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

No Man's Sky Cosmos

nomanssky.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 271 posts

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#171

Post by IceDane »

beloch wrote: post #135
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

NMS's art-style is low-detail, but highly aesthetic. It can look amazing at times, but only when you're looking at grand cinematic vistas. It rarely looks good in closeups. This parallels the game's systems in many ways. NMS is a technically impressive game. You can build a custom-spaceship, either with the in-game editor or by importing one from outside the game, dogfight in it, land on alien worlds, etc. and that's…

It's been years since I last played it, but when I did I finally did so for a while until I finally found myself at a space station with other players and whatnot. And some random dude just gives me something like tens and tens of millions in cash. And my friend. And a bunch of other people in the same station.

At that point I was still rather new to the game. I had little money, few resources, understood little - which was the whole game for me. Discovering new stuff and trying to make money. And being given all that money sort of just .. ruined the game for me. What was left was the very meh storyline and maybe exploration, neither of which had any appeal to me.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#172

Post by IceDane »

KronisLV wrote: post #38
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

You do occasionally find some pretty cool stuff. I found a barren planet in a black hole system where the vibe was all dark and shadowy with the light being tinted purple, and just some crystals or something on the surface, alongside a damaged robot that you could interact with. There was also a world that had high Sentinel activity where I founded a settlement (well, more like took over managing it), however as it t…

That sounds cool, but it's either a handcrafted world (if NMS has those) or pure luck. If it's the latter, then it can't have any depth. At best it can have some procedurally generated content that's going to be something you've seen before. Looks cool, but no substance.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#173

Post by danielvaughn »

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

I had a different experience.

I bought it on day one in 2016, and like everyone else, I was wowed by the planet hopping experience for about an hour or so. Then I put it down and didn't think about it again.

Then I picked it up a few years later, and discovered base building. Had more fun than the first playthrough, but it didn't click. Eventually I hear about something called the Galactic Hub, which is a star system marked by players as a central spot to build their bases. Kind of like a human home in the vast empty universe of NMS.

I get curious about it, and look up instructions on how to get there. I did some quick napkin math and realized it would take literally dozens of hours of grinding - nonstop travel - to get there. However, as it turns out, there's a loophole with black holes. When you enter a black hole, it spits you out into a totally different place in the galaxy. From the players perspective its random, but players got together and figured out that each unique black hole always sends you to the same spot in the galaxy. So they constructed a black hole "highway", along with an app that let you input your desired coordinates, and it would give you the list of black holes that would most optimally get you near your destination.

So I spend an evening playing the game, switching back and forth from the game to my laptop, inputting coordinates and slowly making my way closer and closer to the hub. Eventually I find it, and what was amazing was that it was the first time I'd seen any evidence of another player in the game.

That moment felt utterly magical, because while I was playing a game, I had an actual, real objective that I formed entirely on my own.

So yes, the game is an odd duck, but it can really open up with the right mindset.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#174

Post by spandrew »

glenstein wrote: post #130
john_strinlai wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't why scare quotes around for free? they were free. > haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. i went from hating it to really enjoying it. i am not the only one. > 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. my comment comes fro…

I suppose because you still bought the game, after all, and on some level it was about catching up to expectations for what you would have paid for out of the box. That said, I don't agree with their take at all. Hello Games offered a mountain of content that's right in the bullseye center of game's core vibe and identity; and continuing to hold the original critique against them based on the "not procedural enough"…

You pay for a game——if the game is not good, and patches are provided "for free" that doesn't mean much.

Here, NMS launched with abysmal content and atrocious systems. Now at least it doesn't have abysmal content. A bad game is a bad game (yes, my opinion).

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#175

Post by simoncion »

bluetidepro wrote: post #48

NMS is one of the best comeback stories in gaming, but I'll keep dying on this hill: the game is an ocean wide and a puddle deep. I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours. Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials. It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content. The UI isn't intuitive and badly needs modern…

> I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours.

Yep, me too. It's a decent sandbox to spend a bit of time in, and it's fine that that's all it is.

> Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials.

They have spent substantial amounts of time on UI, UX, and tutorials... several times. Unless you're proposing they convert everything into a brain-dead "mobile" game UI (which would be a significant downgrade), it'd be very difficult to do much better than they already have with the inventory management and conversation UIs.

> It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content.

I mean, it's a sandbox. If they did all of the UI overhauling and tutorial creation you wanted from them -and nothing else- would that keep your interest for weeks and months... or would you play for a few hours and get bored? There's not much _game_ in the game and it's been that way since the beginning.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#176

Post by spandrew »

simoncion wrote: post #164
john_strinlai wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i bought a game that contained X with no expectations of more content. the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates. i did not pay for those updates. so it seems completely reasonable to consider those updates to be free. wording it as something i paid for when i didn't pushes the baseline towards dishonesty.

> the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates. Yeah. Back in the day, those would almost always be paid expansions... if not whole-ass sequels. There's a subset of video game players these days who expect years and years of substantial changes to a game. Why, back in my day you had to pay for anything more than a game-breaking bug fix... and you counted yourself lucky if you even got…

This isn't an arguement I'm making.

There's a difference between DLC and providing "the base game content" – which No Man's Sky was doing. It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now. They could have cut their losses but it would've ended the studio.

Now they're being touted as a paragon of scrappy game dev. Which is wrong.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#177

Post by 0x457 »

jklinger410 wrote: post #32
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

I feel the same way about Starfield. Just soulless projects instead of engaging video games.

Starfield is IMO worse. NMS at least has sandboxes that can entertain you and expeditions can be fun. NMS just doesn't have "goal" to work towards, so unless you can create your own goals its boring. Starfield, bugs aside, had the most boring base-building/operations I've seen in my life.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#178

Post by simoncion »

rpdillon wrote: post #61
viktorcode wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> ...my impression is that they are releasing updates to No Man's Sky as a marketing effort...

Given that they don't (often? ever?) advertise Light No Fire alongside the NMS updates, I'd say that the updates into NMS are large-scale playtests of LNF engine updates, game systems, or both, rather than marketing.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#179

Post by dakial1 »

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

People who didn't follow up their post-launch recovery still have the impression made at the launch (first impressions matter a lot). I didn't play the game (yet) but I have followed their recovery path. It is an incredible story and it seems that the game has evolved a lot.

I wonder if they won't add generative AI to create infinite stories/missions inside it, that would get rid of the 10K bowls effect.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#180

Post by simoncion »

spandrew wrote: post #176
simoncion wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates. Yeah. Back in the day, those would almost always be paid expansions... if not whole-ass sequels. There's a subset of video game players these days who expect years and years of substantial changes to a game. Why, back in my day you had to pay for anything more than a game-breaking bug fix... and you counted yourself lucky if you even got…

This isn't an arguement I'm making. There's a difference between DLC and providing "the base game content" – which No Man's Sky was doing. It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now. They could have cut their losses but it would've ended the studio. Now they're being touted as a paragon of scrappy game dev. Which is wrong.

> It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now.

I'd argue that it was barely a game at launch, and it's still barely a game today... it has always been a sandbox with very little game in it, and that's fine. [0] But that's neither here nor there.

They released a "game" ten years ago. They've updated that "game" many times and never charged for updates.

That makes those updates free. You can justifiably be angry about the circumstances of the launch, and justifiably be angry that anyone's saying anything good about the devs. That doesn't change the fact that this [3]

  And the features they've bolted on "for free"...
is an asinine use of scare quotes. The updates were delivered free of charge, and the price of the base game hasn't been increased to account for them. This makes them free updates.

[0] See the fourth paragraph of [1] as well as most of [2] for a little more commentary on this.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630148>

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630824>

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629510>

Post reply on HN