What exactly is the issue here? What is the “lie” that they told? I not familiar enough with all the SC ins and out to know what the MP issue is here.
Tonight, I’ve taken on some delivery missions and some bounty hunting. It allowed me to visit a few new places in the verse.
Rooftop delivery, this time with appropriately sized platform:
Pitstop on a satellite station to refuel on my way to hunt a bounty.
That hunt didn’t end well. I still suck at dogfighting. And I used to be so good at Wing Commander, a mere 31 years ago. :(
New Babbage on Microtech is beautiful and a fun place to nail a landing. You are buffeted by winds while trying to lower your ship into your assigned hangar.
The connection to town is a fancy maglev monorail which zooms around… And sometimes forgets to open its doors and let passengers out. So I got to enjoy 2 loops. :)
I love not looking at all out of place in the lobby of a fancy apartment complex in New Babbage.
Trying to navigate in atmosphere, at night, while a snow storm rages and reduces visibility to near 0, is a bit of an experience. My Freelancer never made it to the pick up point (I crashed).
On the second attempt, I felt relief when I touched down with my Origin. Spotting obstacles and a suitable spot while being pushed around by gusts of wind kept me on my toes.
Later, the storm cleared but the wind remained. The clear skies made for pretty cool views.
If you ask me, it’s pretty clear that this alpha is the shell of a game. There is only so much to do. It is more an exploration and chill out activity than a game. And there is some discontent at recent decisions.
I would not recommend people spend money on it (not that anyone here feels it’s a good deal for a jpeg generator :) ).
That said, it’s my kind of activity. The physicality added by being able to get out of your ship and explore locations (on foot or in vehicles, alone or in groups), as well all the game systems (like retrieving your ship and standing awkwardly in the lift with a stranger on the way to the hangar, or cycling an airlock before getting through) are nicely immersive.
Something inevitably bugs out at some point though.
That said, I enjoy this immersion in No Man’s Sky too. After those 2, I’m not interested in playing a space sim where I’m only a ship.
Yeah this is my feeling too. I log in every now and again to see what’s changed and take in some sights, but it became clear to me pretty quickly there’s not much point in really playing it at the moment.
Hopefully with another $300 million they’ll be able to get there.
Man, if that’s not something absolutely crying out for VS tech (virtual smell), I don’t know what would.
Really digging the screenshots and recounted experiences! I’ll have to watch for the free events to try some of this myself.
Glad you like them! Seems like players expect the next free flight event to be around May (I might be wrong). In any case, I’ll post about it when it occurs. Free is a fair price to give it a go. Be aware I wasn’t always this good at crashing and dying in a fireball. Everything takes learning/practice in SC. :)
Plus the bugs make for some major RNG no matter what you’re doing!
I think I technically own that same ship. Was neat to walk around inside for a few minutes like two years ago.
A lot of those screenshots look great, but screenshots of SC just leave me utterly cold at this point, because as you say - it’s an incomplete, bug-ridden shell of an experience after the better part of a decade. And it’s so far away from being more than that, that it’s comical.
A few shots from my travels this week…
Approaching Arrakis (aka Daymar. The gas giant seen behind is Crusader)
It’s as dry and as dusty as it seems.
You pretty much expect signs of the worm from the moment you set foot on it. And sandstorms are frequent.
Cellin is quite the contrast. Its pockmarked surface is a combination of over 100 dormant volcanoes and geysers that erupt unpredictably.
It’s a desolate and lifeless place.
Though taking off after a delivery and seeing the silhouettes of volcanoes at sunrise is pretty cool.
As for the game, patch 3.13 has just been released on the public test server (many SC streamers are playing it for those curious).
That said, it seems as buggy as you’d expect a new patch to be. I’ll stick with older moon surfaces, no huge caves / sink holes and the boring old asteroids until it is ready for the regular servers. In the grand scheme of things, this seems like a pretty small patch (though more features, like ship docking, are due in the point updates).
One guy I sometimes watch:
Watching the stream last night, my screenshots of Daymar are indeed out of date. The surface has had a quality improvement pass and looks quite a bit better.
The other thing I saw on stream yesterday was one of the gang bringing in a Constellation and proving me wrong. The very first stage of ship docking is now in the game. And the ship that I and (if I remember correctly) @Desslock own since the KS is finally fully functional.
That ship has a snub Merlin fighter in the back. Until 3.13, it was essentially a prop. But it’s always been intended as a ship that one of the crew can jump in to help defend the Constellation. And now you can undock/dock it.
Seen from the surface, it looked awesome. But here is a more space based demonstration:
I decided to experiment with loading a buggy onto a ship yesterday. The way to do this is, generally, to spawn your ship, fly to a station or spaceport with a garage, and drive the ship onto it.
Some moon stations are essentially a spawning platform for vehicles. In the case of Lorville, I knew the “gates” around the city had garages.
So I flew VFR over the city until I spotted what I thought was a gate (it wasn’t) and landed close to the spawning point (not).
Cue nice little morning 5K run following gate signs to get to the garage,
Then a more fun drive back towards the ship in my ROC miner buggy, while avoiding the strange vegetation.
I should have realised things would not be as easy as loading the buggy onto the ship when I fell on my ass just walking around to get a good look at the way onto the ramp.
And the first attempt at closing the cargo bay led to a hilarious Flubber like bouncing buggy, until it settled in a way I didn’t quite deem safe for travel.
Lower the ramp, reload and it behaved.
Exploring and driving around was fun, but the above took me an hour. So I called it a night. Lesson learned, either spawn the buggy first near a gate (then you get a tracking indicator for your vehicle) or go pick up vehicles at a small mining station. Still, it gave me a sense for the scale of the outskirts of Lorville. What looks tiny from the air is actually not at all.
I love how all of these screenshots and videos are made with a strong emphasis on art rather than gameplay. SC has pretty much turned into a virtual stamp collecting game. Or it was so from the start.
Not an unfair comment.
But, as to how the screenshots are taken, that’s always how I take screenshots. I’ve got a DSLR and bag full of lenses in real life. I’ve been shooting for over 15 years and I always consider composition when shooting a picture or taking a screenshot. The earlier screenshots I posted in this thread were not like that because I didn’t know the camera controls. But now that I do, I try to make them look good (though I still need to replace the horribly compressed in-game jpegs by another capture).
Is SC currently mostly about pretty pictures with not much else to achieve except collect ships (which you can buy with in-game money)? Why yes, yes it is. You can mine, run cargo, go on cave missions, collect bounties by shooting AI and other people in the sky and on earth. All those activities are being expanded in the coming patch. But none of them add up to any kind of complete game loop. As I mentioned higher up, it’s more a chill out activity where you can take pretty pictures than a game.
That’s why I don’t recommend people put money into it. With 3.13, it might be worth trying on a free flight weekend to see the sights though.
Yeah, that’s been the general consensus for years now. Hence the on-going derision that after 10 yrs this is where they are. It’s a travesty. Imagine what could have been if this project, with all this money and talent, was in the hands of a more capable AA team. I mean, can you imagine what me, Egosoft, Hello Games etc would do with $400M+ to build an all-encompassing space game like this?
That’s because they invest heavily in artists & modelers. Plus, they’re using a derivative of CryEngine, so this is also to be expected.
Dear diary,
Today, I died in a wasteland. I decided to get rich like all those other miners and visited friendly Aberdeen.
The desolate look of the moon didn’t put me off.
My first mistake.
I didn’t heed the warnings.
My second one.
Then I got lost driving on the dark side.
By the time I noticed my survival estimate plummeting, I made a mad dash for my ship. I was so close. And yet too far.
Colourful spots started appearing and dancing around my vision as I got close to death. Made driving challening
The budget of SC is indeed hard to fathom for mere mortals. I believe that Elite had reached about $100M in lifetime revenue by the end of 2020. Not sure what the dev budget has been over that period. Similarly, I have no clue by now how much NMS has cost to make and maintain and expand over the past few years. But yeah, I imagine both will be a fraction of what was spent on SC.
I have to say that I really appreciate the physicality of SC. I want to step into my ship and be able to explore it rather than transition into a fixed pilot’s seat. I like the flight simulator vibe of living in the SC world. NMS is probably closest to the experience I enjoy, though more as fantasy escapism.
I don’t know what kind of game more restrained devs would have been able to deliver by now. But hopefully one that still offered this kind of immersion. Other space sims already exist. Having a bit of a unicorn project is interesting to follow for me.
Though PTU players are already waiting for the point releases and the next patch for more gameplay. That’s the constant SC development equation: Gameplay = Current Patch + 1. :)