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No Man's Sky Cosmos

nomanssky.com

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Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#61

Post by rpdillon »

viktorcode wrote: post #37
LelouBil wrote: post #2

I am just wondering where do they get the money to keep pushing out big content updates like this

Small studio, don't have to generate a lot of sales to keep them afloat. Updates push visibility and generate new sales. Obviously, they need new projects to keep them afloat in the future.

The enhancements they're making to NMS appear to be backports from the Light No Fire engine, so my impression is that they are releasing updates to No Man's Sky as a marketing effort while the actual technical work is predominantly on the next game.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#62

Post by goatking »

m4rtink wrote: post #27
margalabargala wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A mile wide, and an inch deep

Yeah, that is exactly my issue with the game - they crammed so many mechanics into the game, but all of them are incredibly shallow & even unfinished. The RNG space is part of the problem - planets and biomes kinda start to repeat after while and it is not really important any more on which weird planet or station you are. It is actually interesting how many games with much smaller RNG generated world maps work just…

Also the existing mechanics are overly simplified. Like space combat...

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#63

Post by uzish »

I think facts would be helpful for this discussion:

1. Total Revenue - ~$500m-$700m

2. Copies Sold - ~15-20m

3. Steam Review Score: 84.36%

4. 40 Free Major Updates

I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.

NMS is a great example of a developer who was devoted to their customer base, kept updating the game for free, and saw great market success in return.

This is a story to be celebrated.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#64

Post by rcxdude »

meowface wrote: post #35
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big name in proc gen is Kate Compton who coined the term "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" to describe this phenomenon of technically unique but not different enough to matter - I googled "10000 bowls of oatmeal" to see if there was a good article and the second link was about it and nms https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowl...

One thing this article lacks is any tips on how to still do procedural generation while partly mitigating the oatmeal issue. In other words, define a more sophisticated generation procedure that can add character and identity. It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.

The advice I've heard is 1) have as many different dimensions of variation as you can manage, and try to have them matter, 2) resist the urge to impart correlations into the generation, since this just reduces variety, and 3) allow your parameters to become extreme occasionally, so that some parts of your generation are notably different, and special because they're rare.

1) is the really hard part, I think: it's a challenge to come up with enough meaningful variations that also work from a gameplay point of view.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#65

Post by goatking »

john_strinlai wrote: post #31

at the time of posting, i think every top-level comment except one is negative. so, i'd like to balance it by saying that i have never seen a better executed turnaround than what the no man's sky team did. they cratered their reputation on launch, worked hard and long to restore it, and then continued to offer free updates long after they needed to. lots of respect there. (i will reward the effort by purchasing their…

I don't really enjoy the game for more than 10-20 hours after picking it up (gets boring fast for me), and have problems with it, but kudos to the dev team. I agree, huge turnaround

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#66

Post by goatking »

uzish wrote: post #63

I think facts would be helpful for this discussion: 1. Total Revenue - ~$500m-$700m 2. Copies Sold - ~15-20m 3. Steam Review Score: 84.36% 4. 40 Free Major Updates I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early. NMS is a great example of a developer who was devoted to their customer base, kept updating the game for free, and saw great market success in return. This is a story…

I don't think anyone disagrees and I don't really see negative comments about the devs or the studio.

The problem is the game itself, gameplay wise. It's just boring for many (including me)

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#67

Post by BoBaitlyn »

big-chungus4 wrote: post #29

What are people on about, there is tons to do in NMS, tons of missions, expeditions, build bases, build a corvet, hunt rate parts, ships, rifles, creatures, manage a settlement, automate crafting chains, find a lucrative trading route, and this new update apps even more things. I'd never consider NMS anything close to empty, there is so much variety in the content

The game has so much stuff to do its actually overwhelming. The game is definitely a sandbox though and I think for some reason a lot of people don't like going out and doing the different things you can do in the game if the game doesn't force you to or if there's not heavy progression.

I feel like the same thing happens to other sandbox games too. Minecraft is one of my favorite games of all time and I could easily spend a thousand hours in a vanilla world and still find things to do, however the game gets constantly shit on by the community no matter what it does. They speedrun through the progression and then lack any creativity to do anything else in the game.

I personally love building bases and customizing and collecting things, which is a large part of the gameplay in NMS. I could spend hundreds of hours doing that but I guess some people just need a constant sense of progression and the game telling you what to do because they aren't capable of setting their own goals. Anyone who says NMS lacks content or things to do has barely touched the game.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#68

Post by micromacrofoot »

avazhi wrote: post #19
helle253 wrote: post #5

It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing. It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game

How I feel as well. This game just doesn't scale well from mid game on - it's way too easy, even on permadeath + hardest difficulty. Like, making money is way too easy, combat is way too easy, everything is too forgiving. And the entire loop is centered on like, 3 things to do that are all variants of the same exact thing. Really hope they do a much better job in Light No Fire. To the guy who replied to me: Our geniu…

it's because it's a sandbox farming game, it's not meant to be difficult

you spend most of your time finding/farming resources and unlocking builds

most of your time is traveling between planets/systems/galaxies for different resources

I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding, which is the core gameplay, you can easily miss it if you don't play for 40+ hours but there are entire varieties of star systems you can't access initially, an entire race you literally can't see without completing some strings of missions, etc

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#69

Post by spandrew »

john_strinlai wrote: post #31

at the time of posting, i think every top-level comment except one is negative. so, i'd like to balance it by saying that i have never seen a better executed turnaround than what the no man's sky team did. they cratered their reputation on launch, worked hard and long to restore it, and then continued to offer free updates long after they needed to. lots of respect there. (i will reward the effort by purchasing their…

I disagree with this logic.

They launched an empty, hollow game. And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. Most of their new systems are half baked—confusing and only adding to the game design mess the game came out with.

I'm convinced the reputation that they executed a "turnaround" is based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.

The benefit to the NMS team for this is they'll have people half willing to try their next game because they "didn't give up". Not the worse idea, but I think we're over stating the heroicness of this.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#70

Post by estebank »

raincole wrote: post #39
helle253 wrote: post #5

It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing. It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game

It more or less reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode. They were playing an asteroid shooting. > Morty: it's boring. crank up the realism slider to max > Rick: why does it get even more empty? Wait, I got it... because the universe is empty. At the end, I think there is little point in simulating the vastness of the universe in a video game (even just a fraction of it).

I don't think that simulating the vastness of the universe is ever going to be fun, but approximating a theme park ride that evokes the vastness of the universe can be breathtaking, like Outer Wilds was. (The gameplay is confined to a single solar system, but it certainly makes you feel both the a sense of adventure, and the vastness of space-time.)
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