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No Man's Sky

Fedora Master

Arcane
Patron
Edgy
Joined
Jun 28, 2017
Messages
27,815
With the NEXT update the game is finally what it should have been at release. The problem with that is, that what was promised at release was still a pretty bad, bland game. It's still an interactive screensaver. Just now it's a screensaver you can play with friends with a little bit more to interact with.

The "make your own fun in this sandbox" approach does. not. work.
It only took devs 5 or so years to figure that out after the initial success of Minecraft.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
8,818
Location
Italy
i wanted to like nms, i truly wanted, but i couldn't because it was just too shit.
"NEXT! best thing since sliced bread! all the features you'll ever want and some more!", alright, let's try it. even a survival mode which should add a challenge which completely lacked before. 2 minutes loading on an ssd, "this is the tutorial, you need to gather these x things and oops, you died while doing so because a space suit can't stand 70° and also has like 5 minutes worth of oxygen". oh well, i'll go back to gathering materi- "no fucking way dude, you lost all your inventory, and also mined resources won't respawn, so your situation is worse than before. also the random generation means you're fucked because there's just not enough stuff to survive around you. sorry, fuck off now".
but i clenched my teeth and endured on, because i desperately need to like this game, in theory it's everything i've ever dreamt of.
in practice it is pure suffering.
both on land and space mobs are faster than you, but if on land you can hope they would get stuck because of bad pathfinding, in space you're doomed. you can't run away, and even if you manage to kill them more will spawn, literally more, double the last amount you killed. well, you have a small window, like 10 seconds to engage hyperdrive or at least recharge shields while more are warping in, but thanks to the always retarded interface which has to work on a fucking shitty console with 8 buttons 10 seconds are nowhere near enough to open the inventory and manually load the shields also thanks to horrid controls and mouse acceleration and/or shitty amount of frames per second (i mean, the game looks like ass and takes so long to elaborate frames it seems like it's painting them, on the same computer which can run a stunningly gorgeous the witcher 3 flawlessly) but also the hyperdrive won't engage while there are no enemies around anyway. "you died. also remember that you've lost all your inventory. sorry, fuck off now".
also the aim is off in an extremely retarded way. let me explain: we must play in third person now because it took them two years to come with such a basic, and promised, feature. we have a crosshair, but it's not where the interaction happens. the interaction happens along the line between the puppet and the projection of the crosshair. being it painted on screen and not actually a 3d object existant in game, it's maddening trying to guess where you're actually going to aim at, especially in close quarters, more often than not you're standing right behind what you're aiming at with the crosshair but it won't work, you'll have to keep running in circles around it looking for the right angle.
this is something glaring, obvious, anyone spending 5 minutes with this pile of shit MUST notice it, but now we should have understood how hello games works: "like i give a fuck, we're going to be paid anyway".
 

Zewp

Arcane
Joined
Sep 30, 2012
Messages
3,566
Codex 2013
The "make your own fun in this sandbox" approach does. not. work.
It only took devs 5 or so years to figure that out after the initial success of Minecraft.

I'm inclined to agree, although there are exceptions. Sandbox games need some kind of goal to work towards. Pure sandboxes rarely work. It's why in games like DayZ or Elite Dangerous people who have played for significant amounts of time turn to trolling other players as their only means of having fun. Meanwhile games like Terraria are ridiculously successful, because the devs realised that pure sandboxes don't make for compelling games. You've got all the sandbox elements you could want, but there's also concrete goals you can work towards in the form of bosses and events.

You do get sandboxes that work, but they mostly take the form of roguelikes. Like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. You don't invest enough time in any one session to really grow bored or start to feel that sense of "what am I supposed to do now" setting in. Compare it to Project Zomboid, though, which is similar in concept but falls flat. Zomboid makes it easy to survive for long periods of time, to the point where repetition and monotony starts setting in and then the lack of concrete goals starts chipping away at the fun.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
8,818
Location
Italy
blasphemies incoming.

i told you i wanted to like this game. i desperately do, because on paper it's close to the game of my dreams when i was a kid, so i kept suffering it these last days. and i'll tell you that after 10-15 hours of absolute nothingness (double that if you're playing survival, or maybe even triple it, i didn't dare try it) at some point the game opens up, and between the base, the upgrading, the freighters, the missions, the treasures hunting and so on, it somehow offers some entertainment, something to do.
it still looks like a beta, with lots of incomplete, barebone stuff tacked on the basic structure because otherwise it'd have been a screensaver (and an ugly and repetitive one at that) and a casual comparison with starbound utterly devastates it, but now it offers something to do at least.

planets are still retarded, all of them already populated, none of them barely believable. in starbound every planet is a surprise, you never know if or when you're going to meet cliffs, seas, outposts, cities, jungles, or even absolutely nothing, and even underground biomes vary. nms's planets are all the same, have all you need, go only up to 20m above sea or 20m underground, offer no kind of secret or surprise, exploration is discouraged both by this and by the constant need to recharge environment immunity, and let's not forget all the countless means of teleportation: after unlocking 4-5 systems you don't need to use hyperspace anymore, you just teleport from one base to another. for free.

ruled exploration out, upgrading equipment should be the reason to play: the suit can be improved and there are even two ways to raise its available slots, a bit flat but it's there. there's nothing like that for ships and the only weapon. even worse, both not only differ in number of slots but also in inherent boni, so you either have the infinite luck of finding just the perfect thing you were looking for (impossible, quite literally) or suffer forever knowing you're working with suboptimal equipment. why? you have the system in place already, why not use it?

every single part of this is a half-assed job, but at least it's half. at launch there was nothing. i can see an interesting game in two years from now if this bunch of baboons keeps working on it.


ps: what really puzzled me is the lack of mods. a game which sold millions and millions of copies should have quite a lot of mods, shouldn't it?
 

flyingjohn

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2012
Messages
2,944

No man sky subnautica update.
Looks like they are learning slightly,they seems to be adding a actual human touch to the procedural generation.
 

J_C

One Bit Studio
Patron
Developer
Joined
Dec 28, 2010
Messages
16,947
Location
Pannonia
Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
I have to stay, the devs really got their shit together after the botched launch, the game starts to reach a level of competence at this point.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
8,818
Location
Italy
no, it's about mindlessly grinding for materials to craft things to mindlessly craft things a little slower. really, whatever little automation the games has, you'd do better, faster and easier do it manually.
 

Curratum

Guest
If this loads up in less than the 7 minutes it took last time I tried it, I might reinstall!
 
Joined
Oct 1, 2018
Messages
2,323
Location
Illinois
Sounds kwan, just enunciating and using a flat narrator voice. The thing that makes me think she might not be kwan and instead might be a fucking leaf or some other manner of heathen is her pronunciation of colorful, which almost sounds like "Cahlerful". Around 48 seconds in. I don't know bros, but I know I'll be replaying that video all night and jerking off while I think about it.
 

Makabb

Arcane
Shitposter Bethestard
Joined
Sep 19, 2014
Messages
11,753
They constantly add new things, but the only gameplay centers around mining to make stuff that makes you mine more, amazing.
 

Curratum

Guest
I'm fine with that, tbh. I bought the game for no gameplay, just to drift about and look at cool things. Seems they're adding enough of that to make me reinstall.
 

Agame

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 29, 2015
Messages
1,702
Location
I cum from a land down under
Insert Title Here
They constantly add new things, but the only gameplay centers around mining to make stuff that makes you mine more, amazing.

Yes and all these idiots praise it as the second coming now after they "fixed" the game. Its still the same game it was on launch day. There is nothing to do except roam around generic proceduraly generated landscape. Oh but you can do it with friends now so obviously its a brilliant game.

Mark my words we will see the same thing happen to Fallout 76. In a year or so the apologists will begin to defend it, "its a good game now that Bethesda has patched and fixed it from the terrible launch!". And the masses will follow. Its trendy to shit on F76 atm, just like it was trendy to shit on NMS. But you can already see certain people, eg. CohnCarnage setting up the process, he is already saying it will be a good game, he is "enjoying playing it" but its just buggy on launch.
 

Latelistener

Arcane
Joined
May 25, 2016
Messages
2,579
Forget about this shit, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is the Next Big Thing:



Makkab approves it:

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