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I'm probably not going to talk about this on the podcast, but I found the ultimate way (for me) to enjoy No Man's Sky. I fire up a nice, long Hardcore History episode and I go about my explorations/farming/mining bullshit. It's ~perfect~

 

I sort of always figured it'd be a good podcast game, but even better - it's the perfect semi-academic (rather than conversational) podcast game, because my eyes and hands are engaged, but my mind is completely free to listen and engage with the material. 

 

Is it weird that I now associate the Anabaptists with weird, penis-looking iron spires? 

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I'm probably not going to talk about this on the podcast, but I found the ultimate way (for me) to enjoy No Man's Sky. I fire up a nice, long Hardcore History episode and I go about my explorations/farming/mining bullshit. It's ~perfect~

 

I sort of always figured it'd be a good podcast game, but even better - it's the perfect semi-academic (rather than conversational) podcast game, because my eyes and hands are engaged, but my mind is completely free to listen and engage with the material. 

 

Is it weird that I now associate the Anabaptists with weird, penis-looking iron spires? 

 

Nope that's regular. That's also a fantastic episode.

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I'm probably not going to talk about this on the podcast, but I found the ultimate way (for me) to enjoy No Man's Sky. I fire up a nice, long Hardcore History episode and I go about my explorations/farming/mining bullshit. It's ~perfect~

 

I sort of always figured it'd be a good podcast game, but even better - it's the perfect semi-academic (rather than conversational) podcast game, because my eyes and hands are engaged, but my mind is completely free to listen and engage with the material. 

 

Is it weird that I now associate the Anabaptists with weird, penis-looking iron spires? 

 

Normal. Elite:Dangerous is my other podcast game.

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Last night I landed on a planet populated by these...well, I don't know how to describe them...

 

And then I tried to make friends and it all went horribly wrong

 

...I'm still having a lot of fun with this game. One thing I've realised is that exploration is a lot better if you give up on the idea of using your ship to hop from outpost to outpost. Just find a planet you like and, as long as the atmosphere isn't too awful, pick a direction and start walking and scanning everything in sight until you find one of those machines for calling your ship. You probably won't die! Live dangerously! (The run-punch-boost helps enormously in this regard and I really hope they don't take it out!)

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omg they hop around that's adorable!!!!!!

 

(i didn't konw there was a melee attack????)

 

last night i found 12/13 creatures super quickly and then spent over an hour failing to find the last creature - i'm sad ): - i really wish there was a way to at least get a direction toward undiscovered creatures (or even just undiscovered anything), maybe as an upgrade to the scanner or something (maybe there is, i'm still not very far!)

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There is not anything like that as far as I know. It's one of a few big complaints I have about the game, they want you to relax and run around discovering stuff, but they don't make it easy.

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well tbh given there are a bakillion planets or whatever not discovering all creatures on a single planet doesn't seem like a big deal

 

seems like it encourages moving on rather than sticking to one planet, which is fine

 

also it's not like one person on earth discovered all creatures by themselves :P

 

(if planets had multiple biomes i think i'd feel differently about the moving-on thing)

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Then there shouldn't be milestones or extra cash payouts for finding them all on a planet.

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why not?

 

it's a bonus for sticking around and being persistent, but it's not really actively encouraged

 

in fact, every other metric of the game basically encourages you to move forward toward either the cente rof the universe or further along the atlas path

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I have completely disengaged from the plot as prescribed and am instead pursuing ship upgrades so that I can jump to any class of star that I like. I still keep running into Nada and Polo as I jump around, though, and their story seems to advance regardless of whether or not I'm visiting the Atlas stations.

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If you bring up the scanner and aim it towards a creature you haven't discovered yet, you'll see a little red blob in the middle of its body. If you have discovered it, the blob will be green. (I think perhaps you see red/green blobs around you if you hit the L3 local area scan as well?) 

 

It is sometimes a bit funny about this - I'm sure I've scanned red blob creatures only for the game to tell me I've already discovered them, perhaps because they're a larger/smaller sub-species of the same genus? But it's the only clue you are likely to get that helps you find all the animals. I would guess the game can't give you much more direction because, like all the rest of the environmental detail, the game's algorithms only call the animals into existence once you get within a relatively small radius.  

 

If you're missing one or two creatures, at least one of them might be a bird. Birds are a pain in the butt to scan. In fact, scanning them never seems to work properly from the ground, so I often will go to the highest possible point, shoot them down, and scan their corpses. It's naughty, but valid. I feel like some latter-day Joseph Banks with a laser gun and a jetpack.

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Different genders of the same species can be scanned individually.

 

Using the scanner (the area scanner) doesn't reveal creatures.

 

Using the visor/binoculars/whatever will sometimes show a white dot for a few seconds as you move across the land, and that means there's a creature in that direction. Kinda like a sonar thing I guess. But it doesn't guarantee a NEW creature. ):

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https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4zlqpw/went_back_to_my_starting_planet_and_every/

 

So as I got closer to the center I thought to my self I should head back home good thing I set a waypoint on my starting planet to find my way back. I finally made it back after many hours and I found out all my discoveries were wiped and it said I discovered it on the 11th when I started on the 9th.. I check a few neighboring stars I discovered and their discovers were wiped.. So none of my named animals plants were ever saved. The system name and planet names were saved but everything elts was wiped. I'm kinda sad that after heading back that all that I discovered was never really saved except the system and planet names..

 

 

This is the first piece of NMS game systems that actually upsets me.

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:(
 

The more I ruminate on No Man's Sky, the more I get bummed out. Pre-release coverage prepared me that it might be tedious, and it might be boring, and it would lack the depth of mechanics I generally really like in my game, but what I did not expect is that it would be so ugly. Voxel pop-in is so intense that there's not really a hope of seeing anything interesting while flying over the planet, and it's still pretty apparent even when walking around. I expected a Skyrim type moment, cresting a hill and seeing the next hill over, or the next one after that and getting that "I can go there" feel, but instead it's "I can go there, but it won't look anything like that when I arrive." Couple that with how many creatures look basically the same, and how bad their animation cycles are, and I just get sad. NMS looks so good in screenshots, I just wish it felt good when things were actually moving.

 

As a side note, I calculated that I'll have to go through more than 100 black holes to make it to the center of the galaxy. That feels a bit excessive.

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https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4zlqpw/went_back_to_my_starting_planet_and_every/

 

 

 

This is the first piece of NMS game systems that actually upsets me.

 

That's a real bummer, but I'm more than certain it's a client/networking/server issue than it is a lacking feature. I've heard more than a few stories of people going to planets and them already being discovered. Although... I guess I've never heard anyone specifically call out CREATURES as already discovered?

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That's a real bummer, but I'm more than certain it's a client/networking/server issue than it is a lacking feature. I've heard more than a few stories of people going to planets and them already being discovered. Although... I guess I've never heard anyone specifically call out CREATURES as already discovered?

 

I understand that it's potentially a server restriction and in a lot of ways sympathize with the decisions that led to that point.. The finite limitation of computing and coding doesn't make it ok, though. I'd say this is the first moment where I feel NMS genuinely lied to me.  ESPECIALLY since you can play it offline. There's no server that needs to hold that forever. It can be on your hard drive!

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No I didn't say restriction, I said issue! Meaning bug.

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This offline-online error makes sense to me. In that I noticed the game going offline and online willy nilly; but the game never warned me or kicked me off in the way other asynchronous online games might do. The game also made no compunction about my "uploading" my discoveries to the world database while the game was in offline mode. I imagined a scenario where the game holds onto that and sends it later in online mode. I speculate it just dissipated into the aether.

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That reddit post has already been updated saying his discoveries have now shown up again, and plenty of others have gone back and found theirs intact. Seems it was a hiccup.

Edit: while I'm defending NMS, here's a defense blog post from Paul at Frozen Synapse dev Mode 7 Games:

https://blog.mode7games.com/promising-the-earth-no-mans-sky-c6227ae3a35d#.piueftyrt

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That's a good post. I got perma-banned from GAF for suggesting the same thing. OOPS!

 

I really like that post. It's super frustrating seeing people call Sean an outright liar.

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That reddit post has already been updated saying his discoveries have now shown up again, and plenty of others have gone back and found theirs intact. Seems it was a hiccup.

Edit: while I'm defending NMS, here's a defense blog post from Paul at Frozen Synapse dev Mode 7 Games:

https://blog.mode7games.com/promising-the-earth-no-mans-sky-c6227ae3a35d#.piueftyrt

 

Good, I'm glad. Guilty of getting caught up in the hyperbole.

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I think this thing with Murray highlights why so many game companies are tight lipped about their games, especially during development.  While I do think Murray bears some of the responsibility for the misunderstanding of the multiplayer, I think his big mistake was trying to answer questions like you would in a development meeting as opposed to a press facing thing.  Just like multiplayer games are designed around griefers and implemented around hackers, press releases tend to be geared around raising the ire of that particular subset of video game fandom that is absolutely ravenous.  Murray seems to have been stuck between a rock and a hard place, on one side being a small video game developer it would be almost irresponsible to try to diminish the hype about your game, and on the other side wanting people to see his game as a whole rather than it's component parts.

 

One thing I'd like to note is I have seen a number of people suggest things like the game might get synchronous multiplayer in the future, and... well no this is not going to happen.  I know nothing about Hello games, or their development process, but to implement that kind of multiplayer would essentially require them to make a whole other game.  Not to mention that kind of thing, with the number of players we're talking about, would require hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in server costs and an around the clock network admin team, and those people don't come cheap.

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