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No Man's Sky Cosmos

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Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#331

Post by vor_ »

zf00002 wrote: post #43
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…

no matter what, that always happens with this game. Any news about it causes the people who played for 10 minutes at launch however long ago come back to tell you how much they didn't like it.

It appears that the go-to response from certain fans is to accuse anyone critical of having only played it at launch. I assure you that's not the case. I find the game just as shallow today every time I try a new content update. What do you want me to do? Convince myself I don't feel that way about it? I can't make myself like something.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#332

Post by vor_ »

Perenti wrote: post #306
modeless wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 65 hours logged on Steam, am I allowed to say that I have also bounced off of several updates and find the game empty and lacking meaningful goals? It's simultaneously an amazing achievement, worth the money I paid, a redemption story for Hello Games, and yet disappointing in a way that e.g. BOTW is not. One of these years I plan to dive back in again, hoping to find that the sum of all the updates has provide…

I have over 3500 hours logged on Steam for NMS, and at 65 hours you have barely scratched the surface. Like many open world sandbox games, you have to make yourself goals. If you want a nice guided "start here" to "finish there" type game NMS is not for you.

NMS actually does ship "start here, finish here" content, but my main issue is that the game is terribly easy. All that extra content you're implying is there, I find to be very shallow, unchallenging, and unrewarding. In the end, I'm simply not interested in LARPing around on procedurally generated planets and going through the motions.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#333

Post by vor_ »

lconnell962 wrote: post #143
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

I think some people don't understand what a procgen survival-craft game is. They're not wrong about it being an open sandbox, that's kinda the point. People talking about taking too long getting to space might not know about the limited time expeditions you can just start in for a different take, or turning the game to creative mode so they don't need to spend time resource farming to get their ship working so they c…

I know what a procgen survival-craft game is. I just don't think it's a very fun one. It's actually too easy, in fact.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#334

Post by dwattttt »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #59
zf00002 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no matter what, that always happens with this game. Any news about it causes the people who played for 10 minutes at launch however long ago come back to tell you how much they didn't like it.

That is a predictable consequence of their decision to launch before the game was ready. The game as it is now may not deserve that kind of contempt, but it's the price they chose to pay forever at launch.

There's a fair bit out there about their launch circumstances. From memory they weren't entirely in control of the timing.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#335

Post by scotty79 »

kjs3 wrote: post #51
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...

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.

That's funny because that's exactly what I feel when I travel IRL.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#336

Post by zargon »

benterris wrote: post #211
k4j8 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best space exploration game I've played is Outer Wilds ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/ ), but instead of the NMS sandbox there are puzzles.

Outer Wilds is really an amazing game. I highly recommend playing it without looking at anything online: when I started I reached for google every time I was stuck, just to realise I could have found answers if I has searched just a little bit more. After a while I stuck to a rule to never look at answers online, and it was such a bliss to finally crack puzzles after trying lots of different things.

Unpopular opinion, but for me, no amount of puzzles/story can offset the utter obnoxious frustration of the time loop.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#337

Post by rideontime »

t-writescode wrote: post #114
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..

Sean has said so explicitly in multiple videos, including the "deep dive" video for today's update.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#338

Post by avazhi »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #133
goatking wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but my main issue is that after visiting a few systems and a bunch of planets, you kinda saw everything the procedural generation has to offer, and visiting planets becomes boring quickly, at least for me. There are differences, and as someone mentioned there are some unique planets for sure, but for the most part they all look samey. Wildlife is also just walking/flying around doing nothing. This takes away…

Visiting planets is just a very small part of the overall game. That was more the first NMS. Wildlife for example you can train as pets, mounts or milk/harvest. Once you get access to the Space anomaly the game opens up more and if you are social you will find outposts, pet arenas, race tracks and dog fighting/pvp zones. Ship building and freighters. The latest update appears to allow groups to control areas of space…

> Once you get access to the Space anomaly the game opens up more and if you are social you will find outposts, pet arenas, race tracks and dog fighting/pvp zones. Ship building and freighters.

Outposts sound cool. I assume they aren’t just all the same thing. What do they offer? I’m sure it won’t be something I look at for 5 minutes and think ‘yeah this is neat’ and then realise there’s nothing deeper than that, right?

Ship building and freighters sound cool. I’m sure I’ll be motivated to do that because my stock ship is really holding me back. Oh wait, combat is a joke and I can perma farm max bounties playing with my toes with my default shop I bought on max difficulty/permadeath.

Pet fighting? What’s the point of that?

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#339

Post by xboxnolifes »

BoBaitlyn wrote: post #67
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…

Saying the game is a space sandbox and then implying that the inability to find fun falls onto the player's inability is what every online NMS fan says in discussions about not enjoying NMS. Calling a game a sandbox doesn't spawn game mechanics into existence, the game is still limited by what the devs put into the game. Your goals are still limited by what the game provides to you.

But a game can have 1000 hours of collectables content and still not be an enjoyable game to people. For example, I don't really enjoy collectables purely for the sake of collecting or building without having some sort of meaningful functionality. Every time I've tried to get into NMS (and when I ask others about what you can do in the game), I get the impression that 99% of the game is just flying/walking around, scanning things, collecting some random doodads, base building, and hoping to find a "cool" ship in a station to buy. Which is to say, the same things every base building survival game has, but in space.

I don't necessarily need forced goals, but I need things to work toward that aren't just collectables. For example, in certain other space sandbox games I can build up or destroy political factions. The universe around me dynamically updates in ways that actually affect me meaningfully. I can build up industry to harvest resources, refine them, and produce various goods either to use or to sale. I can have a goal of building all of the infrastructure needed to produce ships, or colonies, or what have you. With a larger industry, maybe some of the political factions try to attack me, so I then need to defend against them. I could build up a fleet of ships that handle defense and transportation of resources. I want to feel like the universe actually responds to my input.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#340

Post by thaumasiotes »

DonHopkins wrote: post #248
kaashif wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spore had that but I kind of liked it. I guess that was 20 years ago almost, maybe my standards were lower. It felt charming seeing others' animals, some of them looked pretty cool.

There's a fundamental difference between procedurally generated worlds and how Spore actually works. The creatures, vehicles, and buildings weren't generated -- they were created by other players and exchanged asynchronously, then seeded into your procedurally generated galaxy. Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game: no real-time multiplayer, but your galaxy fills with other people's content. That's the oppos…

But this doesn't look like it's making any new observations. Spore has some 3D modeling tools and abysmal gameplay that could never persuade anyone to start up a game of Spore.

But the models are fun, sure. And other people can find your models, and you can find theirs.

So if we recognize that the "gameplay" part of Spore never worked... we're left with Second Life, a much, much older thing. It hasn't been much of a success.

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