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"This long!" I know you aren't trying to throw shade, but goddamn this is impressive for the short amount of time it took! (With the caveat that I haven't played it yet since the update.)

 

I'm stoked.

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The game still feels like a grind fest to me, particularly getting units to afford bigger ships/freighters, but the base building adds a good chunk of things to do. All of the people you can recruit to your base have little quest chains where you have to go find specific resources to unlock their next dingus. However mostly they seem to unlock things for base building and most of the actual base building appears to be purely cosmetic. Apparently the hydroponics lab adds a farming element where you can get some of the more expensive resources easily but I haven't gotten to it yet because everything takes forever to do in this game. I also haven't unlocked the auto-miners yet so I don't know how those work either.

 

Some observations from what I've seen so far:

- They removed the guaranteed suit space upgrade in the space stations. These were convenient and gave an incentive to keep pressing forward.

- Teleporting between any space station and your base is pretty convenient. I had to go to another system with more varied planets to find things I need for the quests.

- Signal beacons are now a craftable item. You can select one of four specific choices rather than four vague categories, but it doesn't seem to guarantee the same diversity of options. Haven't used these enough to really tell how big this change is.

- Certain resources require new upgrades from the base building quests that take up a suit slot and a multi-tool slot for no real reason.

- Many new resources depend on the type of planet (hot/ice/toxic/radiation) or a specific area (caves/underwater) or from combat. This gives a reason to go to place that had little reward before, but adds a ton more crap to the game.

- Components don't stack in your suit, only in your ship or storage slots. 

- Components stack up to 5 in your ship and up to 10 in storage. This is a very nice quality of life change,but it also shows how ridiculous the old system was. I originally stopped collecting Atlas Stones because of this.

- You can construct up to 10 storage boxes that have 5 slots which have double the capacity of ship slots. I haven't gotten a freighter yet but apparently they also come with 10+ storage sized slots. Perfect place to stash Atlas Stones.

- Some of the new crafting things for base building require the new location specific resources so you need to farm up a supply of them. Haven't seen them in trading at all.

- Most base building components use 50-100 iron so you need to get a huge supply of that. It's relatively easy to farm with grenades but still quite a bit if you want to build large bases outside of creative mode.

- Deleting base components seems to give a full refund of resources which is good for fixing mistakes.

- Pulse engines now use iron instead of thamium and asteroids mostly give iron instead of thamium now. Not sure what the reason is for this change but good to keep in mind.

 

 

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Sounds good! I'm sure there's a joke to be made about bringing a hydroponics lab to the most chill game of this year but I can't think of a punchline.

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I lost a great deal of my weekend playing survival mode in No Man's Sky. It's really tough to start out. Your life support doesn't recharge on its own and your ship takes it's entire load of thruster fuel when you launch, which makes every visit to a planet a risk that you might not take off again. Later in play when your fuel sources are a little more secure, the base building sections come in, sending you to dangerous planets in search of special crafting components. Oh yeah, and when you die you lose all the crafting components you're carrying, plus having to repair bits of you suit.

 

It's not for the faint of heart, but it really makes all those extra upgrades that used to be useless feel really meaningful. 

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It does look pretty cool. I said after fiddling with the previous update a bit that I'd wait until the next update before jumping in. At this point there's a pretty significant amount of changes from launch. 

 

On the other hand... I still have Zelda.

 

I'm a fan of the variety of things they're adding to No Man's Sky. It's not all necessarily something I personally will touch (permadeath??), but it's cool to have options. I think it's good.

 

I'm also just glad they didn't let the absurd overreaction to its subpar launch get to them. Or, at least, if they did, they did it in a constructive way.

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Crashed freighters! Yay! Maybe in the next one they'll introduce sandworms.

 

I do wonder if some people aren't happy with these big updates, though - particularly sharing portal codes so everyone can jump to the same planets and having VOIP seem like they might lead to a load of the standard MMO gamer assholery and fuck up the game's atmosphere...

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If that's the case and it avoids assholery, do you think it will still be to the detriment of the 'lonely explorer' vibe? (I don't own the game, but I'm just wondering if they're actually losing cool stuff about the game by trying to fix this 'broken promise' shit.)

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From what I've seen of the feature so far it just works with anyone, and as to whether or not it ruins the vibe, it depends on how often you encounter someone. I'd want it to be every few hours rather than all the time.

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wait holy shit really multiplayer?!

 

that I did NOT expect

 

re "fixing" the game, they went on record long ago that updates would change the focus of the game over time, in ways that wild make the game feel different

 

whether or not you agree with such a strategy is obviously up to you, but it's not some reaction to shit fucks... it is at least consistent with their messaging!

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A Eurogamer piece discusses the changing of the vibe a little, though this is from just before the latest update came out:

 

Quote

 

Now your base comes equipped with a teleporter that will zap you back to the last space station you visited, even if it is hundreds of light years away, and vice versa. If you find a system you want to return to, you can leave a beacon there that will make it easier to navigate back. The first of these is essential for the base-building systems to work smoothly, but it comprehensively breaks the sense, so carefully constructed and well communicated by the base game, of interstellar travel as a precarious enterprise in which you can't afford to ever not be moving forwards. It trivialises distance, while the rest of the game does everything it can to make distance something you fear and feel.

So building up your presence in No Man's Sky is fun and rewarding, but thematically troublesome.

 

 

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I played 5 or so hours over the weekend. The update improves the game, but I think it's still a game that has such fundamental issues that are just being cosmetically hidden by these updates. Take the new mission system for instance, the missions are terrible because they have nothing to work with. Go to a planet and shoot some creatures, or scan them, or blow up a random building in the middle of an empty expanse with no enemies or challenge. Collect 250 of something and go to a trade depot. That's it, so a mission system might sound cool in a blurb and when you're picking them up they sound interesting, but once you get to the meat of it you get bored after you've done the 5 lame types of mission. I only did as many as I did to raise my standing to get to the end of a slightly more interesting quest line, but one that was pretty similar in terms of what I had to do(fly to different places, build a thing, repeat 3 times, do quests to raise your standing, learn 3 new words etc.). There was no substance to it and when the game crashed I didn't care to go back to it.

 

I'd go into more detail if I had time, but to quickly cover another couple of annoyances: Base building takes forever and is a massive slog of farming materials. Missions and quests can be even more frustrating when the goal is constantly on a toxic planet that you can survive on for 2 minutes before having to rush back to your ship.

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On 8/14/2017 at 4:21 AM, thepaulhoey said:

I played 5 or so hours over the weekend. The update improves the game, but I think it's still a game that has such fundamental issues that are just being cosmetically hidden by these updates. Take the new mission system for instance, the missions are terrible because they have nothing to work with. Go to a planet and shoot some creatures, or scan them, or blow up a random building in the middle of an empty expanse with no enemies or challenge. Collect 250 of something and go to a trade depot. That's it, so a mission system might sound cool in a blurb and when you're picking them up they sound interesting, but once you get to the meat of it you get bored after you've done the 5 lame types of mission. I only did as many as I did to raise my standing to get to the end of a slightly more interesting quest line, but one that was pretty similar in terms of what I had to do(fly to different places, build a thing, repeat 3 times, do quests to raise your standing, learn 3 new words etc.). There was no substance to it and when the game crashed I didn't care to go back to it.

 

I'd go into more detail if I had time, but to quickly cover another couple of annoyances: Base building takes forever and is a massive slog of farming materials. Missions and quests can be even more frustrating when the goal is constantly on a toxic planet that you can survive on for 2 minutes before having to rush back to your ship.

 

Absolutely agreed. It's a better version of the base game, but it's not a different game, and it's still just a more grindy version of a music visualizer

 

It's not a bad game by any means, but I cannot imagine being happy if I paid $60 for it - either now or at launch. It's a perfect $20ish indie game.

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I think I'm back on the Sky-train (do you see what I did there?) after the 1.3 update, after having set it aside for a while. It is really impressive how much has been added and overhauled. That said, some of it feels like expansion for its own sake.  

 

I'm not convinced that the game needed more resources and crafting materials for players to worry about collecting, let alone a second currency. Inventory management still feels like a bit of a faff, and new features like stackable objects and dedicated slots for tech upgrades work in strange ways (items stack, but not automatically; why are my old upgrades in my inventory and not in tech slots?). The sheer range of new things to craft has become quite intimidating. At the moment all my upgrades still feel pitifully weak. I want a freighter, but it feels like it'll take forever for me to get anywhere close to affording one. 

 

And yes, the old fundamental problems remain. Every time my nose is down and I'm chipping away at some rock with my terrible mining laser I'm thinking: this isn't very good. The way that minerals and items are colour coded still gives me a headache trying to unpick it; there's so little meaningful differentiation between different varieties of red/yellow/blue stuff.  I don't understand why they've made it more difficult to craft/gather certain things – why do I now need an advanced laser to mine certain minerals when I didn't need one before? Why is that good? I don't see why they've made that stuff more complicated when there would be so much to gain from making it simpler. 

 

I've been thinking more about the nature of the story as well. The nature of the game means it can't really have 'characters' in the conventional sense, and so they've opted for an expansive, vague, abstract, post-singularity fable; and that's fine, but the game doesn't know how to marry the grand scale of this with the actuality of its own small-scale mechanics (mining, scanning, shooting spaceships). What little I've experienced of the story so far might actually work better in the context of the creative mode, where the player is free from the tedious constraints of fuel and life support and shields, and perhaps more at liberty to think about the nature of what they're doing – something like what we've seen with David O'Reilly's Everything, perhaps. (A version of NMS that 'plays itself'  just surfing around planets like a screensaver  would be amazing.)

 

I realised I've mostly only had critical things to say thus far, and yet I was reminded while playing again last night of what a singular experience this is. It still looks and sounds and plays like nothing else, and it really does look extraordinary at times. I still like the basic experience of pottering about in space with some late Pink Floyd albums on Spotify. I think these refinements will be enough to keep me occupied for quite some time. I'm intrigued again. 

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Has anyone played Creative mode? Whenever I play that's what I intend to do because I'm not interested in the game 'challenging' me, I'd rather just explore and play it out in whatever way I'd like.

 

But is creative just a sandbox mode with minimal interactions or is it like a cheat mode where you never have to worry about resources? I'd much prefer that it's the latter, rather than a mode where they remove certain functionality that's kept for the "real" game.

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On 22/08/2017 at 2:25 PM, SuperBiasedMan said:

But is creative just a sandbox mode with minimal interactions or is it like a cheat mode where you never have to worry about resources? I'd much prefer that it's the latter, rather than a mode where they remove certain functionality that's kept for the "real" game.

 

I'm pretty sure it's the latter – you're still a little person in a little spaceship, but you have infinite resources and can't be killed, so you can just swap into whatever ship you want on the fly, etc. But you still have to warp from place to place. And you have to charge your engines, I think. Hmm.

 

I'm kind of reluctant to touch that mode because I worry it'll curb my (already slightly curbed) enthusiasm for the main game mode. It's probably asking a lot, but I wish the game would give players a reason to chop and change between the new game modes; perhaps let them pass resources or planet references from one save to another, in a very limited fashion to prevent exploits? But that would probably be an absolute nightmare to develop. 

 

In other news, Kotaku had a lovely story recently about a group of 5000 (!) players who decided to 'colonise' a particular galaxy. I'm still not really sure how this worked in terms of asymmetric multiplayer but it's a fascinating example of a community arising within a game that wasn't really ever intended to support such a thing.

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I just got done playing NMS in Survival mode all weekend. The last time I played was during the initial base-building update, and I think they've made some good changes here. Personally, I like all the new types of crafting materials, as it makes finding a planet that not quite as miserable as the others, but has the crafting item you need, a real valuable find. The base-building quests have been improved and now have a logical sequence that's a good intro to all the new stuff. It definitely is a grind, but it's the kind of grind I'm looking for I guess? Also, the new story has me intrigued.

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On 8/28/2017 at 12:18 PM, Dewar said:

I just got done playing NMS in Survival mode all weekend. The last time I played was during the initial base-building update, and I think they've made some good changes here. Personally, I like all the new types of crafting materials, as it makes finding a planet that not quite as miserable as the others, but has the crafting item you need, a real valuable find. The base-building quests have been improved and now have a logical sequence that's a good intro to all the new stuff. It definitely is a grind, but it's the kind of grind I'm looking for I guess? Also, the new story has me intrigued.

 

I've likewise been playing with the Survival mode lately and am finding it a pretty fresh experience. I've gotten bored fairly easily in the standard mode, but Survival seems to be keeping things interesting, at least at the outset (though I'm a total sucker for early-game experiences in open-world games like this).

 

Starting the game a 10-minute walk from your damaged ship with only enough environmental protection for a 2-minute walk makes for some interesting strategies. You end up engaging with the more obscure mechanics like life support draining faster when sprinting or jet-packing, seeking out overhangs for shelter, and scavenging many small bits of resources. Requiring 100% launch fuel to take off also makes for some interesting experiences when you have no plutonium around your landing site and the planet you landed on happens to have "aggressive" Sentinels. The extra-lengthy cooldown on the scanner I could definitely do without, though.

 

Now that I've made it to the second planet and started accumulating some resources (I now have enough plutonium to land *and* take off after), it might slow a bit as is usually the case with those early-game experiences I love so much. I wonder if playing Survival as more of a roguelike would fit my interests more?

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I find the max Plutonium for take-off thing really keeps my mind on finding places to land that either don't cost anything or have a lot of plutonium around the area. The new low-flying helps a lot for that. You should definitely do the initial base building and car-making stuff. After that it does get a bit samey.

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