Nice! This is the first game not published by Microsoft to feature Play Anywhere right?
Been playing this co-op for about an hour and a half and it was quite fun.
It isn’t a tense survival experience (at least not yet), but that’s perfect for me. I was enjoying building tether networks, finding new caves to poke around in, and researching mysterious objects to find new recipes.
@Oscuros and I both had some crashes on occasion, and I think I was experiencing a memory leak toward the end, but things work relatively well even at this early stage.
The word “Manly” is right in the title. How can this be a bad thing?
And also root around for png cheat sheets on reddit that explain orbital dynamics.
God damn did I have fun with Kerbal. Might be time to pick it up again, but I really need strong goals & rewards built right into the game.
Not me man, I love this genre. I can however understand your reluctance given the amount of crap out there. I just go back to Factorio & modded Minecraft when I need my fix.
I’ve been following this game for a while, so I broke down and picked it up.
There’s not that much there, at least insofar as threats are mostly limited to dangerous plants, long drops, storms and the perils of your own stupidity, but those have served me pretty well. I love the graphics, sound, and interface, and the desire to see what’s over that next rise or down in that cave is pretty engaging. After a couple aborted tries while I figured out how it all works, I started a game and got serious about building up a base. Lots of exploring and building elaborate oxygen tethers while I searched out the rarer, more useful, minerals.
I finally built the dune buggy, and the whole game changed. Now I’m racing across the landscape, freed from tethers because the buggy has its own oxygen supply. I equipped my ride with a wind turbine, a small solar panel and a generator, so I’m theoretically safe from running out of fuel, although the tiny solar panel and generator take a long time to recharge the buggy. I made it to the far distant space wreckage I’d been eyeing for awhile, pulled up some unknown items to research, learned to make a habitat. It was all coming together.
Then I raced out to an even more distant point where another piece of wreckage lay. I found some items to research and loaded one up on the vehicle, but somehow that last push had put me byond the range of the beacon I’d dropped, so when I went to return, I could not tell in which direction my base lay. It was between two mountains, but huh, there’s lots of mountains. I kept driving around in what I thought were circles, but rather than the flat terrain I crossed getting out there, I kept coming across dangerous crevasses impassable by buggy. Now I couldn’t even find the place at which I’d started to get lost.
Eventually, frantic because I was outrunning a wind storm and I’d offloaded the wind turbine to have room for the item I wanted to research, I drove off a cliff and died. You respawn at your base, but of course I’d lost the buggy and the wind turbine, both of which required all the aluminum and whatnot I’d been able to find.
I decided to pick this up despite generally avoiding Early Access games, and after an hour this is totally scratching the itch that I had hoped No Man’s Sky would.
You guys are making me tempted. Noticed all the negative Steam reviews all complain about lag, lock ups, etc. Seems to just be a few people though.
I found it very laggy. Even with view distance turned down all the way it was still freezing up a bit. It also crashed about 20 minutes in. It’s defnitely not super stable right now.
No lag at all, but there is something causing significant framerate drops over time. Might be a memory leak. Some are blaming the tethers. I think there may be some weird interaction between carrying an object in the vicinity of tethers.
It’s FAR from a finished product, but I really like what I see so far.
I read a number of the negative reviews, and noticed a lot of them talk about performance. That’s actually encouraging to me, because performance is something we can always be improved, where as a faulty game design or bad mechanics are much more difficult to fix.
Giving a game that just entered early access (and intends to be there a year or more) a bad review because of performance issues is asinine.
I don’t know, to be fair, people can change their review with time. Plus right now, as an EA title I want to know what the issues are so I know if this is worth diving into this early. I appreciate the negative reviews. This is where the “recent” rating really comes into play.
You find it encouraging? That’s crazy. It’s a bad sign and should be called out. :)
I’m not sure it’s even true, as ingrained performance issues can be just as difficult to fix as game mechanics, if not more so. There’s not some magic switch you flip when you’re done and everything suddenly runs better - it’s an ongoing aspect of development and you have to keep working at it to maintain control.
I disagree. The game is for sale, and open for reviews. If it’s a broken mess from a technical standpoint that should factor into the review just as much as poorly designed or busted mechanics, or a lack of content. Why shouldn’t it? If it’s not fit for consumption, don’t offer it for tasting then frown when I vomit it up. :)
This whole ‘slap it together, worry about performance later’ mentality is a terrible idea. Sure, you don’t want to be doing premature optimisations but you should at least have some idea of how your underlying architecture will enable your software to run properly on target platforms.
Terrible performance problems early on are a big red flag that the developer hasn’t planned a solid foundation to build the game upon. I mean, in these very early stages the solid foundation is the main thing that should be there! There shouldn’t yet be enough performance-sapping content present to cripple the performance, unless things are poorly designed! ;)
Look at Ark: Survival Evolved. That thing still runs like garbage and I don’t think they’ll ever fix it as I imagine by this stage it’s a monumental task. 'Oh it’s still early access, performance shouldn’t figure into the reviews, we’ll fix that later. Hahahaha ka-ching ka-ching!!".
And there’s a difference between some slowdown and being a “broken mess”.
Well yeah, I’m talking generalities, not specifically this game. Generally, you need to design for performance.
The other side of the coin is, a proportion of steam user reviewers are just complete prats. :)
I’m running this on an i5 with a Geforce 970 and it only gets a little slow when I’m in my main base or there are a lot of physics going on or something. It does seem to slowly get worse with time, though. This is the sort of thing I’d expect from a brand new early access game though. It just comes with the territory. How adept/quick the devs are at addressing it is what separates the good from the bad :)
In two days I managed to get a sprawling main base and a smaller moon base going on. I’ve researched everything. I feel like I’m sort of at the end of what’s there for now so I’m a little sad. But it’s a good start and I’m looking forward to seeing what they add from here!
Sounds like this game is going to be a must buy for me. I am hoping I can last until early access is over.
It’s rough around the edges, no doubt. I think that’s to be expected with something that just hit early access. That’s all I’m saying. Giving a game a negative review because it’s rough around the edges in early access strikes me about the same as someone that picks up a book, reads the back cover, says “I don’t like books like this”, buys it anyway, then gives it a one-star review because it is exactly what the back cover said.
If it were completely broken or unplayable, that’d be a different thing entirely.
Looks like the tethers are what’s causing lag, and a fix is on the way / sorta out already.
10 minutes into the game any planet I’m on is about 60% tethers, so I’m not surprised.