As someone who last tried No Man’s Sky out about 5 years ago, it looks like it’s time to give it another shot.
ITT: people vaguely complaining about NMS but not pointing to anything that’s wrong with it.
Y’all know you can not like a product without something being fundamentally and at-its-core wrong with it, right? It could just be not your cup of tea?
I personally have been having a blast making my Corvette and am excited for the new expedition. The fact that I got all this stuff for no added cost makes me feel even better about the time I’ll have.
Mile wide, inch deep. I’ve no doubt (as excited for this update as I am) that this will be the same.
Basically they just add a framework for new features and then leaves it there without building it out.
But you just don’t understand. Sean Murray personally lied to me nine years ago!!! Boycotted forevar!!!
(Edit: I thought the sarcasm in this was clear enough but maybe it’s tough to get through to some people.)
I just wish there was more to it. Every update adds more to do, but no reason to do it. Now we have a puddle as wide as an ocean.
There are two types of gamers:
Some see an open world sandbox and say “Wow, I can do anything!” and pick their own goals.
The other type says “WHAT it’s pointless!” and wants some kind of arrow pointing at the next objective.
Cool false dilemma.
It’s one thing to be given a sandbox, and another thing to be given a toy box. Maybe your imagination lets you take it as far as you need, but some people need more of a purpose to justify putting time into it as opposed to something more productive.
What’s your opinion on Minecraft?
Minecraft is a great example of what the survival genre looks like at its peak. Everything you do serves to help you accomplish your next goal, all the way to the final goal of beating the Ender Dragon. And then there are optional sub-goals you can set for yourself, like doing alchemy, making a mob farm, getting a Heart of the Ocean, getting an Elytra, beating a raid, finding treasures, automating your own production. All contributes directly towards making you survive better.
In NMS you reach the goal of surviving when you first unlock your ship. Once it’s fully repaired you embark on a fetch quest to walk and fly around gathering materials to craft the mystical orbs that mark the completion of the story, stopping once in a while to gather fuel for your ship, materials to fly to new kinds of star systems, and to talk to NPCs for some lore. But it’s not like the gathering of these materials really takes effort. There’s no spelunking, or braving a netherworld, or fighting back poisonous spiders while charting out old ruins. The most you get is that you need to craft a more powerful laser, and a special glove to collect some special resources that are, in fact, so abundant as to make gathering them no challenge at all. And everything else that’s in the game just exists on the side, optional distractions that don’t feed into the core loop. The only things that really affect your main game loop would be freighters, because they give you a bigger inventory, and this most recent update that adds mobile bases.
Minecraft also has a benefit that, when you run out of things to do, when you’ve beaten the dragon, collected everything, built your monuments, and done all that over and over until you’re bored, the game enables limitless new experiences through being so very customizable. Mods that turn the game into Factorio, or Diablo, or DayZ, or change how the world generates or how it all functions on the most basic level. Or if mods aren’t your thing you can join a server, and play with other people in all kinds of minigames. Standard SMP, or PvP stuff, or custom-coded challenges, what have you. NMS doesn’t have any of that, and while it does have multiplayer that doesn’t really change anything of the core gameplay. It’s still just “fly around and gather things,” but this time with another person along for the ride.
Good shot dude! I really want to like NMS, but it’s hard to go back to it. You’ve articulated the differences amazingly
false dilemma
This guy thinks lawyer talk works outside of court rooms lol
This guy thinks lawyer talk works outside of court rooms lol
This guy thinks logical fallacies only apply in court rooms lol
I was about to dispute this, but I think its essentially correct. I for sure fall into the second camp, and while I despise the minimap bloat of a lot of newer games, I do want something that is going to guide my actions a bit. I want to like No Man’s Sky so much, but playing it feels like work. Endless tasks with no satisfaction except whatever personal pride you happen to glean from a job well done.
There’s gotta be a sweet spot between “I dunno, do whatever” and “here’s a map of everything interesting, do it all”. I think Breath of the Wild had a okay balance, but still not great. Maybe something more like Morrowind’s “here’s verbal clues, now go figure it out” approach
Unfortunately the “anything” is limited by what the game allows. If “anything” isn’t what you find interesting, then you’re gonna drop the game pretty quick.
There’s two types of gamers.
People who like sandboxes with the understanding that there are some toys / structures to play with.
People who just like playing in sand and don’t care if a sandbox is literally just a box of sand.
Hah. Same complaint I had about Elite:Dangerous. Lightyears wide, one inch deep. Gotta hand it to FDev, though, they really try to keep community goals happening.
Agreed. While it’s still pretty cool and I definitely respect their continued updates, I really only play for a few days every update then move on to something else.
Aside from the creative aspect to it, there really isn’t much keeping me engaged for long
Me too, pretty much, but I’m fine with that. Every couple of months we get a new content drop (for free!) and I go experience the new stuff, max out everything new there is to be maxed out, and then I can put it down and play something else. I appreciate that NMS doesn’t try to make itself my full time job or require such an asinine time investment that it forces you not to play anything else.
I think the only FOMO aspect built in to NMS at all is the expeditions, and even then you can replay them any time you want with a third party tool (on PC, anyway).
My exact feeling!
Have they changed up the flight physics in that game at all since like 3-4 years ago? Combat always felt like it was on rails compared to like Elite or x4. I like that there was a lot of other stuff you can do but that really took me out of it.
Nope, still the same as it always was. Still has the “easy mode” targeting where if you reverse the ship it will keep itself pointed at the baddies for you.
It reminds me a lot of Wing Commander: Privateer from back in the day. Games where your guns only point forward just devolve into spinning fights.
One of the best redemption arcs in recent video game story.
I keep being enticed back to trying the game again with each new release but the gameplay just doesn’t grab me and there’s such a limited amount of story that it doesn’t get its hooks in me. I guess I’m just not a crafting/survival type.
If they have an expedition then play that mode. I really do not understand why they do not keep an Expedition or two running at all times. They add exactly the amount of depth folks find missing and normally I can run one and then I still play and have fun for another 20 hours before the game gets repetitive and I quit for a bit again.
Expeditions are amazing, but I’ve only finished one because I’m usually out of the loop and start them way late. It would be amazing if they brought old ones back into rotation so people who are new or just missed them could earn the rewards eventually. I feel like they have enough now to make a pretty good rotation without feeling repetitive
They have brought a few expeditions back for replay a couple of times. However, another user here alerted me a while back to the presence of this:
https://cwmonkey.github.io/nms-expeditions/
On select platforms (PC and strangely also the Switch) you can replay the expeditions and get their rewards payouts any time you like.
They do this occasionally, where they’ll replay them over the course of a week or something. I recently read that there are also ways to play them in offline mode through mods.
This game has added so many systems over the years, but it still just hasn’t really grown into anything of substance. It’s a game where the only real “thing to do” is mindless busywork. 200 new systems, all created to a standard of absolute minimum viability, none of them are very rewarding on their own, and none of them really create interesting interactions with each other. It’s like they every system was added with the idea that they’re optional, which makes them all feel unnecessary.
You can build bases now, but there’s no real reason to other than to do so. There are settlements you can become the leader of? But what that entails is essentially nothing. The game is designed from the ground up for you to move from planet to planet without lingering too long on any particular one, and yet they added a bunch of mechanics based around specific planets.
It’s a really bizarre product.
It isn’t a game I play. It’s a universe I visit from time to time. I fucking love it
To me, it’s a similar game to animal crossing. Lots of things to do and customize, not alot of depth. But, some people enjoy that, and that’s okay. And I gotta give them credit for adding so many updates over the years.
thats the perfect game for some people.
would have liked to play this, but its just too much to jump into now. would have been nice if it was functional from the get go.
ill probably end up giving light no fire a try as theyre probably more in their element as developers in regards to a game of that scale
Eh, I picked it up last year and had no trouble hitting the ground running. I did make it harder on myself by skipping the storyline and just figured things out as I went, though.
My dude, you sound like a south park character. I’m not even kidding. Just dont play the game if you dont understand how to create your own fun.
I don’t play the game, I prefer games that are fun on their own without me having to create my own.
This describes literally every single video game ever, though - there’s never a reason to do literally anything beyond “I want to” because it’s almost entirely time wasting entertainment anyway.
Now, these procedural games often fail to create much of a reason to ‘want to’. But sometimes I prefer that to the transparent, skinner-box optimal game design in many other genres.
I don’t agree with that at all. Giving your players a rewarding reason to interact with the games systems is a foundational pillar of game design.
Have you ever thought that people may find that rewarding reason in an endless exploration itself?
In the endless exploration, yes. In the myriad of other slapped together mechanics that don’t really tie into the exploration at all, no.
The exploration of new planets is well implemented, but that’s existed since the game launched. If you were happy with that then, you’ll be happy with it now. But the game was panned due to there not really being anything else to it. And after all these years and added mechanics there still sort of isn’t.
I got 150 hours out of this game and I think that is very much all i will ever play.
For a good while it was even quite interesting because there were still a lot of new things to discover.
But then you started to do things just to get them done not because they were particularly fun or interesting.
If they don’t implement some fundamental new way to play this game or combine existing mechanics better together I don’t think anything could pull me back.
And i hope procedural generation starts to die very soon. Throwing the same basic ingredience into a mixer does not give you something new but more of the same. It’s boring.
Honestly, i wonder if generative ai would work for a procedural game like this. Any ‘errors’ could just be written off as alien flora/fauna or a glitch in the simulation.
My biggest problem with exploration in NMS is how quickly it all becomes the same thing.
Hell if they just made planets multibiome that would go a long way to eliminating that cookie cutter feel.
Yeah, i feel same-ish.
I used a save game modifier to unlock the cool stuff hidden behind the grind. Since then I spent some time building a base in a nice looking planet and flying around looking for a cool world.
Thing is, you are right: it gets old fast. Planets are boring. There are some cool combinations here and there, but 90% of them are just the same old same old. Seen them once, seen them all.
From time to time i still hop in, but it doesn’t grab me more than a couple of hours every six months or so.
I absolutely love the vibe of playing the game, but yeah a lot of the systems they add feel isolated and rather pointless. There’s a settlement system where you can basically be the mayor of a settlement, developing it and managing its growth - but it doesn’t really lead anywhere. They have fishing, crop growth, cooking - but it doesn’t really support anything in particular. There’s an extensive creature taming/breeding system, but creatures don’t seem to do a lot afaik.
Couldn’t have phrased my NMS experience better. It was interesting at first then it got boring / repetitive
I mean if it was 150 hours (or close to) before it got repetitive, that’s better than 98% of games.
They’ve released a ton of content and game enhancements since 5 years ago. I just picked it up a couple of months ago and I’m floored by how good this game is. Yes, it’s all randomized/procedurally generated and that’s why it’s so vast. The story is okay but not AAA amazing, but definitely check it out if it’s been a while.
Might hop on with a few friends in a few days, I’m already excited to see the current state of the game!
There is a story? I just remember it saying to get to the center of the universe and when I got there my ship was destroyed leaving me stranded. I dk I was one of the people who preordered and played it on release lol.
Yes there’s a story, and it’s decent. At release you wouldn’t have even experienced the full story, iirc. So if that interests you, you could try it out again.
I really don’t know what to think about this game. It definitely has come a long way, but to this day, it feels… Shallow.
It’s a sandbox game where building, crafting and trading are not great, not terrible. It’s also an adventure game, but the story is overall very predictable and combat is again, not great, not terrible. It’s a multiplayer game, except no, not really, since you don’t share quest progesss and almost never meet random people (if you aren’t close to the center of the galaxy).
I’m about 200h into it and still can’t tell you if I like it or if it just keeps me busy. I have high hopes for Light No Fire tho.
not great, not terrible
So, it’s good?
It’s okay. As the other comments pointed out, it kinda feels like a really cool tech demo. Lots of systems to look at, but everything is disconnected. That’s what makes the game feel shallow. You can completely ignore most stuff without any consequence
During my first time playing it (not long ago), it was pretty obvious where new content was layered on top of old, mainly because none of it really works together all that well. It feels like there’s a lot of stuff to do, but none of it is all that cohesive
Also the building system is like pulling teeth (on console anyway). I can never get anything placed where I wanted it if my build was at all complex, particularly stairs as I can recall
Well, you’ve spent 200h on it, so clearly you must enjoy it.
Nothing bad with enjoying a shallow game.
I play it when I’m really depressed.
I would say that I enjoy the game and feel that the developers have invested a lot of effort into building a panacea of a game that is sort of low stress and maybe a little repetitive, but it gives me something to do, and I can set goals for myself that are… well, absolutely batshit.
My current goal(s) are to get my settlements to S tier (pretty close on this one), swap all my frigates over to supply ships (If you repeatedly assign the same ship to the same sorts of missions, it will level up just that stat, so you can have a supply ship that has a high combat stat, etc), and build resource bases so that I can automatically collect every kind of automatically collectible resource in the game. I’ve also visited about 20 universes, and think it might be fun to put a resource collection base in each universe (that I have the patience to visit) and then just go hang out at the anomaly so folks can use the teleporter to fling themselves to universes unknown.That’s a really bold assumption lol.
I was about to say, I put 2000 hours in League of Legends and I’m not sure whether I enjoyed that either :D
I go back to it like yearly, hoping it will stick and it never does. I dunno why. Too alien maybe? Too empty or soulless?
Someone about it just doesn’t feel right and I can never stick it out
First I’d heard of Light No Fire, wow yeah, that looks great. Honestly, I think their style lends itself more to fantasy than SciFi, this could be great.
Your mistake is thinking it’s a sandbox game. In my opinion, it’s barely even a survival game.
Sure, over the years they have added a lot of systems, but as you noticed, they’re all pretty shallow, and on top of that, have basically no interaction with each other.
When I tried it a few years back there was this really strange field of view and input lag that felt really clunky when moving around the world. Anyone knows if that’s been fixed?
They’ve fixed the fov (although maybe I used a mod) input latency was better than before but still not perfect.
Cool, maybe I’ll give it a shot again sometime
I want to like this game so bad. On paper it is exactly the kind of game that I love, but trying to play it multi-player with my partner is just an experience in frustration. It seems so perfect for multi-player, but so much of the interface just seems setup for one player only.
The UI design has always been a weak point in the game. Through all the revisions.
It really says something that like the first mod that was ever published after release was the one that eliminates the damn hold-to-confirm mechanic that is on every. Single. Stupid. Interaction. (At least this became an official feature and you can natively disable it on most interaction prompts now.)
The fact that basically none of the inventory and crafting screens are consistent with each other is one of the main things that still bugs the hell out of me with NMS. Especially when you’re using refiners and so forth, because the dumb popup they give you that only shows you like four options at a time doesn’t even arrange the items within it in the same order as they are in your main inventory. They should have just stolen the paradigm from Minecraft and used it for everything.
They took all the wrong lessons from the Destiny UI. (I find the Destiny version to be fine.)
Nooooo i cant play right now, the fomo is getting me
I’ve had it on my wishlist for years but my laptop would probably run it at like 20fps which is just low enough to be miserable
How sure are you? It runs pretty well on some pretty low specs.
Well I haven’t tested it so I can’t be sure. Also depends on res. I might get decent frames at a lower resolution, 720p maybe, but that’s also a compromise.
It plays well enough on a Steam Deck and even better 7-year old machine with a 1060 in it. But not sure how low-spec your laptop is.
I haven’t played in a while, this is piquing my interest again! I love how vast this game is becoming, more major gaming studios need to follow their example when it comes to rehabbing a game that came out initially as the worst version of itself. Still haven’t even gotten to the center of the universe, I might try again as the path is really weird.
I hoped on lemmy to look up some news since I saw the steam artwork changed and here was this post at the top
Haven’t read the notes yet on what we get but I’m excited
