No Man's Sky

[Adam Jensen]

No Man's Sky has been on my wishlist for a long time, but there's a reason why it's still there instead of in my library. I don't think that I could get into it. It's one of those pointless games that I just don't know how to enjoy. I need a plot and interesting characters that hold the game together in order to enjoy it. Roaming around aimlessly has never been my idea of fun. As much as I love exploring big open worlds, the enjoyment I get from that is tied to the plot and the character that I'm playing as.

 

My favourite game of all time is The Witcher 3. And I love the world of The Witcher 3. But that world is only enjoyable to me because of all the stories and characters that are woven into it. If I'm playing as a nameless character in a world without a real plot, then the whole thing is pointless to me and I don't want to do it.

 

It's also why I can't get into Souls games. Challenge for challenge sake doesn't matter to me. But give me a real story and a concrete reason to explore those gorgeous worlds and I'm all in.

 

The plot doesn't have to be especially interesting, either. For example, the plot and the characters in the first Borderlands aren't anything to write home about. But it exists, it's immersive, original, quirky and funny. And it's enough for me to want to see what the next area is like.

Edited July 18 by Adam Jensen

[Jason]

NMS has plot, there are story threads, but their delivery and quality is a bit eh really. It's a lot of going to a randomly picked planet to a generated PoI and using some stuff then moving on. They stories/quests are useful as they give you a sense of direction as you travel around the galaxy upgrading your stuff, expanding your world knowledge, unlocking stuff etc, but ultimately they aren't why you play the game.

[Gettin up]

I just can't believe it that this game got better reviews than Starfield did.

[Jason]

At launch? No it didn't. NMS was regarded a pretty massive failure and one of the worst cases of a developer lying in the marketing there's ever been. They openly talked about stuff that wasn't in the game, with the famous example being Sean Murray heavily implying that multiplayer was in the game but two players would never run into each other so it's near impossible you'd ever see another person... only for people to stand in the exact same location within days of launch and confirming there's no MP, and dataminers found no networking code in the game files at all.

 

It's only after years of updates that the tide changed on NMS.

[Tacymist]

I'm kinda curious about this game again, I tried it a couple years ago when I was told it was a good game finally and I ended up uninstalling it because I died during the tutorial. I froze to death because I didn't know how to make the thing to warm up my character because the instructions weren't very clear. And yeah I'm stupid. lol 

 

It's on GP so I guess I'll give this one more shot.

 

 

edit: Uninstalled. No amount of updates will make this game enjoyable to me. Moving on.

Edited July 21 by Tacymist

[AZAZEL]

1 hour ago, Tacymist said:

I tried it a couple years ago when I was told it was a good game finally and I ended up uninstalling it because I died during the tutorial.

 

The tutorial is funnily enough the toughest part of the game. Once you get over that hump, it's usually smooth sailing from there. But that's irrelevant if you don't enjoy the game format at all, I guess. 

[Tacymist]

heh yeah I'll just play something else. 

[OysterBarron]

1 hour ago, AZAZEL said:

 

The tutorial is funnily enough the toughest part of the game. Once you get over that hump, it's usually smooth sailing from there. But that's irrelevant if you don't enjoy the game format at all, I guess. 

It certainly is a bit less forgiving than the original release when they made the change to spawn up on worlds with enviromental effects. I liked just being able to start a new save until you spawn on a normal planet. No environmental effects let you take your time and learn the different systems at your own pace with enviromental systems coming into play a bit thurther down the road after you've landed on a couple of other planets.

 

I find it as a player who has returned multiple times over the years that everything is very convoluted and not very intuitive things have changed or get reworked there seems to be a grand vision of what they want in the game but don't know how to knit it together.

 

I play for another ten hours come back 3 months later and I can't remember any of the controls and feel like I need to start again because I feel like there's a feature I can't activate or use anymore.

 

I can only hope that Light No Fire has a better direction when it comes to control methods. The base level engine tech they've created is super impressive but if you can't intuitively interact with it with a slight bit of simplicity within the UI it just becomes annoying.

Edited July 21 by OysterBarron

[Jason]

6 minutes ago, OysterBarron said:

I find it as a player who has returned multiple times over the years that everything is very convoluted and not very intuitive things have changed or get reworked there seems to be a grand vision of what they want in the game but don't know how to knit it together.

 

Classic problem of a game that's received over 10 years of updates, with many updates meant to be something works for both veterans with 100+ hour saves but also as a new jumping on point for brand new players. Everything is meant to be able to accessible to everyone resulting in a lot of content that has no connections to anything else, and a new player experience that is massively overloaded with mechanics and systems. Loads of MMO's and F2P games have the same issue and it's nigh impossible to balance, and a big reason why many studios will every now and then do a new player experience update where they redo the first few hours of the game. Even R* did this a bit with GTAO, which suffers from the same problems.

 

It does make NMS tough to get into today, but I would say to anyone wanting to get into it that they should set themselves on something they want to do, be it base building, building your freighter up, unlocking your inventory/tech slots, finding new multi tools/ships, completing the story/quest chains, whatever, find one thing you wanna do and then do that. Along the way you'll no doubt stumble into random stuff that'll peak your interest and may distract you or become your next goal after you finish up whatever you chose to do.

 

It's a very goal driven game, if you go into it expecting to stumble onto cool stuff it's not actually that great for that, the exploration in the game is a side show to the mechanics and systems in it. Exploration is something you do while doing that, and not something you do cause exploration is fun and rewarding.

[lndex]

2 hours ago, Jason said:

It does make NMS tough to get into today, but I would say to anyone wanting to get into it that they should set themselves on something they want to do, be it base building, building your freighter up, unlocking your inventory/tech slots, finding new multi tools/ships, completing the story/quest chains, whatever, find one thing you wanna do and then do that.

Yep, I decided to give it another shot before, and I'm now just doing contracts for the Gek. I'm on a mission to take a screenshot of a marsh planet at the moment, so I'm just going from there.

 

Really do want to give NMS a fair go, though, since there's now so much content. And kinda want to make it a goal to get one of those living ships at some point, cause they look cool as f*ck.

[lndex]

I just realised that NMS has a bunch of difficulty settings, like survial and combat, crafting, and some ease of use stuff. Not sure how that would affect the core gameplay, but I've lowered a few things, like space combat, because I was sick of running into other ships.

 

Might help if you're struggling to figure out environmental hazards and whatnot, I suppose.

 

soz for the double post

 

edit: I took a trip to another planet before cause I needed to harvest some gamma root, and this was the first thing I saw. It really had to be a Dune looking sandworm, didn't it

 

Edited July 22 by lndex

[deadx23]

New update Aquarius