One thing I really like about this game, and your post illustrates it, is that the element of chance actually does impact player experience in a meaningful way. Most of the planets I've gotten so far have been fucking hideous, but Ashley's home planet was a lush rainforest loaded with fauna. Thing is, the ugly ones with awful atmosphere yield better minerals, so it evens out.
Agreed on the waypoint suggestion, which I'm sure won't be difficult to implement if they so choose. Currently, I'm not actually sure what waypoints are for besides saving and uploading the discovery for units.
One thing I really like about this game, and your post illustrates it, is that the element of chance actually does impact player experience in a meaningful way. Most of the planets I've gotten so far have been fucking hideous, but Ashley's home planet was a lush rainforest loaded with fauna. Thing is, the ugly ones with awful atmosphere yield better minerals, so it evens out.
Agreed on the waypoint suggestion, which I'm sure won't be difficult to implement if they so choose. Currently, I'm not actually sure what waypoints are for besides saving and uploading the discovery for units.
i've gotten some decent tech upgrades from the waypoints but that's about it.
one really positive thing about this game is that hello games has said they're committed to providing new features and content via free patches rather than paid dlc. on top of that, this game is basically the only thing the developer has ever made. they have nothing else to focus on but to improve this game for the moment. so i'm satisfied with what we have now, and definitely think it's a great base to build a really cool universe on top of.
most open-ended games i like such as the sims, civilization, etc (i sort of put nms in the same category) end up starting as okay games and then become leaps and bounds better with patches and expansions. paradox games releases dozens of patches and cheap dlc that adds huge amounts of content to every game they put out for years (they're still releasing expansions for crusader kings 2 - the tenth major expansion comes out next month and adds a shit load of mechanics around the black death and other plagues. the game was released in 2012 and the vanilla mode was godawful - it's a classic now and everyone should play it). i'm optimistic to see what they can do here.
i've gotten some decent tech upgrades from the waypoints but that's about it.
one really positive thing about this game is that hello games has said they're committed to providing new features and content via free patches rather than paid dlc. on top of that, this game is basically the only thing the developer has ever made. they have nothing else to focus on but to improve this game for the moment. so i'm satisfied with what we have now, and definitely think it's a great base to build a really cool universe on top of.
most open-ended games i like such as the sims, civilization, etc (i sort of put nms in the same category) end up starting as okay games and then become leaps and bounds better with patches and expansions. paradox games releases dozens of patches and cheap dlc that adds huge amounts of content to every game they put out for years (they're still releasing expansions for crusader kings 2 - the tenth major expansion comes out next month and adds a shit load of mechanics around the black death and other plagues. the game was released in 2012 and the vanilla mode was godawful - it's a classic now and everyone should play it). i'm optimistic to see what they can do here.
I'm actually very new to open world/exploration/building/mining games like NMS and jumped on the bandwagon mostly because of the art style, so I'm looking forward to seeing what is set on the foundation that is in place, which I still find lovely. I've seen people say that Minecraft was a hollow shell of what it is now prior to the updates.
Everyone just needs to be patient, especially with a studio this small.
this exactly. as a base game, it's a hell of a lot of fun. their first priority should be fixing the issues so everyone can play, and then i'm sure the universe will be expanded. but in general gamers are idiots and can't see further ahead than their own noses.
Hi guys, the year is really 2013, No Man's Sky is only a cool idea in early development, and I'm playing Assassin's Creed Black Flag for the first time.
Alright so yeah I saw it for $8 a while ago and only just decided to play it, kind of dreading having to play another AC game but wow, it's so much fun. Just all the pirating is great. Also despite the appearance of Blackbeard it doesn't have quite so much the Forrest Gump feel of being involved with every single significant historical event/person of the time that the other games have, it truly feels immersive to the place and time rather than a haphazard rush to see recognisable faces. I was disappointed when it was announced because I prefer to see less popular historical settings utilised and fuck white guy protagonists but it's a lot of fun, even if the Templar/Animus stuff is still frustrating as fuck. The game within a game stuff is unbelievably dumb - at first I liked the ballsiness of it - but really it sells the game short. Given the fact that the best things about it are the things that make it less of an AC game - the naval combat (it's messy but who cares when you're boarding a ship and exploding powdered wig dudes), the exploration, the shanties - I doubt I'll bother with Unity (even though I like the setting) or Syndicate (even though there's a woman) as this is the first AC game I've played that has lived up to the potential, but yeah. Good fun. Good pirating.
A lot of people haaaaaaate No Man's Sky and the critic reviews have been mixed.
Personally, I'm still enjoying it about 12 hours in but understand the complaints fully. Combat fucking sucks (I avoid it whenever possible) and if you visit, say, 20 planets, you're going to see a couple that are very similar to one another. So far I've been to maybe 8 planets over three solar systems and haven't run into any glaring duplicates. In fact, I've found a couple of major oddities; the last planet I visited was mostly gold and I used it to buy a new spacecraft. That being said, the layout of each planet is more or less the same, with item placement, weather, and flora and fauna amounts being the only major differences in most cases.
A few things that I would like to see from future updates:
-Base building (on the way)
-Bigger ships that can hold fleets (also on the way)
-Confirmation that you can run into other players
-The ability to tame animals and use them for battle/transportation
-Less pop-in
-A slightly greater sense of danger overall, but not too much
It's a solid game, but definitely not for everyone and I think there's a lot of room for improvement in future patches. I could see myself putting 25-30 hours into it and then taking a break until the next major patch.
Yeah, I agree with this. It's not that it gets boring, but after a while it can get a bit repetitive. The inventory management system is a bit annoying. I haven't really spent more than an hour at a time with this game, so I'll see how it develops. My worst experience so far was getting stuck in a huge cave I coulnd't find the exit for. The lack of maps/problematic waypoint can be a hindrance, but I don't see how they can fix that. The upgrades should make this a fun game.
I think some additional procedurally generated quests would also increase the sense of accomplishment (they have this in every RPG, and it provides some good side entertainement).
actually yea, i'm really starting to get a lot of the reasons people are so pissed off at this game.
after the initial novelty of seeing the planet geographies and biodiversities wore off i realized there's no real sense of discovery in this game. every single planet and moon has outposts and research stations. there is literally nowhere in the entire galaxy that is uninhabited, and you are actually discovering nothing. the entire point of the game for me was going to be exploring and charting new planets, and every time i get to one there's a dozen outposts all filled with aliens and advanced machinery.
space stations i don't mind quite as much, but every single system has one that's got permanent staff and is very busy all the time. we always knew these would exist, but i had always figured they would be relatively few and far between, and that they would be sort of a regional hub for a collection of local star systems. i was looking forward to collecting artifacts or rare minerals from an uncharted system and having a choice of systems to go to to sell it. you shouldn't be able to buy and sell literally everything in the game just by launching and pointing your ship straight up for 30 seconds no matter where you are.
so i decided okay, maybe i should focus less on mining and trading and just go for the center of the galaxy since the developers insisted repeatedly before release that there would be some amazing cool reward there, and i did...
and this is when the game imploded for me. i diligently followed the trail, bought or crafted fuel as i needed to, and after about 3 days of this grind i finally got to the center last night. i clicked to warp to it, excited to see what i had been so excited for in the build up to this game, and...
there's literally fucking nothing. the game does a reverse version of the title screen, zooming out instead of in, for like 30 seconds, and then just plops you back to zero in a new galaxy that's exactly the same as the previous one. no new amazing super-ship, nothing different about it at all. just like you warped and then came out of warp on the surface of a planet with a shitty crashed ship. like you're just playing the same thing over and over. wtf, why would i want to do any of that again?
and it's not like there is a reward after 5 galactic cores or anything. there are videos on youtube of guys going into dozens of new galaxies and it's the same thing every time.
this isn't a case of "features to be added later" like a civilization game. it's not even a case of "this is a rushed product to meet a deadline" this game is not even remotely close to the one we were pitched. for example:
where the fuck is this game that was presented two years ago? where are even half the things that existed in this? the planets certainly don't look anything like this. where are the massive hundred-ship convoys of freighters you see here? flight controls and space combat are absolute shit compared to this. it's one thing to promise features that you can't deliver, every developer does that. but it's when you not only don't tell gamers about the things you've cut out, but instead continue to say these features exist in the game, to keep the hype train going and the preorders coming in, that it crosses a line. people say "well, if you think of it like minecraft it's gonna be pretty cool when you can do base building". well yea, but minecraft also doesn't cost nearly $70 for the most basic version.
i definitely don't believe anymore that there won't be any paid dlc, and i certainly will not be paying for it. i'll just torrent it out of curiosity, but hello games is not getting any more of my money off this.
i dunno. i really wanted so badly to like this game and tried so hard to, but i can't overlook the "ending". i feel pretty ripped off for buying this, and wish i hadn't gone over the steam hours-played threshold and could get my money back. i'm frustrated.
Wooooww I'm surprised to hear such vitriol coming from you for this game.
I got it for $48, which is nice, even though that's a pretty steep price for what's essentially an early access title. I've stopped playing the game but will pick up again to check out updates and mindlessly mine. I like that sort of thing every now and again.
Meanwhile, I picked up The Last of Us Remastered, Battlefront and Until Dawn at Best Buy for less than the cost of No Man's Sky because they had a sale going on. Started playing TLOU but haven't gotten that far yet. It's such a sad game.
man that "ending" really felt insulting tho...at this point i think i'll leave it for a few months, then go back to it and try to have an open mind when the weather turns cold. if they actually try to fix this with free patches, then great. but i'm not paying for shit from that company, or pre-ordering for any game (my last three preorders were simcity, civ: beyond earth, and no man's sky ), ever again.
buying the new deus ex tonight/tomorrow instead. it seems pretty good and i think it'll be a good way for my newly-unemployed self to procrastinate from job hunting unwind after long days of job hunting.
Wooooww I'm surprised to hear such vitriol coming from you for this game.
I got it for $48, which is nice, even though that's a pretty steep price for what's essentially an early access title. I've stopped playing the game but will pick up again to check out updates and mindlessly mine. I like that sort of thing every now and again.
Meanwhile, I picked up The Last of Us Remastered, Battlefront and Until Dawn at Best Buy for less than the cost of No Man's Sky because they had a sale going on. Started playing TLOU but haven't gotten that far yet. It's such a sad game.
Did you play The Last of Us when it came out for PS3? Damn, I really love this game. One of my favorite, ever. The connection they make you create with the characters is just incredible. Don't want to spoil anything, so I'll stop here.
Did you play The Last of Us when it came out for PS3? Damn, I really love this game. One of my favorite, ever. The connection they make you create with the characters is just incredible. Don't want to spoil anything, so I'll stop here.
i've been bored this afternoon and taken a look and it seems no man's sky is highly moddable. thank goodness for that. there's already a few mods i've heard about that sound interesting so maybe i'll be able to have some fun with this game after all until the new dlc comes out.
HA! we all thought there would be dlc - nope! nobody's heard a thing from the studio since the PC release. no tweets, no interviews, no announcements, nothing. sean murray has literally disappeared to go swim in his pile of money.
this is looking more and more like the biggest bait-and-switch con in video game history.
on the other hand, deus ex is really good so far, other than some minor annoyances with the control scheme.
go to minmus first. it's easier to land on and easier to get home from (less gravity and a slower rotation period means less fuel needed to get off it). the exact same rocket will get you to both because of this difference, just remember to adjust your inclination before you do the burn to exit kerbin orbit. doing it mid-course burns so much fuel you'll never get back, although rescue missions can be a lot of fun.
get civ afterwards for sure. it's the best and deepest of the vanilla base games since civ 2 and has a lot of cool potential for expansion too.
No but for reals, KSP is actually like my real life work. I mean if you can play KSP, it's pretty much sketch board orbital mechanics. Very little is different between this game and actual systems level space mission analysis
Right now my issue is mostly technological limitation. I have the power to get to Mun and Minmus pretty easily, just not the ability for landing and control. I chose my technology in a pretty shit fashion, so I can get to the moons but can rendezvous/dock with an object in orbit around Kerbin yet.
rendezvous and docking is wayyyyyy harder than moon landings, for me. i sort of have the hang of it, and last time i was playing i was trying to build an orbital refueling station so that i can get to duna and eve. i've sent one-way trips and satellites, but haven't been able to get a kerbal to duna and back - eve's gravity is way too hard to come back from a landing unless you're a pro. i can build a spacecraft that theoretically should have enough fuel, but it ends up being so heavy that the extra fuel gets burned just getting the craft to LKO.
and yes, we can get married as soon as my divorce is final next month. i thought you'd never ask. see you in vegas on thanksgiving
Theoretically, docking shouldn't be that difficult. But you definitely need low power vector thrusting. Something I don't have at the moment.
As for your theoretically scaled rockets that seem to be burning all the extra fuel by LEO -- as a principal of design I suggest attempting to have every stage of your rocket provide the same or similar Δv. Just a general rule or thumb. And another thing -- the quicker you burn fuel, the better. The quicker you move between stages, the better. In all cases, atmosphere or not. That is to say, an ideal space launch vehicle is a catapult.
Im sure it comes as common sense... the less fuel and less engines you have to change the momentum of, the less impulse required to move such an object. As you obviously know, the only real downfall is that you have to get through the atmosphere. But struts and coupling devices are your best friends.
i haven't played since 1.0, and holy shit is 1.2 ever different. i felt like i needed to re-learn the mechanics so i restarted my career mode. my goal is the mun by the end of the weekend.
), ever again.
