I got tired of the core gameplay loop by about 85 hours. I had a decent home base (looked janky AF, but what am I, an architect?), one or two secondary bases, and a mid-size freighter.
Once I got at least one of every variety of ship in a B-class or higher, there didn't feel like much else to aim for. I'd send guys off on freighter stuff to do quests, and then just kill time until they got back, sell their loot, do some ship upgrades, rinse, and repeat.
Everything the game does is serviceable, but nothing that really makes me say "I've gotta pick this up again!" The space combat was not up to the level, of, say, Freelancer, nor were the scavenging missions terribly enjoyable. I never really got into the multiplayer/co-op aspect, other than encountering other players running around the hub area.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my time with the game. I just don't feel the need to go back and play it some more, even with all the (admirable) content they keep putting into it.
If I wanna keep sinking dozens of hours into a game that seemingly goes on forever, I'm only 90 hours into Tears of the Kingdom.
Were those really high-energy hours of your life that you really could have put in building something instead? Or have you actually gotten 900 recovery, low energy, brain dead hours out of it?
Indeed! Think of all the old men on their death beds reminiscing with regret, 'I sure wish I spent less of my life doing the things I love.'
The obsession with productivity is weird. The entire point of earning money is to be able do the things you love. The biggest reasonable concern I can see in life is people spending immense amounts of times doing things they don't really enjoy, but somehow feel compelled towards nonetheless - like social media. I've put something like 2000 hours into Crusader Kings 2, and if I knew beforehand what I was getting into, I'd still do it again every single time. Just such an enjoyable and rewarding experience.
what video game is low energy brain dead? they are designed to do exactly the opposite. sure, you may be sitting stationary in a chair/couch, but the endorphin rush from the game play is exhausting.
Lots of video games are low energy. Idles and incrementals, certainly. But I find things like Diablo to be pretty relaxing (or at least I play it that way), and tons of others. I can't really get into the FPS games anymore just because they _do_ require so much energy and attention.
i guess it's different for different people. for me, regardless of the game play type, it's exhausting. I can watch TV without issue, but playing games strains my eyes much much more than TV viewing. after an hour playing, i have to stop
As a sibling has said, I get the opposite effect! Watching a movie or TV drains me, I feel like I need to highly focus to really take in the story and be present so I don’t have to constantly rewind 20-30 seconds here or there.
I’ve been playing Assassins Creed: Black Flag recently and find it incredibly relaxing, I hardly need to focus, I just cruise around, find anything I fancy from the minimap, battle other ships and explore cool locations.
I’d say the same mostly goes for NMS, but I get more invested in that as upgrades require specific components, which are available on certain planets etc, it takes a little more thought, but there’s no requirement to rush these upgrades, I might need some rare resource, I might jump 30 times exploring different planets as I go because it’s not something I _really_ need to get right now, it will arrive when it arrives and the journey and ‘choose your own pace’ type exploration mean the most to me.
I have the opposite problem; watching TV tires me out and makes me lethargic. I can't really get into TV watching unless it's a really solid show. Otherwise, I'm all about playing a solid game.
Yeah I got about 30 hours, paid about $30 (there have been many sales where its much cheaper - plus IIRC its on Xbox Game Pass now).
Im more then happy at the cost/reward. Would seriously follow a new game by the same developer [1] the engoodening of No Man's Sky is a entertaining mini-doc on the game.
Go read some Steam reviews from time to time, just for fun. Hundreds of hours are a remarkably average playtime for many games. There are some with thousands of hours and still get a thumb down, heh.
I’m not a gamer; I’ve almost never played PC games; I’m really only a Switch gamer and that’s it.
I can hear the cry of a thousand gamers if I tell them that I’ve crossed ~85 hours, longer than any other game so far, playing Super Mario 3D All Stars. The package the internet loves to hate. Oh well. :)
I am one example, I suppose, of how diverse gaming is.
Mario's a good game! I probably have tens of thousands of hours logged in my PC games, but there's still no denying Nintendo does a hell of a job crafting great gameplay into their titles.
Considering I've spent most of my 80 hours in Armored Core 6 just designing ACs (building, equipping, painting, creating new decals and applying decals, testing, taking pictures, naming, writing lore)... yes I think it is. The only games I really get into are ones that let me express creativity.
Yes I agree; I didn't make my point very clearly. For sure there are games that allow for creative expression - I myself have spent many hours building houses in Rust for example - but not all games offer that nor set out to do so, so guitar vs game is not necessarily a useful comparison. To put it another way, you can pick up Godot for free, but I would expect a whole lot more opportunities for enjoyment using that tool than any single game could deliver, since you could in theory use it to build whatever you want. A guitar is a gateway to all of music, whereas No Man's Sky is a gateway only to itself.
It can be, but not exclusively. Sometimes it's a toy, sometimes it's therapy. What's the difference between playing a level over 100 times until you beat the boss vs playing a rift 100 times until you get it right?
Right... but what I mean is - a video game a piece of entertainment, whereas a guitar is tool for making pieces of entertainment, so it would surely not be surprising that the latter could provide quantitatively more enjoyment, as it offers more opportunities than a single game? To make the comparison a bit more obvious, what's the difference between playing a level for X hours to beat the boss, vs spending X hours learning how to create video games? It seems fairly obvious to me that if you enjoy the process and/or the result, the latter will deliver more longevity.
Travelling at some fraction of light speed to cover the vast distances, 85 hours elapsed might equate to tens of thousands of hours in some relativistically static frame of reference.
Yeah, very little of the things they've done since launch have fixed the obnoxiously repetitive core gameplay loop. And everything except the procedural planet gen is literal copy-and-paste.
How about, for the next update, they add tons and tons of new buildings, POI, and activities? Maybe a bit more variety to the enemies? Or maybe a bit of lorebuilding on why nearly every fucking planet in the universe is populated by the mechanized equivalent of PETA? (Like, seriously, there has to be at least one core world producing these things, and the energy requirements for universe-scale manufacturing would be literally off-the-charts.... hmm it would be cool to visit a hostile alien dyson sphere... where are the transports and logistics supplying them?)
The endless open world / survival / scavenger games are all like this for me. You learn the ropes, start playing well, and after a while go "now what?" In Rust for example people seem to wind up mindlessly picking off new players, or blowing up peoples bases to steal materials so they can... make explosives to blow up peoples bases.
Context: Arma is a milsim, and Epoch is a mod with basebuilding, where one can place a "frequency jammer" that creates a sphere around it where its owner can build a base (walls, doors, safes, etc), while others (non-owners) are prevented from building anything in the area.
A few friends and I played it for a while. Picked a server, built a base there, did some missions or just random squabbles with other folks, eventually got bored (or distracted by life events), abandoned it all, then repeated on some new server after a few weeks.
One day we were on a server where someone had managed to glitch the jammer underwater - easy to reach but it was considered impossible to destruct as it was out of reach of available firearms and explosives. We realized there was only one in-game weapon that was capable of firing underwater (SDAR), and it had very small damage numbers. Being really stubborn and persistent, we spent over 24+ hours straight, working in shifts, shooting at that jammer, while watching out for the base owners to ensure they can't get anywhere close to open the repair menu.
Upon the destruction of said jammer and announcing the victory, we all univocally decided that enough is enough and we've fully completed the game. Haven't played Arma ever since.
Sounds like you completed it to me, that’s pretty impressive!
I used to be very into Dayz Mod and over the years it devolved into holding FOBs and just maintaining, maintaining, maintaining. Once we held the FOB and fortified it, it was night on impossible to raid if we were online, short of finding and fixing a Chinook with the 4000rpm miniguns on with a great pilot/gunner combo and some ground support.
I only played the game in VR. It was fun, the flying experience etc. was very cool in VR and I liked how "alien" I felt in different environments. Eventually the game loop became boring I think, I started playing it less and less and stopped.
To be fair, not many games stay engaging after 85 hours. I think the most hours I've put into a game was playing Monster Hunter, but that's mostly multiplayer it's probably not directly comparable.
I think you got stuck in a strange cul-de-sac. That was apparently more common in early versions of the game -- you can end up on a procedurally generated planet that sucks. I'm at something like 10-20 hours, and it has been a steady ramp of cool stuff and rapidly learning different corners of the game the entire time.
I've started to figure out the language, karma and trade subsystems (and crafting), and have mostly mastered mining, long term survival in hostile environments and interplanetary travel. I ignored the personal and spacecraft combat stuff, because I haven't needed yet (running away has worked so far).
Anyway, I just got teleportation and interstellar travel, and suspect a lot more stuff is going to open up soon.
This is all in the initial mission, which I think is a tutorial.
See, when I played it, I bailed not too far past the point where it seems like you are, when I realized that nope, there actually isn't that much more there to enjoy if you find the basic gameplay to be a grind, which I do. (I despise 1st person resource gathering, and mostly dislike 1st person games in general. (I'm prone to motion sickness, and they're a big trigger.)
It quickly became obvious that it was a fairly small amount of actual content basically painted different colors at random. Once the illusion fails, it failed HARD, at least for me.
I love this game so much. First of all, it's kind of technologically astounding. You can get in your spaceship and take off from a planet and fly to another one and land, all without any loading screens. The planets themselves are sculptable isosurfaces (only to an extent, though; you can't drill a hole through to the other side) and littered with points of interest, unique animals and plants.
It's quasi-social -- you can play with friends or go on missions with randos if you want -- but fundamentally a mellow, solitary sandbox to play in however you'd like. I like to collect neat looking spaceships, some people build amazing bases, and others basically use it as an outer space dog fighting game.
It's absolutely worth picking up if you want to putter around for a hundred or so hours in outer space.
It's like Elite: Dangerous or Minecraft. There are all kinds of loading screens, but they're all pretty cleverly hidden. On planetary surfaces, you can see chunks load as you drive or fly towards surface features. Every teleport is a loading screen. So is entering and exiting a vehicle, landings and takeoffs, entering/dropping from NMS's equivalent of supercruise, or warping to other systems.
My one big gameplay complaint is how lost and directionless I feel in NMS compared to Elite: Dangerous. Like, in Elite I can see a nebula or some other galactic destination and plot a course toward it, settle in and explore an area, and so on. But I never quite feel like I can know where I am or see—at the galactic level—where I'm going. I'm not a huge fan of the spaceflight mechanics, either. And VR in NMS seems completely broken on my brand new gaming machine, which ultimately got me to uninstall it.
I feel like I got a lot of entertainment out of my $6 NMS purchase, so none of these criticisms are to say the game is bad. If you've never played it and think you might enjoy a hybrid of Minecraft and Elite: Dangerous, it's the game for you! And I'm very glad to hear the game and the player base are still lively. Great community there, especially with player groups like that taxi service, or various colonies, or resources like the Glyph Exchange.
P.S. I have to second the "simultaneously too small and too big" feeling of NMS. Space in both KSP and Elite feels scaled well. Then again, I came to NMS late, so maybe how KSP and Elite do things only feels natural because I played those first.
In order to have a realistic, but reasonably playable space game, you need one of 1. Distances compressed, 2. Time compressed, 3. Unrealistic speeds
KSP uses [1] (scaled down solar system) and [2] (user-controlled time passage), although [1] can be modded away by using a realistic solar system mod. Elite:Dangerous uses [3] (warp drives). I've never played NMS but it sounds like they use [1] and maybe [3]?
Mostly [3], I think. There are a few different levels of plaid speed for the ship's engines. If you want to walk on the ground, it rapidly turns into "this will take days or weeks". Similarly, different levels of implausibly fast mode in the ship remove multiple orders of magnitude from travel time.
They may have also used [1] for NMS. I don't think it really matters, given the game play, to be honest.
All of the planets are something like 20 km diameter IIRC, so [1] is very much a thing. They're annoyingly big to walk around, but tiny compared to earth's moon.
I love it too, but after playing KSP so much, it bothers me how compressed space is… although a huge class gripe about NMS is how empty it feels, I actually feel like it’s not empty enough at times. Space doesn’t feel big, and solar systems feel like planets and moons are stacked on top of each other.
Galaxies and systems in NMS both feel very flat compared to both KSP and Elite: Dangerous. Bodies in NMS systems are just there, nothing really in an orbit or anything. There's no structure. No real ring systems. Stellar phenomena is just RNG. Every planet is landable. Interplanetary travel is in very straight lines. You can't even fly to the stars in a system, as they're just skybox objects.
At the galactic level, well, first, I never know where I am or what direction I'm going. In NMS, you don't see some oddly bright splotch of light slowly resolve into huge nebula as you slowly jump toward it, like you might in Elite. NMS doesn't seem to render much of the surrounding galaxy when it generates the skybox. There's definitely no sense of galactic orientation because there isn't anything like the Magellanic Clouds or distant galaxies off in the far distance. Your only views of the galaxy are either of the immediate vicinity or a tiny thumbnail.
But hey, without getting too far into spoilers, the whole "obviously procedurally generated" thing is part of the NMS universe's conceit, right? And out of universe, it's clear that Hello Games explicitly set out to *not* create a sim like KSP or Elite: Dangerous but rather something with a unique story and a different player experience entirely. I respect that. The game's a lot of fun, and the story it tells is deeply engaging, if that's what you want.
Elite dangerous' star model is slightly more rooted in reality but it's just as RNG as NMS. And it doesn't even have planets with atmosphere yet (if they ever come because they seem to have given up on it).
Also they're moving away from VR support rather than towards like NMS.
I used to love E:D but it's really gone to shit sadly and all the promises are moot. No atmospheric planets, no ship interiors, no VR when walking around.
It's a shame because it was building up to be great. Then frontier lost interest and started pulling resources away towards their rollercoaster and dino games :(
I think it's peak was when the deep core mining came out. And the decline with Odyssey which I never really played because they dropped VR.
I still have to try NMS. But at least the planets are more interesting.
> * Elite dangerous' star model is slightly more rooted in reality but it's just as RNG as NMS.*
I'm well aware of how Elite: Dangerous's procedural generation works. Frankly, I think it's is even more impressive than NMS's, since the Stellar Forge-generated galaxy has real structure to it: the spiral arms, areas of greater and lesser density, and so on.
> they seem to have given up on [planets with atmospheres]
Odyssey planets do have atmospheres, so I'm not sure what you mean.
> Also they're moving away from VR support rather than towards like NMS... [Frontier] dropped VR.
Well, first of all, FDev didn't drop VR. It works fine in Elite: Dangerous Odyssey. The way they implemented on-foot VR as theater mode instead of attempting to hack some kind of room-scale VR system into their engine—which has great support for seated VR—seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Contrast that with how NMS implements vehicle controls in VR. They do room-scale VR, so there's no transition to seated VR when entering a vehicle, which is controlled—and I use that term loosely—by basically waving your fists around in the air to work controls you can't feel. It's pretty awful.
Second of all, VR in NMS was very badly broken as of August, the last time I tried it out. And I'm running a brand new 5700X and 4070 Ti that can play Elite: Dangerous Odyssey on VR ULTRA at 45 fps worst case.
As far as the current direction of Elite: Dangerous? Sure, there's plenty to criticize, but after over 10k hours, I'm still really enjoying it. I'm still learning new things. I'm still following the story. I'm still engaging with other players. I'm still buying ARX. With NMS, after 367 hours every system, every planet, every station, every alien has started to feel the same. I no longer enjoy it. But hell, you might really, really love NMS. If you can pick it up on sale, you should get it.
> Odyssey planets do have atmospheres, so I'm not sure what you mean.
Only light atmospheres where you have to wear a spacesuit. The real atmospheric planets with cities and roads etc never came despite being promised.
> Well, first of all, FDev didn't drop VR. It works fine in Elite: Dangerous Odyssey. The way they implemented on-foot VR as theater mode instead of attempting to hack some kind of room-scale VR system into their engine—which has great support for seated VR—seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Contrast that with how NMS implements vehicle controls in VR. They do room-scale VR, so there's no transition to seated VR when entering a vehicle, which is controlled—and I use that term loosely—by basically waving your fists around in the air to work controls you can't feel. It's pretty awful.
To me it breaks immersion completely which is the whole point of VR. Controls can be adjusted with the controllers, I play msfs2020 like that all the time. Projecting a virtual screen is not VR. Just a cheap shortcut.
I'm very disappointed with Elite Dangerous :( and the Devs totally disregarding the community doesn't help. But anyway maybe NMS will be nicer. I haven't played E:D since Odyssey came out. Without real VR there's no point anymore.
As far as I understood from the forum they're locked into this engine but all the people who knew how it worked internally have left so they can't build new features into it anymore.
And regarding the direction of development, there just isn't really any anymore. It's just stopped. It's like maintenance mode.
> fundamentally a mellow, solitary sandbox to play in however you'd like.
So a Minecraft competitor, basically? I can see that. I have played it and enjoyed it, I think Minecraft does it better overall but some variation is nice.
This is going to sound shallow but it’s so hard for me to play rpgs that don’t graphically look good or realistic. The art in that game cheapens it so much for me I can’t really play it.
to each their own I guess. Personally I avoid good graphics. It's not that I actually dislike them, but rather ive found across many games the rpgs and systems designed by small teams, often lone developers, have a lot more quirk and charm that I enjoy. I tend to love and embrace janky gameplay though, so I guess its not for everyone. Some highlights include cataclysm dda, dwarf fortress, rule the waves
That does sound shallow, actually. Once you learn to leave behind the vain realm of sensory experience, then you'll really be able to enjoy quality video games.
No Man’s Sky for me is a very accomplished example of the Boredom Management genre of games. Every individual activity in it is quite boring and starts to grate after a while, but there are enough different things to do that when you get too bored you can switch to some other temporarily less boring task.
Fun game or not, I appreciate Hello Games for fulfilling what they originally promised and failed to deliver, then constantly improving the game with 100% free updates. You can't say they aren't trying
No Man's Sky is one of the biggest gaming disappointments of my life. It was always a grindy, pointless game about exploring a dull, repetitive universe.
I don’t even mind a grind, but this game just feels… pointless. Why am I here, why do I care? Something about an infinite loop in a simulation? May as well use the “it’s all a dream” card.
I did give it an honest try, and even enjoyed the first 30 hours or so. This was about a year ago, though I did buy the game at launch and promptly give up on it, like many others.
A true mile-wide-inch-deep game. Once that initial spark fizzles out the idea of picking the game up again is painful. Bit of a shame really, because the actual game parts do work well enough.
Just a long way of saying “I hate to say it, but I completely agree”
Agreed. New systems to the game tend to just be shallow window dressing. Settlement management is literally fetch quests, or kill X number of sentinels that are attacking. A vast portion of the game revolves around finding things and shooting mining beams at them. Valheim solved this beautifully, they turned boring resource gathering tasks into practically their own minigames - you can use the simple tree/ground physics to cause massive chain reactions that are super satisfying to watch.
NMS's planets are enormous and completely devoid of any content. They're just an endlessly repeating pattern of the same outposts, resources, etc. They couldn't even be bothered to add a map feature so you can see where you've been, probably to hide the fact that it's just a bunch of identical tiles. No landmarks, no biomes, no reason to venture past a 5 minute radius from your landing area because everything on the planet can be found everywhere.
That's also what I was hoping for, but yeah, NMS kinda just culminated into pastel drudgery. For some reason it just doesn't feel like there is either carrot or stick and I suppose the creative avenues offered don't really feel interesting to me in the context of the game. But maybe it'd be more interesting on creative mode or something similar. But the combat has always been really subpar, both in FPS and in-ship which would definitely be my forte.
Sca..ehm Star Citizen is such a weird subject. The game seem to be on a completely different timeline than any other game, so its hard to form an objective opinion on it. From one point of view it might look like vaporware on life support, but from another it might actually shape into solid game in a decade. We just have no real data to infer from, because no other game dev story comes close to SC.
I wish that game the best, and I so so wish for it to actually shape into something great, but at the same time I have given up all hope on it, and I still cant imagine investing a single dollar into it (I think they got more than enough money to make a solid game already).
To give you a little hope, I think it's hard to refute that the company is actually making the games at this point, it's not a secretive project and they have over 600 staff. There is so much information on it plus a very contentful Alpha game that thousands are playing. They recently announced that the singleplayer game was feature complete and showed off a lot of gameplay footage as well.
I wouldn't suggest people go sign up or anything because of that but as someone who has followed dev pretty closely, they look to be in the end phases for the singleplayer and probably like 50% into the open world game mechanics. I would bet on a singleplayer release in the next two years, and I would not place a bet on the open world because who knows. Their biggest risk is just running out if money and needing a publisher.
I think that's a bit unfair, they had barely put a team together by year three. They started from zero employees and had to put together a AAA studio from scratch, and kick off two massive games that had no fixed scope due to the crowdfunding goals. They have 600 employees or something right now, are feature complete on the single player and somewhat fixed scope on the open world. I am not a rabid fanboy, but credit where it is due, 10 years isn't unheard of even from established studios on known scope games, and they have two games plus all the overhead of open development.
I've made several attempts, but I legit can't get past the first 2 hours of gameplay. Call me superficial, but the interface is just so messy. It's so disorganized and all over the place.
That's my sense too. Starfield is clearly the worst of the Bethesda RPGs. But it's the first Bethesda RPG in 8 years, and nothing else scratches that itch. I loved it. Hopefully DLCs clean up the Outpost-building subgame, which is a mess.
The thing that was a huge let down was the fact that 95% of planets were just barren and procedural generated with the same outposts and the same layouts. It provided no incentive to explore, because there simply wasn't anything unique out there.
Starfield is fun but it has no gravitas because they’ve taken anything with edge out of it (sex, nudity, drugs/junkies, extreme violence etc.) it feels like one of those bleh G rated Disney “horror” movies.
I'm speaking more in general, not as a comparison between cyberpunk 2077 and starfield, there are plenty of games that do not have dark themes, and I don't think that any of that is required to make a good game.
This is a hype article for people who think No Man's Sky is already a great game. Seems like a fluff piece to me. There's nothing in it that suggests any sort of fundamental change in the quality of the game.
I agree the article was fluff, I expected it to do some sort of analysis of the changes in the game since its crushingly disappointing launch. However, that said, the game has improved dramatically and does so at a blistering pace. For instance there has been several major releases this year alone:
Each is pretty packed with quality of life, gameplay, and content improvements.
I no longer regret my original launch purchase. The game is pretty amazing now, and the rate of change and improvement indicates to me it’s not close to topping out. If you have it and haven’t picked it up again, then, I would actually say wait another year and try it again then. Not that it needs another year, but that in that time it’ll likely be even better than it is now by a substantial margin.
I got stuck there due to a bug. When I played that bug was already known about and reported to them for like 6 months. This after the game was already supposed to be "fixed". I wont ever bother again.
I agree on it being a puff-piece; the author has been playing since launch and most of the praises he brings up are features that launched years ago. I thought No Man’s Sky was cool from an exploration standpoint but the campaign story was disappointing and very grind-y; I put 48 hours into it before getting bored and uninstalling.
If you look at today’s NMS and think, “ooh, that looks like it could be fun!” you’ll probably have a great time. If you look at it and think, “Enh, is it good enough yet?” then you’ll probably have a bad time.
It is what you see and they’ve fixed the incredibly shallow game loop. But it’s one of those games where if it’s not for you, it’s not going to win you over.
I enjoyed it as a “podcast game” where I’m just focused on a tv show or podcast while mucking about, planet to planet.
Everywhere you go in the whole damn galaxy, armed drones are there, waiting to enforce the rules. It mashes up the rule of law and rules of nature such that the rule of law cannot be escaped even at faster than light. It's a dystopian surveillance universe. I'm not that into horror.
I have huge respect for HelloGames. Internet Historian did a great video on the history [1]. I have played for probably ~300 hours? Maybe more? I started 2-3 years after release and by then it was in pretty good shape. I like the new stuff they're adding but I see some glaring omissions in what they should be doing.
Planets:
- Different gravity
- Tidally locked;
- Localized weather (it's global on a given planet or moon);
- Different biomes on a planet (eg polar ice caps). Having a world be a single biome seems limited for no real reason;
- Rivers
As for general features:
1. Top of any feature wishlist should be better base building. What they have now isn't bad but it could be so much better. Some things are just annoying (eg certain parts don't snap to other parts) but as we've seen from the Sims, Minecraft and similar games, people will happily spend hours just building a base to their liking;
2. They added a feature (resource nodes) and in 4.0 basically nerfed it into irrelevance, to the point that it may as well not even be there. What did it do? It allowed you to build activated indium farms for essentially infinite money. Money doesn't really matter in this game and there are other infinite money glitches. I had fun (pre-4.0) building my activated indium farm. Now there's absolutely no reason to go through the effort;
3. Race tracks, preferably player-built. Have a mode where you have to stay on the track. Players do this anyway;
4. Also in 4.0 (IIRC) they nerfed technology modules for really no reason. Like a ship could have 6 S-class Hyperdrive modules, 3 in the inventory and 3 in the technology slots. So you were trading storage for jump range (which you could get to 2500+ light years). They just decided to remove inventory modules so you didn't get this choice anymore. Your ship had random supercharged slots so you could almost get up to that same range with 3 modules but honestly it felt like a worse version of what they had.
5. The core story isn't really the point but it probably needs some attention. Last time I did it there was a mix between the new story and some of hte old features like finding people to man consoles on your base.
After fairly lonely exploration initially, seeing all the bases at the center of the galaxy (nearly 100 hours later) was a unique experience. Kind of like thinking you’re the last person on Earth and then stumbling upon other people.
It’s a fun game, but definitely much more breadth than depth. Still greatly enjoyed the exploration, especially when playing coop.
Started a new game 5 (6?) times now since it came out, each after a major update or 2, and had to abandon the game every time due to some game-breaking bug (like my ship getting stuck in the terrain multiple times). I really wanted to like the game, but losing hours and hours of progress due to bugs like these just killed it for me.
My wife ran into that landing bug. Right after the tutorial she struggled to control the ship. She was going really fast along the surface for her first landing, hit the landing button and for some reason the game let her land the ship even though it was going really fast ... but she got landed in a tree. The landing animation played in loop forever and so we had to reload the save, except at that point she lost interest.
The worst aspect of this game is the tedious inventory management and awful UI. You only get 10 storage crates which each only hold 5 different items and they all look identical so you have to run around trying to find the right one to add it to the right stack. There's not enough space to be able to store most items especially if you need intermediate items for crafting, even if you limit yourself to storing only one stack of one type of item. You end up using all the exocraft just for storage and never use most of them besides only for storage. Progression is largely centered around buying extra storage slots for your exoskeleton which ends up allowing you to carry more stuff on your body than you can on a large vehicle or in one of these giant storage crates that barely hold anything. The item icons are also unnecessarily huge in them and there isn't an easy or efficient way of interacting with them. The big storage cubes allow you to access the inventory from anywhere so that somehow justifies the very limited space, but there is no option for building a container that you can only access locally from inside a base other than building portable refiners to abuse as storage, which hold hardly anything and sometimes despawn randomly. So you end up building like 50 refiners in a base for storage and you constantly run around trying to remember what each one holds so you can go store something in an existing stack to save space.
No Man’s Sky and Street Fighter 5 both broke my heart in the same year. It was the beginning of a massive decline in quality and business practices. Video games haven’t been the same since. The free-to-play model, 2010 GDC/IGF indie game scene, and the mobile gaming market are largely responsible.
I’ve played so many games at various stages of development I can’t remember them all anymore. One of my favorite games doesn’t exist anymore. I just like science fiction and I’ve been playing SF since SF1 came out. Outer Wilds and Subnautica are pretty good games though.
I can’t play Subnautica anymore, I finished it but now live with existential fear of deep water and vast open spaces. Would highly recommend ruining your ability to swim in the ocean just to play that game though, it’s incredible.
In Subnautica maybe by bug a leviathan was in the shallows… where I had thought I was safe. If it was a bug it was an excellently timed one.
In Outer Wilds, the whole coming together point when you realize the time scale, the reason it’s 22 minutes, every single nerve racking time in the bramble, so good!
I bought this game on Switch (via Nintendo Store) about 12 months ago and I don't think it's the same game as is currently on Steam. There is nearly nothing to do and there hasn't been any software updates since I originally bought it?
I went to about 10 different planets and nothing interesting ever happened. The wildlife on every planet all just looked like Bison with a random number of legs, and nothing I came across looks anything close to the screenshots in the article?
I was under the impression when I bought it that the developers were continually improving it, but I did not realize that this did not include Switch, so I feel a bit cheated about that.
A lot of the individual features are adequate, but because there are so many, they're on hbf shallow side. I don't find that a problem however - you can constantly swap between space combat, ground vehicles, building, missions, etc. So they feel fresh enough.
What I can't get over is how dull, lifeless, and copy and paste each planet feels. You explore a small square for a bit, and the rest of the planet is basically the same. There is no real variation in landscape, fauna, and flora across the planet. And the vast majority of planets are fairly barren rocks.
Spending last weekend playing and probably same for this one. I have to admit it is in parts quite fun game.
But soon it becomes obvious that while there is even too many things at one time all of them are pretty simple and then you come across the same thing, but in different place... So depth seems somewhat lacking.
Once I got at least one of every variety of ship in a B-class or higher, there didn't feel like much else to aim for. I'd send guys off on freighter stuff to do quests, and then just kill time until they got back, sell their loot, do some ship upgrades, rinse, and repeat.
Everything the game does is serviceable, but nothing that really makes me say "I've gotta pick this up again!" The space combat was not up to the level, of, say, Freelancer, nor were the scavenging missions terribly enjoyable. I never really got into the multiplayer/co-op aspect, other than encountering other players running around the hub area.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my time with the game. I just don't feel the need to go back and play it some more, even with all the (admirable) content they keep putting into it.
If I wanna keep sinking dozens of hours into a game that seemingly goes on forever, I'm only 90 hours into Tears of the Kingdom.