WHEN!
Though I wonder what it means to ‘complete your fishing log’ - does this mean per planet like scanning fauna, or is there a fixed number of fish in such a huge game.
Now. Like, right now.
I swear that every expedition I’ve participated in starts me in the ugliest ship.
Hopefully it already solved itself.
Theres a bug in Xbox where the game enters in a infinite loop. Oddly enough a way to fix it is to open other game, and once the other game is launched, return back to NMS. This odd workaround triggers a return from background and the game continues to main menu.
Anyway this was a few weeks ago, maybe is already solved.
I know it’s a minor gripe, but I wish HG would include a walking speed setting. I feel like I’m crawling when I play in first person and playing in third person doesn’t click with me as much as I’d really like it to.
It still kept happening but not every time and not quite often enough for me to want to quit it for good. It improved after one of the initial patches but it still felt like there was about a 1 in 30 chance of it getting stuck. I got through the expedition at least, and enjoyed my time with it.
You need to master the melee attack/jetpack glide combo! You can zip around faster than the exocrafts once you get the hang of doing it.
Fishing is exactly as shallow (sorry) as you’d expect for NMS’s “breadth first” approach to gameplay systems. Cast line. Wait for something to start splashing. Hold trigger. Nothing can escape as long as you wait a second for a steady splashing. It’s possible to jump the gun and reel back an empty hook if you just reel immediately at a brief splash, but other than that there’s no trick. No managing tension, direction you pull, nothing. If you hook it, you’ve got it. Fish are just random, rarities and traits affected by your environment. Bait is a multiplier for those factors or your rarity chances based on the bait you use.
I’m not sure I understand the point of the skiff beyond aesthetics. It doesn’t move, it’s just a stationary platform you can deploy wherever you are in water. So it’s not providing anything your ship couldn’t do since the aqua jets to land on water were introduced.
It has dedicated storage space which seems nice at first, but I think at some point you’ll still have to do a lot of inventory shuffling to get anything you stored in the skiff to an inventory you can actually sell/use your catches from.
This also looks to be one of the most straightforward expeditions so far, but it’s also probably not going to be any faster for you since you’re at the mercy of luck for how long it will take you to catch enough of each fish needed for the milestones.
I’m not disappointed, it’s pretty much exactly what it looked like from the trailer, a very minor update. I do wish the skiff was a little more interesting though.
Did they overhaul how creatures are made yet? If not, that’s the only update I want. So many look like the same variations of the stuff I’ve seen a million times already.
If they ever dramatically overhauled creature generation, it was long enough ago I don’t remember it. They add new types of creatures occasionally, like in the Worlds part 1 update there are now some weird plant-y creatures, and creatures that look like living alien buildings, but they’re not meaningfully different from any other creatures beyond a couple new templates for creature aesthetics.
This update, as far as I can tell, doesn’t really add any fish creatures in any meaningful way at all. It adds a fishing activity, which involves a lot of new “fish” you can catch, but all those amount to are inventory items with icons and descriptions. Some generic models of fish nibble at your line when you cast it, but you couldn’t dive in the water and see what you’re about to catch swimming around. They’re just to give a visual indication of something about to bite, then you reel in your line, then you get a little UI box with the inventory icon of the “fish” you just caught.
tl;dr: No.
There’s a few more types now, like the plant wolves and the giant land bugs that have been recently added; those draw from their own pool of body parts.
My last couple posts probably come across as heavily critical of the fishing, which I should clarify.
I think the fishing they added is extremely lightweight and simple, and that’s also okay in theory. There’s also no reason to complain, it’s just another little freebie of a feature you can take or leave.
What bothers me a little is that it’s both too simple to be engaging for its own sake, and not rewarding in game. You should all do the fishing for the expedition and get some sweet new character customization parts, but no one should ever fish after that, and that’s the mistake it seems could’ve been fixed easily. The only reward for fishing once the expedition is over will be credits. Anyone who’s been playing for a while stopped caring about credits ages ago, anyone new to the game will have more efficient ways to gather them.
Visual personalization through titles, character creation parts, unique ships, that sort of thing, is the most meaningful reward the game can offer, so a “simple” fix (I know I shouldn’t be arm-chair game developing) would’ve been to just plop another vendor in the Anomaly that offers those kind of unique rewards for fishing milestones. X number of fish, X number of rare fish, X number of nocturnal fish, etc. Basically the same things in the expedition milestones now, but they could be a rotating set of missions to up your fishing reputation and new cosmetics could be added occasionally.
Fishing isn’t bad, but it also isn’t fun by itself, and it’s only rewarding for a limited time during the expedition. Fixing either part of that would offset the other, which makes a better reward system for fishing seem like low hanging fruit.
As mentioned somewhere a few days ago, this is likely a backport from Light no Fire. It makes sense for a fantasy game to have some sort of fishing mechanic, and has probably some food/alchemy/crafting related stuff attached to it.
As far as a “fishing minigame” goes, it’s decent enough - it’s got all the usual trappings, bait, engine hooks for having different rods, a variety of possible fish to catch, in various rarities, determined by biome and weather condition.
Obviously, it’s not Sega Pro Bass fishing. But then again, it doesn’t have to be, and I find it kinda hilarious that I can now jump into a system, boost down to the nearest planet with water on it, burn through the atmosphere and plop down my ship on the nearest body of water, emerging from it, then sitting down on the wing and casting my rod into whatever foul liquid the planet has to offer.And then pull a fish from there. Or a boot.
Besides, you can release the fish for nanites (and quite a few of them), for which there is always demand, and they also added automatic fish traps for those who need the fish for some reason but passionately hate the actual fishing mechanic.
In NMS, it’s obviously just a cute addon of a reskinned mechanic from somewhere else, but I’m kinda curious what other systems will tie to it in LNF. I expect that to be a mechanically more curated experience, while NMS is more of a mutated beast that got stuck with all the extra bits, but no interlocking mechanics.
I thought the fishing was going to have some tie-in to the cooking system, which I’ve yet to really try.
I forgot about releasing fish for nanites, that’s a very good counter to my “fishing isn’t rewarding” argument.
Agreed. It makes sense to use NMS to test and iterate on some of the ideas from Light No Fire as a safe way to get some feedback and all.