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Post by Crumpy Six on Aug 31, 2016 9:40:52 GMT
There was some talk about No Man's Sky on these boards a while ago, with a few people looking forward to it. It's sad to see that it has apparently been a victim of the hype machine, with customers now complaining that a lot of the promised features haven't been realised and the final product isn't even all that good in its own right. I don't know how fair that is. I haven't been following the development myself, but one of my friends has been playing it and says it's pretty good, maybe easier to enjoy outside of the context of the hype and unfulfilled promises. Has anyone here played it? Any thoughts? It looks really interesting and is the kind of game I would enjoy, but it's hard not to be put off by a game with a "mostly negative" rating when the list price is still £40. I was reading an article about it which compared No Man's Sky to Godus, in so far as the developer's over-ambitious plans hurt the game when it came to be released. The article speculated that maybe customers and fans are to blame for not understanding game development properly. But it also suggests that situations like this are an argument for killing pre-orders, which frankly, they are. There is zero reason for anyone to pre-order a game these days. There is nothing to be gained by the customer and everything to be gained by the studio, who have guaranteed themselves a sale regardless of what they release. |
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Lord Ba'al
Supreme Deity
Posts: 6,260
Pledge level: Half a Partner
I like: Cats; single malt Scotch; Stargate; Amiga; fried potatoes; retro gaming; cheese; snickers; sticky tape.
I don't like: Dimples in the bottom of scotch bottles; Facebook games masquerading as godgames.
Steam: stonelesscutter
GOG: stonelesscutter
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Post by Lord Ba'al on Aug 31, 2016 10:06:08 GMT
What are the most prominent complaints?
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Post by Crumpy Six on Aug 31, 2016 10:15:56 GMT
Not having followed the life cycle of the game I'm not entirely sure and was wondering this myself. According to the Reddit post linked in the article the key complaints are: - Lack of the promised level of planetary physics
- All the ships are functionally identical (instead of different classes enabling different play styles)
- The faction system is overly simplistic
- Overly simplistic resource and crafting system
In addition I've seen it heavily criticised for instability and performance problems, and while there is a vast amount of exploration possible the landscapes and planetary life you encounter lack variety. I don't know how much substance there is to these complaints. My friend said he didn't encounter any problems with performance, for example. Edit: To expand on this, it seems the developer has been accused of making claims about the complexity and features of the game just a few months before the commercial release, which means he was either deliberately overselling the game or (more likely) late-notice technical/quality issues meant large portions of the game had to be cut or abandoned. He's also been accused of using misleading demo footage from a more feature-rich early build for marketing purposes. It's less easy to be sympathetic about this kind of behaviour, which of course we've grown thoroughly accustomed to from 22Cans. |
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Post by greay on Aug 31, 2016 23:37:28 GMT
I'm enjoying the game a lot. It's very... zen-like  Why might you not like it? It is very buggy, and the UI is simply bad. It's not a very complex game, and there's very little challenge. The crafting is pretty shallow, and the points of interest on the planets (the buildings & such) are way too similar. It's also a shame that some of the features didn't make it into the final game, but it's also still being worked on. At the moment, it's mostly bug fixes and performance improvements, but supposedly a base-building mechanic is one of the next features to be added. But the draw of the game is to explore alien planets, and this is the part where it shines. The planets are mostly very pretty, and all unique. Yes, you'll notice some patterns. Certain types of plants or creatures are far more common than others, but they'll still usually have some unique feature. On the other hand, this "baseline" for the organisms is what makes the really weird ones stand out a lot, so it's a tradeoff. If you're just looking at each creature individually, focusing on the patterns, I can see why some people think the life lacks variety – but if you're looking at it on a per-planet basis, there's a lot. So I enjoy traveling to a new planet & just walking around for a while, scanning new creatures and naming some of them (mostly the animals). Periodically I'll spend some time gathering things to upgrade some of my equipment, but not that much. And I'm also enjoying uncovering the backstories for the alien races. |
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Post by morsealworth on Sept 2, 2016 8:45:43 GMT
I don't have much to say.
Death! Death! Death! Death! Vy'keen warrior! Death!
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Post by Crumpy Six on Sept 2, 2016 11:18:18 GMT
Thanks for the feedback  I think I'll buy it, but only after the price has gone down. |
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Post by earlparvisjam on Sept 7, 2016 3:36:36 GMT
I've played worse games but it's far from the best I've ever played. It's a game that teases so much more out there to explore, but fails to actually deliver on it. while creatures and environments can be wildly diverse, it ends up feeling like the same thing with a new skin after a few planets. Apart from hostile critters bum rushing you, the general atmosphere is stuff just wandering around aimlessly for you to interact with them. Apart from non-hostiles' tendency to flee from you, they have the AI of an Everquest mob.
There are 3 races to encounter and interacting with them is like interacting with red, blue, or yellow bricks after you've figured out the 6 or 7 different interchanges. The puzzles were interesting for a while but repeat surprisingly quickly, making them a matter of rushing through them so you can see if the reward was worth bothering. Disturbingly quickly, I ran out of new blueprints to find and the "already have this blueprint" message soon feels like a taunt that you've just wasted a bunch of time and fuel landing your ship to see what is in that derelict structure that looks the same as the last 5 you encountered.
Then, there's the interface. It's a mutant abomination of a f2p mmo inventory and console port control structure. Inventory is a series of screens for suit, ship, and weapon with far too little space. Upgrades to your suit are constructed and then take up space in the respective screen. Want to add protection to that toxic atmosphere? That's a slot. Cold? Slot. Jump pack boost? Slot. Oh, and you're given a minuscule number of slots and adding them is tedious, expensive, and repetitive. To cap it all off, once you've constructed an upgrade, it's locked into the slot it was built in. Either you deconstruct it to try to reorganize your inventory or you live with it where it's located.
Oh, and don't forget about recharging your stuff. To recharge ship shields, you have to enter the ship inventory, right click on the shield upgrade, and then select the material you want to use for fuel. It begs for a quick key to make space combat something other than a lesson in frustration.
To be fair, I had about 3 hours of fun before I felt like doing something more interesting than taking screen shots of majestic landscapes. Get it when it's a $10 sale item.
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Post by Gmr Leon on Sept 13, 2016 2:28:39 GMT
I'm enjoying the game a lot. It's very... zen-like Why might you not like it? It is very buggy, and the UI is simply bad. It's not a very complex game, and there's very little challenge. The crafting is pretty shallow, and the points of interest on the planets (the buildings & such) are way too similar. It's also a shame that some of the features didn't make it into the final game, but it's also still being worked on. At the moment, it's mostly bug fixes and performance improvements, but supposedly a base-building mechanic is one of the next features to be added. But the draw of the game is to explore alien planets, and this is the part where it shines. The planets are mostly very pretty, and all unique. Yes, you'll notice some patterns. Certain types of plants or creatures are far more common than others, but they'll still usually have some unique feature. On the other hand, this "baseline" for the organisms is what makes the really weird ones stand out a lot, so it's a tradeoff. If you're just looking at each creature individually, focusing on the patterns, I can see why some people think the life lacks variety – but if you're looking at it on a per-planet basis, there's a lot. So I enjoy traveling to a new planet & just walking around for a while, scanning new creatures and naming some of them (mostly the animals). Periodically I'll spend some time gathering things to upgrade some of my equipment, but not that much. And I'm also enjoying uncovering the backstories for the alien races. This is way late to the party, but wanted to add in that I agree with Greay here mostly. It's certainly buggy, but coming from a recent spate of survival horror games, I honestly didn't mind the UI all that much. It isn't fantastic, but it isn't nearly as awful as some people say, if you ask me. Once you learn what you need for your primary techs, there's no reason to fill up on anything else until you know you'll need those resources, and you can generally last awhile on two to three stacks of primary resources, especially if you recharge the primary techs before they dip too low. Generally, I think this game's worst wrap is coming from a dumb marketing campaign that somehow made people mix it up with triple-A content standards, which combined with a matching price of $60 didn't help matters at all. If this had come out like The Witness at $40 or so, I don't think anyone would have given as much of a damn about it falling short in certain areas. For the PC version, I'd hesitate to recommend it unless you're running a more up to date PC with an Intel processor and, if memory serves, an Nvidia graphics card, as at launch it wasn't playing well with much else, and even now some people are reporting some issues (albeit what hardware they're running is anyone's guess). That said, I'd say if you're down for a unique experience, and it truly is unique, that you want to play between other games and aren't looking to binge through, it's a great game at any price to play in bursts. It just isn't a game to be binged through like an open world game with a campaign, such as GTA or Far Cry or anything like that. You might be able to enjoy it that way, but from many of the accounts I've read, it seems more common that people just get burnt out and disappointed that way, since it really isn't built very well for that. As earlparvisjam notes, you very rapidly collect all the tech blueprints (as for some bizarre reason, there's nothing gating the suit/multitool ones, only the product ones) and come across many of the basic puzzles. However, there are little side stories that are somewhat fun to dig into. Earlparvisjam mentions the upgrades in the derelicts, but doesn't mention that they also hold a story preceding their acquisition, of which there seem to be at least three distinct stories to pick through. Admittedly they don't seem to connect to much else, but they at the very least add a tinge to the atmosphere of the game's universe. Also somewhat fun to pick up are the races' backstories, if you're into that. Each of them has a fairly interesting one, at least if you ask me, but many folks didn't seem to care since they didn't lead to coming across any majorly distinct ruins or missions or what have you. Having not been mentioned at all in the marketing leading up to the game's release, though, they were a pleasant surprise to me. |
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I think I'll buy it, but only after the price has gone down.
