No Man's Sky

[Fide]

Meh.  I could just as easily find a couple of dozen glowing pre reviews.

I wouldn't go on one person's opinion.  I've played about 15 hours so far and I love it.

[forameus]

The big issue nowadays with demos being super-rare.  Remember when you could just download a version of the game for free to form an opinion yourself?  Now you either buy the game - a significant price too now - or you trust reviews, which is a minefield in itself.

[Dindeleux]

2 hours ago, forameus said:

The big issue nowadays with demos being super-rare.  Remember when you could just download a version of the game for free to form an opinion yourself?  Now you either buy the game - a significant price too now - or you trust reviews, which is a minefield in itself.

You can also try the trusted method of stealing a copy.

[placidcasual]

I'm sure the comparison has been made, but it seems a bit like Minecraft : Space Edition. I also seem to have found a really annoying bug. I keep being prompted to go and interact with an alien at a trading post. When I get there, no interaction is available.

[Sherrif John Bunnell]

Jim Sterling has predictably had his website nuked by sweaty VLs for writing a critical review.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.thejimquisition.com/no-mans-sky-review/

[Fide]

4 hours ago, Sherrif John Bunnell said:

Jim Sterling has predictably had his website nuked by sweaty VLs for writing a critical review.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.thejimquisition.com/no-mans-sky-review/

I caught a glimpse on Metacritic that he'd scored it 50/100?

If true, good re his website.  50% is a ridiculous, attention seeking score.

ETA:  Good review in the New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/all-alone-in-no-mans-sky

Edited August 11, 2016 by Fide

[pj_puttz]

Played this pretty much all day yesterday and a bit underwhelmed to be honest.  I can see this getting really dull, really quickly.  Could it be TOO big?

Saying that, I've only explored and catalogued the planet I started out on then went into space and landed on a nearby planet following a distress signal.  My worries began when I realised the second planet was almost identical to the first right down to the plant and animals.  They were a different colours but that was about it really.

Naming things got boring VERY quickly and I just cant be bothered now.  Who is ever going to see them anyway?  Same goes for finding all of the wildlife and plants, I've done it once and definitely will not be doing it again.

The resource management feels like busy work for the sake of it but I understand why it's there.  It's not too much of an issue once you suss it out but it's a bit tiresome.

The pop up in the graphics and almost constant rendering of textures is annoying but not a game breaker for me.  I imagine it could be for a lot of people though.

I could go on and on but, long story short, I can see me playing this for a few more days then it'll be gathering dust on the shelf because my gut feeling is it's all about doing the same thing over and over and over again with very little pay off.

Hope I'm wrong about that mind you!

[forameus]

39 minutes ago, Fide said:

I caught a glimpse on Metacritic that he'd scored it 50/100?

If true, good re his website.  50% is a ridiculous, attention seeking score.

ETA:  Good review in the New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/all-alone-in-no-mans-sky

So just because it was bad or average, it's attention seeking?  I read the review this morning as his site's back up, and you can't really argue with anything he says.  It fits with his tastes in games, and there's nothing hyperbolic about it.  

After playing it for 3 or 4 hours last night, I have to say I agree with him in most points, although I wouldn't mark it as low as 5.  Maybe 6-6.5 at the current point.  I put the game in while I was working from home to get the update downloaded and installed, and when I came back to it I was greeted with a white screen prompting me to press square.  I did, and was booted straight into the game, in a little ravine needing to fix my ship.  No real intro, no real tutorial as to what I was supposed to be doing, just go and dae it.  Went into a nearby cave to try and find materials and got lost several times.  Being a cave, it was pretty dark in points, and short of a hovering icon on the HUD, there was no real indication as to where you were supposed to go.  Then I got killed by sentinels.  Admittedly at the second attempt, because I provoked them after the first, but hey ho.

Got back to the ship and headed down again, this time found my way through the cave and back to the surface.  When you see that, the planet spread out before you, all kinds of new stuff and creatures charging around, then you have to admit the game is impressive.  Graphics-wise it isn't mind-blowing, but the colours make up for that to make a very vibrant world.  I managed to get the ship repaired, and then it was off into space.  I was supposed to go visit a space station to advance the story, but instead headed to the huge planet I'd seen from the surface of the first one.  It looked a lot different - hot instead of snow - but aside from a few new species, there wasn't that much different.

Went back to the first planet because I'd missed a quest point and met my first alien.  Which doesn't move.  And shows off the absolutely woeful writing.  I'd say they were going for corny 70s Star Trek, but I don't think they were.  Still, it's a minor thing, not as if the game relies on its writing.  Headed to the space station to meet another stationary alien, with more absolute nonsense to say.  Did what I needed to there and saw another ship fly in.  Ooh, exciting, maybe it's another...no, it just sits there.  Apparently you can interact with them if you go to the ship directly, but there was no indication to do that.  

I repaired the warp drive and headed to the next part of the galaxy, and that's where I switched it off.  So my thoughts so far...

Pros

+ If you look into the sky and see a planet while you're on the surface of another, it's brilliant to think that you can get in your ship and go and visit it.

+ The soundtrack is varied and atmospheric

+ While it doesn't have the polish of a "hand-drawn" world, it does look good.  Immensely colourful and very clear.  

+ The scale of the game is vast, but it's a double edged sword, as...

Cons

- It's shallow.  There's absolutely no getting away from it.  Scale is brilliant, but there's a reason that more developers are moving away from the "look how many square kilometers I've got" and concentrating on depth.  There's a reason Bethesda moved from Daggerfall having a map "the size of Great Britain" to Skyrim having around 10 square miles.  People complained that Fallout 4's map was too small, but it was probably one of the best examples due to how densely packed it was.  Witcher 3 has an absolutely enormous map, but there's vast swathes of nothingness in it.  That detracts from the experience.  When you boast about how there's a squillion planets to explore, you better hope that they're distinct enough and have enough interesting things in it to actually matter.  

- The procedural generation isn't mature enough to achieve what they wanted to achieve.  There's a limited palette the game has to work with, particularly in the creatures (from what I've seen so far, and read in reviews).

- The world as it stands doesn't seem quite "there".  You clip through most things, particularly the creatures.  I clipped through the world a couple of times by going into gaps you shouldn't be able to fit in.  It all just seems like they concentrated on building the world visually and then called it done.  

- The meat of the game at the moment seems to be "venture to planet, gather resources, feed resources into charging your suit, gather more resources, leave".  This may change as you go into the game, but even if it does, that's a poor choice to make.  They'll end up losing a lot of people in the early hours of the game because it just seems incredibly shallow.

- I get the impression - purely personal perspective - that it's trying to be a little smarter than it deserves.  The lack of any real intro or tutorial made the start of the game a bit jarring, and it doesn't stop there.  They tell you which buttons do what in popups, but there's very little other than that.  It could be that the game is a lot more deep than I'm making it out to be, but with such a huge game, you perhaps need to prod people in the direction of this depth, otherwise they'll never find it.  

- Combat is paid little more than lip-service.  The sentinels are just annoying, and really the only things you'll get to fight.  I know there's space battles, but I'm yet to experience any.  From reading reviews it looks like it's much the same.

The game isn't bad, but it's not particularly great either.  I'm going to keep playing it, and will probably end up putting many, many hours into it.  There's definitely the core of a great game there, so it's all the more disappointing that this is what was served up.

 

 

[Fide]

To be honest, I can't really argue with any of those points.  One man's meat is another man's poison and all that.

I personally am loving it but can see why some people wouldn't.  Hello Games' vision is to be applauded, imo.  They're genuinely trying something different that could be the bench marker for games to come, but then vision doesn't get you good reviews.

It's all about the personal experience, but having played it since Friday, I can say there is more to it than just planet hopping and resource collecting.

But like I say, it's your opinion and I can't argue with any points you make.  It's NEVER a 5/10 though.

[pj_puttz]

Despite my negative comments I am still looking forward to having another go on it tonight.

I think my gaming OCD does me no favours with games like this, I usually like to explore every nook and cranny coz I don't want to miss anything but that is simply not possible in NMS.  Having a quick look around a planet then leaving to find another goes against every gaming instinct I have yet roaming around every planet I visit to see all it has to offer would be ridiculous.

This is why I think the game, for me, may be too big.  I've put hundreds of hours into hundreds of games but they all had direction, purpose and a feeling of progression.  I don't think NMS offers any of those things at the moment.

Still, I'll be back onto it tonight hoping to find something that will keep me coming back for more.

[KnightswoodBear]

£45 - 50 is a bit pricey, but I'm really struggling not to bite the bullet and go out and get this.

[forameus]

1 hour ago, Fide said:

To be honest, I can't really argue with any of those points.  One man's meat is another man's poison and all that.

I personally am loving it but can see why some people wouldn't.  Hello Games' vision is to be applauded, imo.  They're genuinely trying something different that could be the bench marker for games to come, but then vision doesn't get you good reviews.

It's all about the personal experience, but having played it since Friday, I can say there is more to it than just planet hopping and resource collecting.

But like I say, it's your opinion and I can't argue with any points you make.  It's NEVER a 5/10 though.

To some people it will be.  It's certainly a far better reaction and review than people who are going to rate it 0 on metacritic (or 10 from that matter, they're just opposite sides of the coin). 

I can't remember if it was you, but someone said a while ago that it was borderline unreviewable.  I can see that point, so does it really matter what someone else thinks of it?  As long as the review is well-written, which I believe that one was, then there is no issue.  Also worth noting that the scoring system Jim Sterling uses is slightly different to a straight 1-10 that some sites will use.  He outlines it on the site in a lot of detail.  Not to mention that putting a DDoS attack on a site because it holds an opinion you don't like about a game is an incredibly cringey thing to do from those sweaty VLs that did it.

One parallel I'd actually make is with the Division.  In both of these games, the location is very much the star - NMS for its procedural generation, and the Division for its painstaking mapping of New York.  Both are great in their own way, but the Division struggled to not fill gameplay with repetitive grinding tasks, and it looks like NMS will go the same way too.  Completely different games, I understand, but there is a comparison to be drawn.

[Fide]

1 hour ago, pj_puttz said:

Despite my negative comments I am still looking forward to having another go on it tonight.

I think my gaming OCD does me no favours with games like this, I usually like to explore every nook and cranny coz I don't want to miss anything but that is simply not possible in NMS.  Having a quick look around a planet then leaving to find another goes against every gaming instinct I have yet roaming around every planet I visit to see all it has to offer would be ridiculous.

This is why I think the game, for me, may be too big.  I've put hundreds of hours into hundreds of games but they all had direction, purpose and a feeling of progression.  I don't think NMS offers any of those things at the moment.

Still, I'll be back onto it tonight hoping to find something that will keep me coming back for more.

The game does have direction, purpose and progression.  I've experienced it.  That won't be enough to hold all players, but there is a clear progression.

36 minutes ago, forameus said:

To some people it will be.  It's certainly a far better reaction and review than people who are going to rate it 0 on metacritic (or 10 from that matter, they're just opposite sides of the coin). 

I can't remember if it was you, but someone said a while ago that it was borderline unreviewable.  I can see that point, so does it really matter what someone else thinks of it?  As long as the review is well-written, which I believe that one was, then there is no issue.  Also worth noting that the scoring system Jim Sterling uses is slightly different to a straight 1-10 that some sites will use.  He outlines it on the site in a lot of detail.  Not to mention that putting a DDoS attack on a site because it holds an opinion you don't like about a game is an incredibly cringey thing to do from those sweaty VLs that did it.

One parallel I'd actually make is with the Division.  In both of these games, the location is very much the star - NMS for its procedural generation, and the Division for its painstaking mapping of New York.  Both are great in their own way, but the Division struggled to not fill gameplay with repetitive grinding tasks, and it looks like NMS will go the same way too.  Completely different games, I understand, but there is a comparison to be drawn.

I agree 100% that a DDoS attack is a very cringey way to react to a review of a game.

Jim Sterling though, along with people like Total Biscuit strike me as publicity whores who like to be a little "out there" in their opinion in the hope they get an extra 1000 Youtube subs.

ETA: And it was me that said the game is borderline unreviewable.  It's really like nothing else out there.

Edited August 11, 2016 by Fide

[pj_puttz]

2 hours ago, Fide said:

The game does have direction, purpose and progression.  I've experienced it.  That won't be enough to hold all players, but there is a clear progression.

That's reassuring to know!  I obviously just haven't found it yet.

I realise I'm still at the very early stages of this game but the sheer scale of it threatens to overwhelm me at times.  Knowing that I can't possibly see everything the game has to offer is both exciting and annoying at the same time.

The size of the tasks ahead, such as discovering words in a language so I can understand what the aliens are saying, seem as though I could play every day for the rest of my life and still not scratch the surface.

Hopefully after another session of play the bigger picture will start to come into focus a wee bit. 

[pj_puttz]

Found this -

http://mashable.com/2016/08/10/no-mans-sky-tips-tricks/#PxSt8CqYnGqA

Could be useful to some players seeing as the game basically tells you hee haw!

[ScotlandGer]

Aye, this is definitely the game I was hoping for.

I managed to get off my first planet last night and it was great fun getting into space.  Tonight, I touched down on a weird ocean planet with jagged islands, red, frozen and found an abandoned space settlement.  I then traced an alien trader from a beacon beam who gave me some sort of map or other to a space station.  Sounds like my plans for tomorrow night are sorted   

I've got no idea what I'm doing, where to go, what to collect etc. yet.

I was sitting in my space-ship and couldn't help but thinking that it's cold outside, there's no kind atmosphere.  I'm all alone, more or less.  Let me fly far away from here ...

Spoiler

...

Fun, fun, fun!

In the sun, sun, sun!

 

I'm planning / hoping for some Red Dwarf-esque capers in this game 

 

Admittedly, I'm well pre-disposed to the type of game where you wander around collecting / finding stuff, but I fancy I'll be hooked on this for a bit.  

 

[t1t3h]

Has anyone tried to fly into or near a star yet? I spent about 40 minutes flying directly too one but I was killed by pirates before I even got close. Might try again later on today.

I'm barely into it but I'm loving it so far, it's everything that I expected it to be in all honesty. I really hope that you can eventually get one of those huge ships that you sometimes see floating about too. Just so I can store all the stuff that I want to keep.

Also, is anyone finding it difficult to scan the planets 100%? I'm finding that I only have one thing to find but I can never complete it.

[CityDave]

Watching Youtuber RadBrad doing the walkthrough for this. Not sure about it yet, looks an amazing game in terms of expansive universe the effort put into that with the detail. It has a Witcher 3 feel about it with all the graphics, the collecting, the scanning etc, very technical and very menu based. Will you be gambling with different aliens at some point?

Brilliant soundtrack by 65 Days of Static, who have made the perfect music for this game. The soundtrack is out now on CDx2, shame its not out yet on vinyl.

[Fide]

1 hour ago, t1t3h said:

Has anyone tried to fly into or near a star yet? I spent about 40 minutes flying directly too one but I was killed by pirates before I even got close. Might try again later on today.
 

Press L1 and R1 together to engage hyperdrive.  It'll cut that 40 minute flight down to a minute or so.

[t1t3h]

Press L1 and R1 together to engage hyperdrive.  It'll cut that 40 minute flight down to a minute or so.

Yeah I was using that too. I ended up burning through 3 or 4 tanks of hyperdrive fuel. I was travelling at over 5 million k/s before the pirates attacked me.