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I was thinking of waiting for a few reviews before I picked up NMS, but...do I really care what some random dude on the internet thinks? Might as well just buy it and play it. I have the money right now.

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I was thinking of waiting for a few reviews before I picked up NMS, but...do I really care what some random dude on the internet thinks? Might as well just buy it and play it. I have the money right now.

 

I think reactions to it are really going to be determined by what they want out if it. If you want a game that is repetitive in a relaxing way that lets you fly around different planets looking at stuff, you'll love it. If you want deep combat/survival/story content, you'll feel a bit let down.

 

I have to say that I am loving the language system so far. I'm getting close to understanding the aliens in my starting area at least a little and I feel weirdly proud of that.

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I've been looking for a game that I can just turn on and veg out to. When I get home from work, I just want to immerse myself in something that's not stressful, and fun. Looks like it's exactly whatI want.

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I've been looking for a game that I can just turn on and veg out to. When I get home from work, I just want to immerse myself in something that's not stressful, and fun. Looks like it's exactly whatI want.

 

If that's what you're looking for, I think you'd probably really enjoy it. The tutorial can be a bit of a slog, but after that, it become a perfect game to just relax and wander around in. I'm really enjoying setting short term goals for myself, like repairing a neat looking ship.

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Previously I used Destiny for that, but I fell behind with gear and suddenly playing daily missions was stressful and difficult, so I dropped it completely. Well, I'm looking forward to playing it when I get home from work.

 

Also, I love that I can buy a game from work and have it download on my PS4 while I'm still there. That was the only down side of digital for me - having to wait for the download. 

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A thing that would be huge for me in this game is some kind of waypointing or bookmarking or note-taking system included in the atlas log.  If I discover a space station that's buying at 95% higher than the galactic average, I want to be able to find and get back to that station quickly.  Or my money-cube planet.  Right now I expect I'll need to have a wirebound notebook to log my journey like some kind of savage.

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I got to a planet that had over-sized creatures, like a story tall. That was exciting.

 

I also found out you can feed certain creatures if you have an isotope they find yummy. Then that animal will bond to you, follow you around, find goodies for you. Cute!

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This thread is super refreshing. On GAF all I see is people complaining about the lack of multiplayer (seriously there's an enormous thread equating Sean to Molyneux, it's incredible).

I'm so stoked to be able to play this Sunday night. O:

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I occasionally peek at the no man's sky reddit and it's the same.  People are so, so mad about multiplayer, and immediately spin up the steam teen outrage because they feel like they've been misled about the significance of multiplayer in the game.  While it would be cool to for the game to have some interesting multiplayer mechanics - like base building or ship trading or asynchronous tradewars 2002 mechanics or whatever - it's really not necessary.

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Yeah I'd like it to be there (the idea of rare Journey-like multiplayer in a, massive universe is so goddamn enticing), but at the end of the day... It's not that big a deal, ya nerds. \:

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Yeah I'd like it to be there (the idea of rare Journey-like multiplayer in a, massive universe is so goddamn enticing), but at the end of the day... It's not that big a deal, ya nerds. \:

 

I feel like it was inevitable, though? That much hype and that much vagueness, there was going to be a feature that an appreciable segment of the fanbase had decided in advance would be important and turned out to be unimportant or even nonexistent.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-08-10-no-mans-sky-players-meet-at-the-same-location-but-cant-see-each-other

 

Sean Murray implied that there would be some interaction between players that's possible besides just seeing discoveries, but didn't elaborate.

 

I guess I shouldn't be so surprised about internet uproar for things I thought were pretty clearly spelled out, but I am. Outside of the vagueness of how players can "interact" with each other, I really don't feel like I have been illuminated with hidden secrets to the game mere hours before launch. I haven't been following it rabidly, just through osmosis of liking video games. C'est la vie.

 

Is there any sort of preorder bonus? I was cautiously approaching the game, but it's gotten enough positive coverage and the loop seems palatable enough that I'd, for instance, rather put $60 into trying this than buying the Elite expansion. I wouldn't get to play until Sunday at the earliest, so preorder/launch buildup doesn't mean much right now.

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Sometimes I worry if it was beneficial in the long run or not for Sony to spotlight this game as a flagship indie and market it so intensely. 

 

But that lets you get Bill Bailey to do a promo! That makes it all worth it.

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There really wasn't a whole lot of vagueness in general BESIDES the multiplayer. Unless you count "I'm deliberately not mentioning some things" as vague, which I don't.

No Man's Sky garnered this reputation because, as far as I can tell, the initial reveal didn't come with too many details, and even though those details came out in increasing number over the years, people refused to acknowledge them (and even refused to acknowledge things that WERE in the initial reveal!). It's such a bizarre thing.

"It is because it was!"

Anyway, whatever, I'm still stoked.

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That's about the same place I am with regard to the game. I suppose there's some vagueness that I'm either ok with or actively like. "How structured is the game?" is a different sort of question to "Is there multiplayer".

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The Alien NPC designs are tight. They are such weird fun aliens. They're not all TV headed robots. For example, there's also a parrot-man.

 

This game also reminds me of what an FPS "FTL" might feel like. What with the focus on jumping from star to star, planet to planet.

 

Then I begin fantasizing what a more "Star Trek" style space combat system would look like in NMS. That asks a lot, enough to be basically a whole different game. Like having a AI crew to send from station to station.

 

That's like my most wanted thing at this point- multi-room space ships. Maybe it's like my private space-station that I park in orbit. I could do base-building inside it. Keep a little zoo of space-pets. Fly down to planets with my space-car. That makes more sense to me than terrestrial base-building.

 

I think there's an instinct with "universe simulation games" to ask for more and more...

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Zoo of space pets is the most correct idea for an additional feature I've ever heard.

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I've not been paying attention at all to this game but I'm suddenly finding myself wanting it.  It seems fun and chill which is what I need right now.

 

Is there any sort of preorder bonus? I was cautiously approaching the game, but it's gotten enough positive coverage and the loop seems palatable enough that I'd, for instance, rather put $60 into trying this than buying the Elite expansion. I wouldn't get to play until Sunday at the earliest, so preorder/launch buildup doesn't mean much right now.

 

The preorder bonus is a ship with an upgraded hyperdrive, but I've heard that it's actually screwing early players over.  Apparently you're supposed to find a blueprint that lets you craft a hyperdrive yourself but players who use the preorder item to skip that step can warp ahead, buy a seemingly better ship with no hyperdrive, then be stuck there forever because they can't warp out and you can't switch back to your old ship.

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I got the ship with the upgraded hyperdrive and did not encounter that bug. Or maybe I did, I don't remember crafting a hyperdrive, but every ship I've bought since then has had a hyperdrive in it.

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I waited to activate the pre-order ship as long as possible in order to not miss crucial tutorial messages. 

 

This lead to a different irritant: Constant pop-ups telling me to activate my pre-order ship, blocking the tutorial messages.

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I waited to activate the pre-order ship as long as possible in order to not miss crucial tutorial messages. 

 

This lead to a different irritant: Constant pop-ups telling me to activate my pre-order ship, blocking the tutorial messages.

Yeah, that's why I ended up redeeming the damned thing.

It just adds to my distaste for "bonuses" like that. I mean, if the early game is tuned around having a certain kind of ship, then that should be the ship. Pre-order bonuses that stack the deck for the player in the early game seem kind of absurd and bad to me.

There are a ton of games that give you, say, better weapons if you get the pre-order sucker edition or whatever, and it hurts the experience. It undermines the intended sense of progression, because the first bunch of times you get a new sword or gun (or race car) it's worse than the thing you started with.

Tangent aside, I'm finding the game pretty interesting so far.

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I played this for about two hours last night - long enough to get my ship fixed, to explore the first planet, and to jet off to a second world - and I'm really enjoying it so far. 

 

There's one or two odd bugs, like the game insisting I have a free inventory slot before I can talk to an alien. And you can't seem to re-name planets if you make a mistake or change your mind. I wanted to name my first system 'Norman's Sky' (a dad joke, in memory of my dad) but I accidentally just called it 'Norman's', which is not the worst, but makes me feel faintly stupid every time I look at it. I imagine the single-submission limit is to stop their servers from falling over with millions of repeated renamings and they will probably unlock it at some point.

 

But for the most part it's been a smooth and relaxing experience. It is, as many people have pointed out, an extremely chill game. I'm just pottering about, seeing what's over the next ridge, what that '?' icon is on my HUD, or just scanning and documenting the local wildlife; it's just a trickle of quietly satisfying moments. I was surprised by just how much there is to see and do at first, though like Animal Crossing, I don't think it will benefit from people trying to rinse it in a few long sessions. It feels like it ought to be picked up and put down occasionally. 

 

It is a very specific kind of experience. If you ever enjoyed playing alone in the survival mode in Minecraft, or ever just refreshed the world generator to see what kinds of incredible things you might see over the next horizon, you will probably get a lot out of this. I am not in the least bit bothered by the absence of other players. It really does require you to set and manage your own micro-goals, and accept that many of them won't provide immediate fulfillment. (As in life, etc.)

 

I really like that there isn't a mini-map. Too often I end up playing the mini-map in open world games and largely ignoring the actual world in front of me. But I was also surprised to discover that there doesn't seem to be any kind of 'maxi-map', either. That's quite a radical design decision - I don't think it's a bad one, but unlike Minecraft, the intent seems to be that players should always be pressing forward onto the next thing, rather than staking out a space and securing it for themselves. (Which in turn makes me wonder how base-building is going to work in this context - how and why should I build my own home if there's no convenient way to return to it from time to time?) 

 

At one point I discovered a crashed spaceship, and I was astonished to find that it wasn't just part of the scenery: if I could scavenge and build the necessary parts, I could fix it and take it as my own. But some of the materials didn't seem to be present on this planet, so I had to leave it; and of course I have no way to figure out how to find it again now. I think the game wants me to feel like that won't matter - that there'll be countless more crashed spaceships out there for me to fix up - and that's probably correct. But at the same time, I worry that if I find something else that's even more amazing, I'll want to have a way to get back to it again.

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I very much doubt requiring you to have an inventory slot free is a bug - alien interactions usually have a few different possible outcomes, and often at least one of those outcomes is them giving you a trade good of some kind (like a convergence cube or geknip or a vykeen dagger or whatever), so the game probably wants to make sure you have room to recieve it before allowing you to proceed.

 

Also yeah not being able to set planetside waypoints or some kind of location bookmarking system is a huge drag.  I'm always running into places I wanna return to - usually trading posts, so I don't have to blast off to the star system's space station whenever I wanna sell off my cargo - but not being able to keep them in some kind of options menu rolodex is kind of inconvenient.

 

It is possible, from the universe map, to locate places you've already been, provided that you've transmitted your discoveries to the server.  You hit the r1/l1 buttons to toggle between your waypoint/freelook options and then use the d-pad to select nearest discoveries, which will hop the cursor from discovered star to discovered star.  It's kind of clunky, but I was able to return to my treasure cube planet using this method (and then make enough bank to beef my suit out to 36 inventory slots).

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