Anyone else here played No Man's Sky yet?


Garrett

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I've played quite a bit since it launched & I'm still undecided.. my initial thoughts were underwhelming to say the least but as I've put in more time it has grown on me significantly and based on the experiences of others I've read this seems to be common.
I doubt there will be a middle ground with this game based on what I've experienced so far.. it seems (so far at least) to be a love it or complete waste of money experience. I'm currently intoxicated though & I'm not quite sure why as it ain't half frustrating me atm.. with it's visuals, performance, control, menu issues and plenty of other annoyances. Every time I quit though I'm wondering what the next memorable vista to catch my attention is going to look like and whatever frankenpoke will slither past whilst I'm taking it in and there is stuff to do although it all feels a little pointless to me currently. I'll stick with it though as there's definitely something to keep me coming back & I suspect we'll be seeing lots of patches/updates before too long.

I'd love to hear anyone else's thoughts here.
 
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Well, my boyfriend has been playing it, and he hates it. The bugs and framerate and control issues ruined any enjoyment of the game for him.
 
I've been playing it a bit on PS4, so I'm not seeing the FPS issues that the "Windows" people have been reporting. In my opinion what it does is fairly amazing, however it does seem a bit repetitive and that may get old at some point. Right now I'm still really eager to play it for some reason.
 
I've written about it elsewhere, and it's pretty much a polarising experience.

I love it. The worlds are vastly different, even between systems. Seems that the sky changes colour based on system, the flora/fauna based on the planet you're on. I've found giant flying snakes and what can only be described as whales. The only aquatic life I've found has been a giant solitary shark, so far.

I've explored about 6 planets and probably only about 10% of each. The lore is fascinating. The language learning is fun and discovering new words means less guessing when interacting with aliens.

Inventory management was a pain until I found a few drop pods to upgrade my suit with. One tip - always upload your discoveries. They're worth more money than you think.

All in all, I'm loving it. I've been in combat in space and been destroyed, and had to find my grave marker to retrieve my stuff. I've robbed places (and got into fights because of it), I've been chased by vicious animals. I'm currently on a lovely green planet with grass and all sorts of wonderful creatures and trees and rock formations. Previously the planets had been kinda desolate, so this is really nice.

And I'm having a great time investigating points of interest and following quests.

Love it, love it, love it.
 
I didn't played it, but somehow it resembles like another game I played years ago, a space exploration simulator called "Noctis" (http://anynowhere.com/bb/layout/html/frameset.html)

It included planet exploration and there was also some kind of life on many planets, but it is more relaxing than action based, as I see from the NMS trailers
 
It included planet exploration and there was also some kind of life on many planets, but it is more relaxing than action based, as I see from the NMS trailers
Well actually I find NMS as pretty relaxing, Just roam around discover things, gather resources and such... Well until you piss off Sentinels by mistake or happen to run into something Hostile, but often that is rare from my experience.
 
I didn't played it, but somehow it resembles like another game I played years ago, a space exploration simulator called "Noctis" (http://anynowhere.com/bb/layout/html/frameset.html)

It included planet exploration and there was also some kind of life on many planets, but it is more relaxing than action based, as I see from the NMS trailers
Noctis is playable on the Pandora, using dosbox. Just launch "MODULES\NOCTIS.EXE" instead of "GO!.EXE" as this one is a windows executable. No idea how this game works (but it sounds interesting).
 
No Linux port, 60$ and I already heard that it doesn't live up to the hype and gets rather boring at times.
Wait and see but I guess since it probably will stay Windows only, I'll have to pass anyway.
 
Noctis is playable on the Pandora, using dosbox. Just launch "MODULES\NOCTIS.EXE" instead of "GO!.EXE" as this one is a windows executable. No idea how this game works (but it sounds interesting).
I played this on my Qemu Dos Tests on the Pandora too.
It was realy fluid inside the Spaceship but i did not understand this Gameplay...then it was only a short Test :$
 
No Linux port, 60$ and I already heard that it doesn't live up to the hype and gets rather boring at times.
Wait and see but I guess since it probably will stay Windows only, I'll have to pass anyway.

Well, the only hype that was kinda mentioned, possibly, was being able to see other players were you fortunate enough to encounter them - the games files have nothing in them that would facilitate that. Other than that, every single feature that has been seen or discussed has made it through to the game (though Portals have yet to be encountered, and although nobody has found a giant sandworm, the files for it do exist).

As for windows only - it's out on PS4, is strongly suspected to be released for XBone, but there will likely never be a linux release which isn't very surprising tbh. I play it on my macbook, and then only via bootcamp.

Definitely worth the £35 I paid for it, I've played it pretty much non-stop since launch and it's still exciting as hell in places and wonderfully chilled in others.
 
I only had a quick glance at some videos online. It seems to suffer from the "nothing-interesting-to-see-here" or "just-more-of-the-same"-syndrome that procedurally-generated titles tend to have.

Once you understand the generator well enough you will never encounter anything of interest again.
 
I only had a quick glance at some videos online. It seems to suffer from the "nothing-interesting-to-see-here" or "just-more-of-the-same"-syndrome that procedurally-generated titles tend to have.

Once you understand the generator well enough you will never encounter anything of interest again.

Which is absolutely fine. I understand the generator very well indeed and am still finding lots of things that are interesting... :)
 
:)
Hadn't thought about it at all ... but now you've prompted me to with that ^ link...
I guess the title has wordplay association to the common phrase 'no mans land', the unowned piece of land between two armies. Now the title actually makes more sense to me - I hadn't thought of it as in that meaning of 'no mans'
 
The more I see of the game, the more I get the idea that 1 hour is all you need to see what it has to offer. After that it is just a grind doing the same thing over and over again.

Reminds me a bit of Spore and Minecraft. At least in Minecraft the design of redstone circuitry added some more variation and challenges to the game (price was also way better).

It seems to lay a nice foundation upon which a decent game can be built. But as it is for now, it is not for me.
 
I also think the engine of No Man's Sky could be a basis for many other types of games that have a fuller story in them, such as Homeworld, Freespace, Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, or Master of Orion. In comparison, there is some story in the Atlas quest of No Man's Sky, but the story is slim. There is almost no conflict with other living things in the game, other than with random bounties, space pirates, sentinels, and the occasional animal. Once, an animal resembling a Tyrannosaurus Rex attacked me next to my ship, and I shot the creature with a grenade launcher. The greatest enemy on planets, though, is the environment on hostile planets, which can be hot, cold, toxic, or radioactive. The game is mostly about gathering resources, managing them in limited space on your ship or in your suit, creating things with the resources, and exploring on the ground or in space. There are random situations in which freighters will send out a distress signal, because they are being attacked by pirates. You can choose to help or to let them die. Early in the game, you will probably die if you try to fight space pirates until you get some ship upgrades. There are occasional random space ship bounty missions where you get 10,000 units of currency for destroying a fugitive ship. Occasionally, pirates scan your cargo and jump into the solar system to attempt to kill you. You can occasionally find a crashed ship that you can repair and fly. That becomes much easier once you learn to manufacture things from knowledge gained at manufacturing facilities. A quest system would make the game better, like in The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim game.

Flight over terrain in No Man's Sky is highly automated, so you cannot crash into the ground even if you want to do so. The game would be more interesting and fun if your ship takes damage from pirates or sentinel ships in space combat and you have to control your crash landing to the extent you can onto a nearby moon or planet. A player's heart would start beating faster if a message that the flight control computer has failed is played along with the alarm sound of a failed deflector shield as the pulse engine propels your ship into a planet or moon as the last ditch effort of the flight computer to save you as the heat of atmospheric re-entry starts to be visible on the windshield. If you crash into water that is too far from land, then you could become exhausted and drown unless you use the existing gear in the game that lets you breathe under water. Another option would be to occasionally have to land the ship like in the arcade game Lunar Lander, but in 3 dimensions in windy conditions.

Currently, there is no reason to ever go swimming that I have seen in the game. Swimming seems to be a complete waste of time and not worth the risk of drowning. Being able to recover a ship that crashed in water would making swimming worthwhile. A ship that crashes in water might have fewer damaged systems that need repair. There are occasionally buildings and monoliths underwater, but the buildings tend to be embedded in the indestructible sea floor and are impossible to enter.

One time, I found a crashed ship with more cargo capacity and transferred all of the cargo on my existing ship to the crashed ship and began to fix the damaged systems. The game crashed. When I restarted the game, the crashed ship with all of my cargo was gone and I was left with my empty original ship which I had dismantled as much as I could to repair the crashed ship. I alternately took ownership of my original ship and the crashed ship to transfer inventory items between the ships to make space for repair items that I needed to create.

The gravity is the same on every planet and moon, like in Mass Effect. Some variety in gravity might be nice to have.

There is some boring repetition in the game. For example, some of the buildings require you to solve a number sequence puzzle, which gets repetitive once you have solved them all. The multi-tool examination device that gives upgrades to your multi-tool will eventually keep telling you that you already have a particular upgrade. Once a player has all of the upgrades for their multi-tool, then they should no longer have the option to even try to upgrade their multi-tool. There is one health +3 upgrade that I obtained but which I cannot build in my exo-suit. I think it's a game bug. There is also one environmental shield called Tau when you obtain it but displays as Theta in your exo-suit. The sequence of upgrades is: (1) Sigma, (2) Tau, (3) Theta, and, sometimes, (4) Omega. There are passes called Atlas Pass v1, v2, and v3 that can require many attempts to get. You get them by raiding Operation Centers or Manufacturing facilities which have a reinforced steel door that you need to blow open either with a laser or with a grenade launcher. The grenade launcher works faster than the laser and does not alert the floating sentinel robots which seem to be everywhere in the game except in caves and under water. Sentinels are apparently deaf. If they are looking away when you blow open the door with a grenade, then it is as if it did not happen, but if they see you using a laser on the door, then they attack you. Once you get inside, you have to operate the controls of a computer that displays a message in an alien language to select the correct option. You might understand some of the words from knowledge stones, monoliths, or from having conversations with aliens. Getting these Atlas passes allows you to enter places in some rooms in space stations or in some buildings on the ground that are otherwise locked. The rooms may contain plants, cargo containers, an exo-suit upgrade device, or a lounge with a table and chair. The plants are useful for getting carbon, which is the first ingredient for making hyperspace fuel cells. Blowing open the reinforced steel doors was always fun for a while until the computers inside kept saying that I already had the blueprint for an item.

Gathering resources that you can resell to get a better ship can be a grind. A ship with 48 inventory slots can sell for over 100 million units. In the entire journey to the galactic core, I earned less than 12 million units of currency. I eventually got a 48 inventory slot ship by repeatedly finding and repairing crashed space ships which always have at most 1 more inventory slot than your existing ship. Some asteroids can be mined by your ship by shooting the asteroids with lasers or photon cannons. The type of star in the system seems to affect the minerals that you can find in the asteroids. In all solar systems, most smaller asteroids are made of Thamium. Larger, potato shaped, asteroids can be made of copper, iron, nickel, iridium, gold, aluminum, or a substance in the game that is called Emeril. The explosion effects on large asteroids are really nice looking. I'm surprised that blowing up larger asteroids to protect a space station or large ship or convoy was not one of the missions, like a 3D version of the arcade game Asteroids.

Despite the huge odds against coming across the tracks of other humans in a galaxy with 18 billion billion systems in it, I have come across the discovered systems of 4 other people. I found one planet near the galactic core named by a Twitch player. I discovered for myself one planet that resembles Earth with one moon which I named, "Eden," in the, "Eden System." Perhaps one day another player will find it.

No Man's Sky is a game about dealing with limited information, limited resources, solving a fixed number of math sequence puzzles, and exploring a big galaxy. You can choose to go to the center of galaxy and find what is there, or you can choose not to do so. No Man's Sky is a generally relaxing exploration game that is open-ended, like life.
 
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:)
I guess the title has wordplay association to the common phrase 'no mans land', the unowned piece of land between two armies.
I completely get it as "No-mans land" as in "unowned", but I don't know where this anti-feminism thing plays in (as a side note, feminism isn't the same as egalitarianism). That article is literally two paragraphs and doesn't explain anything, other than they're bitching about the title
 
You can't take anything Jezebel says seriously. It's a rag-mag geared towards women. They just made a quick two paragraph article because a) it's suddenly popular, b) it'll get a rise, and c) they can link to kotaku and make revenue that way. That's basically true of all gawker websites, shuffle you around among their websites to try and maximize ad revenue.
 
Currently, there is no reason to ever go swimming that I have seen in the game. Swimming seems to be a complete waste of time and not worth the risk of drowning. Being able to recover a ship that crashed in water would making swimming worthwhile. A ship that crashes in water might have fewer damaged systems that need repair. There are occasionally buildings and monoliths underwater, but the buildings tend to be embedded in the indestructible sea floor and are impossible to enter.

Yeah, actually I've found several species of ... creatures ... in the deeper water after hunting for hours to get the last one, and some of them are really big, and you don't find them in the shallows. Also on my current planet there are quite a few outposts underwater (they're all abandoned) and it's weird swimming through one.

Speaking of my current planet, there are a tonne of vortex cubes everywhere in the caverns. There's no life at all, and no sentinels. There's also no aliens - every single outpost is abandoned and overgrown with slime. Sounds like heaven, but the landscape is a problem. There's lots of floating islands, all very high up. Ship landed at the edge, I got out... fell off. No harm done, but can't jetpack back up to the ship.

Bit stuck there. So lots of exploring until I can find a place to call my ship back to me. Making an absolute fortune on the vortex cubes. Tonnes of inventory add-ons for the suit.

This is an amazing game, even on a planet with no life.
 
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