procedural generation. Seeing “the same building blocks in a different configuration” is better than seeing “the same thing”.
the space that they would need on your hard drive to make the game really non-repetitive visually would be out of this world
Not necessarily. You can procedurally generate textures, sounds and geometry, but that becomes a huge CPU hog in a game that already blows CPU usage. But most of the repetitiveness can be “fixed” (read: reduced) without adding more than ~20MB of new textures and geometry.
One of the problems is that there’s no variation within a planet. Every grassy planet is the same mechanically. Sure, one might have bubbles in the air, another might have yellow grass instead of red, but they’re mechanically identical. It’s the only planet type to find starbulbs and minerals with parafinum. No grassy planet has an ice cap, or a desert patch, or a volcano. If you ever need to find cactus and pyrite, you have to go to a desert planet. If you need uranium and gamma weed, radioactive planet. Then you have the caves, which are completely identical in every planet.
Some planets may have bio luminescent plants, which are gorgeous to look at, but because there’s no variation within a planet, you see them everywhere. There’s never a point where you think “This is the spot on this planet”. Because everywhere is “the spot”, so it’s just “the planet”, which can also be found on the next star system.
Save for airless planets, if I’m not mistaken, every planet has the same 3 “trap” plants (man eater, whip, spores in a cave). There’s not even a color change depending on the planet. Same damn plant, same damn damage, same oxygen amount on death, whether on ice or on a volcano.
Another thing that compounds on the lack of planetary variation is the same sin that Starfield did, of every point of interest being the same everywhere. Every market is the same, every small settlement is the same, every infested facility is the same. This one is easy to give more variation, just create some building blocks and chain them together, like how rooms are generated in ARPG games like Diablo or Torchlight. You know how each star system has a different market rating? Use that to calculate the maximum size any one POI can reach, or as a weight to the POI that can appear (small settlements become more common in 1 star system, markets more common in 3 star, etc).
They do the above in a limited capacity with derelict freighters, so it’s not like there’s “no way” to do it or “they don’t know how”.
Yet another thing that breaks the immersion and “want” of exploration: the vast majority of the galaxy is “settled”. Star systems without any alien presence are the exception. What the hell are you even exploring if there’s already someone there with a working teleporter in space, plus several POI dotting every planet?
You can procedurally generate textures, sounds and geometry
Does any game do that today? I’m not aware of any. ??
Another thing that compounds on the lack of planetary variation
That’s the same problem again, you need hard drive space for all that 3D variation.
As far as I know all the 3D stuff is what takes up the most space on the hard drive, and that stuff is never procedurally created. /shrug Maybe someday with AI??
Today? No, I don’t think any game does it.
.kkrieger did that. Not a “real game”, it’s a demo (of a demoscene), a “proof of concept” or a “proof of skill”. Nostalgia Nerd has a very interesting video about it on youtube.
3D models tend to occupy less disk space than textures, as these usually come in at least 2 files: one for the actual colors, one or two more for light mapping (bump map, emission, normals, etc). I don’t know which format NMS uses, but a .obj 3D model with 62k triangles will take around 4.5MB of disk space.
For comparison, this Damaged Helmet in gltf format (which you can see on your browser here) has 15k triangles, a .bin file (the actual 3D geometry) of 545kb and roughly 3MB of textures - The
Default_albedo.jpgis the “actual color” and it alone is larger than the .bin + .gltf, at 914kb.That’s the same problem again, you need hard drive space for all that 3D variation.
Not really. Again, they just need to be smart with what they have. Grassy planet where one third is green grass, another is red grass, another is yellow. No need for any extra stuff to be made, they already have the building blocks. Better yet, mostly grassy planet with patches of radioactive terrain surrounded by desert.
For buildings, just think about player made bases. You can make effectively “infinite” interiors and exteriors with all the stuff players can use to make a base. Write coordinates of “premade” rooms, write some extra lines of code to join specific rooms together and bam, all you needed was less than 10kb of extra text to increase variety.
You can procedurally generate textures, sounds and geometry
Does any game do that today? I’m not aware of any. ??
Today? No, I don’t think any game does it.
Well, my comment that you replied to was about a specific game that is already out, today. Hence, my point still stands.
Let’s hope that future hardware and games are aligned more with what you described, but today’s games do have limitations, based on the day and age they’re created in.
Yes, for a while now.
Yeah. Kind of.
Some people have already given their take, so I’ll add to it:
The game has a couple of hours of actual, fun content. After those couple of hours you’ll start to notice that everything is the same. Oh sure, the creatures and plants are made of different parts, but that’s as far as the differences go. Every planet has the exact same pattern, every system has a space station with the exact same functions, so eventually it really feels like exploration doesn’t matter. Which kinda sucks for a game that’s supposed to be about exploration.
I’ve always said that exploration would’ve been far more impactful if the universe of No Man’s Sky had just a bit more realism in it. This would mean most planets would be frozen iceballs or low atmosphere dustballs with no life on them. This would make discovering a planet with life on it quite momentous. It would also eliminate the problem of quickly finding out all life on every planet is exactly the same.
Honestly I’m really thrilled to play the update tonight.
I’ve played through the game a few times and am at it again in VR. A good use of the $60 I probably spent for it.
I am still salty about equipment/cargo slots overhaul…
Why’s that? Haven’t really kept up with the updates recently.
It’s not recent update but basically your ships gear slots - weapons, shields, landing gear, etc - and cargo slots were 1.
This way you could do interesting builds.
Ship which has all slots filled with ships equipment and your big ship is for cargo, etc.
Right now you have dedicated cargo slots and dedicated equipment slots. Ofc they are smaller than when they were combined…
I would have been happy with the change if they dropped the slot system entirely for cargo now that it serves no purpose (equipment gets bonuses based on slot and adjacent gear, cargo does not). For some unfathomable reason they kept the manual slots for cargo and it makes finding anything specific in a large cargo hold a nightmare.
This is compounded by their terrible crafting system where you have to manually pick every single component of a recipe rather than just clicking on the recipe and having it grab stuff from cargo for you. Cargo should have been turned into a sortable list like in nearly every other RPG.
The inventory has been one of the primary sources of complaints since day one, but despite several major overhauls they haven’t fixed the core issues, just made it slightly less inconvenient to use each update.
The inventory has been one of the primary sources of complaints since day one, but despite several major overhauls they haven’t fixed the core issues, just made it slightly less inconvenient to use each update.
Still waiting on them fixing the fucking interaction. Hold E to interact with the thing 5yd behind you instead of the npc right in front.
Another old annoyance that will probably remain until the end: stopped firing your weapon for 1 second? Let me holster it down again, sure you won’t mind the extra 400-500ms animation lag until you have to fire that sentinel again!
PS: Oh, and the teleport list! Another thing that desperately needs more information shown and a way to order/filter it.
I think ideally it would work like it does in Endless Space, ships have varying amounts of space for equipment and cargo, and you can install upgrades to convert between them somewhat.
E.g. with a freighter you could convert enough cargo space to equipment space that you can slap on some extra guns, or you could make a bootleg fighter by taking a standard ship and jamming equipment into most of the cargo space.
I might try this again when I get home
