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I've been really, really loving this game, but, like I've said on the podcast and elsewhere, I detest the mining/crafting/shitty inventory management. It would've been a far stronger game with mechanics that didn't make you a space asshole, but instead a benevolent explorer/photographer/whatever. I can't help but feel the survival stuff was a concession to marketability.

 

Like "Infinite planets and sci-fi book covers!" wasn't enough of a sell, so they had to pitch "but also, shitty Minecraft elements and a Destiny interface!" on top of it.

 

I don't know how far off the mark I am for thinking this. NMS is like, one core decision away from GOTY for me, hence my saltiness.

 

(I still can't stop playing...)

They didn't pitch it that way though, did they? (I'm asking)

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Haha for some reason I find shitty more tolerable, and I only just now realized that.

In the end it's all the same. :P

Eot: they did not! In Danielles defense, there are plenty of people who agree with her, heh.

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I enjoy the survival elements and the chill exploration elements, but I feel like the game makes a pretty muddled compromise between the two. The survival stuff gets in the way, but it also feels really inconsequential compared to other survival games. There's not much mechanical depth to the survival/crafting, so it can be mastered in the first hour or two of the game.

 

That said, I'm still enjoying it as a zone out + podcast game.

 

It'll be interesting to see how Hello Games evolves it from here. People have projected so many aspirations onto the game that it'll be impossible to satisfy everyone. Reminds me a lot of the early days of Minecraft in that respect.

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I'm sorta surprised there's not just an in-game option to let you play the game peacefully.

 

I like survival stuff so I'm all about it, but if I were in charge I'd deffo add that option. Also I'd make it so fucking items fucking stack in the fucking inventory FUCK. Do that and I'll have no more complaints about inventory management!

 

Also calling these mechanics "cynical" is far more cynical than the actual mechanics themselves!

 

I really hope(/believe??) that these sorts of things (especially photography! i so want a pokemon snap mode in this game) will make it into the game through future updates. Depending on how long they want to keep working on it...

 

I like all of your ideas! A 'chill mode' for this game would solve a lot, as would the ~so-simple-why-the-everloving-fuck-didn't-they-do-that~ idea of allowing you to stack items in your inventory. I do have hope for mod support one day, or for hello games to maybe make some QOL improvements, at the least.

 

I don't dislike survival mechanics, I just dislike them in this game. Don't Starve is a game I adore, for example. I just think they feel half-hearted and out of place here. Just my thoughts.

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I've mixed feelings about the survival/crafting/trading mechanics thus far. I don't think they are great, but at the same time, I'd really miss them if they were gone. They give me an incentive to go out on little adventures that I just wouldn't have otherwise. Like the other night I followed a '?' marker to a base that was submerged at the bottom of a really deep lake, even though I didn't quite have enough air to make a dive like that. It was thrilling to figure that out for myself, to be allowed to make my own mistakes; to feel that mystery of something unknown just out of reach. Another time I found a planet full of a valuable item that made the sentinels go completely nuts when I took it. Fleeing offworld with a hold full of great stuff, then being ambushed by a couple of pirates on the way to the space station, made me feel exactly like a slightly inept version of Han Solo.

 

Or even just the feeling of sitting in my little spaceship while a radiation storm rages outside. It feels exactly like sitting in your car and zipping up your jacket, listening to the rain drumming on the windshield, knowing you'll have to go outside in a few minutes. Would it still be meaningful if you couldn't get wet?

 

I'm a big fan of the idea that sometimes games should make players do things they don't want to do - or at least do things they think they don't want to do. Cut out such moments and you'd have no malaria and weapon jamming in Far Cry 2, no respawning enemies in the Souls games, no creature in Alien: Isolation. You've got to have some notion of risk for reward to feel properly rewarding.

 

(Incidentally I'm not sure that making trading items stackable would necessarily fix the issue of limited inventory space. To keep the thing balanced - to stop players just nabbing Geknip x 99 and then making a vast fortune in one trading run - you'd have to greatly reduce the value of stackable items. And then players would end up having to collect more of those items to make it worthwhile, which is probably less fun for all concerned. Perhaps it would be better just to make the trading consoles more accessible, so you could easily get rid of stuff you no longer want to carry without just destroying it?)

 

Still, I think the suggestion of an alternative 'free mode' is a good one. They could give your ship infinite hyperdrive, ensure your suit never runs out of juice, and render all the sentinels and wildlife totally harmless. But I'd be inclined to make it so that players can't rename planets/species in this mode, or get an endgame state when they reach the centre of the universe. No reason to give that stuff away for free when the rest of us have to work for it.  :P

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While the idea of a "Free Mode" is initially appealing, I think after rapidly visiting lots of planets I'd get bored. If there's no challenge to distract from the procedural generation, I'd just see the pattern, see the similarities and end up finding it boring.

 

Planets are fun to go to and explore when it's work to get there. A new environment is a reward for the hard work you put in at the previous planet. Remove the work (and I'm being serious, most of what you do on a planet is work, the rest is exploration) and there's no real carrot and stick. It's all carrot, and carrots get boring if that's all you eat.

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While the idea of a "Free Mode" is initially appealing, I think after rapidly visiting lots of planets I'd get bored. If there's no challenge to distract from the procedural generation, I'd just see the pattern, see the similarities and end up finding it boring.

 

I haven't played this yet, but I think the thing is that for me I'd get bored either way. I didn't like Don't Starve at all, or Terraria. So no matter how good the survivalcraft mechanics are, they're just going to be an annoying obstacle to me. I'd rather be able to explore some planets for a little while and get tired of it relatively soon than spend a longer time exploring less planets because I spent so long with filler.

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I'm not one of those people angry about the game, but I thought this video was hilarious

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I'm not one of those people angry about the game, but I thought this video was hilarious

 

That's hilarious.

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Yeah saw that yesterday and about fuckin' died. So fucking good lol.

 

(Gotta admit, seeing that old trailer does sting a bit. Game looks good, but nowhere near that good. Thing is, I think it still could. I'm not talking about the animation/creature design, either.)

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Did anyone else have low expectations for this game? NMS always seemed to set out to do the things that mattered to me least in games: huge amounts of barren worlds with generated, non-curated content, a focus on magnitudes and numbers, and crafting, blech. I guess for me, I've always been averse to those kinds of promises.

I think there's a big segment of gamers out there that loves the idea that the planet they're seeing is algorithmically unique, and that they are the only ones to see it, but really they're just seeing one iteration of a hand-made formula; if there are 18 billion permutations but only 10 different formulae that generate those permutations, then there are really only 10 different planets, in a way. Whether a planet has tiger butterflies or purple grass doesn't really mean much to me. They're effectively all equally arbitrary, garish Lisa-Frank hellscapes.

I don't know, I just don't get the appeal. Not trying to troll here - if you are enjoying the game, don't let me ruin it for you - but just looking to see if anyone else was skepical about NMS in the first place.

I haven't played the game because of these concerns. That said, this thread is really interesting for me. PlasticFlesh's metaphor of the game basically being an exploration of a folder-structure in a first-person game form is a concept I'm totally into. On launch-day I looked at a few streams and all of them were in what amounted to a very pretty loading-screen and so I decided that I am too impatient to play this game, but From what I'm reading, No Man's Sky is illuminating some fascinating discussion.

I'd be really interested in players being able to affect the universe in ways that were apparent and interesting to other players. I heard there is going to eventually be a base-building mechanic. My assumption is that the structures that other players create won't populate everyone else's game automatically (perhaps requiring an invite instead), but I like thinking about the side-effects of trying to impliment a shared, effectable universe. I would imagine that they would have to reverse the procedural-generation by creating some sort of compression algorithm that could condense player-structures into something that could be produced procedurally which might corrupt the structures in interesting ways. For instance, maybe it would just record and reproduce the placements of corners and fill in the tile-choices as defaults. Would players start to exploit these corruptions in order to shortcut construction-processes? I think that type of thing is interesting to think about.

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Yeah saw that yesterday and about fuckin' died. So fucking good lol.

 

(Gotta admit, seeing that old trailer does sting a bit. Game looks good, but nowhere near that good. Thing is, I think it still could. I'm not talking about the animation/creature design, either.)

 

I wonder what the procedural generation version of a bullshot is, because fuck me if that's not a bullshot. 

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I don't think that's the fault of procgen. (Again, not talking about the monstrosity.) It's just, like, the graphics. Where's the fog like that? Why is the lighting not that good? The colors feel so much more vibrant!

 

The real answer is, that's not a gameplay trailer, but you know.

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I was more referring to the giant dinosaurs. That's really what stood out to me, I've not seen anything like that.

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Oh, I've seen stuff in screenshots. Not personally, though. I'm still on the first planet!!

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Ok, I normally just see little critters. Nothing bigger than a bear-sized alien. I've been to roughly 5 planets, which isn't a lot!

 

Trying to find all the wildlife on one planet is painstaking. I want to know what thing I've missed though. 

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I wonder what the procedural generation version of a bullshot is, because fuck me if that's not a bullshot.

Hah, well that footage still plays on the Steam store page ;)

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Ok, I normally just see little critters. Nothing bigger than a bear-sized alien. I've been to roughly 5 planets, which isn't a lot!

 

Trying to find all the wildlife on one planet is painstaking. I want to know what thing I've missed though. 

 

In about 30 planets, I've only seen three creatures significantly bigger than me. A bear that I could stand under and it's stomach was just above my head, A horse lizard thing about two stories tall, and a flying snake thing that looked to be about 50 feet long at a distance (also carnivorous, so I didn't get any closer.)

 

The animation quality is the main disappointment when I compare to that old trailer. Nothing in the actual game seems actually aware of it's environment, and the animation cycles for most things seem pretty similar between each other. I've also yet to find a planet that has as much vegetation as I've seen in screen shots, so it's been a lot of creatures inexplicably hopping around hills of rock with a few fungi/trees dotted here and there. *shrug* But how are you going to know a cool planet unless you see a bunch of crappy ones?

 

Edit: I probably should have posted this earlier, but I was having all sorts of problems streaming video and other critical applications on PC hitching and breaking when No Man's Sky was running. I noticed over the weekend that the NMS.exe process is set to Above Normal priority in task manager. While I'm sure they must exist, I've never seen another program set itself to anything but normal by default before. When I switched to Below Normal (In Win10 you can do it from Task Manager > Details Tab > Right Click NMS.exe) the performance of everything else on the PC improved a ton, with a barely noticeable effect on NMS itself.

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Man, this game. 

 

So, like many of you I was pretty hyped for it, but I have a pretty reasonable skepticism to keep my enthusiasm pretty low. I kept them realistic and the game is pretty much what I was expecting. Not following the media for the past year or so, just dipping into the few big trailers they would show, I did hear about the crafting and kind of expected it to be minecraft in space.

 

It sort of is and it sort of isn't and its not necessarily a bad thing. I'm like 14 hours in on my third star system and I've enjoyed my time, I'm glad I'm playing it now rather than hearing other people talk about their experience never really looking into myself. It's a neat game, it has a solid foundation, it just doesn't feel like a complete vision, and that is to say, it feels like it started out as something else and turned into what it is, but never got fully realized. I'd be interested in seeing if the developers continue to tune and add to it based on where I think they were going with it or if they tune it to what they originally wanted.

 

Let's get the really bad out of the way... performance. I was ready to play the moment it unlocked on Steam and it was about an hour of frustration. The visual basic pack or whatever was missing so it didn't run, and once running performance was terrible, using your analyzer caused massive hitching and I was averaging 10-20 fps. Granted I don't have a great computer, but I just stuck in a 1070... so I expected a bit more. Within a few hours they patched it and while some hitching still occurred I was getting 50-60fps steady most of the time until it hitched for whatever reason. Anyway, past saturday I was out of town and I came back to it today, it seems like they tweaked things again and I get less hitching, but performance is back to bad 20fps with a max of 30fps... even though my setting is 60fps  or max (I tried both thinking maybe something got broken). So yeah, they are still working on kinks, but the good news eventually it should run smoothly because it mostly did before.

 

So, I was expecting mincraft in space in the fact that you're gatthering resourced and crafting, and so far that seems to be bulk of the gameplay loop for me. The big difference, they didn't just throw "minecraft" into their exploration game. Minecrafts loop is resource gathering and crafting just like No Mans Sky, but it's about building, collaboration, and homesteading. No Mans Sky's  main motivation is exploration, so you're resource collecting and crafting is in service of exploration.

 

This is where I it sort of falls apart for me. I love the idea of exploring space, I'm a world builder by trade, and I love exploring in video games, no matter the game, so to have an entire gmae built around that motivation sounded awesome to me. The thing about No Mans Sky is the exploration part isn't that interesting. The nerd in me revels at a procedural,y made space and how everything is a unique collage of items and algorthims, but so far in my experience, it's resulted into a lot of dull moments. 

 

That isn't to say you would want a game like this to be the most exciting and amazing situations ever, I think the problem with my expectation of NMS vs. the reality of it is that it's too big, there are too many variations to the point where the variations are meaningless. 

 

Sure from a content point of view it all looks the same but with different colors, different names, regions, etc... but because there is a seemingly infinite amount of terrain to cover on a world, then an seemingly infinite amount of worlds and solar systems, the discoveries become meaningless. The first hour or two on my starting planet every discovery seemed amazing, there is an outpost, a swamp, an ancient temple and I was naming them all, but slowly the sheer size of the game started to reveal itself. One world is massive, it has dozens, hundreds of locations to discover, and the variety between them is not that different... things started to feel less special every time and my lexicon of location names quickly ran out and that was on one planet.

 

So variety is a bit of an issue due to its size, but the exploration part of the game is also a bit lackluster, you'll venture upon 1-20 different templates on a single planet and while the architecture for the different races seems to change, it's essentially the same experience every time. The discovery doesn't become meaningful anymore and with so many of these locations on a single planet, who cares what it's called or why it's there? There is nothing special about most of these places, there is nothing to discover beyond the location itself, most interactions no matter what the hook is to these places (Talking with an alien, activating a shrine, activating a becon, activating a computer, etc...) results in running up to it and essentially pressing "X" to interact.

 

Exploring, as in the game functions of interacting with the world, becomes a chore and sort of meaningless to the point that I'm almost completely ignoring it and only looking for minerals to upgrade and language terminals to learn language (and that's mostly just for me as it really has not a lot of use in the actual function of the game). Wandering around a planet is fun, since it's what I like to do, but again the sheer size really nullifies any sort of satisfaction of being a catographer and eventually is only in service of mineral finding.

 

That's where I think there is that split for NMS. If like minecraft my main purpose is gathering resources and crafting than either let me build and collaborate like minecraft, or do something to make these discoveries of your environment more special and meaningful. Which is why I feel it may be too big for it's own good; it needs more "gameification". Make the worlds smaller, even if it is unrealistic, make less seeded discoveries and devise a better loop for why these places exist and why I should care about discovering and naming them other than going up to a terminal and pressing "X".

 

I do enjoy the aesthetics and the atmosphere, that's what keeps me going, I hope to see it through till the end. But I"d be really curious to see how this thing evolves over the next year.

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Performance is definitely CPU bound, not video card. I have a 970 and it's barely heating up, but my fairly nice i5 is constantly pegged.

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First big free update will allegedly be bases so soon it'll be full Minecraft! :D

 

EDIT: And yeah procgen is almost always gonna be CPU bound unless people start looking for a way to take advantage of GPUs for it.

 

Get hype for PGPUs in 2020!

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It would be really cool if the base-building included a lot of terraforming options. "From Dust" style.

I'm super skeptical of this game getting a good mod scene. I'm equally skeptical of the game getting the desired "free-mode." This is due to the asynchronous multiplayer aspect. I could see the devs having concern over mode scene or free-mode people getting to name all the planets and animals. Not that there seems to be any shortage of planets.

I see three ways Norman's Sky could resolve this-

a: give free-mode players their own "universe" of name-able claims, which doubles the backend HG needs to maintain, and splits the player base;

b: shared universe between free-mode and survival, but remove the ability of free-mode players to name entities. They can work this into their lore, the "travelers" get to name entities, but the free-mode players are something else. Maybe they play as the "sentinel" race, that could be cool.

c: don't worry about it, let it be unbalanced, there's plenty of room in the universe

d: no free-mode

This again hinges on the question of balancing the amount of planets people can name. The survival aspects of the game serves as a gate to keep players from traveling too far. Was that itself implemented to balance the amount of claims a player can make? Or just to kludge together a game-loop to make it feel more like a "game"?

Also,


final3.jpg
This game is a great Space Man Spiff simulator

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There's a mod scene?! Maybe they can fix the fucking non-stacking items in the inventory.

 

The only way I can see base-building as having a point is if bases you build, once "completed" (maybe triggered by you leaving the planet or something), it gets propagated out to other people's worlds and downloaded when they enter the system with that planet. I think it'd be super cool to run into player-built structures, even if there's no actual real multiplayer. (Though I'd still love actual real multiplayer.)

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I don't understand why base building matters at all, since you're moving from plane to planet all the time. Much the same way that building a base doesn't matter much in Starbound either, because you're not on a planet long enough to really get much of a use out of a base because individual planets are rarely interesting enough to be worth hanging around.

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