No Man's Sky

[TheFeniX]

Seems like someone is competing for the Spore award for over-promising and Brink award for broken launches.

NMS is an open-world space/planet exploration game. "Endgame" seems to be to fly to the center of the universe for "reasons." Worlds are procedurally generated and you mine resources so you can leave. The randomly generated lifeforms are, at least from what I've seen, "pants on head" levels of idiotic looking. Many "professional" reviewers are saying it's a novel concept that gets stale quickly and a bunch of cool ideas that don't come together as a game. $60 price tag at that.

The user reviews are getting hammered due to technical difficulties. Even the PS4 version seems to crash often. Hilariously, you can see these in some of the HYPEHYPHYPE fan videos. NVidia finally released a driver fixing a lot of the issues, but the game still seems to suffer from poor performance on killer rigs. What's even more amazing is that the game seems to have a laughably low internal resolution. Running it at 1024x768 vs 4k makes little to no difference.

I remember seeing a lot of hype for this a year or so back. "NEW NOVEL CONCEPT: YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE THIS!" I love the fact that gaming is so inundated with people who think Sunk Costs is a cool band name rather than something to avoid that they continue to defend bullshit like this. It's just not fucking acceptable, yet at every turn, we're bombarded with shit that doesn't/might work and you're entitled or a troll for demanding a functioning product for your money.

Even if the game launch wasn't a train-wreck, the concept alone sounds boring as Hell. I thought it would be a cool way to explore the universe with friends, yet there's no actual multiplayer, even though that was talked up originally.

[Iroscato]

Yeah, I was excited at first but this does look like an updated version of Spore, with the aforementioned inability to ever live up to its own premise/promise. After playing the stupid-big and stupid-shallow Elite Dangerous, I'm not hugely fussed over this.

[Mr Bean]

The general consensus is this is an indie game that got overhyped and they tried charging Triple A pricing for what remains an indie game. However like Minecraft the basic framework is there. I'd call No Man's Sky Minecraft as of December of 2010, lots of promise and it's for sure a game but they are just scratching the surface.

But the main problem with the game is the fact that you have all of this interesting exploration and system expansion tied onto the fact that your super space suit for quite a long time will kill you stone dead inside ten minutes. In fact many systems seem to have almost no endurance.

One commentator mentioned flying the ship the thing that should be the most interesting bit is hampered by the constant need for refueling. "It's like being given a new seven hundred horsepower supercar with amazing 0-60 and horrible handling and oh by the way the fuel consumption at top speed is four miles a galleon and in order to save space we only installed a half galleon gas tank.

[TheFeniX]

Even at release Minecraft had a decent amount of depth. The building mechanics alone along with the ability to dig down, which opens up a whole other avenue of building. And Minecraft started out cheap and is only now a $50 (or whatever) title. NMS is charging AAA bucks for a skeleton, a framework, with little idea if those concepts will be expanded on. People ordered steak and got 6 tons of cooked ground-beef: yea, it's a lot of food, but you can only eat so much ground beef before it just gets old.

Meanwhile, in a game like ARK: I bought in (on sale) under the notion that the game wasn't complete and that it may never be. I don't recall anything like that being said for NMS. It's just another example of how slick marketing and word of mouth can rail customers. Once again: I'm glad Steam returns are a thing, otherwise they'd be pocketing all their bullshit cash and sneering at reviews.

The game is extremely big. But so is the Sahara desert. Doesn't mean all areas are engaging. 3 alien races of advanced nature and a grind to try and learn their language one word at a time. The same little robots across different worlds that attack you for no "raisins." The wildly different planets that all manage to look the same. Being tied to the ship no matter what. No MP.

Spore wasn't this bad because there WAS a game there. The gameplay did evolve as time was spent. This seems much less like a game and much more like an OCD simulator. You're doing things because the developer has given you the same limited number of things to do and people like to do things. There's no emergent gameplay, which is pretty important in these types of games. For instance, Minecraft: getting yourself established then dealing with the idea of moving on, running into new environments or monsters or people or whatever. Even just perfecting an already perfect build to make it more perfect.

[Vendetta]

I'm not sure where the overpromising comes from?

I watched the dev videos and interviews and No Man's Sky is basically what they said it would be. (Except with more inventory management).

I mean it's not what the internet decided it was going to be, but the internet is full of morons, so who in their right mind was listening to them?

You walk around planets, laser rocks, and give silly names to passing wildlife that no-one will ever see because the galaxy is improbably large. Just like the previews said you would do.

This isn't even being taken in by hype, this is people autogenerating their own wacky sperg version of a game that isn't out yet and being annoyed that the game was what the developer said it was going to be not what they imagined based on them being strange in the head.

[PREDATOR490]

I thought this game was multiplayer - The steam page specifically lists it AS multiplayer as one of the tags. I also see news reports about the multiplayer tag being under a 'sticker' on the box. Quotes from the Developer that the chances of meeting another person were slim.

If someone says it is SLIM then the inference is that it is possible to meet someone. I have not seen any outright statement the game was single player.

The game itself, disgustingly shallow. Very little is explained and indications this game was made by complete amateurs. The map screen that says press TAB to scan for discoveries - Oops, the button is actually X.
Various upgrades but no indications or stats to show what the actual benefit is or they have some sort of adjacency system to further enhance things.

I was not on the hype train and only saw the thing on Steam after it was highlighted to me as a Multiplayer Open World game by Steam's recommended list. The added amusement of watching the community explode and people's futile attempt to justify their purchase when the 'endgame' turns out to be a reset.

I still cannot fathom what the point of the game is when you get to the centre of the galaxy, it puts you in a new galaxy. Either the game wants you to get to the centre of the universe or this is meant to be a newgame+. Either way, the game makes no attempt to really indicate what the fuck is going on.

[Flagg]

I'm not sure where the overpromising comes from?

I watched the dev videos and interviews and No Man's Sky is basically what they said it would be. (Except with more inventory management).

I mean it's not what the internet decided it was going to be, but the internet is full of morons, so who in their right mind was listening to them?

You walk around planets, laser rocks, and give silly names to passing wildlife that no-one will ever see because the galaxy is improbably large. Just like the previews said you would do.

This isn't even being taken in by hype, this is people autogenerating their own wacky sperg version of a game that isn't out yet and being annoyed that the game was what the developer said it was going to be not what they imagined based on them being strange in the head.

Welcome to the world of fat nerd gaming circa forever. It's almost like a small but incredibly loud minority of total fucking morons make so much noise that game paid shills journalists feel the need to cater to them because actual normal people who play games as a hobby don't waste their fucking time in the various sewer system of comment sections and steam forums complaining about games, but actually play them (hard to believe, I know)!

[TheFeniX]

The multi-player comments are really just what's on everyone's mind since two randoms found each other on the first day. I'll concede the rest because I'm not going to dig for old hype videos from over a year ago. I would also consider a lot of this on Sony being desperate for some AAA action in 2016 for trying to make an indie game look like a AAA title.

It's almost like a small but incredibly loud minority of total fucking morons make so much noise that game paid shills journalists feel the need to cater to them because actual normal people who play games as a hobby don't waste their fucking time in the various sewer system of comment sections and steam forums complaining about games, but actually play them (hard to believe, I know)!

Yea, fat nerds are loud and obnoxious. But I had to laugh audibly at the idea that gaming "journalism" in any shape or form caters to them. The only time the click-bait squad hammers a game without the kid's gloves is if they have support of the so-called "normal" people who taste something so shitty even they couldn't stomach it. Other than that, they will dance for whoever is buying ads, and that's definitely not fat nerds.

[Vendetta]

The multi-player comments are really just what's on everyone's mind since two randoms found each other on the first day. I'll concede the rest because I'm not going to dig for old hype videos from over a year ago. I would also consider a lot of this on Sony being desperate for some AAA action in 2016 for trying to make an indie game look like a AAA title.

What the guy said about multi is "this is not a multiplayer game, even if you did find another player which is unlikely you might not even be able to tell that it was another player".

So y'know, just like No Man's Sky really is.

But to fatnerds, and people who write articles for fatnerds like you linked (though apparently no games journos do that?) it's worth asking "did a man lie by giving a reasonably accurate description of reality".

[bilateralrope]

The first player to discover things gets to name them. I guess that the discoveries of the alien NPCs you're interacting with don't count

"this is not a multiplayer game, even if you did find another player which is unlikely you might not even be able to tell that it was another player".

Either multiplayer where you meat other players is possible, or it's not. Every time Sean Murry said that meeting another player was unlikely was him saying that it was possible. The stickers covering the online play icon makes me think that multiplayer was intended, but was cancelled very late in development. Without anyone telling the public about it, which still makes it a lie.

It probably doesn't help that the No Man's Sky community seems fucking toxic:
- Death threats to a reporter for reporting that the game would be delayed
- Then, when Sean Murray confirmed the delay, he got death threats.
Still, we shouldn't judge a single player game just because its community is bad.

[Flagg]

The multi-player comments are really just what's on everyone's mind since two randoms found each other on the first day. I'll concede the rest because I'm not going to dig for old hype videos from over a year ago. I would also consider a lot of this on Sony being desperate for some AAA action in 2016 for trying to make an indie game look like a AAA title.

What the guy said about multi is "this is not a multiplayer game, even if you did find another player which is unlikely you might not even be able to tell that it was another player".

So y'know, just like No Man's Sky really is.

But to fatnerds, and people who write articles for fatnerds like you linked (though apparently no games journos do that?) it's worth asking "did a man lie by giving a reasonably accurate description of reality".

What I love is the whining about how it's a space survival sim as if it ever pretended to be anything else, when trailers for the game specifically touted the space survival sim aspects of the game. But since it wasn't part of fat idiots fantasies about what the game actually is, it's all a huge bait and switch. Like I said, if the whiners spent as much time playing the games they claim are horrid shit, they might find that it's not, or at least would move on to play a game they don't hate (if such a game that isn't part of the CoD franchise exists).

[Grumman]

However like Minecraft the basic framework is there.

I don't know if that's true. Minecraft comes from the Dwarf Fortress school of terrain generation, in which procedural generation is used to produce three-dimensional arrays of terrain data - data that can be replaced on an individual level to permanently modify the world. I don't know if NMS is set up to allow persistent changes without using a bitcoin-style blockchain of sequentially applied terrain-deforming effects or by replacing the highly efficient procedural terrain with storage-intensive meshes.

[bilateralrope]

I have just one question about No Man's Sky: Why does your character want to reach the centre of the galaxy ?

[Vendetta]

I have just one question about No Man's Sky: Why does your character want to reach the centre of the galaxy ?

You don't have a character, you have an avatar. It's not here to tell you a story, it's here to provide you a world (or many) to wander around in.

[Lagmonster]

I'm not going to buy this game, because I'm old and my idea of a great game is one with less than 8 hours of total gameplay value.

But I won't pretend it isn't even a bit impressive for a first outing. If nothing else, it marks this guy as a viable investment - and frankly, I'll bet that's the point. This guy probably has a Magnum Opus in him, and maybe it looks kind of like No Man's Sky, but now he's a lot closer to being able to actually make it.

[TheFeniX]

But to fatnerds, and people who write articles for fatnerds like you linked (though apparently no games journos do that?) it's worth asking "did a man lie by giving a reasonably accurate description of reality".

Well, one fatnerd did what I'm too lazy to do and went full OCD in list form about what was talked about and shown vs what we got. Links included and all.

My own recollection is weak since I looked this up after a friend said "You talk about Star Control 2, this game looks up your alley." I watched some of these "first look" videos. I looked at what was promised and the size of the team and figured there's no way they'd accomplish half of that. But what got me was the talk about joining the factions and choosing sides during a battle. I remember that video. From everything I've read, the entire concept of factions has been gutted.

At no point do I ever recall the game being touted as nothing more than another basic survival game. It was shown as much more than that through multiple videos. Guys involved directly with the game were talking about all this cool shit you could do and how the system didn't "fake" anything (such as forgoing using skyboxes and going with a real day/night and orbit cycle).

So the "aw man, it doesn't give me blowjobs" crowd is full of shit. But so are the people claiming these poor guys promised us McNuggets and we're mad we didn't get Prime Rib. At every turn with this game we were promised (and even shown) a massive experience with depth. Spore did the exact same thing. Showing us functioning gameplay about their systems in play. And what we got was extremely neutered.

[Edi]

I don't even care about the goddamn gameplay. I bought NMS on preorder because I liked what was being shown and the game (when it deigns to work) does just that.

The entire problem is that it just fucking doesn't work! Crashes every three minutes to the desktop and the originally listed minimum requirements were not actually enough to play the game because of incompetent coding practices. Rigs that should run this thing like an F1 racer will crash and burn like nobody's business.

I was overdue a graphics card upgrade anyway, so I did that and did a nuke and pave reinstall of Windows 10 for good measure just to get rid of all the old crap on my machine. And I get the exact same crashes with the exact same error codes on an Nvidia graphics card that is way over spec as I did with an AMD card that was minimum spec.

The QA and coding work on No Man's Sky has been, in a word, incompetent. Hello Games has been basically with its head stuck up its arse and hasn't bothered to do even elementary quality control or proper beta testing, else why the fuck did they require three patches before people with AMD processors could even get the game running (only to crash just minutes after start)? Hell, some people even considered it an improvement that instead of crashing immediately after the Hello Games logo, they got to see a few seconds of the opening flying through the stars sequence.

The NMS launch has been a bigger clusterfuck than the Eador: Masters of the Broken World non-Russian beta testing was, and that was some mythic levels of epic fail.

I like No Man's Sky, but I just want the fucking thing to work first before I start poking holes into the content.

[Lord Revan]

From what I've heard(I don't own the game myself) the optimization and QA for No Man's Sky has been lazy to say the least and with some systems it works just fine while with others it constantly crashes and there there's those for whom it technically works but you get single digit FPS randomly.

[bilateralrope]

I'm just waiting for someone to independently verify exactly how many planets are in No Man's Sky. The fact that two people managed to be in the same place, at the same time, on the first day makes me suspicious of claims I've seen about the size of the galaxy

I have just one question about No Man's Sky: Why does your character want to reach the centre of the galaxy ?

You don't have a character, you have an avatar. It's not here to tell you a story, it's here to provide you a world (or many) to wander around in.

Does anything happen when you reach it ?

[Grumman]

I'm just waiting for someone to independently verify exactly how many planets are in No Man's Sky. The fact that two people managed to be in the same place, at the same time, on the first day makes me suspicious of claims I've seen about the size of the galaxy

From what I heard the attempted meeting wasn't two guys who knew each other arranging to meet, it was somebody stumbling across a planet that had already been named by someone else, and arranging to meet with them just because they happened to be in the same region of space. Given that everyone is given the same goal of converging on one area of space, it's not surprising that at least one pair of people would cross paths and then try to take advantage of that.

[PREDATOR490]

If you want to know what happens when you reach the centre:
Spoiler

You are subjected to being 'reset' in a new galaxy. You still have your old equipment but it all gets broken so you have to go and repair it then travel to the centre all over again.

The only other quest - Is a long chain of flying to a chain of exactly the same stations which if you do AND keep all the items you were given - You supposedly get to create a new star which another traveller can start on. What this means is completely unknown. You will never find this star and no way to know if it was actually created or if it is dialogue bullshit.

So far the theory is it makes a star for another player to start on but since this is a single player game and once you reach the end of the galaxy - You go to a new one ANYWAY. Not sure what the damn point is in creating a star you will never see or even know if another player started on it.

Some folks have taken to using trainers to warp to the galaxy centre multiple times and it would appear the order of galaxies is in a set order. Thus, either the game is designed for players to eventually reach the centre of the universe or it is just a glorified reset mechanic which may eventually hit a brick wall.

I suppose the only other quest is trying to collect all the words for the 3 alien races in the game so you can actually understand what they are saying to you when you meet them ALL the time. Otherwise, painfully walk across multiple planets taking photos of wildlife and digging in the dirt so you can jump to another planet and do it again.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

A few months ago when the hype train was nearing 88 mph I made this YouTube comment:

"I was really excited about this game back in the mid-90s. Back then it was called Battlecruiser 3000 AD. Now I don't get excited about games."

I think I can say I nailed it.

[bilateralrope]

If you want to know what happens when you reach the centre:
Spoiler

You are subjected to being 'reset' in a new galaxy. You still have your old equipment but it all gets broken so you have to go and repair it then travel to the centre all over again.

The only other quest - Is a long chain of flying to a chain of exactly the same stations which if you do AND keep all the items you were given - You supposedly get to create a new star which another traveller can start on. What this means is completely unknown. You will never find this star and no way to know if it was actually created or if it is dialogue bullshit.

So far the theory is it makes a star for another player to start on but since this is a single player game and once you reach the end of the galaxy - You go to a new one ANYWAY. Not sure what the damn point is in creating a star you will never see or even know if another player started on it.

Some folks have taken to using trainers to warp to the galaxy centre multiple times and it would appear the order of galaxies is in a set order. Thus, either the game is designed for players to eventually reach the centre of the universe or it is just a glorified reset mechanic which may eventually hit a brick wall.

I suppose the only other quest is trying to collect all the words for the 3 alien races in the game so you can actually understand what they are saying to you when you meet them ALL the time. Otherwise, painfully walk across multiple planets taking photos of wildlife and digging in the dirt so you can jump to another planet and do it again.

How many planets are in this first galaxy ?

All the advertising made it sound like you were unlikely to run into things another player had named. But now it sounds like the unnamed things in the first galaxy (the only one that most people will see) will run out. That's going to annoy people who are waiting to pick up No Man's Sky on sale.


Still, that means that the only narrative thread I've heard of in No Man's Sky is how the aliens names for things don't count because they aren't proper explorers.

[Cykeisme]

I was cautiously optimistic that this game would be something great, but fortunately with more caution than optimism, thus I didn't take the (generally stupid) move of paying for it before it was actually released.
Thus, after it was released and was revealed to be a huge disappointment delivering on almost none of its promised features (with poor delivery on the features that it did have), I decided not to purchase it, and avoided wasting money.

For those that are unclear on whether it really failed to deliver on promises or whether disappointed buyers are exaggerating, here are a couple of resources that I found useful when I was still at the stage of deciding on whether or not to buy the game:

This reddit article has tables showing promised features and a general description of what the game actually offers:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGa ... _big_list/
Edit - The original content is archived here, for some reason the posted deleted his Reddit account:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGa ... ront_page/

This Youtube video shows various promises that the developer made over the last couple of years, putting emphasis on the ones that are completely absent from the final product:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8P2CZg3sJQ


I don't want to delve too deeply into the negativity that inevitably surrounds the sense of disappointment that many purchasers experienced, but from what I can piece together, the indie developers were indeed very passionate and driven at the start, expounding on great ideas that would be difficult, but possible, to implement.
Early on, they released several promotional videos showing worlds and space environments that were hand-designed (not procedurally generated), which is understandable at that early stage of development, showing space fleets, rivers, and other features (that cannot be created by the generator in the final product).
Due to the massive positive response, Sony decided to just go with it, using the hand-designed pre-rendered videos as promotional material right up to launch, while in reality the small development team had to drastically scale back the actual product. First ancillary features were cut, many of which were described in interviews as though they were already implemented, and then eventually core features were also removed.
Final release was a skeleton product that doesn't really do the things it was described to do.

[Vendetta]

For those that are unclear on whether it really failed to deliver on promises or whether disappointed buyers are exaggerating, here are a couple of resources that I found useful when I was still at the stage of deciding on whether or not to buy the game:

This reddit article has tables showing promised features and a general description of what the game actually offers:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGa ... _big_list/
Edit - The original content is archived here, for some reason the posted deleted his Reddit account:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGa ... ront_page/

If you read most of that with the brain of a thinking human being not a gamer, you realise that the "promised features" are actually "things we are experimenting with", like him saying "right now you can land on asteroids", which is interpreted by fuckwits as "you will definitely be able to land on asteroids in the finished game I promise" but is clearly just a feature under test that got taken out because maybe it just wasn't fun to do.

Y'see, every single videogame (and board/tabletop game) has loads of features that get tested during development and get removed, and this has always been the case but people now get much more visibility of the development process, but don't have the mental filters required to process the small slices of current builds they're seeing talked about as being part of an inherently experimental development process, so they think absolutely everything a developer ever tries is definitely a feature that will be in the game, and so we get these aggrieved lists of "promised features" that were never anything of the sort.