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No Man's Sky Cosmos

nomanssky.com

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Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#111

Post by t-writescode »

goatking wrote: post #66
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)

That’s fine, it has a sustained concurrent players online of > 7k every day for the last 6 months [0]. Few games on Steam achieve that.

While several people are complaining about a one-time-cost game with an absurd amount of updates that had a rough launch, thousands of people are continuously happy, the subreddit expresses joy. It’s okay to “not get it”; but at some level, this much hate and dogpiling over a game that’s not harmful and not fostering a toxic community is … embarrassing for those participating in the hate.

[0] https://steamcharts.com/app/275850#6m

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#112

Post by rcxdude »

omoikane wrote: post #89
rcxdude wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of bones files in nethack.

I was going to say, NetHack doesn't feel sparse to me, but maybe I just have not played enough NetHack. I think it's due to the fact that there is a fair bit of content, but the interface drip-feeds them very slowly, combined with the difficulty of the game itself that prevents users from finding all possible ways to interact with all content.

Nethack does procedural generation pretty well, and indeed roguelikes are a pretty good framework for it, because the game design tends to revolve around giving the player different options to solve a given problem and they're also not too afraid to have the difficulty vary a lot between runs.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#113

Post by Antipode »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #102
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…

There is no such thing as a turnaround. People wait for a game to be released. When you give a release date, you must give one that shows the almost complete state of your game. Not something that is half done, not something that will feel completely different 1 year later. When you buy a thing you get an experience. If your game is a different experience 1 year later, well, I couldn't care less about it. I'm not gon…

I agree with you in principle, but "nobody cares" clearly isn't true given the steam review history.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#114

Post by t-writescode »

mstank wrote: post #8

Spent a lot of time in this game… The team is excellent and they ship incredible ambitious work. I really wish they would just focus 100% on Light No Fire.

Part of me is secretly hoping / assuming they’re releasing new features as a testing bed for the changes in Light No Fire. I’m also very hopeful for Light No Fire. *VERY* hopeful, but I have to assume all these updates are for their broader engine. I hope..

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#115

Post by embedding-shape »

glenstein wrote: post #92
kjs3 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much the perfect description of NMS. Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way. Oh look...this planet has 4 legged animals that are green and bumpy and the last one they were brown and spiky...but they move the same and act the same. Yawn.

I still think it's a remarkable success story and they can and should be incredibly proud of what they've built. But this vision of what is meant by cosmic depth and expansiveness seems to tragically miss the point. Compare it to even our own solar system where even so much as a new high-res photo of the hexagon storm on Saturn comes with stunning new and specific detail, or the "heart" on Pluto, we're practically am…

What do you think people want a true space exploration game to feel like?

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#116

Post by BrokenCogs »

goatking wrote: post #66
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)

Somewhat of an aside but, personally, I also found GTA V and Red dead redemption 2 to be boring because these games didn't respect my time. I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world".

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#118

Post by messia »

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

stuff to do != fun stuff to do

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#119

Post by bsimpson »

My Legion Go came with a free Game Pass trial. I spent 20 minutes playing No Man's Sky in VR and liked it, bought it on Steam, but haven't actually played it yet.

Maybe this is the nudge to move it higher in my queue.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#120

Post by schnevets »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #11
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

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...

I vaguely recall an episode of the Triple Click podcast around 2023 where they had a serious AI fanboy who was rah rah-ing about future procedural generation in games. It might have been Casey Anthony, but I'm unable to re-listen while at work.

The fanboy started saying how they could have endless different levels in Destiny 2... which is absurdly off-base since the entire game is just running through the same 9 sandboxes and 12 raids over and over and over again

He then went on to talk about AI creating an album as perfect as OK Computer on-demand, which was gently putdown by Kirk (who is an exceptional musician but also chill enough to suffer fools)

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