No Man's Sky

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.