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No Man's Sky Cosmos

nomanssky.com

311–320 of 361 posts

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#311
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 people interact with LEGO varies. Some people like to buy specific sets and make them. That's fine. Some people see a random pile of bricks and build a massive city [1]. There are also competition events for what people can build from a random pile of bricks. There was a TV show about this too (ie Lego Masters).

Some games are problem solving, others are competitive, yet others are elimination but an awful lot of games have a component that requires you to inject imagination. The Sims and even Minecraft (despite it having a survival mode too) spring to mind.

That's what NMS is. Some people like to find the perfect looking ship. Others build bases to look a certain way. Others just explore. Yet others make money.

If that's not for you, that's OK. But NMS can't be dismissed as being repetitive or boring.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfVCmkexl2E

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#312
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Mincecraft basically that? I've never played it, so would be curious to hear from someone who's played both. From the outside both look very dull/soulless and yet people spend hours playing Minecraft building things - just engaging with their imaginations

Basic Minecraft is basically that imo Modded Minecraft is a very different beast, depending on the mods It's pretty cool to see what modders have done with it over the years. I genuinely think Minecraft + Create is the best factory game.

Even vanilla minecraft is a far superior experience to NMS. Minecraft's approach to procedural generation poduces more meaningful exploration because its terrain, resources, structures, and building system interact far more deeply with the gameplay than NMS linear number-go-up grind.

Of course, introducing mods makes Minecraft the most compelling entry in the genre by a huge margin, but not necessarily a fair comparison since the combined human effort involved in the minecraft mod ecosystem vastly eclipses what the NMS team could do on their own.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#313
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.

It's not just NMS.. the "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" is a plight of all AAA games these days. Ubisfot is a perfect example, look at their "Watch Dogs: Legion" for example. They decided to get creative and give you random characters generated by AI.. it turned out to be a disaster. Another one is their Far cry games, where they copy and paste the same events but slightly different, all over the map and call it a day. I t…

Let's see if GTA 6 breaks away from this

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of criticism from no man's sky, like this one, comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what no man's sky is, i fear... No Man's Sky really is just a sandbox game. a sandbox game doesn't need infinitely complex mechanics, it just needs to give you a blank canvas to do what you want to do... minecraft has like what 40 biomes, no man's sky has practically infinite biomes, is that not enough? you can build a u…

Oh, my mistake, now that you've explained it like this it is magically fun for me now.

Oh, everyone else's mistake; we didn't realize all of human output had to satisfy you...of all people!

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse when you see the exact same animal asset but scaled differently with a different color hue on a completely different planet. Ruins the immersion immediately. Obviously, it has come a long, long way since the 2016 article, but still.

For me it's the asteroids. Having space being so densely populated with procedural asteroids is immediately, irreversibly immersion breaking for me. Like... space would be opaque and life on these plants would immediately cease in a cataclysm of bombardment. This was also one of many gripes I had with Starfield.

Well this update fixes your asteroid complaint then

Adds persistent asteroid belts, asteroid mining, and base building on asteroids

Go wild

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#316
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all of the story missions are: 1) walk/drive/ride to this place 2) Talk to NPC 3) Do an extremely boring task (follow someone, drive somewhere, etc) 4) Walk somewhere else 5) Talk to someone else. 6) Collect XP or another reward. Most of it is not enjoyable gameplay.

Yeah. Like, the train heist and other cool gameplay segments were fun. But the missions to go to some random town and talk to someone and escort them back? Horrible.

Don’t forget the top notch drawer rummaging simulator.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#317
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

To me it feels like what i actually want is Eve's economy, PVP/PVE strapped onto the noman gameplay, at least personaly

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#318
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

The best things about the game (and it is a good game at this point, they continued to add to it at a steady pace since launch) are the human written stories. But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast. But also, the worst thing about the human-written stories is that they're often transparentl…

The thing is they could probably have easily had the pvp and economy and soverignty of eve, and that would have been amazing

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I meant the marketing effort for No Man's Sky since that's where the money is. They need to continually attract new players.

> They need to continually attract new players. I'm not so sure about that, but otherwise agree with your comment. I'll gently point back to my hunch that many (most?) of the NMS updates are large-scale tests for things they're thinking about having in LNF. Given that it seems likely that both games are using the same engine, it'd make a lot of sense to use a preexisting playerbase for large-scale, no-cost testing of…

Yes, I think we agree... I think they're using it for both marketing and to test the viability of it and get player feedback, but I do expect LNF to have at least some substantially similar mechanics to NMS for this reason.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just NMS.. the "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" is a plight of all AAA games these days. Ubisfot is a perfect example, look at their "Watch Dogs: Legion" for example. They decided to get creative and give you random characters generated by AI.. it turned out to be a disaster. Another one is their Far cry games, where they copy and paste the same events but slightly different, all over the map and call it a day. I t…

Let's see if GTA 6 breaks away from this

The GTA franchise already broke away from this in the currently existing titles, but that's not a fair comparison given that GTA worlds are mostly handcrafted.
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