yeah, 4.0 is focused on early-game tutorials and reducing grinding - sounds really awesome.
Hey nice, maybe they can make it more like 1.0 in that regard. I hope. Back when the start of the game wasn’t so overwhelmingly complicated.
If they do that, I’ll buy it again for my XSX.
OMG yes please. I just want to take quests and fly around the NMS universe without mining fuel and rocks and shit.
It’s all in this article:
“For me,” he continues, “this update is for if you’ve said, 'Look, I played No Man’s Sky and I wanted to love it, but I bumped off it a bit because it was a bit grindy, [or] if you said ‘I want to come back, but it’s been ages and there’s been so many updates and it feels overwhelming’… You’ve probably had this experience where you’ve come to a game where it’s been updated a tonne and… sometimes those [elements] don’t fit as cohesively as you’d like. We hear this sometimes, and I think it’s true… and so what we’ve done [in 4.0] is we’ve revisited a bunch of things that are really impactful from the design perspective.”
To that end, 4.0 features “lots of streamlining in terms of the tutorial, when you unlock certain things, what’s available to you”, all intended to fit No Man’s Sky’s six years of updates “into a more cohesive whole”. That streamlining will also extend to the game’s inventory system, which, in turn, has enabled Hello Games to “massively increase what is effectively the level cap”, meaning bigger inventories, and the opportunity to level up ships and weapons further than was possible before.
It’s me!
Not me:
“For me,” he continues, "this update is for if you’ve said, 'Look, I played No Man’s Sky and I wanted to love it, but I bumped off it a bit because it was a bit grindy…
Me?:
On top of that, among its various other revisions, 4.0 brings an overhauled Survival mode and tools for custom games. “Survival is [curently], I think, at its strongest in the first few hours as a game mode,” Murray explains, “[so] we’ve made it a much more challenging, more unique experience.” Custom games, meanwhile, will enable players to create bespoke sessions that better fit their needs at any given time, featuring options to adjust everything “from controls, to difficulty, to how a lot of those sort of fundamentals work in terms of the pacing of the game… which opens up a whole bunch of different ways to play the game that weren’t there before.”
Gotta try this since the grind put me off the game for good after trying it a couple of times. Another thing that I’m surprised by (and don’t see people mentioning) is that the graphics in this game are really not that good. I was hoping to be wowed by the experience of moving from planet to space and back, but instead the textures are kinda yucky, the skies are a mess, the feeling of moving through the atmosphere is very underwhelming. Maybe this was impressive back in 2016, I dunno, but I have a feeling I would never have been impressed with the graphics in this had I seen it back then either. The procedural elements seem to determine that the textures and objects, heck the whole thing just can’t be made to look very good.
The “core” conceit of the game, that there’s this infinite universe of unique worlds, really didn’t pan out. It’s kind of amazing to start No Man’s Sky for the first time and see, quite realistically, a “world” that no other player has or will see before you, but after a few hours you discover that all the worlds are unique like snowflakes and have the same basic DNA underlying their generation, and so most of the time there’s a lack of interesting worlds to discover - in fact pretty quickly all the worlds start to look exactly the same. My biggest disappointment was that they didn’t spend a bit more time in, let’s say, the geology/ecology planet generator. Geology was especially bad, and in fact you can kind of tell that they didn’t (and still really haven’t) thought of planetary geology more than “a bunch of rolling hills, everywhere”, especially when the game started out with crystals of plutonium everywhere, just because.
OTOH, it might well look pretty nice on a smaller Switch screen (or Steam Deck screen), as really there’s not that much detail to find out there anyway.
Looks like 4.0 has dropped, I see a 7GB update on Steam! I’ll likely play some this weekend and try out relaxed mode.
I’m looking forward to trying this on the Switch. Paradoxically I think the fuzzy lower rez graphics might actually make the game look better.
So people are losing their minds on Steam about how the update has wrecked their game by stripping tech upgrades out of the general cargo area of the inventory and confining them to the tech area. I’m curious if it’s an overreaction or if it is really that disruptive. I’m not sure if I can bear to start another run, but either way I definitely got my money’s worth out of the game.
If you double dipped bonuses by duplicating mod sets in general and tech, it is a significant nerf in numbers. And I did double dip for permadeath.
That said I started a new game, and at standard settings (new settings are nice) the game seems MUCH easier. I remember fretting for recharges trying to find my ship the first time before this update, and it was just not a factor this time. Yeah, the recharge mat is more common but … protection seemed to be draining much slower. Assuming the same changes were made to combat, I’m guessing the new “normal” is nerfed to match less modules. If you want old hard, you may need to do custom settings.
The only nerf that can’t have been adjusted behind the scenes is the hyperdrive range. If you double dipped hyperdrive mods on an explorer that number is way down and static. However, they just buffed in the last update the ability to get high range on the freighter. And the living ship fuel use by endgame makes the number fairly irrelevant if you use one of those for exploring. And then, the ability to summon ship and freighter after using a portal that happened a while back means that once you unlock all portal addresses (early/mid-ish) you can port at near infinite distances instantly. Just make a base at a portal and go at will. So while this number getting smaller is a clear functional nerf, it is easily mitigated by systems already present.
So while I’m not loosing my mind, if you only log in and just look at the numbers I can see why some people are mad at “numbers getting smaller”.
I’m waiting for the backlash on the game being easier on “normal” to hit. But as that can be changed on the fly to harder, again … player can make it the way they want easily. And for people mad at the tech storage space number being smaller: just toggle on “free upgrades”, and buy them back out to the new max for free!
There are always going to be people angry with how new versions break their game. You saw this all the time in Skyrim although to be fair Bethesda’s version changes are sometimes meaningless compared to the magnitude of changes that NMS has in its patches.
Is the main storyline much more developed now than on original release? I remember plowing thorough it in about 10 hours just flying from system to system.
Good question! And part of why I started a new game.
Though I restart often, part of why I am not in the “pearl clutching” group. The main thing this update makes me think of is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Watching the number go up is extrinsic to the activity you did to make it go up. Some numbers just went down, oops! It becomes clear you did not enjoy the “work” in making those numbers go up.
I go for the intrinsic rewards in NMS, and try to in any game as I think it is personally better for me. Of course, then you run into the limits on duplication in the algorithm leading to boredom. But I think it does pretty well for any generated content.
…and my axe!
err, I mean “and me!”
This is very true. They also really lacked a game loop that makes you want to visit more planets. I think the reliance on survival tropes is part of that: if you need to create basic things to survive and fly, you better have the ingredients available on every planet. The very dynamics that make these games interesting, which are seeking out new and interesting worlds to find exotic items you actually need for gameplay, don’t really exist here. You catalog the animals, which are just version A/B/C of the same animals that will be everywhere. You’ll get meaningless credits for that. You then collect mineral A/B/C which will be on virtually every planet.
This is a game engine waiting for a better game. For example, a Privateer-style game where you fight as a mercenary, and then find a shady client who’s willing to pay you exorbitant amounts if you find the exotic mineral on one of 5 planets.
Oh God yes please. I’d kill for a mode where you just did missions and made money.