No Man's Sky

There's no way this can live up to the hype, right?

https://youtu.be/v5sBbjckyzU

FUCK I messed up the thread name. I'll get a mod to change it.

Anyways this game isn't coming out for months and months and there was already a New Yorker article about it

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/world-without-end-raffi-khatchadourian

i haven't played video games or owned a console in years but i think i'd snatch a ps4 for this

I'm not convinced this game will be fun to play.

“I hate the idea that people will go around and say, ‘It’s like Minecraft but in space.’ Fuck off!” - a thread for No Man's Sky

remember when the new yorker had that whole article about the braid guy and his new game and the new game was just myst

pretty into this

It looks pretty but I'm skeptical bc the article made a big deal about how it was all about exploration and then the demo is mostly shooting stuff? Wondering how much they had to compromise the original concept to make it marketable.

I have noticed that whenever the New Yorker has had a big drooly article about some upcoming entertainment that's outside their usual sphere of snooty art, that thing when it comes out invariably winds up sucking.

more like poo porker

would rather have like 10 handcrafted artisanal planets than a zillion procedurally generated planets, gonna be more like the dungeons in oblivion than spelunky levels

small batch planets pls

i might actually care enough about this to save the money i don't have to buy the console i don't have in order to play it. i've always dreamed of a game where you don't have to interact with anyone / do anything but walk around an infinite space, realize i'm probably in a very small minority on that one though.

it's coming out on PC too if that helps you any

why yes it does, ty

i feel like the fact that there was so much shooting in that demo was out of fear of having something to show. i think he says like the badguy robots only show up if you start destroying the planet, so you could jsut... not do that i guess.

i feel like the joy of this game is preceisely going to be BECAUSE there is no small-batch artisanal free-range planets created... like the fact that they're all procedurally generated means a lot of them are going to be lame and sucky, and a few will be really cool, and a few will be lol-glitchy... it adds to the magic of going to the new planets. what will you get this time?

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2015/08/03/35-amazing-things-about-no-mans-sky/
this could be a thing for me

Animal calls are procedurally generated
We’ve created special software that models throats, allowing animal calls to be defined by the shape and sizes of their bodies. Every planet’s soundscape is unique.

Oh man, I hope they make this modular as fuck. Let people mod it and build out the initial systems.

what's good about that game is it's going to take a long time for anybody to really fuck it up

argh that article ! so good

It has amazing music
65daysofstatic are Sean’s favorite band, and they’re making No Man’s Sky’s soundtrack album. We are incredibly excited about this.

We held a concert at PlayStation Experience
65daysofstatic came to Las Vegas with us and played a concert. It was incredible. Watch it here.

did lj help make this game or something?

still have the nagging feeling this is a Molyneux-style fakeout

oh for sure but a man can dream

Ive been hanging out for this one purely for the 65DOS soundtrack!

haha turns out it's a crafting/survival game http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/thirty-minutes-with-no-mans-sky/1100-5407/ that sucks

Crafting things and installing upgrades is the name of the game, and there's a three-pronged upgrade system split between your weapons, ship, and spacesuit.

obv it's only 30 minutes' worth of impressions (which is weird) but it sounds like there are meters that go down that have to be refilled, which i personally do not care for.

i've been thinking of it as an extremely ambitious roguelike the whole time so this makes perfect sense to me

can i still get baked and wander around vibrantly coloured alien worlds? i can? sold

Bizarro I have this great Will Wright game from 2008 I think you might really like--I can let you have it for cheap

maybe there will be an option to turn off the depleting meters. a few recent games have offered that and it seems to be well-received. there are definitely games where i enjoy the tension of constant approaching death, but based off of what i've seen of No Man's Sky, i think i'd rather just explore and collect stuff and not have to worry about eating peanut butter or whatever it is

gotta click on the peanut plant until it turns into peanuts then pick up the peanuts then open the menu and hold x to craft the peanuts into peanut butter then press y to consume it

will it be creamy or chunky? only procedural generation will tell

Bizarro I have this great Will Wright game from 2008 I think you might really like--I can let you have it for cheap

inbox me dude

gotta click on the peanut plant until it turns into peanuts then pick up the peanuts then open the menu and hold x to craft the peanuts into peanut butter then press y to consume it

if the irl universe really is infinite, than there's a version of this game that features this exact mechanic

then

Hah speaking of Will Wright I reaallly hope this doesnt disappoint me like that did (assuming yr talking about Spore)

oh i think this is sorta destined to be spore 2.0

I gave up on Spore before I even got to build a spaceship :( and I'd been so looking forward to it.

will it be creamy or chunky? only procedural generation will tell

― adam, Thursday, March 3, 2016 12:44 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

yeah, i'm worried about it being Spore 2.0 as well. guess i'll wait a week or so before making a decision. i WANT it to be good so badly, though.

i made a LOT of little animals with spore. I think i used the character creator for hours. i think i played the game for like twenty minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-MnJtLIdlI

lol

snore

all this isn't to make No Man's Sky sound like a mundane resource-management sim; it's still a first-person action game at heart.

double meh

I asked if there's some kind of story justification for why these same-looking robotic police are ubiquitous across the galaxy, and the answer is yes. Hello says it's working with a writer to flesh out a backstory that contextualizes that sort of thing.

oh good eight years in and a quarter before release and they've decided to add "story"

I was so stoked for this on a conceptual + eye-candy basis

i'm stoked for the concept/tech mainly, even if the game is a bust surely it will pave the way for better games with similarly ambitious procedural content?

there's certainly no reason why there should be a dead end for fun procedural games somewhere between spelunky/minecraft/etc and this

This looks cool, but it's not without precedent, e.g. Noctis. Ambitious nerds love working on these kinds of projects, so I can' t imagine they'd go anywhere.

this is why nobody announces games until they're like 9 months from release. everyone's hype eventually eats itself and turns into contempt.

i still can't wait to chill on cool colored planets with chill music, i'm gonna find one planet and hang out on it for ever

yeah i feel like in the worst case for this game i'm still gonna wander around and look at pretty things for like 20 hours which is good enough for my money imo

i will probably set my target coordinates to the location of a friend's planet, work on improving my spaceship for like 2 years of IRL time in order to make the journey to see their planet and say hello to the other person, only to discover that they quit playing the game back in August 2016

can't wait tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au_jnd5PSvU

http://kotaku.com/sources-no-mans-sky-delayed-1778797365

lol kotaku commenters

silver6kraid
Jason Schreier
5/25/16 9:06pm
Anyone else getting kinda worried about this game? I feel like it might fall quite short of the hype around it.

well played mr schreier

https://twitter.com/NoMansSky/status/743928033942315009

Holy shit seriously!?

it's ridiculous and i'm not sure how it's possible. how do you trademark the word "sky". and even if you can trademark the word "sky" somehow, can't trademark lawsuits only happen if there's a reasonable chance consumers can confuse the two products? who's going to confuse a video game called "no man's sky" with a tv channel? or a file hosting service? idgi! i don't even wanna know, what a horrible world this is

This is more mental than the Mirror's Edge lawsuit debacle.

Sadly unsurprised...

"Sky" no longer the limit

and even if you can trademark the word "sky" somehow, can't trademark lawsuits only happen if there's a reasonable chance consumers can confuse the two products? who's going to confuse a video game called "no man's sky" with a tv channel?

IIRC the jurisprudential tests in the UK for stuff like this are quite different from those in the US

Clearly!

not the first time
http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/31/4574878/microsoft-skydrive-name-change-bskyb

livestream here: http://kotaku.com/watch-us-play-no-mans-sky-1784877447

i've only been watching for about 10 minutes and i'm sure it's more fun to be the person playing, but...

this does not look like fun

http://www.polygon.com/2016/8/4/12343898/no-mans-sky-how-long

I'm still trying to figure out why you would spend $1300 on a video game that everybody else is going to get for a fraction of that about a week later

well here you are talking about it, knowing the guy exists

the best part of that is they're resetting all server progress for the day 1 patch *MWAHAHAHA*

I should think so really

The prospect of resource gathering and crafting admittedly makes me want to rip my eyes out.

On the plus side whilst I live for the day that somebody can make a space exploration game that doesn't involve stock market work - the obtaining rare resources and selling them to strangers, that I saw in that video, wasn't too annoying.

I'll definitely be waiting for more reviews and, more importantly, the thoughts of iLGers before I snap this up

who's gonna be the ILX guinea pig here?

it's me! i pre-ordered this ages ago, forgot about it, and my copy arrived early today.

only played about 20 minutes so far but initial impressions aren't great - limp combat, the collecting / crafting mechanic seems like it'll get incredibly boring very quickly, and it does quite a poor job of explaining what i'm supposed to do. and the narrow fov made me feel kinda queasy.

it's not fair to judge it on the little i've played so far (in the early stages of a migraine, too) but i'm not exactly rushing to get back to it :(

thank you for taking hte hit

it's possible that the game opens up after a while, but everything i've watched has seemed less about exploration and more about "you need key item X to get your ship working again, travel over here and harvest the 39 Y resources so that you can craft it", then 10 minutes of that happening, then repeat repeat repeat with other key items that must be crafted to proceed

also, while the bits where the spaceship seamlesssly takes off and exits the atmosphere and then flies toward some distant location are initially kind of cool, after the 3rd time it becomes apparent that the 30-45 second journey (aided by pulse boosters or something, which of course are also limited and must be collected by collecting resource XYZ) is just a glorified loading screen while it builds the planet/space object.

At one point in that stream they were looking at three planets next to each other, and their texture patterns were exactly the same! Not a deal breaker but something which would take me out of the moment.

i;ll still buy this bc it look pretty

the day one patch sounds like it makes it a different game.

http://www.no-mans-sky.com/2016/08/update-1-03/

huh, definitely. also sounds like all press reviews will be outdated by the time it comes out

Maybe that's why they didn't send out review copies.

For someone like me, who spent most of the Elder Scrolls gametime wandering around idly collecting plants/minerals etc and crafting shit/making spells, I feel like I'd get something from this. I guess we'll see.

that's one hell of an update

Feeding – creatures now have their own diet, based on planet and climate. Feeding them correctly will yield different results per species, such as mining for you, protecting the player, becoming pets, alerting you to rare loot or pooping valuable resources.

http://66.media.tumblr.com/6bd9ace3d650b69ce17f319c66e71e7f/tumblr_mreczsWyFw1r8nxtno1_400.gif

it'd take a lot of negative reviews to convince me that i won't get 20+ hours of enjoyment out of this

i spent hours wandering around exploring and not actually playing the game in minecraft ffs

Thats what I'm sayin! I dont understand why thats a bad thing. I guess we'll see.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HaPW6hkZLEU

Jeff Gerstmann from Giant Bomb is streaming this now

Still waiting for ILX hot takes in a week or two

I played a few hours last night. The gun and space stuff is barely worth mentioning. So far it feels like a one-player Glitch in unlimited space.

okay, now you're talking to me...

I think you just won forks over!

lol xpost

aobut to go buy it and go home to get the patch to start downloading and maybe sneak in 10m of gameplay if it doesn't take too long

tbh i can't realistically think about taking on a new game that will require any genuine though until about October at the earliest

But in Glitch the crafting was more creative? And allowed opportunities for engaging with other players.

played the first couple of hours. more of a game than I was expecting it to be tbh.

i watched a few ppl playing it on twitch last night, looks even more like a cousin of minecraft than i expected. focus is on exploration first, crafting & survival second, everything else is tertiary and not particularly fleshed out

obv with minecraft the focus is on survival first and building things second with exploration being tertiary so it's not really the same priorities but the feel is the same

Spore meets Fallout Shelter meets Desert Bus

i do hope this game does reasonably well as i'd like to see what other developers can do with this sort of extreme procedural generation tech and i don't want it to become stigmatized and set back another 10 years like what happened with spore

Spore meets Fallout Shelter meets Desert Bus

Trade Wars 2002 with graphics

Spore meets Fallout Shelter meets Desert Bus

aaaaaaaaand you lost me again

lol I'm in!

I want a mod that turns this into a gigantic space taxi game.

are all the achievement trophy things named after sci-fi books?

i put a solid few hours into this earlier - it's better than i thought it would be from my first impressions, and it's frequently very beautiful. the music is really good too.

like zappi, there's a bit more game than i expected, but unfortunately so far it seems to be a lot of fetch-questing. still not quite sure what to make of it but i'm looking forward to going back to it and exploring a bit more.

i think it's probably fair to say that it'll never live up to the incredibly close attention it's had since it was announced, though - if it had been released more quietly i suspect people would be losing their shit over such an ambitious game coming from a tiny studio rather than being disappointed that it's not elite x mass effect + wing commander

regardless of what i end up thinking about it in the end i think it'll very likely match up to my early hope that getting baked and wandering around vibrantly coloured alien worlds will be cool

I want a mod that turns this into a gigantic space taxi game.

― "Stop researching my life" (Ste), Tuesday, August 9, 2016 1:39 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was thinking about directions you could take "procgen galaxy + exploration" other than crafting/survival and this was definitely one that came to mind

make it crazy space taxi and fuck yeah i'm in

I haven't been too interested but if you guys convince me it's time to make some CRAZY space money`

HEY HEY HEY...

could be perfect for a pohl/gateway game

the local barcade place has a crazy taxi machine and I made the mistake of playing it after my friends were like "hey, this game looks fun! mh, you try it!" and about 30 seconds in they realized I've lived that crazy taxi life

i bought it on lunch hand took it home (even tho i knew i wouldn't have time to play, just wanted to get the patch downloading cos my nets is slow) but then ended up playing 30-45m anyway. game looks as good as i hoped but the ui is so... weird? also the destructability isn't quite where i want it. there was like a gateway arch shaped thing made of rock, i took out its legs and the rest just hung there like minecraft. but idc. i just wanna explore strange new worlds. seek out new life. and civilizations.

does this game have the leeway / infrastructure to allow for a metagame to spring up?

it's not true multiplayer which tends to put a damper on that sort of thing

hey i kinda got sucked into this again for a couple of hours and i had a pretty good time

not sure how much depth or longevity it'll turn out to have but it's pretty hypnotic at the moment. it's actually (dare i say it) bringing back memories of getting lost in elite on the zx spectrum for hours at a time

regardless of what i end up thinking about it in the end i think it'll very likely match up to my early hope that getting baked and wandering around vibrantly coloured alien worlds will be cool

Pls report it on this when possible because it would probably be my default playmode, if you know what I'm saying, wink wink 420

i am not paying full price for a game that requires extra peripherals for enjoyment

That's what we all said about Bandersnatch

just when it was becoming repetitive and kinda boring something v v cool happened. hmmmm. feels like a subtle narrative thread is being set up, which again was not what I was expecting. the menus are really annoying me tho, but then that always happens to me with games that have a crafting system.

Whats its PC playability like? If I get this on PS4, I'll never get to play it cos bf is a fckn console hog, but my laptop only has a Geforce 750m and struggles on games like cities skylines...

This should totally have a two-player split screen mode on consoles.

Yes! I was just thinking that.

"oh hey I'm flying by your planet, wave to me hai"

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4wxydf/im_about_to_meet_another_player_seriously/

synopsis - two players manage to be in the same spot in the universe at the same time and are unable to see/interact with each other.

if true (seems to be lots of evidence from twitch streams etc) implications are that the loose multiplayer eluded to by devs doesn't actually exist and/or the universe isn't actually as large as suggested given how long the odds are (in a universe of the size that they claim)

*that two players would meet

lost part of that post oops

or the universe isn't actually as large as suggested

or they used a crappy random number generator? but, yeah.

one anomaly does not signify a crappy random number generator, true RNGs should create anomalies like that at some rate

I played for a few hours this evening. It was, unfortunately, super boring and clumsy. The dull universe is difficult to navigate and I feel pretty confident I wasted my money. :(

anomaly does not signify a crappy random number generator, true RNGs should create anomalies like that at some rate

I visited three planets. One of the three was previously discovered. They are clearly intending for collisions. I don't know why since everything looks the same and they are separately instanced.

ok yeah if it's happening multiple times then that sounds like a bug or else they misrepresented the size of the gameworld by a lot

i like aspects of this and am unsure if they are strong enough to propel me much further. it's early days yet

the whole multiplayer thing has always confused me. if the universe is actually so large that it would be very rare to meet another player, then why bother designing multiplayer at all? seems like a wasteful use of resources. but if the universe is small and they're intending for collisions to occur, then why did they either a) make multiplayer impossible (if you believe that reddit and don't think it'll be patched) or b) make it so difficult to purposefully meet up with people?

Inventory management in this thing is horrible.

it's godawful, yeah. even worse is that you can't speak to some npcs without an empty exosuit inventory slot - wtf? i've just bought a new ship but i know my expanded inventory will be full in no time at all.

i've had a couple of crashes in five or six hours of play, which i don't think has ever happened in the two years of so i've had a ps4.

i really wish there was a way to alter the fov to make it even a little bit wider - it feels super-restrictive, especially during combat.

oof - this sounds bad. for months i've been feeling like it was going to be a flop but i was still hopeful.

if it was mid-priced and hadn't been super-mega-hyped for the last three years i'm sure people would be giving it a much easier ride

I'm enjoying the hell out of this. No crashes, no problems beyond me sucking at aerial combat like I do in every game that isn't Crimson Skies. The UI isn't great, and inventory management can be a pain like in every game (why can't I stack high price items? Oh right, you want me constantly selling stuff ASAP. Thankfully the planet I spent the most time on had scattered robo-vendors out in the wilderness). I was surprised about the inventory slot to interact with things, but I learned to keep a space open. Finding and buying a bunch of suit upgrade slots was a huge help. As was fixing up a wreck of a ship that had a 4 more spaces. I haven't seen signs of any other players yet.

After playing some more, I agree that this is godawful rather than just ordinary bad. The game actively discourages you from crafting because of the limited materials, the limited items that can be crafted, and the non-existent aesthetic or gameplay rewards (there's practically 0 terraforming and absolutely 0 building). Likewise, the game actively discourages you from exploring because you're forced to babysit meters (oxygen, radiation, life support, health, and so on) so you end up staying near your ship. I guess this isn't too much of a problem since everything looks identical and there's nobody to interact with (the space station in the tutorial literally has one NPC who is completely stationary).

So the main incentive is to get more inventory slots.

i played for a few hours last night and while it may not be a "good game" in the sense of um everything everyone is talking about, i am still thinking about it a lot and want to go home and play more.

never underestimate the power of a game i want to hang out in pulling me in

(unless it gets INCRED tho, don't expect it at the top of my c&p 2016 list)

same - i recognise it's pretty massively flawed but for the moment i'm enjoying pottering about on day-glo planets and feeding isotopes to tiny alien t-rexes (haven't seen any of them poop yet tho. sad!)

So the main incentive is to get more inventory slots.

Journey to the heart of the universe where you'll find A LOCKER

never underestimate the power of a game i want to hang out in pulling me in

This is true though, I'm still kind of itchy to get back.

One thing is that the main quest (which just seems to be a slow tutorial really, so far at least) keeps wanting me to jump from planet to planet but I feel like I'm getting most fun from just fully exploring/scanning/mining a single world. But I do that, and get to uncover a bunch of different building types/resources/etc as I go, only to find that the main quest, when I return to it, then wants me to do all those things again but without any of the fun of discovery.

what worries me is that this is just a really pretty starbound which was extremely cool and interesting for the first few hours and then you realize everything is the same (like hitting the 7th forest planet with the same exact dungeon facility) and there's no gripping storyline.

not every 'tech demo' game can be a donkey kong country or mario 64 i suppose

Game designed to appeal to everyone ends up only appealing to a lot of people.

Trade Wars 2002 with graphics

― ciderpress, Tuesday, August 9, 2016 5:19 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fuck I loved this game so hard. this and the legend of the red dragon were my bbs JAMS.

Yeah if this was really trade wars w graphics it would be heavenly

No PTEOS? xp

all I remember from the last time I played trade wars was constant massive battles being fought over sector 420 while not much happened elsewhere

I was like 12 when I hit my trade wars peak and the game usually involved me getting my ass killed by other users =( I even paid like 10 bucks to get a printed out strategy guide to help out.

i guess eve is kinda tradewars w/ graphics but eve is so boring

Beginning to see a familiar pattern with 'space exploration' games

well at least FTL is 100% classic

and star control 2

privateer

Could never get the hang of FTL, though I felt in principle it was a cool game
Star Control 2 is still the gold standard in this sorta thing, really felt like a vast adventure/story that was mixed in well with the screwing around planet-hopping for resources

ehhhhh this game got tedious pretty quickly, think I've had enough. It's weird that they put so many survival gameplay elements into it when death can be easily avoided and there are no consequences if you do somehow manage to die anyway. the seamlessness of the universe is impressive, but babysitting limited inventory slots is just not fun. hopefully in the future someone will take the tech behind this and make an interesting game out of it.

Escape Velocity, nerds

Watching a couple of streamers playing this on Twitch, I'm astounded nobody has pointed out how numbing it is that every planet's palette is in high contrast neon. PURPLE GREEN!! ORANGE TEAL!! It also would appear that ground cover always evolves to photosynthesize the opposite end of the spectrum than all the other flora.

Escape Velocity, nerds

― El Tomboto, Thursday, August 11, 2016 7:34 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

best

how numbing it is that every planet's palette is in high contrast neon

this numbness is my favourite part of the game. this game is like asmr for my eyes.

ppl really trying to convince themselves that they like this game

or maybe people like it!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CVpFUZlWEAAw6UR.png

we will find out tomorrow, when i play it

i think there's a game worth playing in here, i'm not sure i'll make it to the end but there's enough cool stuff to give it a go. that having been said if i had it to do over i'd probably wait to pay for it until the price was reduced.

Pretty much. $60 is steep for an indie tech demo, but I love exploration games, love procedural generation, and want to encourage this sort of endeavor. My Steam copy will be unlocked tomorrow, but in the background on this screen last night I had a guy who'd been livestreaming for around 40+ hours; he was first to complete the Atlas quest and he's racing to be the first to reach the center of the patched game. At the current rate, it'll be another 24 hours or so, or maybe his next session if he lucks out on some anomaly jumps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w43erB2g2DY

indie tech demo

basically otm, it's interesting in this context but this also speaks to its limitations. i'll be interested to see if the devs continue to patch in content or not

Sean Murray has said he expects the team to continue working on NMS for the next year.

http://www.videogamer.com/features/game_guide/no_mans_sky_story_guide_complete_guide_to_the_secret_third_path_ending.html

kudos

$60 is steep for an indie tech demo, but I love exploration games, love procedural generation, and want to encourage this sort of endeavor.

"want to encourage this sort of endeavor" kinda says it all

pc release seems to be a mess, doesn't run well at all for me compared to other recent games

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1DJPm6eEow

ended up refunding it after spending an hour failing to get it to run with an acceptable framerate. may try again at some point if i upgrade my pc or they optimize it way more, but seems like ps4 is the way to play this for now if you dont have a high end video card

Ugh, good to know.

Ive started it on the PS4, but was dumped into an insanely toxic planet my exosuit could only last 5 minutes in, with basically no zinc to be found. I gave up and deleted my save and retried, its muuuch easier now. Havent got far yet tho. I like it, its kind of zen, I can see why others might not.

So to those like Allan who said resources were scarce and you had to stay near the ship? Thats just a bad planet generated. Chuck it, start again.

First evening in NMS was good, no hiccups/crashes on a modest PC (i7, GTX 760). 4 hours, 28 milestones, 2 systems, 7 planets, 12 add'l slots (22 ship, 17 exosuit, 10 tool), and 2 M units. Most units from farming a lifeless planet with towers of gold and caves of plutonium, so lavishly wasted plutonium for short hops between glittering outcrops.

I seem to have lost the plot with the Atlas path. I fear I may have to backtrack to the first system to scan down the next step.

Have you tried backtracking? I'm not sure whether it's impossible or just near-impossible but I've not managed to do it yet, previous visited systems just seem to vanish from the map for me.

WHat is this Atlas path thing about? I agreed to it with no idea what it does.

There are three game paths: To Da Center (feat Nada & Polo), an Atlas path, and a 3rd no one's seen yet...

It is possible to backtrack. I decided to name my systems "Sanpaku 001", "Sanpaku 002", etc. and I was able to go back to 001 to root around.

Escape Velocity, nerds

We've all moved on to Endless Sky: https://endless-sky.github.io

PC version does nada on my laptop - starting screen, 5 secs of song then crash to desktop. I'm not too fussed, we didnt pay for it, I'll just have to play the PS4 version when I can steal a moment from my house full of gamehogs.

Has anyone found any use to feeding the animals? Some things Ive read suggest they'll poop valuables?

We're having fun renaming all the planets stupd things like Evandando and Gordangano, and the animals Fatbum.

And yelling "come back, ziiiinc!" a lot.

WIRED speaks with 65daysofstatic's Paul Wolinski on how the math-rock band crafted arguably the largest game soundtrack ever

Ya the music side of this Ive known about for years, been following the band on it since the game was a twinkle in the eye a few years back.

ok i took the bait, now spending actual $$$ to upgrade my pc to play this

I'd wait... there seems to be hella issues with crashing on PC :(

I've now run NMS on PC for 24 hours without a crash (specs upthread).

* Sad 65daysofstatic can't afford PS4s (or PCs?) to see their work in context. Maybe Hello Games can pass one on (they're doing very well for a team of 11 devs/artists). I became interested in them due to the inclusion of a track in the 2014 NMS trailer, and the OST is an EOY contender for me.
* Atlas path can be reentered at space anomalies
* At half-buried ore skyscrapers, be wary of falling to the bottom as you mine. There are gaps down there in the collision detection and you can fall out of the map, to drown in virtual water that underlies all maps (even bone-dry ones). I teleported irreplaceable items like Atlas stones out to my ship before dying, as I'll never return to that grave.
* The ships with spherical cockpits have the best view, particularly for landing.
* Selling loot on-world will save a lot of hassle fighting off pirates that scan you. Only ship cargo appears to matter for their risk/reward calculations, so exosuit spaces are useful.
* Also, exosuits can have up to 48 inventory slots. Very useful to keep a periodic table there for upgrades.

I visited a moon that was fucking beautiful and breathtaking last night that also seemd to have some procgen glitches... in addition to the incredibly gorgeous tubes that looked like weird volcanos had erupted in a near-zero gravity environment millions of years ago, there were also giant smoothed cubes of land where the elevation calculations were all fucked.

also i took an old twitter account of mine and repurposed it as my endless no mna's sky screenshot factory, intend to use that to great effect soon

Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3

Inclusion of geometric anomalies in the surface was a patch 1.03 thing. Personally I think they overdid it on the frequency of landscape cubes and levitating tubes (which I've seen on about 20% of worlds).

ah, i've only seen the one, but i spent a huge amount of time in one system because it had six planets and my gf helped me name all of the planets and animals we found together and i became attached to it ;_;

also it had aluminum and copper :D

so if i don't start playing this soon is the universe going to fill up with ppl's joke names for planets and animals and it'll be like a fresh coat of snow after a thousand children have stomped through it?

there are a quintillion planets or something, sooooo probably not?

But people are seeing a lot more overlap than you'd expect?

yeah that's what i'm hearing which makes me concerned :/

I'll probably buy this next week when I get home. It's possible to have multiple accounts, right? My wife is really interested in playing so it would be nice of we could have our own separate games going.

also, how easy is it to avoid fighting and violence? She is interested in exploring and naming, not at all in fighting space pirates and sentinels.

I've yet to see evidence why I'd even bother with this game tbh.

also, how easy is it to avoid fighting and violence?

I also avoid violence and have had very few issues. Some planets have scary fauna, but you can avoid them. I've only been attacked by pirates a couple of times (3?) and fled twice. Sentinels only atack if you brazenly destroy the planet as quickly and relentlessly as possible.

Also I'm p sure if you use two accounts on the PS4, you'll have two games going. Dunno how PS Plus plays into the "online" component, though.

Good to hear, thanks!

Jumped into my first black hole last night and it crashed the PS4. Tbf that's probably what would happen in real life too but still. It was 2am so I didn't bother rebooting to see whether it'd work on the second try.

That's kind of awesome, although I bet it was annoying at the time

Tbf that's probably what would happen in real life too

haha

COME BACK ZIIIIIINC

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BmigUSDIcAATsFT.jpg:large

I feel I'm going to have many, many 80 and 90% completions in my quest to become a NMS naturalist.

Bit the bullet and bought this against my better judgement. Surprised that reviews don't mention how cheap this game feels. It's all very early 90's. Also is there a way to orient yourself in underground caverns? Spent an hour last night trying to find my way out.

Multi-tool grenades are quite effective for digging out of cave labyrinths. Use the scanner to locate where surface resources come closest to the cave system, and dig towards them.

NMS is certainly not for everyone. If you could spend hours looking at the artwork of 70s/80s sci-fi paperbacks, its for you.

Graphics dont seem cheap to me? Theyre quite painterly, but it seems purposeful.

I feel like current AAA gaming has spoiled people.

I like this "review" of the game and agree 100%. I've been enjoying this more than any other game in a long, long time.

http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2016/08/no-mans-sky.html

I'm coming around, I want this now.

PC users, are there still issues with this game ?

https://m.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4y046e/wheres_the_nms_we_were_sold_on_heres_a_big_list/

list of features suggested by devs now found to be absent in the final cut

https://twitter.com/Britbongreturns/status/765190830894317568

omg

That's hilarious. Is it real?

I haven't seen anything that goofy but it's certainly possible within the engine

swagasaurus rex has been a thing more or less since the game dropped

I haven't seen anything that goofy but it's certainly possible within the engine

!!? Every second animal I see is an insanely goofy dude hopping on 2 legs awkwardly, or spindling along on 5 crab claws... there was one large, lumpy tiger sized mammalian thing that was FLYING AROUND WITH TINY WINGS.

Oh and the thing that was basically a mushroom, but alive, and bouncing around.

Its very Spore-esque, basically.

I wish they had more actual cities with advanced lifeforms in them but I suspect thats beyond the ability of the engine, at least right now.

ugh this sounds so bad

It really isnt. I could play this for days.

I haven't seen anything that goofy but it's certainly possible within the engine

!!? Every second animal I see is an insanely goofy dude hopping on 2 legs awkwardly, or spindling along on 5 crab claws... there was one large, lumpy tiger sized mammalian thing that was FLYING AROUND WITH TINY WINGS.

Oh and the thing that was basically a mushroom, but alive, and bouncing around.

Really! I've seen some hopping Shmoo looking blobs and large cats with cow heads and mushrooms on their backs, but nothing as oddly put together as the swagasaurus thing.

i found a planet absolutely covered in these sac venoms, work 25k each... you shoot one and the sentinels get pissed but there are SO MANY of them i just find a trading post, shoot the 30 closest to the trading post, hope the sentinels don't kill me (they never do), enter the trading post, sell em all for for three quarters of a million... repeat. i say "repeat" but i have only done this 4 times so far because 3 million is plenty of money for me now. i got a cool new yellow spaceship!!!

i also repurposed an old joke twitter i made and abandoned after a day to be my PS4 twitter so i can post 100000 screenshots of no mans sky to myself and use them as phone backgrounds etc i am a nerd

after a frustrating start, i am having a great ol' time now

i started off on a toxic planet (maybe everyone does?) and thought i was trapped in a tutorial-like crater for about 20 minutes until realizing i could jetpack my way out of there.

wish i would have read this earlier on: http://www.gamesradar.com/12-hidden-mechanics-no-mans-sky-never-tells-you-about/

i didn't find a toxic planet until like my 20th planet! (and the 21st is radioactive, which i didn't even know there was)

are there diff kinds of toxic planets? mine was "alkaline rain," and neon green

Toxic planets have different descriptors (acidic dust, alkaline rain etc.), but it irrelevant to gameplay: the same suit modules work for all toxic planets, much as they do for radioactive planets, hot planets, and cold planets). The main effective difference is in intensity, with some being mild, and others more extreme. I've refueled when the only zinc bearing planet in the system was pummeled with constant radioactive windstorms.

every time i almost bite on this i remember i never play subnautica

When you're on a mega-cold planet and your exosuit's temp protection starts to fail, the edges of the FOV frost up with ice, which I liked the detail of.

I've seen extreme cold (with the waters warmer than the air!), extreme heat - both worsened by incoming storms that force you into caves or buildings to shelter from (the storm warnings reminded me of MGS Phantom Pain). I was dumped on a planet so toxic to begin with, buried in a massive crater with no flora/minerals, that I had to delete my save cos I kept dying every 5 mins.

What's going to be the acronym for these games? Massive Procedurally Generated Universe (MPGU)? I hope the lesson is more and better of these things. I think a Terraria / Crashlands with almost-fully procedural flora and fauna would be worth my premium dollars. No idea how the pet / familiar / summoning system works with generated lifeforms works, but I want to see it!

fake animal diddler simulator

that is to say that they are fads

https://i.imgur.com/xeKHfZv.gif

HA

patch 1.04 out today. no patch notes, yet.

supposedly has a lot of fixes and some optimizations for pc version. my new rig is still on the way but i might give it another try with my current one now.

Suspect 1.04 is mostly a release of the experimental branch beta. It didn't resolve an issue where everything slowed to a crawl when I was aboard my ship and not looking at the star map.

My ticketed issue isn't all the time, btw, just occasionally after an hour of play.

Is it possible to play with your own blank universe? I know that in theory it's enormous, but by the time I get around to playing it everything will be called 'cuck' or 'fag', which I'm not interested in.

I've visited 80 systems, and still haven't seen anything discovered by another player.

2^64 (the number of systems in the game) is a big number. If 100,000 players (launch night levels) renamed the planets of a system once every 10 minutes (about as fast as possible), it would take 3.5 billion years to name them all.

In fact, because its unlikely anyone else will visit systems I've been to, at least until I get much closer to the center, I find it pointless to give anything a name, except as notes to myself.

Lastly, there's an overzealous profanity filter. I've had Latin taxonomic designations rejected. Cuck and fag are right out.

Excellent, thanks.

i think to call a particular jerky animal "big jerk" and it filtered me. actually, i can't remember if it was jerk now... it may have been "stupid." whatever it was, it was overzealous.

We've seen I think.. one renamed planet? Maybe 2. In my bfs game anyway. I havent, yet.

I came across my first galaxy with planets someone else found. Unlike me, he didn't name them anything stupid. He didn't change the names at all.

There are factors that draw player paths together. Maybe 1/500 systems hosts an Atlas interface, and players in their neighborhood can follow these breadcrumb trails. And the galaxy map has huge voids over 200 LY across. If travelling to the center, trying to maximize jumps (within one's warp drive capacity), players would tend to land on a subset of systems that are just before these voids. Sometimes there's a single star in the midst of these voids, which is an obvious stepping stone. That's where I intend to do my territorial marking, once I get within 20,000 LY of the center (and yes, I know but won't spoil what will happen at journey's end).

he didn't name them anything stupid. He didn't change the names at all.

the stupidest naming is no naming!

i am still addicted but can't stop thinking about certain seemingly easy things they could fix that would make it less annoying in some places (e.g., allow an option to not hold the button every time you want to select something, or adding a Look Behind you button to your spacecraft view)

one big, complicated thing that would make the game not just easier to use but better and more interesting in the longterm - multiplayer of any sort. fuck, even just being able to compare how high my missions/stats are compared to others would be cool.

since i'm in whine mode

i understand not having the resources to build different space station layouts. but if you're only going to have one, it should be easy to use. why do the trade terminal and alien have to be SO far away from the landing site? how annoying is it to have to run 15 seconds to the most useful part of the station every time you visit, rather than a couple seconds away?

i understand not having the resources to build different space station layouts.

the developer of the game, i mean

btw how cool would it be if you could actually BUILD things on planets

i kind of feel like someone just invented the car and then all they thought to do with it was use it to transport horseshoes

how did this game end up getting SO MUCH hype? when did it make that shift from ambitious chill indie game to Very Important AAA Game That Will Make The Masses Feel Like This Whole Hobby Is Still Worth Something

I'm finding the butthurtness hilarious, cos I was mostly oblivious to this apparent hype I think.

NB not saying anyone in this thread being butthurt

i wrote this over 2 years ago!:

no man's sky looked cool tho, are there gonna be lots of guns? i don't want guns, i just want a game where i go around planets and discover new animals

and i think in my head it never stopped being more than a game where you go around planets and discover new animals, even as i saw the blazing inferno of hype in the distance

this sean guy really has a case of the molyneuxs huh

The sci-fi game fan has been fairly underserved by all but FPS and RTS games for over a decade. There's a hunger of the sort that has crowdfunded Star Citizen to the tune of $118 million so far.

NMS is a wildly ambitious/audacious idea for a game in an era when established franchises have all the novelty of Madden football games.

The promises were often so vague that evangelists could speculate on the perfect space exploration/opera game in their heads and find support for their dream in internet echo chambers.

As for the backlash, Hello Games didn't have expertise in QA, and pretty clearly had to make last-minute cuts and additions at Sony's behest. Some for the better (Atlas path didn't exist a few months ago), some for the worse (playtesters didn't grok rotating planets). I suspect a token lobby/chat system for players at the same location was one thing that got the ax (there are models of players' exosuited characters in the PC distribution, perhaps intended for this).

Everything would have been smoother as pre-release Steam title, but Sony outbid Microsoft for the title (MS supported Hello Games after their studio flooded). There are legitimate gripes about game performance/crashes, and legitimate criticisms of the gameplay depth. Given we don't know what transpired over the last few months, and everyone is under NDA, the ad hominem attacks on Sean Murray seem mostly haters gonna hate.

i finally got this running smoothly on my current machine at 720p windowed with the new patch and new nvidia driver. still looking forward to the new rig so i can play it in 1080p fullscreen though for proper immersion

this game is super intriguing and i'm looking forward to trying it out soon.

count me as one of the people that just wants a game that looks like an old sci fi paperback and could care less about LIES HORRIBLE LIES

I have a biologist friend who was super-duper hyped about this back in May to the point where she'd taken a couple days off work around the release date, but she was bummed enough when the release got pushed back (and got sidetracked by Overwatch) and she has yet to pick it up.

side note, how the fuck did this game not hit an E rating?!?!

also, i can't find the credits online anywhere but i cannot imagine that sony would have pushed this game this hard without making hello games hire an ourtsourced qa company at least for a few thousand hours!?

guns innit. Apparently classed as "Fantasy violence"

i kind of feel like someone just invented the car and then all they thought to do with it was use it to transport horseshoes

“The coolest [moment] was about 15 hours in I ran up to a giant pillar of what I thought was going to be Heridium and to my joy turned out to be Nickel,” Fernandez. “My eyes were bugging out of my head. I honestly thought I had seen absolutely everything this planet had to offer and was pleasantly surprised.”

great quote from http://kotaku.com/the-no-mans-sky-player-who-still-hasnt-left-his-first-p-1785515562

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CqPnKKGUsAAp4y_.jpg

this pretty much sums up my experience so far

https://youtu.be/3o5UGiYIutk

Can you sum up the summing-up?

it's just 3 kotaku people chatting about the for a few minutes, really excited about aspects of the game but disappointed that there are so many obvious ways it could be much better. a lot of the conversation revolves around the idea of what other games will be able to do in the near future, even if they just took the NMS template and slapped one more feature on it. for example, if you were allowed to build even basic structures that would then be discoverable by other players. even adding that limited multiplayer component (not being able to see or interact with other players, but just seeing what they built) would be amazing because it would make exploration even better than it already is. imagine if every 10-15 planets you landed on one that had a player-built structure that you could visit?

i'm sure that they'll add some more features onto the game over the next few months that'll keep people going for a while, but i'm really excited about whoever makes the next obvious steps in the genre.

Minecraft was pretty basic (and frankly, boring) when it first came out, and its changed a lot over time. I see potential for the same here. Not sure how user-added stuff would work with a procedural world? I might have to pick the coder-ex's brain.

Well the difference is that Minecraft wasn't really boring to a great many at first, and thats how it became popular. It had its base hook, ie creating and crafting stuff and even the survival part was interesting.

MC slowly improved the amount of items you can craft plus some nice UI treatment and general all round tidying up over the years.

Technically I don't see why that wouldn't be possible also with NMS but it doesn't seem to have a base 'hook' like Minecraft imo. It would need to transform into a completely different game.

So what does NMS need to change to improve, maybe should be the next question?

Minecraft didn't have three years of pre-release hype and a $60 price tag. Very early versions of the game were a bit boring, but Mojang have been adding stuff continually. Only last month they added a hefty update including three new mob types. I can't see Hello Games doing much more to NMS aside from balance tweaks unless it's DLC. Also there's the technical issue of changing the algorithms of a procedurally generated game without breaking the multiplayer side.

Plus they've started backing away from their original "all updates will be free" statements. Assuming this game will get better in the future is fine, but when it does it's likely going to need paying for again, and I'm definitely not planning to invest any more in a £20 indie game which I've already spent £50 on.

played this yesterday for a good bit. it looks gorgeous for a lot of it, making for at the very least a nice helping of eye candy.

i want to say things really started to seem samey after a few hours but we were stuck on the same 3-4 planets in that first system, so maybe it opens up later. really hoping there is variation in the space bases cos it honestly felt like the exact same 3-building base everywhere you go. also the planets seemed to have one or two kinds of animal and that's it, no matter where you go on the planet. again this could be entirely down to me randomly getting more barren planets. i dunno? also a letdown that the planets only have one biome.

still, it was a lot of fun to play, and blasting between planets is really cool, and just walking around or flying w your jetpack on these neon worlds is a good time. i do see where some of the criticism is coming from though.

A lot of people out there that are loving the exploration / graphical element of NMS. Their criticisms are that, particularly early in the game, there's a lot of boring crafting and slot purchasing placed as an obstacle to visiting new worlds.

Personally, I think the fundamentals of NMS are sound, but clunky. It does lack variety to match the planet visuals. All ships fly the same, every landing bay is identical, there are about 6 room interiors in the game, gravity is always 1 g. Scripted content is exhausted in about 60 hours gameplay (which seems a lot, but not for this kind of "ambient" game). First thing I'd do is permit player generated scripted content: NPC interactions, facility puzzles, monolith lore. This would help keep repetitive elements interesting, and there's no shortage of would-be authors willing to extend lore.

Yes but dicks.

the second and third star systems i visited had already been discovered which is a bummer and really took me out of the whole sense-of-wonder vibe. and that vibe is all this game has going for it because the halfhearted capitalism simulator bolted onto the lackluster spaceflight is even more of a bummer.

also idk who thought the sentinels were a good idea

• Doesn't every 1st person first-person survival/crafting game have token threats? They're not difficult to kill with upgraded weapons.
• Less than 10% of worlds have aggressive sentinels. On the other >90%, let the cop look you over (blue eye) and leave. Only pillage the local endangered gravitino balls or toxin sacs when you know you can handle them.
• On extreme worlds, sentinels are a reliable titanium source for environmental shielding. There, I kill on sight.
• Sentinels serve a narrative purpose defining the Korvax and Vy'keen cultures. I feel a little guilty every time I dismantle these little park rangers.

Ive found its easier to just run away from their scanning than bother to engage.

Only problem with running away is at some levels of sentinel aggression they'll call in support. In most cases, if you down the one scanning you and the one it calls quickly, that's all you'll have to deal with. It depends if you need the titanium for shielding, and I've been trying to get the extreme planet achievements.

I tried running into a shallow cave to avoid the trio (dog-sentinel + 2 flyers) that usually show up when you do environmental poaching of gravitino balls, vortex cubes, sac venoms, and albumen pearls, only to have them escalate to 5 star wanted with walkers, etc. The trick is to kill the dog (which poses the greatest threat) and one of the flyers, and grab more loot while tanking the last flyer, as additional sentinels won't be called for poaching if you already have a wanted level.

Aside: its probably not worth using black hole shortcuts offered by Nada if you have the Theta warp reactor. Even if it damages ship modules at random, I've now wasted hours repairing the Theta reactor damaged twice in consecutive black hole wormholes. And the repairs always require 500 emeril, 500 gold, 400 plutonium, 200 chrysonite, 200 heridium, 200 carbon, and 80 zinc, which can almost never be found on one planet.

so should i do the atlas path first? is that the best way to go about things?

You can always pick it up later at space anomalies.

I'd wait until you have the sigma and tau warp reactor upgrades, which will allow you to zip from Atlas interface to Atlas interface without pit stops. The major advantage of doing the Atlas path at one time is that its narrative includes accumulating 10 Atlas stones, and inventory slots are scarce.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlz0I7vWzxE

i found a crashed ship with only 14 slots but a (damaged) sigma warp drive in my 5th system so i'm trying to rehabilitate that now - is this earlier than i'm 'supposed' to get the sigma drive, or is that how you're supposed to get one?

AFAIK, you can get any blueprint at any time, without respect to current ship slots or progress in Atlas/Center paths.

As you may know, some things are scripted, like the order in which words are learned from knowledge stones. I believe the some blueprints are scripted similarly. The trick to getting these more "scripted" upgrades is to talk to onplanet NPCs, the ones you'll find at operations centers etc, most easily found via broadcast beacons (the tall antennas). By my 10th alien encounter I had the sigma warp upgrade, by my 20th the tau upgrade. The theta upgrade evaded me for a while until I encountered a Vy'keen smuggler around my 60th encounter.

I haven't bothered with wrecked ships, but because the number of slots in a wreck has roughly a 50/50 chance of having more slots than your current ship, some players have worked up from the entry ship to 40+ slot ships (which would normally cost ~30 million units) purely by farming wrecks.

Yep thats what we're doing. Its too pricey to do otherwise.

Haven't felt motivated to boot this up for a while now, so last night I admitted to myself that I was pretty much done with it, and read some spoilers for the different endings. Let's just say they completely validated my decision to put it down after 15 hours instead of sinking 100 hours into it.

PC players annoyed with flight restrictions may want to try the Lowflight Mod by Hytek.

i abandoned the quest for the center as well. i don't know the ending, i just know that every reference i've seen to it has been of extreme disappointment and sometimes anger

yeah i haven't spoiled myself yet, i just assume it's something like it makes you start over if you want to keep playing afterwards (might not be this at all, but i don't see what else would provoke such strong negative reaction)

my guess is that at the end the atlas god says something very atlas-y about being one with the universe and knowledge, and then you get access to new resource that lets you craft other resources at a 20% discount

have you folks been renaming all your systems/planets? i've just been uploading them with the default gibberish names as i figure until i get further inward no one's likely to ever encounter them anyways

i name my systems, planets, and fauna (sorry flora). but since abandoning the quest for the center, i've been spending a lot more time on each planet (and enjoying the game much more that way), trying to track down each species, so it's a lot more fun to be on a planet with customized names for everything.

for me, naming things is fun if the intended audience is yourself rather than an imagined stranger that might encounter it

btw i got my new pc yesterday and this game is really pretty in full HD with proper antialiasing/texture filtering

i think my biggest complaint with the game so far is that i wish the draw distance was about twice as long while surface flying, the pop-in distance for certain things is so short

this acid trip of a planet is my favorite one i've found so far: http://imgur.com/a/YYR8t

picture doesn't really do justice to just how many colors of grass there was

I've been to quite a few planets that reminded me of false color infrared photography.

Rather childishly decided to try pushing the profanity filter last night.

Planet Phucdat didnt pass muster. But planet Phuqdat did...

it would be cool if they let you change your view while flying your starship, so you could look at this ship you're supposed to care about

Ha yeah I was wondering aloud the other day if the thrusters on some ships change position (when landing and etc) then realised i had no way of knowing :(

Also how come you never see anyone getting out of their ship at the ports?

because the entire universe, all 18 quintillion planets, every single one of them, is full of lonely aliens who do nothing but sit at a desk every day, by themselves, looking at their ipads.

on the plus side i just realized that these aliens can be spun around using the right joystick as you talk to them. now there are quintillions of spinning aliens, at least in my universe

hahaha

because the entire universe, all 18 quintillion planets, every single one of them, is full of lonely aliens who do nothing but sit at a desk every day, by themselves, looking at their ipads.

wow a bleak fortelling image of or future irl?

our

No, we got it.

ok

Sounds like working in an office.

Gamer people are really angry at this game still huh

they are so angry!

honestly this game (and most games) would be improved 1000% by the addition of a no-resources, no-crafting, no-sentinel chill mode

xp until the next over-hyped title launches without a ton of promised content ppl are going to continue to gripe over this. i'll admit to being a little upset with myself for falling for a pre-order again as i still think this game isn't worth full price in its current form, but i'm not losing sleep over it

a no-resources, no-crafting, no-sentinel chill mode

Sorta already available to the PC master race:

Make upgrades and fueling completely free
No random sentinels on planets (won't remove scripted sentinels, like the ones that spawn when you grab gravitino balls, etc.)

someone made a "bigthings" mod that scales up and multiplies trees and other fauna and things so that you get areas that feel like actual forests. there's some issues with clipping and performance as you'd expect but it looks pretty nice in screenshots

http://i.imgur.com/zmIdNal.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/KXTVuQy.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/cFGPTzY.png

Really shouldn't have needed a mod to do that.

Its so easy to implement that I expect Hello Games to take a look at it and add more plant size variation in a future update.

NNS needs 100 m redwoods.

And whales, too, if you have time.

http://www.geek.com/games/no-mans-sky-wipes-your-discoveries-after-two-weeks-1668222/

i can see how this could be a practical necessity from a data management perspective but still

planet and star system names remained intact, but wtf, that's so dumb. i'm no pro but it doesn't seem like it would take up that much storage, esp. since i'd guess the majority of players are naming a bunch of custom flora/fauna?

i mean, the game/servers already know your saved game, planets you've visited, your ship, exosuit, multi-tool configuration, the distance you've traveled, the # of aliens you've visited, the words you know, etc etc etc etc. it can't also store a text table that lists the different animals that you named?

yeah im just speculating honestly, this seems too dumb of a thing to have been done for anything but practical reasons

esp. since i'd guess the majority of players are naming a bunch of custom flora/fauna?

oops, that should be are NOT, obviously

IIRC from an old data structures class, one could do a quick access indexed list of strings for about two 64 bit/8 byte addresses per entry. Any unicode character is two bytes.

20,000 players, playing 24/7, and naming something new with a 20 character name every 10 minutes would generate 6.7 Mb/hr, 161 Mb/d, 1.05 Gb/wk, 384 Gb/yr.

I can buy a 2 TB drive for under $100.

It's probably a bit more space given it records discovery date, and probably some flags, but I feel someone at Hello wasn't thinking this through.

it's probably more about the bandwidth/server strain i'm guessing

lol the update on that story is that it was a server issue and all of their discoveries are still there

"Update: this story is 100% wrong. anywho, here's the original story!"

steam offering refunds regarldess of playtime, amazon offering refunds on physical copies, psn also has a route for refunds:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4zuydl/psa_steam_is_offering_no_mans_sky_refunds/

Latest patch seems to have added some neat things. We had butterflies in one planet!

so i'm getting the sense that i should just wait about 6mos for this to ripen or

NMS's always going to be an example of ambient gaming, that quite unfortunately and inappropriately was marketed as a multiplayer universe simulator by Sony. Don't expect a chill Elite Dangerous. Expect a borderless and beautiful walking simulator.

gbx: it seems possible! I mean I'm not banking on it 100% and like sanpaku said, fuck the multiplayer function, I dont care for it anyway.

I would, however, like to see:
- the actual ship classes they said there'd be (ie difference in performance, speed, storage and weaponry)
- stackable slots for all item types
- way more variety with the races and their facilities. Cmon, theyre 3 different species, why do they all have exactly the same shiny, chrome, vaguely art deco interiors?

- a bigger ask, knowing what it'd involve build wise, would be to have proper interaction with NPCs in the world, Elder-scrolls style, and also with the animals. Oh and some actual cityscapes. But I have lived and worked with many game programmers, and I know this stuff is not easy.

I think some people have been way too hard on these guys esp given they apparently lost everything in a flood and had to start over, then had sony up their arse to get it out ASAP.

theres already a dozen space sandbox games on steam early access that are trying to siphon off the angry gamers who didn't like NMS

huge pan from tom chick
http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2016/09/01/no-mans-sky-vividly-realizes-meaningless-emptiness-space/

I’m wondering whether I dare equip an upgrade because upgrades always take up inventory slots. The better you are, the less you can carry.

sad but true

posted unwatched but i used to really trust this guy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFEi_BdLHlc

i was thinking earlier about the fact that every single of the 18 quintillion planets is already discovered by one of the alien groups and populated with roughly evenly spaced outposts and other small groups of buildings. it seems silly on the face of it, and it definitely dulls the sense of exploration and discovery because everything has already been discovered and populated, albeit in very lonely fashion, with only a single alien playing with its tablet to be found in every handful of buildings. there are no interactions between the aliens, no love or fighting or camaraderie. all of them are alone at the desk, just waiting to be fed a trivial amount of resources that are already located within 20 feet of their swivel chairs in exchange for the knowledge of one more word in their unknowable language that is used on around 6 quintillion planets in the universe.

that's not a good backdrop for exploration, but it's actually a kind of interesting story, potentially. it's like this is the end of a grand scope sci-fi series, the end result of an exponential growth of machines programmed to explore, creating dyson spheres and mining resources in order to produce more exploration crafs, splitting off and exploding outward and colonizing every planet at an expanding speed, until after X^X years later every single planet is colonized with evenly spaced outposts, each designed to completely surveil the entire planetary area in the most efficient manner possible at the time of colonization, each outpost populated with a single alien that has never directly interacted with any other of its kind, only through the internet. etc etc. it's kind of lame but at least it's a story that explains what you're seeing. instead you this atlas path generic stuff with All is One and Quest for Knowledge and all of this bullshit. the story in this game has nothing to do with what you're seeing.

The devs addressed the arbitrary nature of their universe in lore.

SPOILER
Physics simplistic. Chemistry arbitrary. Hypothesis: simulation. Galaxy not base existence. Explore but beware red orb. Find flaws in model, exploit, find truth.
Peripatetic path to galactic core. Path message from creator? Or sloppy workmanship?
This is not real. It has never been real. The universe is an expression of a single thought. It is neither wanted nor designed.

That Errant Signal video is great. Captures a lot of why I keep playing despite all its many flaws.

Thanks also for the Errant Signal pointer - great source for more mature reviews.

yeah i forgot about the errant signal guy for a couple years but he's great

I edited down the game text dump to a lore file (spoilers aplenty). Those looking for gnostic tropes in modern media would have a field day.

the update has started to address a couple things. a bit more variety. also more
jittery

first tweets from Sean Murray since August 18:

Sean Murray ‏@NoMansSky 2m2 minutes ago
If anything was a mistake, it was using Linked In without 2FA.

Sean Murray ‏@NoMansSky 14m14 minutes ago
Server hacked. We're binging Mr Robot Episodes as quickly as we can looking for answers. Ep05 is a cracker

u ok hun

server hacked huh? good thing this isn't a multiplayer game ;)

this game finally got a big update yesterday. among other things it adds a Creative Mode which focuses on exploration and basebuilding, and a Survival mode which does the stuff you'd expect.

http://www.no-mans-sky.com/foundation-update/

i dropped into the new no man's sky to see if the fundamental experience has changed. it has not. after the initial positive vibes to be had from seeing more aliens in space stations and buildings, and some different architecture types, you're still ultimately aimlessly floating above planets that all end up being similar. apparently the patch added different terrain, greater elevation variety, more naturally clumped vegetation, etc, but exploration still feels pretty much feels the same. Creative mode allows you to buy ships and freighters for free. skipping past the "gameplay" of spending hours and hours searching for shit to mine, trade in, and craft so that you can upgrade your shit, i instead warp sped to the reality of having a freighter (which basically is just a glorified Stash that you can access to store even MORE items!!) and a nice big ship, and the feelings it inspires: nothing at all. wow, now i have lots of space on my ship to store all this other shit. and i am learning new alien words as i go! i didn't get into the basebuilding or farming (you can now grow your own plants which give you resources).

(i haven't tried survival because it seems like it would only magnify all the original mode's faults, but who knows, maybe it makes things more intense and urgent in a fun way? probably not).

back to the witcher 3

40% off on Steam offer isn't even tempting to me anymore

truer sadder words have never been etc etc

Still my game of the year. But I never had an issue with what it wasn't. I enjoyed what it is.

and star citizen is going to be amazing

(jokes jokes)

Aside: This post election environment really sapped my desire for escapism. It's one thing to fantasize in an era where hope is possible, and another when all the institutions around me are poised to be used to entrench awful people. My global warming reading queue is way too long for me to enjoy NMS right now. I look at the icon on my desktop as I used to eye the bottle of vodka I once hid behind the monitor.

I look at the icon on my desktop as I used to eye the bottle of vodka I once hid behind the monitor.

This is great

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/youmakespacejesuscry1_8171.jpg

i'm kinda there with you sanpaku but trying to figure out how to normalize internally, not externally and i think fantasy is still part of that

http://www.polygon.com/2016/11/30/13791782/no-mans-sky-false-advertising-results

kinda nice to see these guys winning for once. there were 23 complaints total lol to doomsayers.

someone posted an insanely tall structure indicating Fallout 4-level base building with no height restrictions

Seriously, some of those complaints re the ad are hilarious. Speed of galaxy warping!? Come on, you're not going to show 20 fucking seconds of loading screen in an AD. Might as well raise a complaint because some Star Wars movie wasnt as punchy and fast paced as the trailer, i mean ffs.

it looks like Astroneer is the actually good version of this

Yeah been keeping an eye on that one, looks promising.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice-

Actually yeah I will probably check out astroneer.

http://blog.astroneer.space/system-era/50-days/

just watching that video, i see that the astroneer development team has somehow mastered the impossible problem of how to allow two or more people to walk around on the same planet and do stuff together

WOW

*excited*

this is pretty cheep now and latest update is tempting. still a bad idea?

i got like 15 hours out of it before i got bored the first time around, haven't checked out the updates yet but at a lower price point its probably worthwhile. i dunno if there's another game yet that hits the same notes this does, though i'm sure a few studios have one in the pipeline

actually looking at the info on the latest update is making me want to install again, here we go..

i was also kind of intrigued by the latest update. i think that after a few more updates, maybe by next year, it'll finally resemble the game a lot of us thought it would be in the first place, but by then another new game will have come out that does the same thing but better.

I still think the vistas of alien worlds NMS sometimes offers are fantastic, though I still think all the improvements since launch are frosting on a turd of a game loop. While there are a number of long standing projects with procedurally generated worlds, to my knowledge only Elite:Dangerous has woven its lifeless rocks into an engaging game, and I haven't seen notices of anyone else making the attempt.

I think NMS could have been a lot more interesting if most worlds weren't inhabited, so that the player could believe they were actually explorers, and the three cultures had some sorte of mystery to be solved, preferably in a way that would require collaborative effort for month/years by players. E:D is doing something like this with its Thargoids, for several years.

currently on offer at £16 and with this new update (plus previous ones) I'm started to get real tempted.

$20 on gamefly
https://www.gamefly.com/#!/game/No-Man's-Sky/5010179

i played it a bit this weekend and the gameplay still feels half-assed even with more quest line stuff - i enjoy just wandering around in creative mode more than playing the "actual" game. there's definitely fewer buildings on planets now than there used to be, i found some worlds that didn't seem to have any, whereas last time i played you could go down to any planet and just cruise along the surface and run into outposts everywhere even if it was 100 degrees celsius and barren. there's a little more variety in the environments but you still won't see major elevation differences, flowing water, anything resembling a forest, etc.

it's still a pleasant experience that isn't really replicated by any other game, but it only really works in small doses before you start to see a lot of lookalike planets.

actually looking on reddit now it seems people have been able to find foresty planets and some bigger mountains now - i haven't seen any yet myself though.

Caved and got this last night. I'm really enjoying the story mode so far, it feels quite intriguing and I'm loving the atmosphere. I've only visited half a dozen planets but they are strikingly similar which is a little disappointing. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong with some more exploration.

If they are all this similar then the creative mode will be pointless.

The UI at first was the most baffling thing I've ever encounted, but surprisingly I became really comfortable with it in a short time.

(Had a quick go in a land vehicle on creative mode though and urgh those controls)

Looking forward to playing more anyway, well worth sixteen quid imho.

planets are definitely not ALL similar but the game definitely has a certain kind of planet that it likes to generate and so once you've played a bit the only interesting ones are the 5-10% that deviate from that, or have something rare/weird going on (bubble planet???). you can scan planets from space now though and learn their 'type' which makes it a bit easier to predict what they'll look like without taking the time to land.

decided against it, got E:D instead

probably wise. im already bored of NMS again

how is this different or better than escape velocity

did anybody end up actually getting astroneer?

gbx: it is so much worse than escape velocity.

if you liked EV as much as I did, you may enjoy Sunless Sea

oh yeah? i completely adored EV

if you're asking about this game vs an older game then this is not the game you're looking for.

it doesn't do anything interesting that other space games haven't done except for visuals/atmosphere

I'd never heard of Sunless Sea, just checked it out. Nice.

is this worth playing yet

I all-of-a-sudden just stopped playing, didn't even have an excuse of having any other game to play either.

After my initial enjoyment I became frustrated with the similar looking planets and this just ultimately lacks... something.

I still think there's a fair variety among planets and a lovely aesthetic. But the game play loop was an afterthought, and even proceedurally generated worlds should create more interesting stories than "I got lost in a neighborhood where there was a convenience store at every corner."

https://kotaku.com/no-mans-sky-is-getting-full-multiplayer-at-last-1826134668

“I remember getting a death threat about the fact that there were butterflies in our original trailer, and you could see them as you walked past them, but there weren’t any butterflies in the launch game. I remember thinking to myself: ‘Maybe when you’re sending a death threat about butterflies in a game, you might be the bad guy.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/jul/20/no-mans-sky-next-hello-games-sean-murray-harassment-interview

first interview since launch, big new update coming next week

sean murray is kind of a dipshit

Looking back on the sometimes deafening pre-release hype for No Man's Sky, which included a major presentation at Sony's 2015 E3 press conference, Murray took himself to task a bit for talking up the game's potential so heavily. "We were naively excited about the game, and we talked to other people who were naively excited about the game and they interviewed us and we all talked really excitedly," Murray told Eurogamer. "And I will not do that again!"

Part of the problem at the time, Murray told GamesRadar, was not being direct enough about the overall style of space exploration game players should expect. "I thought we were making it clear that No Man’s Sky was a weird lonely experience. But some people were looking at our trailers and thinking it was Star Wars, when really it’s more like 2001!”

i don't think too many people thought it was Star Wars. it's definitely not at all like 2001.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/07/sean-murray-breaks-his-silence-on-no-mans-skys-development-launch/

it shares some important themes with 2001, like taking place in the universe

i too loved EV, do the updates make it more akin to that? i found an open source clone of EV called endless sky i'm excited to check out

Endless Sky is great!

tempted to reinstall this again even though i don't really have time to play non portable games atm

it's definitely better now though i wish planets with giant flora weren't so hard to find, i've seen some nice screencaps but nothing yet in my adventures

Its only $30 on steam and I think my new laptop can cope with it, might have to give it another try. I liked it well enough playing on PS4 when it came out, it was just so samey was all.

i reinstalled it the other day to give it a shot after reading generally positive reviews, and i lost interest after a couple hours. there was more variety in the biomes and some quality of life improvements in the interface, but overall i still felt like most of what i was doing was going on fetch quests, grinding for parts, and moving things on the inventory screen.

it's pretty demanding on pc specs just as a warning, if your laptop doesn't have a dedicated gpu i dunno if it'll work. i had trouble running it at more than 10 fps on mine

Imagine if they made a Metroid installment (with boss fights, etc) off the bones of this

i'd rather metroid take inspiration from xenoblade x than this i think

though i don't think there's been any metroid game with wide open areas to date, it's kinda supposed to be claustrophobic

Ive got a GeForce GTX 1050 with 2gb dedicated gpu ram so it might be ok.
(its a gaming laptop)

i played for under 2 hours and returned it

I played this on Creativity mode this time because I thought that the fetching and grinding was the worst part, but the experience is even emptier without any reason to do anything. Should I shoot rocks for no reason? Fly around some more?

yeah that should be fine to run it at 30fps

my 1070 can't quite sustain 60fps which is the first time I've seen it choke on a game, this definitely isn't the most optimized thing

you could build a spaceport 10 miles high and then take a screenshot. this will take you 7 weeks irl

xpost

i only play this in creative mode, I just wander around the galaxy and look at things, it's enjoyable enough to me

occasionally if you're lucky you stumble on a system that someone else has been to before and the planets are named like "poop" and "pee'

i reinstalled it the other day to give it a shot after reading generally positive reviews, and i lost interest after a couple hours. there was more variety in the biomes and some quality of life improvements in the interface, but overall i still felt like most of what i was doing was going on fetch quests, grinding for parts, and moving things on the inventory screen.

a couple days later, i found myself wanting to at least get work my way through the opening quests so that i could see some of all the things they've added over the couple of years. for some reason it manages to be addicting, despite the clearly bad game design, which hasn't been substantially altered by any of the updates. many of the rewards in the game are simply things that make the thing that you hate about the game slightly less worse - you can get a few more inventory spots, you can upgrade your mining beam so that you won't have to stand there for quite so long while gathering resources, you can upgrade your running speed so you're not quite so fucking slow.

all i wanted to do is try out one of the planetary vehicles, but quickly found that i need to complete a few quick simple steps before i'm allowed to do it:

Make sure you've got the blueprints and built a circular building/foundation. This will trigger the Overseer's appearance.
Talk to the Overseer for the first time. Receive the Blueprint for Glass.
Talk to the overseer. Go to the marked abandoned building, use the terminal. Receive the Storage Container building part.
Talk to overseer. They request 2 Voltaic cell. Scientist required to complete. Receive Weapons Terminal building part and recruit Armourer.
Talk to overseer, he asks for 50 Pugneum. 55 New building parts are learned.
Talk to overseer, he asks you to hire a base Armourer and acquire the Haz-Mat Gauntlets.
Talk to overseer. He asks for 50 Solanium Receive Agricultural Terminal building part. (Build terminal to continue)
Collect 50 Mordite. Give to overseer. Receive 12 decal building parts.
Talk to the overseer. They ask for a Circuit Board. Receive Galactic Trade Terminal building part.
Talk to the overseer. They ask you for a Gravitino Orb. Receive Landing Pad building part.
Talk to the overseer. They ask you for 100 Mordite. Receive Cuboid Room blueprints.

*interplanetary moans of despair

I also reinstalled and put in 10 or so hours. Some changes are real improvements: there are no longer bustling trade centers every few hundred meters on uninhabited planets, landscapes are no longer dominated by ore deposits, there's a third person view that allowed me to express my inner Gek/robot. However, since I was playing solo and wasn't too interested in base building, the gameplay loop remains the same: explore/exploit/craft, just so one can explore/exploit/craft with fewer annoyances.

The freighter mechanism may be broken, as I was *given* not one but two large freighters within an hour's play, just for clearing off a half dozen fighters in each case. I haven't figured out what to do with them, but park them next to stations (some of which they dwarf).

finally gave in and bought this. only had time to play for a few minutes yesterday. the first game i started i died from radiation pretty quickly. the second game i figured out what i was doing but realized i was in a deep crater with my ship unreachable way up on the cliffs above

Same thing happened to me on my first game. I think I read recently that the first planet always has some sort of hazardous condition. Seems kind of crazy to make the most difficult 30 minutes of the game the first 30 minutes!

I appreciate the attempt at a tutorial that immediately throws the player into a real situation, but they need to revamp the entire first 3 hours of the game.

I'm not sure revamping the first 3 hours in a positive way is really possible from a "writing" standpoint, given the interfaces the underlying game loop offers. They're there to teach the player how to repair/upgrade/fuel in a stepwise fashion, and the game loop for the 100th hour is upgrade/fuel.

As is, it works if the player works really hard to immerse themself in their character's role as a Traveller, a sentient minion of a simulated intelligence in a simulated universe. The stakes are an entire universe of 18 kajillion planets, that players won't care much about because its just a dozen planetary types/biomes repeated 18 kajillion times. There's still an arresting vista on every planet.

This might be a lot different in multiplayer, but as nothing beyond bases is "owned", there aren't stable social groups (yet), and most of the player base is seeded 25+ hours away from the galactic core, there really is no hope of an emergent EVE-like gameplay. Prosocial games are designed with enabling emergent collective player actions from the outset. Tech demos are designed for arresting vistas on every planet.

If you don't buy into any of that, it remains a way to pass time while coming off psychoactive drugs, and a pretty nice one. No shame in that.

i am still getting started and i'm sure i'll get bored with it eventually but i'm enjoying this a lot right now. one of those games where when i was going to sleep last night my brain was conjuring images of me walking around on a NMS planet.

one thing that i really like is how you don't just jump from being in space to being on a planet, you can fly around in the atmosphere or in the clouds or anywhere in between if you want.

So theres been several major updates since this thread was last posted in, and this game is... actually really fucking good now!?

One has come out just today. Vocanoes! Tornadoes! Weather systems! GIANT SAND WORM MONSTERS.

The trading/spacefareing/multiplayer looks proper now too, in fact it looks all too much for me and I'm struggling to get my head round it all.

Well the previous update didn't improve anything so I'm not holding my breath on this either. I'll perhaps watch some review/footage before I consider re-installing.

All the updates ruined the weird zen planet exploration experience.

i went back/reinstalled for one of the earlier updates (the one that added vehicles and basebuilding), and hit the same critical obstacle: i reach a certain point, about 2 hours in, where i'm already exhausted with aiming at stuff and waiting for the gauge to build up. for a mechanic that is so central to the game, it feels so unsatisfying. even if they unlocked some sort of "perfect" extraction, like if you release the button at the top of the gauge you get 1.5x resources or something? i don't know.

i guess the obv larger thing is that it's not so much the bla aesthetic experience of the gauge, it's more that so much of the game revolved around doing it. there's a huge genre of games that have the same structure, i guess - try to build or buy something new, realize you're missing a resource, go get it and build the thing, repeat. at one extreme side of the spectrum you have idle games, then somewhere in the middle there's no man's sky, where you actually have to look for the thing...

i don't know, this whole response is hamfisted, sorry. no man's sky fucked me up for life

Astroneer is a much friendlier execution of that spacebase-building game idea, I think. The tasks I hated doing in NMS I love doing in that game.

Did anyone ever get good at space combat in this game? I always died whenever I encountered an attacking party.

oh i found Astroneer too messy, just all your machines lying around everywhere. But I don't like NMS building either, I just wanted to chill about and feel that "zen planet exploration experience"

The game has become something it was never supposed to be, with a new audience I guess.

I'm finding chill zen exploring fine so far? I dunno *shrug* I dont look to it to be a space battles game. Actually I am also enjoying the trading/communication with the other races, that part seems more expansive than when I last looked at least theyre not just samey things sititng at desks now that youhave the Space Anomaly MMO portal and all that

I must say I find space battles/flying impossible but it could be the ship I have, which is a clunker suited to freighting, but I dont know if more zippy ships handle better?

I'll probably give this another look this weekend. forget what i know etc.

Have they changed anything with the inventory mechanic, because gotta admit - it's an arse.

You mean the annoyingly limited slots on suit/ship? Nah thats still a PITA. I think things are more stackable. Oh, and I dont know how old/new this is (it was new to me) you can build big storage boxes at your bases now that hold 20 slots each. So with that and ship to shore teleporting upgrades its not so bad.

And the game is still frustratingly obtuse and wont explain much of what you're meant to do. I know thats the idea - youre lost in space with no memory and its meant to feel that way - but gah.

That said I'm enjoying it heaps. I found a "paradise planet" (biome v similar to a lush Earth) and have set up a nice little base there. Plus one on a giant ball of rock full of gold and copper, and one on a desert planet with loads of minerals, so I can hop about easily for supplies.

i am just becoming ~enraptured~ with this game, and boy i really don't need another expansive time suck rn

i think i love it? but everything i'd say about it is negative

the landscapes and built environments are repetitive, the alien races are charming but cultureless and placeless, the crafting and unlock chains are not fun, the inventory management is a headache

i do really like the odd elegiac tone to everything, whether accidental or not. the 3 alien races you meet must have been part of absolutely monstrous galactic empires, but that's all gone now, they just chill in space and hang in the same spaceport bars -- everywhere, across a billion systems -- grunting at each other. planets that you can't survive on for a night are littered with little kiosks that teach you a word. how nice!

for now i've abandoned the quest chains and base building in favor of cheesing the 'cobalt flipping' trick while listening to music. no worries!!

every once in a while i install this and just wander around in free explore mode, its a nice vibes game but the actual gameplay was fundamentally not that fun and their zillion updates haven't really changed that afaict

why are the exocraft so fucking slow

Bit obsessed by this game.

Also feel I may be playing it the rest of my life/until my daughter leaves home and takes her Switch with her

God I think I gave up on this game not long after my last post. I was following the subreddit for a lot longer so I was aware there was loads of new stuff with building towns and such but I never got back into it.

I only got into it at the end of the summer. I don't play videogames too often anymore, but if I have an evening to myself it's very easy to lose several hours to this, not have achieved much but still have had a very good time.

Yeah I got into the 'revised' edition of this game not long ago, was loving it. Other things got me distracted, will jump back on it soon I hope.

50% off sale on Steam right now. For $30 I'm going in...

New large update now downloading....

(anybody tried it yet?)

I havent played it in a few years - it seemed like it was starting to get very loaded with ... stuff, and I wasnt keeping up.

I've been tooling around in it a bit and am a few hours in. It's pretty cool. I've played the first two hours like four times over the years and it's still sort of the same game but they've added a lot of flavor to it.

I can’t build a house to save my life, I’ve watched tutorials but the whole thing is beyond my very limited ken

Maybe I need to play my daughters Minecraft for a bit to ground myself

Got Astroneer cheap a couple of weeks ago and am loving it. Saw someone describe it as No Man's Sky made out of Play Doh and that's part of it. A lot more user-friendly, a lot more fun. No space dogfights, which I enjoyed in NMS but don't miss here. A lot more exploring. the building stuff seems a lot easier (is it the Duplo to NMS's Lego Technics?). And tho there's little in the way of danger, I did keep suffocating to death in caves until I learned the knack of it, and still do occasionally, and it's gently traumatic.

Unlike NMS, Astroneer is a great co-op game

Yeah I think Astroneer works much better in coop.