No Man's Sky [PC]

I think I found a moon that is Type 4 according to this. Literally any cave system I go into I have to make several trips to sell all the cubes I find, which are worth about 25k each.
 
I played it.
In my opinion, No Man's Sky is far from being a milestone. The idea that this game uses an unused technique doesnt help much. Everything should act consistent and entertaining. For me, so far no point stands out particularly. Soundtrack? Good, but not outstanding. Crafting? Unfortunately, a not completely thought out inventory system that also annoying me with its limited places in the exoskeleton and spacecraft.
The dismantling of the raw materials degenerates into tiresome work, because on each planet I have to find out what the commodity is. Then there are these little symbols for each raw material to at least scan the environment. But what is the advantage if nowhere a kind of manual can be found, where these are declared? Even after 5 hours I know partially what to be expect. That's an exploration game, right? Why does the player then makes no notes?

The game is rudimentary in my opinion. The spacecraft control is simple. The battle against three other spaceships feel paralyzed and I have actually passed only from the fact that I had to refuel my deflector shield. The fighting at the ground is also primitive. There is no depht behind it. The dialogue system is bad. Why do I always give someone carbon, so I can talk to him? And then there are three pre scraps of text and not more? Very great isnt it, if I can not select them. Then I leave the dialog menu and will again pay 20x carbon. Who came up with something?

But now for the most criticism, the planet itself. Here I must express myself carefully, because I was only on 4 pieces. In my start solar system were all rather boring designed. They are not offer much for the eye. But the worst part is the following: All four planets had nothing charming. One notices immediately that it is computer generated and, as with any game that I have ever experienced with something to repeat pattern. There are no hand crafted details. This motivation curve falls a long way down. The containers and the inner workings of the space stations are also a joke. There seems to be for the latter exactly a preset and in the containers are even a few cases, an aquarium and maybe swivel chairs. Level Design in 2000.

One should keep the ball flat with the "everything is prozedrual generated". There is nothing new per se. Already TES II: Daggerfall leaving spit out of a computer for most of the contents. Thus, the playing surface was as large as the United Kingdom.

I think that will not play it any further. It's not a bad game, but It would not worth more than 60% in my opinion. Too many things are inconsistent. Also the animals I have see so far looked real stupid.


At least it runs better than expected. I cannot reproduce the DF frame rate dips. Perhaps they lawn with too high speed on the planet?
The textures are unfortunately quite poor. The lack of AF (or 2x?) makes it worse. But they want to continue to improve the game. TAA will be added later.
The planets do not move and rotate and the star does not move when the player is in space. But its change the position when one is on the planet.
The shadows only rotate and don't change their lenght. When they reach 90° in the day they stop moving and in the night they go back to their initial day state. A lot of the shadows are static.
 
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The only comparison between Minecraft and NMS is the procedurally generated terrain and mining elements. You can't place any terrain or build anything like in Minecraft.
 
The only comparison between Minecraft and NMS is the procedurally generated terrain and mining elements. You can't place any terrain or build anything like in Minecraft.

They'd need to significantly overhaul their engine to accommodate anything other than ephemeral deformation or building - terrain creation seems predicated on the algorithm above all else. E.g Right you can mine a massive rock, take off and even from just a small distance it shows the rock un-mined. Head back and the mined rock warps back in.

Separately, resources seem to regenerate fairly quickly. There's a lot of smoke and mirror and lots of cracks. It doesn't detract from the core experience but perhaps other choices would have been better.
 
^They probably didn't have the manpower to create a great enough variety of interlocking objects to pull that off. Everything in that game that's not the planetary surface itself repeats over and over and over. I'm also wondering whether a little more variety in the look and feel of the various bases and shelters would have really changed how the final product came across. In terms of gameplay they'd still remain mostly medaningless.
The dungeons in TES: Oblivion were all constructed from various interlocking lego blocks, and they still became a chore after you'd visited your 10th one or so. And those were actually built by level designers.
 
They could have used conventional procedural creation for things like bases. Just a bunch of prefab components assembled in algorithmic fashion.

Yeah I'm really surprised there isn't more variety in habituated areas and disappointed the bases don't use the environment better, like half in/out of caves or recessed into a mountain but I have seen a couple of bases slightly obscured by the environment - I've also seen bases "fall" onto the ground (from perhaps a meter or two higher) while flying around.

Now when I see two shelters together at a right angle I know one will be OK and the other will have nothing but shelves and a chair on its side. It seems weird that Hello Games produced this complex procedural algorithm to build planets yet there be so little variety in bases where the similarities are really obvious.

Maybe I need to get out (into space) more! For "research". :yes:
 
The most frustrating things I've come across:
  1. Inability to see what blueprints you have without having an empty slot
  2. No real waypoints / map
  3. Getting "ruin" waypoints that are underwater with no actual structure there.
 
Number 3 is particularly fun when the water is highly irradiated, the place is a 4 minutes walk away from the nearest shore, and it's like 50+ meters below the surface.
 
It appears this game has a memory leak with SSAA4 enabled, at least that is my hunch. Don't have anything definitive yet.
 
The most frustrating things I've come across:
  1. Inability to see what blueprints you have without having an empty slot
  2. No real waypoints / map
  3. Getting "ruin" waypoints that are underwater with no actual structure there.
The map can be frustrating yes. I went through once system to get to a 2nd system for the Atlas Interface however I could not find that intermediate system and adding that original system as a waypoint I ended up having to go through 2 other undiscovered to get back. Didn't make sense at all. They need to have the ability to target a system from the discovery window where they're listed.
 
The CA and scan lines is obnoxious, glad to get that removed. Much too strong an effect.

I used the Experience settings for NMS on my 970 which basically sets the settings to high/ultra quality but lowers the resolution and it actually looks and runs a lot better. Really struggling to run this at a solid 60fps at 2560x1080 normally with everything set to Medium which is unfortunate but I can't do a negative DSR and the Experience and in-game resolution settings only provide 16:9/16:10 ARs. Maybe that internal resolution multiplier I could use my 21:9 native and render at 0.75x

Runs great on my wife's i7+980 though.
 
New Nvidia drivers are out now, including Game Ready for No Man's Sky. Expect lots of hitching at the start as the shader cache is rebuilt as you play.
 
Holy carpe! The Co-optional podcast is absolutely ripping into No-mans sky. The best thing they've had to say about it so far is that this would be a good 25 USD early access game. They speculate it's a 60 USD game because Sony wanted to hype it as a unique exclusive AAA game once they saw people's reactions to the initial reveal. Sony happens to be the publisher on PS4, so they get to set the price for it. Hello Games, can't price it lower than the console version on Steam.

It has a good base for what could be a good game, but the current implementation is so badly done that it's not enjoyable as a 60 USD game. Their comments are that the combat is bad, the mechanics are bad, the interface is bad, the inventory is the worst ever in a game, etc.

Damn. It's been a long time since I've seen all 3 hosts and the guest host universally rip into a game. At least Crendor found the exploration relaxing...until he had to refuel his hyperdrive and then it all went downhill. And not because he had to refuel, but because of all the impediments to doing it.

[edit] And this just came up in the podcast.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyT...res_the_nms_we_were_sold_on_heres_a_big_list/

Regards,
SB
 
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Refueling the hyperdrive isn't that hard at the start, it's not like it requires rare materials. I think so many are playing the game expecting to be able to do what they want within a few hours, which is an unreasonable expectation for this game. It wasn't that far in that I learned the recipe for the Suspension Fluid, which is where it spawns from. Besides, once you get Alpha Pass v1, creating Warp Cells is a trivial task due to the drop crates at all the locations that contain random warp cell components.

The ridiculous hype of this game ruined it for so many. Thankfully I went in with only minor expectations and I'm really enjoying it so far. There are certainly criticisms I have of the game and it has a lot of potential with some more work done on it, but I'm definitely satisfied for my $60 spend. I see many many more hours delving into this game across many different worlds. But I'm also someone who spent 3 hours last night searching for the last lifeform on my home planet (which I didn't find) but enjoyed the exploration doing so.

I listened to the TB video today where he discusses the hype around the game. There was so much ridiculous behavior from fan boys, journalists and also Hello Games. All sides are guilty for building the hype train to this game.
 

I especially liked this bit at the end.

In an alternate timeline, imagine if we could just be showing it for the first time tonight and launching tomorrow? Imagine how fun that would have been.

I think people would like a lot more games if this was the case. But you can't really develop games like that these days unless your a small indie developer self funding a small indie project. Back in the 80's and 90's a game might have gotten some magazine coverage, but a lot of people would run into a game for the first time ever by seeing it on a store shelf. Now days there's so much coverage on any game with a mid to large sized budget that it's almost impossible to escape the coverage. Especially when you even see them on mainstream TV (talk shows).

Regards,
SB
 
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