Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No Man's Sky just keeps getting better

polygon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 176 posts

Re: No Man's Sky just keeps getting better

#101

Post by NikkiA »

hedora wrote: post #61
ryandrake wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to have a realistic, but reasonably playable space game, you need one of 1. Distances compressed, 2. Time compressed, 3. Unrealistic speeds KSP uses [1] (scaled down solar system) and [2] (user-controlled time passage), although [1] can be modded away by using a realistic solar system mod. Elite:Dangerous uses [3] (warp drives). I've never played NMS but it sounds like they use [1] and maybe [3]?

Mostly [3], I think. There are a few different levels of plaid speed for the ship's engines. If you want to walk on the ground, it rapidly turns into "this will take days or weeks". Similarly, different levels of implausibly fast mode in the ship remove multiple orders of magnitude from travel time. They may have also used [1] for NMS. I don't think it really matters, given the game play, to be honest.

All of the planets are something like 20 km diameter IIRC, so [1] is very much a thing. They're annoyingly big to walk around, but tiny compared to earth's moon.

Re: No Man's Sky just keeps getting better

#102

Post by dylan604 »

golergka wrote: post #96
iamwil wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've racked up over 900 hours on Team Fortress 2 and I'm still terrible at it. I also wonder what I would have learned or built in the time that I've played that game.

Were those really high-energy hours of your life that you really could have put in building something instead? Or have you actually gotten 900 recovery, low energy, brain dead hours out of it?

what video game is low energy brain dead? they are designed to do exactly the opposite. sure, you may be sitting stationary in a chair/couch, but the endorphin rush from the game play is exhausting.

Re: No Man's Sky just keeps getting better

#103

Post by nextaccountic »

iamwil wrote: post #33
jomohke wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's not really a gamer, hearing "it gets tiring after 85 hours" as a negative blows my mind. 85 hours!

I've racked up over 900 hours on Team Fortress 2 and I'm still terrible at it. I also wonder what I would have learned or built in the time that I've played that game.

900 hours might be begineer level in EU4

Re: No Man's Sky just keeps getting better

#104

Post by nextaccountic »

xenophonf wrote: post #41
fnordpiglet wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love it too, but after playing KSP so much, it bothers me how compressed space is… although a huge class gripe about NMS is how empty it feels, I actually feel like it’s not empty enough at times. Space doesn’t feel big, and solar systems feel like planets and moons are stacked on top of each other.

Galaxies and systems in NMS both feel very flat compared to both KSP and Elite: Dangerous. Bodies in NMS systems are just there, nothing really in an orbit or anything. There's no structure. No real ring systems. Stellar phenomena is just RNG. Every planet is landable. Interplanetary travel is in very straight lines. You can't even fly to the stars in a system, as they're just skybox objects. At the galactic level, w…

> But hey, without getting too far into spoilers, the whole "obviously procedurally generated" thing is part of the NMS universe's conceit, right?

Could you give spoilers and/or elaborate? I'll probably not going to play this

Re: No Man's Sky just keeps getting better

#105

Post by RHSeeger »

dylan604 wrote: post #102
golergka wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were those really high-energy hours of your life that you really could have put in building something instead? Or have you actually gotten 900 recovery, low energy, brain dead hours out of it?

what video game is low energy brain dead? they are designed to do exactly the opposite. sure, you may be sitting stationary in a chair/couch, but the endorphin rush from the game play is exhausting.

Lots of video games are low energy. Idles and incrementals, certainly. But I find things like Diablo to be pretty relaxing (or at least I play it that way), and tons of others. I can't really get into the FPS games anymore just because they _do_ require so much energy and attention.

Re: No Man's Sky just keeps getting better

#106

Post by somenameforme »

golergka wrote: post #96
iamwil wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've racked up over 900 hours on Team Fortress 2 and I'm still terrible at it. I also wonder what I would have learned or built in the time that I've played that game.

Were those really high-energy hours of your life that you really could have put in building something instead? Or have you actually gotten 900 recovery, low energy, brain dead hours out of it?

Indeed! Think of all the old men on their death beds reminiscing with regret, 'I sure wish I spent less of my life doing the things I love.'

The obsession with productivity is weird. The entire point of earning money is to be able do the things you love. The biggest reasonable concern I can see in life is people spending immense amounts of times doing things they don't really enjoy, but somehow feel compelled towards nonetheless - like social media. I've put something like 2000 hours into Crusader Kings 2, and if I knew beforehand what I was getting into, I'd still do it again every single time. Just such an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Re: No Man's Sky just keeps getting better

#107

Post by wkat4242 »

GaggiX wrote: post #68
huytersd wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starfield is fun but it has no gravitas because they’ve taken anything with edge out of it (sex, nudity, drugs/junkies, extreme violence etc.) it feels like one of those bleh G rated Disney “horror” movies.

Does sex, nudity, drugs/junkies, extreme violence make a game better? Anyway I think there are more fundamental problems with the game.

Absolutely, it's more realistic.

Unless you like playing hello kitty :)

Re: No Man's Sky just keeps getting better

#108

Post by aetherspawn »

I bought this game on Switch (via Nintendo Store) about 12 months ago and I don't think it's the same game as is currently on Steam. There is nearly nothing to do and there hasn't been any software updates since I originally bought it?

I went to about 10 different planets and nothing interesting ever happened. The wildlife on every planet all just looked like Bison with a random number of legs, and nothing I came across looks anything close to the screenshots in the article?

I was under the impression when I bought it that the developers were continually improving it, but I did not realize that this did not include Switch, so I feel a bit cheated about that.

Re: No Man's Sky just keeps getting better

#109

Post by pests »

eficek wrote: post #98
golergka wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were those really high-energy hours of your life that you really could have put in building something instead? Or have you actually gotten 900 recovery, low energy, brain dead hours out of it?

I have played over 4000 hours of Team Fortress 2, and I can say with complete certainty that you have no idea what you are talking about.

What? So were those hours you could have worked or do you think they were better spent relaxing and low-energy?

What does you having more hours have to do with it?

Re: No Man's Sky just keeps getting better

#110

Post by xenophonf »

wkat4242 wrote: post #91
xenophonf wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Galaxies and systems in NMS both feel very flat compared to both KSP and Elite: Dangerous. Bodies in NMS systems are just there, nothing really in an orbit or anything. There's no structure. No real ring systems. Stellar phenomena is just RNG. Every planet is landable. Interplanetary travel is in very straight lines. You can't even fly to the stars in a system, as they're just skybox objects. At the galactic level, w…

Elite dangerous' star model is slightly more rooted in reality but it's just as RNG as NMS. And it doesn't even have planets with atmosphere yet (if they ever come because they seem to have given up on it). Also they're moving away from VR support rather than towards like NMS. I used to love E:D but it's really gone to shit sadly and all the promises are moot. No atmospheric planets, no ship interiors, no VR when wal…

> * Elite dangerous' star model is slightly more rooted in reality but it's just as RNG as NMS.*

I'm well aware of how Elite: Dangerous's procedural generation works. Frankly, I think it's is even more impressive than NMS's, since the Stellar Forge-generated galaxy has real structure to it: the spiral arms, areas of greater and lesser density, and so on.

> they seem to have given up on [planets with atmospheres]

Odyssey planets do have atmospheres, so I'm not sure what you mean.

> Also they're moving away from VR support rather than towards like NMS... [Frontier] dropped VR.

Well, first of all, FDev didn't drop VR. It works fine in Elite: Dangerous Odyssey. The way they implemented on-foot VR as theater mode instead of attempting to hack some kind of room-scale VR system into their engine—which has great support for seated VR—seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Contrast that with how NMS implements vehicle controls in VR. They do room-scale VR, so there's no transition to seated VR when entering a vehicle, which is controlled—and I use that term loosely—by basically waving your fists around in the air to work controls you can't feel. It's pretty awful.

Second of all, VR in NMS was very badly broken as of August, the last time I tried it out. And I'm running a brand new 5700X and 4070 Ti that can play Elite: Dangerous Odyssey on VR ULTRA at 45 fps worst case.

As far as the current direction of Elite: Dangerous? Sure, there's plenty to criticize, but after over 10k hours, I'm still really enjoying it. I'm still learning new things. I'm still following the story. I'm still engaging with other players. I'm still buying ARX. With NMS, after 367 hours every system, every planet, every station, every alien has started to feel the same. I no longer enjoy it. But hell, you might really, really love NMS. If you can pick it up on sale, you should get it.

Post reply on HN