Ok, fine, I’ll try NMS again.
No Man’s Sky is like Minecraft in the way that it has so much hate from people who either don’t “get why people like it” or say “it’s so shallow,” but the game is just full of charm and it is what you make of it.
It has a loose story, interesting lore, and otherwise a huge universe (heh) in which you just do what you want to do.
It’s space legos.
I’ve tried it several times through the years wanting to like it because it sounds like something I’d enjoy, but it just never sinks its teeth in.
And that’s okay. Not every game has to be made for me. I love that people love it and that the developers have worked so hard to deliver on everything they promised and more. I don’t enjoy the game but I’m so glad it exists for those who do.
I love NMS, but it is shallow for the most part. Just like pure vanilla minecraft is shallow.
Can someone explain the sun thing? I read the article, all it says “yes you can visit, but it will be a perilous journey”. What was the previous limitation? What is expected now?
I’m used to Elite: Dangerous. Ed ships have three travel modes: standard sublight (~1,000km/h), supercruise (0-2000c) between system bodies, and hyperspace jumps (wormhole from anywhere to the orbit of the main star of a system). So, in ED, you can supercruise up to any star, though it gets hot and it has an exclusion zone that drops you to sublight in the edge of its atmosphere. You can’t sublight further as the zone stops you. For reference of distance, it feels like you’re able to fly under the solar prominence loops, though they fade by time you reach the graphics sprite.
ED stands for Erectile Dysfunction haha
In earlier versions the sun was a part of the skybox rather an object within the gameworld, so it couldn’t actually be visited, which you can now do with this new update. Haven’t tried it myself, but from what i have heard it takes somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes to get there (probably depending on how upgraded the impulse drive, this games equivalent of supercruise, is) from the systems hyperspace exit. Should drop you out of impulse at a certain distance, planets and other points of interest do that too. Getting too close deals constant damage to your ship.
Interesting, thank you. Do the planets follow orbits at all? Did they just disregard the sun? Does not compute
E:D lets you refuel by scooping the corona, so visiting stars seems critical in exploration
It’s like in games where you can stand in fire and not get hurt or there’s an invisible wall preventing you from running off a cliff.
Everyone made a comment about it, the devs said “okay, you can kys if you like now,” and now you can die by fire and jump off that cliff!
insert I-don’t-know-what-I-expected.GIF
I’ve always wanted to fly into the sun.
Strange. I’ve always wanted to send other people into it
I tried so many times to get into this game. The first 1-2 hours are always fun. But then it heavily wears off. The seamless transition from planet to space is wonderful. But the depth of the gameplay systems is just too shallow. At least for me, it does not tick the right boxes to keep me motivated. But I am happy for the developers and the fans!
I agree and it was the same comments on the hacker news article about the release too. Most people dont like a sandbox with no progression system, and specially when you can feel that the world is just different colors and different animal skins but otherwise the same.
Beautiful game but feels boring, and I guess it’s the lack of progression system and that everything feels like the same.
I definently need some constant goals set by the game to feel happy.
There is definitely a progression system in NMS. I remember different progression trees for your base, your character, your ship etc. The problem is that the impact of the progression is pretty low. This is a sandbox without meaningful consequences, which leads to the fact that after a couple of hours you already got to a point where anything else you achieve is just for the heck of it. You already got everything meaningful up and running at this point.
NMS definitely has a progression system. It just might not appeal to everyone, especially people who don’t care for crafting games.
“Lack of progression system” is not accurate, because the game offers many different ways to progress the abilities of your character, your spaceships, your base, and the whole space empire you can build has now been bigly expanded. Also the Expeditions are large quests that give large rewards.
It is fairly shallow, yes, but it’s also open ended so you can set your own goals. It’s also pretty good for creative types, with building bases and ships and such. I have some 700h in it but spread over a few dozen saves, played during updates over the years, and very few go past the 30h mark. I also haven’t touched some gameplay elements so there’s that. But it’s a great game in shorter batches.
Yeah, I can definitely see more creative-minded people having a blast with this game. I‘m just not that type of person. The X series is more to my liking, I just wish they had the same freedom in terms of space travel as NMS. Or if NMS was more like X or Mount and Blade in space.
I never understood the base building if one main mechanic is moving on and on and on to explore. I may never have progressed far enough, but the base building is introduced very early and I never understood why I would waste resources on a base I’ll just leave behind.
You don’t have to move on. Even if you’re like 10,000 ly away you can still teleport back from any station if you build a portal at your base.
I still have the same shitty base I built years ago even though I’m a few thousand ly away from it now.
Some people love to have a base they can revisit on a planet they liked. Some also build mining outposts for gold and whatnot. Bases are also useful for inter-galaxy travel.
I spent 40 hours looking for a cozy planet, but my corvette is my base.
I also basically have no progress in the install X component to your base quest.
ive reinstalled this game so many times. it’s always been pretty fun. I’m still waiting on the steam frame to do it again
I bought the game when it first came out. I didn’t really buy into the hype, so I wasn’t disappointed at launch. Fucked around for like 20 or 30 hours, then never picked it up again.
Is it finally time?
If you genuinely haven’t it played it since it first released, you are barely even going to recognize the game. It’s changed significantly enough that it could practically be a sequel by now.
Dammit, I guess I’m installing it again.
It’s been sitting on my hard drive for a few years. I just don’t want to go through the learning curve. I don’t have a lot of time and when I game I just want to hop in and go.
Are there any resources that can help me do that with this game? I’m not a huge survival/crafting fan. Can this game be played without getting too deep into that side of things?
I hopped in once when I first bought it and just felt like there was no direction to go.
I would wait until their next “event” that they have after every update. That will give you kind of a hand holdy “tutorial” to bring you up to speed with the core mechanics, along with a direction to go. Plus during these events you can find lots of other players with cheaty bases you can quickly farm to get all the materials/credits you need with minimal grinding.
when last did you play it?
I played it while high earlier this year and managed to kinda figure it out because the tutorials were helpful enough
granted
I just wanted to build shit and kill shit, so I picked one of the easier game mode options
I think you can sidestep the more difficult survival/crafting mechanics if you want
that’s if my memory holds up
I might have been playing donkey kong or some shit
I got it at launch and I love it, but it is not a game I am trying to finish, rather a place a visit now and then.
When they run an expedition it’s got a good set of quests to follow and usually accelerated progress from the rewards. There’s a new one with this update, not sure if it’s live yet.
I played it before as a grinding game but you can easily play it as a casual game. There’s not really a defined playstyle for nms.
The missions from what I remember give you enough guidance on how to play. You essentially use your explorer tools (scanner, mining tool, combat weapons) to gather resources and explore the universe. Missions are there to guide you and give you things to do but you could just ignore most of them lol.
There’s aspects that are geared towards grinding like exotic ships, mine construction, sector economy, etc. but they don’t matter for casual players.
There is no direction to go, it’s a sandbox, and discovery and exploration is pretty much the whole meat of the game. If you don’t like that, this is probably not the game for you. There are random events, there are questlines that eventually happen which you can optionally pursue, some of which get pretty in-your-face in case you’re worried you might miss them. Crafting and base-building is simplistic and mediocre. “Survival” is almost trivial on all but the very hardest difficulty settings, and even at the hardest difficulty and with willing suspension of disbelief it’s not really a fulfilling part of the game. There are a variety of other meta-systems tacked on too like language-learning, ship customization, fleet management and missions, settlements, universe-hopping, etc but these are just addons, they’re not the core of the game.
If you want a more “guided” experience you could try watching for some of the time-limited/seasonal expeditions they do as live-service events. Some of them are easier to follow than others, but they all sort of have a theme and usually give you a good workout in a variety of the game’s different systems.
Hell yes! Every 6 months or so I come back for another couple dozen hours of play. It’s added up to a truly disgusting amount of hours over the last decade.
I tried to play this game several times and could never really figure out what I was supposed to do and why I was supposed to do it.
I am glad to see some good developers supporting their community. We need more of these.
Yeah I found that there was so much stuff going on that it made the world feel uninteresting. Every planet had aliens already there and life and ancient monuments.
What I liked about Elite Dangerous is that 99% of systems are boring and that makes the lagrange cloud/earthlike world/giant star really memorable
There is a plot you can follow, but it’s not exactly a game known for its memorable plot. Like many other survival crafting games, the “what” you’re supposed to do is kind of up to you and your own creativity. It’s not for everyone, certainly.
Never ceases to amaze me how much they have given back to the community that patiently waited and kept going despite the critique they got at release with so many people shitting on them without being aware of the difficulties they had trying to release the game.
Is every space station still carbon copy of each other including merchants? Is every base in every planet still copy?
Yeah, thats a bit revisionist? I will always be mad what a fucking liar Sean Murray was pre-release. There is just no dancing around that fact. He also wasnt some suit from the publisher. He is credited as a programmer on the game at wikipedia(you know boots on the ground good guy). Almost every promise he uttered was broken. He was on the fucking Conan late night show and educated us on how hard they had it(and on top lied about every single feature the game would have).
And yeah, they redeemed themselves. But i have to say that 10 years later i still regret my purchase. I revisited the game every other year or so after several bombastic update trailers. I’m still not impressed or even entertained. Also they got rid of the only thing i ever really liked at release: the artstyle. Which makes me even more angry. Fuck this game. I should get a hold on myself. I should let it go after 10 years of free update. But seriosly fuck this game and fuck Sean Murray.
I thought the same till I watched Internet Historians video on it. Murray was in way over his head and numerous times he was like “eh yea sure maybe” and then whatever was asked was confirmed as a feature.
Dude had no public speaking ability, got nervous and ducked up tons of times. They were too small to have a real PR person.
Many of the promised things were things they thought they’d add, but couldn’t make in time.
But personally I’m glad I bought it during COVID. I was skeptical when it was being hyped, but eventually I decided to give it a shot and I kinda liked it. But even then I didn’t find it to be a 60€ game. The 20-30 I paid for it was fine.
Wells, it really is baby’s first space game. Kids are having a blast playing this I guess.
For the rest of us, it’s still an ocean deep as a puddle, no matter how many settlements or space stations you own.
It was, is and always will be a boring ass repetitive game.
Has there ever been a game focused around ship combat/trading, either in space or by sea, that had more depth than a puddle? I feel like that is kind of the genre.
Edit because I just recalled that EVE Online is or was a thing. So there is that at least.
I would be fine with that. But i couldnt recreate the approximation of the 2014 trailer in 10 years. I never had the pleasure to see a single cool planet of which i could hop off and do some mediocre space battle. Its just such a frustrating game and i really liked the original artstyle.
Anyway, i should really put NMS in my filterlist because it gets me angry and worked up every single time. Ugh. Stupid.
Never ceases to amaze me how the game still sucks after 10 years of content updates
I love it. I play this with sto because this has all the stuff sto is missing and sto has the content this is missing.
I play NMS, and this comment made me laugh out loud.
I’ve tried it multiple times over the years and getting fun out of the game is like squeezing blood from a stone. The core gameplay is a shallow grind, and almost all of the updates just bolt on other shallow systems onto that core. I legitimately cannot fathom what you enjoy about it unless you’re playing with friends which can make anything enjoyable.
It’s far less typing to just say “I’m not the target audience for this game.”
I am EXACTLY the target audience for this game. Space sims have been some of my favorite games since I played Wing Commander II. I was just as wowed by the initial trailer for NMS as anyone else. The game let us all down and I don’t think it deserves a pass for adding a bunch of boring activities to do in addition to the boring core gameplay.
You: “I don’t understand why you find this fun”
Also you: “I am TOTALLY the target audience for this game”
Also you: “This gameplay is totally boring, I hate it”
Thank you for confirming the accuracy of my assessment.
If you were the target audience, you would enjoy what NMS has to offer.
You have stated clearly that you’d rather be playing Wing Commander - a wildly different combat sim/rpg hybrid whose only similarity to NMS is that they both contain spacecraft.
Growing up means understanding that there’s a wide array of things that you’re just not the target audience for and that’s okay.
Wow, what brilliant circular logic. Only people who enjoy the game are the target audience, that’s a great marketing tactic right there.
Also, I never said WC2 was my ideal, I said it was my introduction to the genre.
I’ve had so many enjoyable hours of playing NMS, and eventually it does get to a point where I’ve completed the current missions and I’ve done everything multiple times and it gets repetitive… and I stop playing it. Then they have a release, and it’s an exciting game again.
I love that it’s still getting updates because it keeps me coming back. I can’t wait to check out this latest update!
Then go play Star Citizen and then come back and say how good THAT game is after almost 15 years years of “content updates”!
They can both be bad, it’s not a competition
I mean, I won’t defend the stability, but the gameplay is unironically better? At least you can see interesting things when exploring, and dogfighting is so much better it’s barely comparable.
Star Citizen gameplay sucks because the UX and controls are horrendous.
Also a different genre of game. NMS is more like a Minecraft in space than a pure exploration/combat game.
The “gameplay loop” of the elevator broke and then my ship blew up for no fucking reason.
The game breaking bugs outnumber the features.
But Chris Roberts has another ship to sell you, so you pay $50 and eat it all up.
As I said the game is not stable and I’m not the one who brought up this comparison.
But I can tell you that I regret the ~20 I spent on NMS, and I don’t regret the ~35 I spent on SC over a decade ago.
Just the dogfighting module alone was better than any half-hour slice of my time with NMS.
Isn’t coop still bugged out the ass?
Its my kinda game, but the management seems like they bit off way more than they could chew, and even after a decade still can’t handle it
My partner and I have hundreds of hours in co op so I’m not sure what bugginess you might mean, but it’s very playable in co op.
Holy shit!
But can you eat the sun?
Darn. Now I want a Milky Way®.
