I think both the WftO and NMS devs have done wonders with updating their products. We would all love it if all devs were more like this.
Absolutely!
I went with NMS. It was an amazing trip from hell to heaven. I still play it. I also still have WftO installed. I just don’t have time for every damn game. :)
So I jumped back into this over the weekend. I hadn’t played since just before the Abyss update launched, and when I left off I’d accomplished most of my goals in game with the exception of building a nice base somewhere and finishing off Polo’s tasks (got stuck on the one for scanning all Fauna on 10 planets…what a time sink!).
First thing that pops up when I get my bearings is the new Abyss quest to investigate the strange signal coming from a nearby planet (with lots of water). I take off to do that, and begin the 5 hour or so odyssey that is the Abyss main quest. That was pretty cool, and now I have my very own Nauticon complete with S-Class upgrades (purchased midway through the quest when I got tired of moving soooo sloooowly). One big problem with underwater travel and exploration though…lack of save points. You get used to autosaving whenever you jump out of your ship, and hard saving at planetary installations. Underwater there are no such opportunities, and after losing an hour of progress to a hard CTD, I built myself a save point and started deploying it regularly during my nautical adventures.
Once I had my nifty reward for completing the quest, I took off into space again to contact Polo and see what the Community Quest thing was all about. A quick pop over to a weird anomaly planet and I had completed that as well. In doing so, I discovered that the new anomaly type planets often only have one or two forms of fauna on them, which makes getting a “completed planet” much easier than most planets. Between the quest world and another anomaly planet I found in a nearby star system I was able to advance from 2 worlds cataloged to 4 in short order.
I also tried my hand at digging up salvage (new in Visions), but it’s kind of a lot of work, plus multiple corrupted sentinels to kill, for a reward that sells for less than I get for one Flora scan on a planet. I haven’t tried archeology yet (also new in Visions), but I suspect it’s similar just using bones instead of ship parts.
I did some space trucking, climbed back over 150mil units, spent 12mil to buy a neat Exotic I ran into at a Trading Post, and am now basically jumping from system to system in the Hilbert Dimension (second galaxy) looking for both anomaly worlds (to knock out the Polo scan creatures quest) and a world with mild climate and plenty of water to start building a cool base. I’d forgotten how addicting NMS is…how you lose track of time while doing all the inventory management, jumping from system to system, exploring and basically chilling out all around the universe.
I picked this up during the Black Friday sale on Humble and have really been enjoying it. I am still in the early stages, but so far it’s been great.
I’m in this boat, too. I grabbed a copy for my brother as a birthday present a few weeks back during the Black Friday sale, but I was getting through all the Destiny 2 content (Season 1 and Forsaken), and only had time to jump on a few times to help him out and guide him a bit. Finishing up D2 meant I could hop back into this for a few days.
I, too started out with the Abyss questline, but I didn’t get the upgrades- I didn’t even know they existed- so it was a somewhat slow slog. But the new underwater stuff is pretty and fun.
Then I turned to my basebuilding. I had a bug in the “Base Archives” quest from way back, that none of the online advice could fix, but has now been fixed in the intervening months, so I started doing that again. One think I love about NMS- if the quest wants you to do something that you’ve already done before, it immediately gives you credit- like ‘Build a Save Point’- I already have one, so it just credits me and goes to the next stage. Unfortunately for this quest, that means a real-time block of and hour and a half before I can proceed. So I got into the habit of just turning on the box and clicking the next stage for the last few days. I think I’m done with it now- I finally got Landing Pads for my base!
Another thing it seems like they’ve overhauled, going back to your comments about the Nauticon- vehicle upgrades! The new vendor at the space stations that sell upgrade components similar to your Multitool, Exosuit and Ship are rad. Also, the new control systems that let you spec your vehicles for different emphasis (tight turns, slides and drifts) are a lot of fun. I found a space station that sells a bunch S-Class mods for vehicles (and I renamed the system to that to make sure I could find it again), and immediately slapped a S-Class acceleration mod on my buggy and Nautilus. This let me land on a crazy toxic world with lots of buried tech and drive my buggy around for a while digging it up. All this salvage tech let me buy the new Pilgrim motorcycle, which is a hoot when specced for sliding, let me tell you.
Looking forward to playing some online in the coming weeks.
I totally missed that you could spec Exocraft like that now. I need to check that out! Thanks for the heads up!
So for the past two play sessions (each about an hour) I’ve been kind of stuck on this toxic planet trying to find the 6th out of 6 creature to scan. I don’t think I’ve ever had this much difficulty finding a creature before. I’ve already scanned 5 of 6, one of which was Rare, so I’m assuming this last one must be Rare as well. It doesn’t help that fauna on the planet is sparse, meaning that I can land just about anywhere and only see a couple of critters lurking about. I’ve checked the skies frequently, as 2 out of the 5 critters I did scan were aviators. There doesn’t appear to be any water on the planet, and what few caves I’ve found are pretty shallow. I’m starting to think there may only be one of these guys I need to scan…maybe his name is Russ and he lives in a hidden valley somewhere, shuns all other critters, and hides whenever a ship flies over.
I may just give up and go hunt some more anomaly planets with only one life form while looking for my paradise planet to build a base on. I hate to leave a planet at 5/6 though.
This wins the cute award of the month.
For no reason I can tell, YouTube pushed a Quill18 video of him playing No Man’s Sky from late last month, so I started watching since I own this game and never really played it, even after the first big update that sort of “fixed” the game and made it “fun”. So I pulled it down and started playing again.
5 hours later I’m just obsessed with this. Holy shit this is cool. How did I not get into this the previous two times? I was up until the late hours last night and got up early eager to dive back in early this morning!
I’ve found that sometimes you just need to have a particular mindset or be in the right mood for getting into certain games for the first time.
This is for sure. I’ve had many games I bounced off of become my favorites in the long run, running the gamut from Final Fantasy Tactics or Final Fantasy VII all the way to more recent stuff like Hand of Fate 2 or… well, No Man’s Sky I suppose is a good example! :)
It’s a special game, glad you’ve finally seen the light! :)
Youtube knows your needs better than you.
Beyond update coming Summer 2019. Introducing No Man’s Sky Online with a major focus on multiplayer and social aspects.
I’m less interested since I like my lonely solipsistic NMS experience struggling for survival on harsh alien planets, but this might be exactly what others are waiting for.
Hello Everyone,
We know that there is a lot of hunger out there for news and updates on No Man’s Sky. We wanted to share some information from behind the scenes.
Our next chapter will be called No Man’s Sky: Beyond, coming Summer 2019.
Each chapter for No Man’s Sky has been more successful than the last. Thanks to our community, NEXT our large release last year was especially so. It went on to bring enjoyment to millions of new players, and it helped to change the legacy of this game we care so much about.
Earlier this year, whilst working on our roadmap of three future updates, we decided we wanted to interweave their features, and had a vision for something much more impactful.
We are excited to announce that Beyond will contain those three major updates rolled into one larger free release.
The first component of Beyond we are announcing today is No Man’s Sky Online.
No Man’s Sky Online includes a radical new social and multiplayer experience which empowers players everywhere in the universe to meet and play together. Whilst this brings people together like never before, and has many recognisable online elements, we don’t consider No Man’s Sky to be an MMO – it won’t require a subscription, won’t contain microtransactions, and will be free for all existing players.
These changes are an answer to how we have seen people playing since the release of NEXT, and is something we’ve dreamed of for a long time.
We will talk more about each component when we know we can be precise, and look forward to sharing more in the coming weeks.
Beyond will be our most ambitious chapter so far, and something we’ve been working ridiculously hard on. We’ll continue to support No Man’s Sky in this way for the foreseeable future.
It’s unexpected but so rewarding to see so many accolades and nominations for No Man’s Sky as Best On-going or Most Evolved this year. To some NEXT may have felt like a natural end-point for our journey, but for us it was another step on a longer voyage.
Thank you so much,
Sean
Question is, are they going P2P like Elite, or server-based? If it’s server-based, how can they possibly afford the costs (even with their current millions)? And if it’s P2P, the multiplayer will still be very limited.
Depends on what they’re going to do. They can do a hybrid system like Warframe, where you have servers which can help link players up but once they’re off on a mission it becomes strictly P2P.
With how large the procedural universe is, I don’t think there’d be a need for a server-based MMO setup where everyone is playing “on the server”, but who knows. I think we’ll have a better idea once we know what it is they’re wanting to do.
Its still a great game but multiplayer is of zero interest to me. I just hope you can opt out of all of it. I just want to explore a universe.
Same; but online is only one third of the update, so there’s more to be announced yet. :)
I think NMS’s gameplay is still lacking purpose. Multiplayer provides it with the additional purpose of just hanging out with friends, but as far as I understand, that’s already available with people you know.
Same 45