No Man's Sky - Exploring a 60s-Scifi-cover themed universe (post-release thread)

There’s a few different things to look out for. The batteries in your suit. The life support system. The batteries in your mining laser or ammo in your projectile weapon (or both). The fuel that your ship uses every time it launches. Some of those are the same, some are different.

Elite Dangerous is a great comparison. I also paid full price for that game and didn’t regret it for a second. And I already feel that way about No Man’s Sky just based on the four hours I’ve spent on the starting planet. Since I’ve only spent time on the planet so far, the game it reminds me of the most so far is Oblivion or Skyrim.

Let’s give Brian Eno some due.

But is there a difference in game play between a wold that is 70c and -70c? Do storms/weather affect movement speed, visibility, etc? Or does a highly toxic atmosphere affect game play somehow other than just making your life support bar go down faster?

I don’t know about toxic atmosphere yet. I’m still exploring my starting planet. But when it gets dark and the temperature goes to -75, my helmet does start to frost over. The frost encroaches from the corners of my view. It’s a nice touch. I haven’t actually noticed if I walk slower or not, but the frost effect, plus the wind sound effects and the frosting sound effect all combine to make it really feel cold. I love that.

Maybe the worst thing about Minecraft, Terraria, and the other survival crafters is we are no longer able to imagine any other kind of game mechanics!

I was picturing some nebulous exploration game, light combat, taking pictures of things, etc. Heck, kind of like Elite: Dangerous without the trading.

If there’s a smelter it’s pretty much an immediate turnoff for me these days.

The planets I saw on stream looked like Ubisoft levels of interesting object density. Someone was photographing a new species, turned 90 degrees to the right, and said “oh there’s an obelisk.” Then walked 20 feet to his ship. Maybe that was a bad example…

This is what the game is for me so far. Exploration. Some light combat so far with the sentinels. (I got up to 2 stars on the Grand Theft Auto Wanted level shown in the top right corner). I traveled for miles and miles in one direction. So it took me over 40 minutes to walk back to my ship. On the way back I got distracted with further things I found, so it took much longer than the 40 minutes, which was a straight line estimate it gives you when you’re going towards an objective.

No Man’s Sky programmer a little frustrated at impressions posted on Steam.

It’s so incredibly weird to me that basically all the things that they showed up to now are exactly what we got (with a bunch of extra stuff that will vary per person) and yet there seems to be so much misunderstanding about what it is.

What I saw is totally what I wanted and I’m enjoying it very much and even if I see a thousand planets there’s always literally a chance that the next one could still surprise me. When you’re dealing with numbers that big and variables that wide it’s a real possibility and that’s awesome.

Then that also means that someone could end up with fewer amazing moments than someone else, and I’m sure that’s a nightmare to review when most reviews these days come across like someone trying to help me choose a dishwasher instead of an experience.

+1 for truthiness quotient.

One thing I saw in a video was the overuse of the inventory menu. It seems every time you have to heal up or refill your energy suit or repair your ship’s shield, you have to go to the menu and do a crafting action in the appropriate object.

I think it would have been better some kind of quick access menu with these common actions?

Of course, this seems to be a inventory-based game. You fill out your inventory taking resources, you use then your inventory to upgrade your systems mainly to filling faster your inventory (faster multitool) and bigger inventory, which finally allows you to… do the same you did for hours, but in a less bothersome way.

About that whole coordinating to meet people thing…

[quote]
I warped for the first time today. The Star system I landed in was discovered by a user named Psytokat… so I messaged him asking him to meet me at a space station.
We are currently 4 systems away! We will meet at a space station.
He is streaming in twitch, username Psytokat.
Edit: My twitter is TheGalacticCact I’m shaking…
Edit: We are both in the same station but cannot see each other…
Update: We are 100% In the same station same spot and everything and we cannot see each other.[/quote]

Ahhh! That must be what the “single player” listing on the Steam page means!

EDIT: Oops, don’t mean to sound like that’s directed at you, Telefrog.

I think it’s more of a “that’s it?” I wasn’t following this game at all until a couple of weeks ago after I found out about all the hype behind it. Now that I have watched multiple streams, I don’t understand what everyone was so excited about. I think that’s why you are getting questions about what it is, not because people didn’t understand what the game was from the prerelease trailers, but because the hype made people not paying attention think there must be more to it. Reading some of the Reddit posts, it sounded amazing, but watching streams it looks like a walking/inventory simulator. There is a huge disconnect between the game I read about and the real game.

Hadn’t the devs clearly stated that you’ll never directly see other users?

If the reddit thread is accurate, and looking at the Twitch streams, it seems to be, then the talk about the chances of seeing other players being infinitesimally small, and requiring so much patience and time to coordinate, that it may as well be impossible is a real messaging issue. If Hello Games was just hoping that people would never be in a position to meet because it’s literally (not virtually) impossible to meet due to the way the game’s servers handle player instancing, then they should’ve just bucked up and said that.

Perhaps they meant you’d only see one another in space? Dunno personally since I’m waiting for the PC version to try it!

Yes, they had. They also said that small changes wouldn’t be visible in other people’s worlds either, but that big changes (whatever that means) could perhaps be seen by other players.

Here’s what Sean Murray told Game Informer regarding multipleyer meet-ups.

[quote]
Game Informer: Will your friends show up on the map?

Sean Murray: Yeah, but they will be a long way away. People keep asking us about multiplayer and I think when people see this they are going to fully realize what it means to be that far away from somebody else who’s playing. And I know that that’s a bit weird for people, but it’s what’s different about our game. And we want to embrace that. We don’t want people just scouting off beside their friends. I actually want people to boot up the game and just think, “Isn’t the universe huge? Who are we? What are we all doing here?”

People keep saying to us, “Yeah, but what if I knew where they were? Would I go there?” And it’s like, yeah, but they are going to have to stay there for quite a while while you get over there. And then once you get over there you might land on the same planet and then you will say, “I’m on a planet the size of Earth and I am on a mountain. Where are you?” Which is, I know, a weird thing and it’s a daunting thing.

It seems like it’s a lot of work to incorporate multiplayer with a high chance that it won’t even happen.

The only answer that I can think of for this is a really technical one. If we were to make a game where we synchronized every player, what they were doing with every other player, then that would be impossible and no one has ever done that. What we can do is, like many games that you have at the moment, where you are flying around with an open lobby. People are coming into that lobby and leaving it – like if you play Watch Dogs or something like that. Effectively, we have players joining your discrete space. We’re not trying to make an MMO where you can play with literally 60,000 people on screen. We handle the case like where other people can fly past in your game or that you can bump into other players in the game.

But that’s okay for us because it will never happen. I guess the whole of the entire community could organize to go to one specific spot and then they would find that they weren’t all there at the same time. That would be ridiculous. [/quote]

Again, it’s the messaging issue. Instead of a straight-up “No. There is no multiplayer. You can never see another player. The server is just for database calls.” Murray instead made it sound like there’s a teeny-weeny-wink-wink-it-won’t-ever-happen chance, which makes the internet think there’s totally multiplayer if you just coordinate hard enough.

Their multiplayer stance always sounded fishy to me. They seemed to say it was possible to meet other players… but it was 1 in a billion chance to do it given how big the galaxy is. Which sounded fishy because, why don’t have normal drop in/drop out coop? lobbies? Or whatever system? Why would they actually work a netcode system and a server/client infrastructure to allow online gaming and then make it so that 99.99% players wouldn’t use it? That was senseless to me.

People like to play these games with friends. If they don’t give you the ability to do it so, it’s because technically they were not able to. You are leaving money on the table otherwise, it’s as simple as that (as strong coop abilities would have sold more copies).

Even yesterday, Murray couldn’t help being vague and contradictory about MP.

So it’s not multiplayer, but the chance isn’t actually zero, right? “Pretty much zero” is not impossible.