I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

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Quazel
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I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by Quazel »

Anyone else planning to play it?
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ShadowDragon8685
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by ShadowDragon8685 »

I hadn't been, but after seeing the reviews, I would only play it if someone paid me.

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Arioch
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by Arioch »

Ouch!

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Siber
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by Siber »

I got it last night, and am about 4 hours in now. It's not as good as it could have been, in some key ways it's definitely not as good as it should be, but I'm still playing and forsee sinking much of my free time into it in the immediate future. I could go on at length about design and aesthetic things that could be better, but if they sort out the technical issues(which are not bad enough to keep me from playing, but definitely present) I'll be quite pleased with the purchase.
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ShadowDragon8685
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by ShadowDragon8685 »

Arioch wrote:Ouch!
Apparently, from what I've seen, it's one of those games that has just enough content and charm to get a player past the two hour steam refund window, then the repetitive samyness grind sets in.

Karst45
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by Karst45 »

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:I hadn't been, but after seeing the reviews, I would only play it if someone paid me.

and even then....

Considering how the critic complain about that game. fell emtpy and really not like how they promised it on the kickstarter

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Siber
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by Siber »

I believe my last post was made around 4 hours of playtime. Now having passed 11 hours, I stand by it still. It's not an earth shattering breakthrough in anything, but I enjoy popping it on for an hour at a time to wander and progress.
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Quazel
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by Quazel »

I have my Environmental Suit slots up to 32, 18 slots in the multi-tool, and a whopping 17 slots in the ship.

I did not realize the mining laser on the new ship tracked targets (didn't read through all the mods), so when an NPC ship passed between myself and the asteroid I was mining I became an accidental pirate. Oops.

The back story is mildly interesting, but once I get to end of that I'm not what else there is to hold me. Seems there is already some mods out for it though. :?:
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Rekov
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by Rekov »

The game is basically just massively less than what was promised. Some dude collected a complete list of various things the devs promised but didn't put in, which can be seen here.

You can also look at the game without the context of it being less than what people hoped for. It's a tech demo without a game attached, and while it isn't completely devoid of value, it is not remotely worth $60.

The guys over at Red Letter Media did a relatively entertaining review of it.

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Arioch
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by Arioch »

I never really saw what people were so hyped about. Procedurally-generated games by their nature tend to be extremely generic and repetitive.

Rekov
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by Rekov »

Arioch wrote:I never really saw what people were so hyped about. Procedurally-generated games by their nature tend to be extremely generic and repetitive.
I don't know if that's necessarily true. The problem here is that No Man's Sky is a procedurally generated universe without a game.

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Siber
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by Siber »

There is a game there, it's just a very simple and easy one.

A few things come to mind in response to Arioch's point. First are Factorio and Space Beast Terror Fright, which are both games that take place in procedurally generated maps but have very well honed and distinctive gameplay. They sort of prove the point, the procedural generation can be tweaked to provide slightly different experinces but ultimately is a backdrop, but they do still spice things up. Factorio is a game about building an industrial infrastructure on alien wilderness, and the placement of resources or obstacles determines a lot about how that industry is laid out. Since layout is the meat of the problems you solve in the game, that randomization makes each run a little bit fresh. Arguably this is just offloading the work a level designer should do, but there's a finite number of levels a person can produce.

Dwarf Fortress and Space Engine also come to mind. Dwarf Fortress I'm sure people are familiar with, and to an extent it's gameplay and procgen interaction are pretty similar to Factorio's, just a thousand times more arcane. Space engine is a bit more directly akin to NMS, being a procedural generated universe that aims to emulate the entire observable universe and all the phenomenon within it. SE is supposed to be a game some day, but for now is really just an exploration sandbox, with you able to pick any point of light in the sky and immediately fly to it and explore it's neighborhood. There's a vast diversity of star types and plant landscapes out there, and I've spent many hours just going places and sharing position codes with similarly inclined friends. Despite the roughness of things up close, I've seen many alien vistas that I felt were well worth the time searching. And DF worldgen, despite having no gameplay at all, has resulted in a similar kind of enjoyment for some, simply exploring this bizarre history that the game has created for you.

having 'played' SE extensively in the past puts NMS exploration into an interesting light for me. Honestly, the small scale landscape generation and the flora and fauna generation are quite great, and I've enjoyed setting down on a planet to discover everything on is some variation of over-sized hopping land mollusk, or turning around to see this thing prancing about. At the same time, the planets and solar systems themselves are a bit disapointing. I love going to a place in SE and discovering that hey, this star has a tidally locked planet with a giant ocean and an eternal hurricane over it, skimming along the surface to find the titanic glacier wall at the horizon, and beyond an vast expanse of smooth ice dimly lit by the star's distant binary partner and pocked by stray supervolcanos. Or seeing distant smudges of color in the sky and flying towards them, slowly seeing a diffuse nebula grow to fill the screen, and then trying to find a star nearby that might have planets that can see it in the night sky. Or finding a globular cluster where the sky is bright in the middle of the local night just because of how many stars there are in the sky. And NMS lacks any of that spectacle as far as I can tell. Making space brightly cartoon colors damages the atmosphere to me some too.

So, it has some of that sandbox appeal, but few aspects of the exploration manifest as gameplay challenges meaningfully. The gameplay systems aren't terrible, but they're also not the best at anything they do. So, it's kind of the spore problem there. It has a mine-and-craft game, it has RPG like character progression of a sort in the upgrades, it has a FPS, it has a spacesim, but they're all very thin versions of those genres. If they weren't, the game would probably be great.

I'm still not done playing it, but I wouldn't try to deny it's flawed nature.
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icekatze
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

I think Starflight is a nice example of a game that had an interesting procedurally generated universe, and an interesting story at the same time. Of course, it wasn't entirely procedurally generated.

A game can have a story and a pre-set goal, it can have a sandbox, and sometimes it can have a bit of both, but it's got to have something. People are generally really good at coming up with their own motivations to do things, there just has to be stuff there for people to make a difference with.

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Arioch
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by Arioch »

Almost all strategy games have procedurally generated maps; that's not what I'm talking about. I'm also not talking about RPG's like Diablo or Starflight where some of the elements are randomized/procedural; the main story path is still the same even if details are randomized.

I'm talking about exploration/adventure games in which the map IS the core gameplay, and is procedurally generated. I've never seen a good one. Software is not at the point where it can write good stories.

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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by Absalom »

Siber wrote:Dwarf Fortress I'm sure people are familiar with, and to an extent it's gameplay and procgen interaction are pretty similar to Factorio's, just a thousand times more arcane.
Siber wrote:just a thousand times more arcane.
Siber wrote:arcane
Hmm... I think I now have a good single-word description for Dwarf Fortress.
Arioch wrote:Almost all strategy games have procedurally generated maps; that's not what I'm talking about. I'm also not talking about RPG's like Diablo or Starflight where some of the elements are randomized/procedural; the main story path is still the same even if details are randomized.

I'm talking about exploration/adventure games in which the map IS the core gameplay, and is procedurally generated. I've never seen a good one. Software is not at the point where it can write good stories.
You know, if someone bothered to "digest" some amateur psychology & story synopses into component parts, I bet that you could procedurally generate story. It wouldn't be likely to be all that deep (probably like the story version of some Dwarf Fortress artifacts: "a golden ring engraved with an image of golden rings admiring a golden ring"), but still quite functional I expect.

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cacambo43
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by cacambo43 »

It's interesting that among (and sometimes within) the angry reviews for this game, that there are a few making the case that either A) as it it, the game is fine - they like not having the pressure of overarching goals or B) they found the elements so many are saying are not in the game, but they are so spread out, maybe some people are just not encountering them. That seems to indicate some algorithms or something are off a bit or could be tweaked to make the game a lot better. I don't know, I haven't played it, but then again, $60 is needed in a lot more urgent places in my life right now.

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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by Absalom »

cacambo43 wrote:It's interesting that among (and sometimes within) the angry reviews for this game, that there are a few making the case that either A) as it it, the game is fine - they like not having the pressure of overarching goals or B) they found the elements so many are saying are not in the game, but they are so spread out, maybe some people are just not encountering them. That seems to indicate some algorithms or something are off a bit or could be tweaked to make the game a lot better. I don't know, I haven't played it, but then again, $60 is needed in a lot more urgent places in my life right now.

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Sounds like it's a nerfed DF in space, without a search function in the site selector (and likely without a site selector).

discord
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by discord »

absalom: if you do not like the site, just hop in your spaceship and find some new place?

Absalom
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Re: I get to download No Man's Sky tonight!

Post by Absalom »

discord wrote:absalom: if you do not like the site, just hop in your spaceship and find some new place?
I'm not playing it, but that does sound like a likely complaint by the actual players. Dwarf Fortress has the site selector because it takes forever to find decent sites otherwise. What little I've seen makes me think that No Man's Sky is more generous, but only in terms of basic materials: complaints seem to revolve around not encountering the random extras, like story hooks.

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