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Looking again at those tweets quoted by Polygon, I don’t really see how anyone could mistake this for ‘Independence Day from the aliens' POV’. This just seems like wilful misinterpretation. It also made me immediately think of this incredible gif, which…well, it’s hardly the Empire State getting blown to smithereens, is it? The average No Man’s Sky player is less like a city-sized spaceship with a big laser and more like one of those confused bug-eyed fellows who flies around the midwest molesting cows. 

 

Annihilating a planet is not possible, as far as I can tell. You couldn’t exterminate every life form and you probably couldn’t take all its resources either. As itsamoose suggests, the key thing is that scarcity doesn’t really exist in any meaningful sense. You can’t deprive anyone of anything in this game. Does this matter? I think it does. It could be argued that all consumption entails destruction, that man should seek to absolutely minimise his impact on the world, much like the followers of Jainism; but surely somewhere there is room for compromise. It’s the difference between being a smallholder and an industrialised factory farming enterprise. It’s the difference between pre- and post-enclosure societies. It’s the difference between just taking what you need to survive, and intentionally depriving others for profit that goes beyond survival. NMS quite clearly lights out for the former in all of these cases. 

 

(For the record, I also think a game where you played an alien race that went around the galaxy destroying civilisations could be really interesting! It would also be neat to see a version of NMS which did map and model economic scarcity, but I fear that since the resources of each planet are algorithmically generated, this would require a great deal more computational crunch than the humble PS4 can currently provide.) 

 

I do think there’s an interesting post-colonial argument to be made about this game, especially regarding the practice of naming everything the player finds. There is, after all, something brutally presumptuous about imposing one’s own will on something so totally alien. But on the other hand, there’s a certain beauty in the project. Again, the players are not depriving anyone of anything that has existed in any meaningful sense. As it stands, it is only possible to make a creative contribution.

 

Imagine we in the real world stumbled across an object floating in space: an artefact of some kind, a sort of Rosetta Stone, a map that recorded in an alien language the names of every star and planet in our galaxy, together with their coordinates. We would know nothing at all about the creatures who made it, and the names they wrote down would be meaningless to us, but their conventions for naming could tell us all kinds of interesting things about their civilisation. I think that something similar will happen with No Man’s Sky and the people who are playing it. Because what else has science fiction to tell us if not that the most alien civilisation is humanity itself? 

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Sure, it's kind of gross when you realize that our hero is essentially another space asshole, exploiting his way through the universe. But not having to worry about resources would seriously take away from the already limited loop. My take away from tweets like that is always, ok. Sure. So do something better then.

I really love what this game has to say about scale, especially, and I want to champion everything it else it's trying to do as well.

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I'm really annoyed that there doesn't seem to be any way to temporarily turn off all UI elements because Fungus Photography Safari on Planet X is like a solid 60% of the fun for me right now.

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I wish I had space on my PS4 hard drive to take screenshots. I need to upgrade, but with Neo around the corner, I'm considering holding out for a 2 Tb version with increased specs.

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Ended up taking a black hole that totally screwed with my progression. Now 50,000 light years away from my appointed atlas waypoint and spun around so much I have no idea where up is, im beginning to appreciate what this is even more.

Cue lost in space references. I was wrong to assume this is something I could play everyday, but I'm delightfully surprised to find its a game I'm happy to be lost in.

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They did an update last night that massively improved the keyboard+mouse controls for me. Mouse movement is smooth and they removed/shortened the hold to confirm time on various UI elements. :tup:

 

Or they didn't do an update and I imagined all these weird issues with the mouse... There aren't any change logs, so who knows?

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As I understand it the PC version is not very stable, but can someone comment if the pop-in that is so obvious on the PS4 version is fixed on the PC version?

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I saw somewhere the pop in will be diminished on PS4 Neo due to higher specs so it seems plausible.

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I don't know how it compares to PS4 but you definitely see some pop-in (although they do it with some sort of dissolve transition instead of just a pop)

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the pop-in is quite noticeable for pillar geometry. For me it starts off as a small line and then suddenly become quite wide. The pop-in is mostly noticeable when flying around in high(er) speeds.

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So many little things I've found by going awol; red and green star systems with unique minerals, animal and plant life. The fact that you have to intentionally leave the linear paths is great.

Part of me still feels like half the game is just clever smoke and mirrors, but the way I keep encountering unique text, crazy $20+ million dollar ships and completely bizarre multi-tool designs leads me to half believe Murray isn't just the snake oil salesman some fools are convinced he is.

Hey to anyone who caught my edit. It was a tequila night.

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Ended up taking a black hole that totally screwed with my progression. Now 50,000 light years away from my appointed atlas waypoint and spun around so much I have no idea where up is, im beginning to appreciate what this is even more.

Cue lost in space references. I was wrong to assume this is something I could play everyday, but I'm delightfully surprised to find its a game I'm happy to be lost in.

 

 

It sound like you're enjoying being lost in space, but...

 

Keep in mind that if you get a chance to talk to Polo and Nada again, you can pick the Atlas option and get back on track

 

Edit: I think the game really is just smoke and mirrors but, much like a magic show, if you're willing to let them, the illusions can carry you away.

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The missing piece of smoke and mirrors that upsets me the most is that the when you launch into hyper-drive to another solar system; the space-car makes no effort to adjust to the new coordinates, and simply flies straight forward into whatever planet you were looking at. My expectations for hyper-drive require the space-car to do a little automatic rotation until it stops aiming at space-furniture. 

 

it crashed a few more times on ps4 for me, but I'll blame that on the heat in my apartment.

 

That said I also encountered a planet of little ewok-bird people. Totes adorbs

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Given the amount of space rocks out there that you fly right through, I assumed the ship phased out of existence for it's trip.

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Massive lore spoilers:

 

This imgur gallery is a collection of 30 Vy'Keen Plaque descriptions. It details their struggle against the Sentinels, the birth and death of their demigod Hirk (a Traveler!), the rise of the Gek, who mistakenly resurrected the Sentinels, and had some sort of beef against the Korvax... fun stuff. Vy'keen worship us travelers, apparently.

I haven't seen a Vy'Keen in my systems in forever, just Korvax and Gek. Perhaps it's because I'm in Atlas systems? And Vy'Keen are anti-Altas? Space politics. Or just the whims of the RNG god.

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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.

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I feel like from the Giant Bomb coverage with podcasts and interviews, I knew exactly what I was getting from this game. It's made watching all the arguments on reddit about how they misrepresented the game in various ways feel kind of surreal. It really made me realize how many folks out there get gaming information from a few 5 minute preview videos. Given that, my expectations were middle of the road and I would say it matched or slightly exceeded my expectations.

 

I felt kinda burned by Elite:Dangerous, as there just isn't much to see in that game, doing anything in it is difficult and time consuming, and you're competing with everyone else while doing a whole lot of nothing. While the mechanics in this game are much simpler/more boring, I don't find it particularly difficult and, while it does consume time, it doesn't waste it in the same way Elite does. For instance, take a stopwatch and time how long it takes you to get from one point of interest (space station, planet surface, etc) to another in Elite, and then compare that with NMS. It's relaxed, smooth, and moves quickly. I can jump in for 30 minutes or 3 hours and feel satisfied. However, I'm starting to see the seams in the procedural generation, and I really haven't seen that much that I'd call "incredible."

 

I've re-wrote this post a few times to try and make it less rambly, but I think I'm getting my point across at least. I like it, it's fun to explore and I'm happy to set my own goals. I see it getting boring in the future, but that's OK. I've gotten my money's worth already.

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ApexTwin, I agree about the cynical take on the iterations. in my own most cynical point of view, the game is just a giant database of iterations; and exploring the universe is just a dramatic way of exploring the folder-structure of the database. 

 

I sort of perceive all games as highly dramatic menus.

 

This is why the crafting annoys me, there is very little drama of interacting with that menu. It keeps me from engaging with the dramatic menus I would rather be interacting with - exploring the iterated worlds and creatures.

 

I have a similar problems playing turn based jRPGs, which make little effort obfuscating the spread-sheet nature of the game. Perhaps I'm more of a spatial person, or I have a slow reading comprehension, or I'm just obsessed with fantasy and escapism; for these reasons I like to have as much of the data visualized as possible, and play action-RPGs instead. To its credit, Normans Sky has a well organized and legible inventory menu.

 

 

But the drama of exploring a cartoon alien universe is something I've always been interested in; so I look over the rough edges. I subscribe to the fantasy of exploring the RNG planets. Am I apologizing for Normans Sky? Probably.

 

Other examples of dramatic menus would be the crafting mini games from Fable 2, or the Sanctuary in Fable 3, or the Hunters Dream from Bloodborne.

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I've re-wrote this post a few times to try and make it less rambly, but I think I'm getting my point across at least. I like it, it's fun to explore and I'm happy to set my own goals. I see it getting boring in the future, but that's OK. I've gotten my money's worth already.

I was getting a hankering for More Space, and I'd decided I was willing to invest more dollars into Space Games. I was having the internal debate over whether I should get the Elite expansion or NMS. I ended up buying Starbound last night after a longer conversation with a friend and the general tenor of NMS discussion. His recommendation was "There's no reason to rush". They'll hopefully get feedback from this open beta period and get some PC stability fixes and Quality of Life fixes and at some point it'll be a game I'll happily buy and mess around in to see what there is to see.

 

(Starbound is amazing for the brief 30 minutes I played it before collapsing into bed last night. Already content with my purchase)

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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...)

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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...

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It feels like I'm on a walk in the woods but my shoelaces come untied every five minutes, I don't want to mine anything ever again.

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Twig, I agree, calling them cynical is not the best language, and you are right, it does reflect my cynical view of those mechanics.

 

But I'd rather call them "cynical" than "shitty."

 

Though I guess both descriptions are vague. "Uncompelling?" "Tedious?" "Boring?" All very judgemental adjectives, reflecting my bias.

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