Anyone getting No Man's Sky?

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So the game is out now on PS4 (PC soon I think). I decided not to get it.

I've watched a bit of the game on Twitch streams. It looks so repetitive- its literally farming for materials, see some animals, maybe learn a word or two.. then go to a new planet. Then repeat many many times. There is no major plot and its just a big walking simulator really, in my view.

Many people are still whining about how its not multiplayer- but the game maker made it pretty clear that its single player only. However- I wouldn't be surprised at all if multiplayer of some sort gets added later. The game maker has said base building will come sometime, which doesn't make much sense. The game is about exploring, not sure why building a base would be exciting? Going back to a planet (or two) just to have a special base isnt exciting. Plus if you return to a planet where you farmed for materials- stuff doesn't grow back for you apparently.

The game feels like early access to me, with how barren and lack of features there are. Perhaps the game maker had a deadline by Sony, so thats why the game is out now. I'm not sure.

So unless a big update comes that adds a ton of stuff to do, I'm passing. I have plenty of games to play and saving for a Wii U as well.

.....it's a survival game. Of course it's like that.

The entire genre is like that, frankly. Glad for it, I am.

Everyone seems to be going into this with a TON of misconceptions, expecting the game to be of an entirely different genre, which frankly I find baffling. But then I also didnt follow the game's hype (way too lazy) so I wasnt exposed to any of the extreme rumors and misinformation flying around. Perhaps there was too much of that going on, that might explain it. Heck if I know.

As for base building, I expect it might work like Starbound. Starbound is about planetary travel like this is. And indeed you build a base ON a planet in that. So... teleporters. You can mark down locations onto the teleporter, in your ship (by using special crafted flags on the planet surface in specific spots), and then warp there regardless of where in the universe you are. The system works out well.

As for why base building would be FUN... that's up to the player. Minecraft and it's compatriots already proved that people often really love that sort of thing, and I suspect it's probably been a much requested feature of this game. It's likely to be optional, not something the player is forced to use.

I'll give it a go. I just hope my PC can cope with it.

I'm thinking about the possibility of getting it. I'm still thinking about whether its worth the price.

the PC version is completely broken apparently, kinda glad i haven't bought it yet. waiting for it to stop crashing on people and frame rate completely hitting the rock bottom

It's light on survival really. From the stuff I've seen- only a few creatures seem to be hostile (unless you go attacking them randomly). Plus the guardian things that get mad if you mess with too much stuff- which is also pretty avoidable. The game suffers due to lack of difficulty settings. Survival games should be a challenge in my view, not just an easy exploration sim (which is what No Man's Sky feels like). Gaming this generation (and a bit of last) is dumbed down games that arent very hard, to cater to more people. It really makes games suffer in my view. If I want real survival- I will play Don't Starve, where health matters. To each their own- this game doesn't appeal to me and its likely not going to be popular too long unless updates actually add stuff to do! Much more long lasting games out there, in my view. I don't like going by Twitch numbers always- but from what I've seen.. it was over 100,000 viewers watching people the first few days. Now its about half that. I somehow doubt all people just stopped watching the game because they got it themselves.

But to each their own. I know its not a game for me unless it gets a big update.

Oh, dont get me wrong: I USUALLY think games like this need to be harder. It actually seems pretty bloody rare that they are. I can remember Dont Starve giving me a challenge. ......that's it. I cant remember any other game in this genre giving me a challenge. I still find them interesting, I still like the genre, but an actual CHALLENGE? I feel like I've kinda just given into the inevitable, when it comes to not finding actual difficulty in games like this.

The annoying thing with this one is, within the gameplay it absolutely has the potential to do this. It really does. Because of RNG lunacy, I've gotten into some very crazy situations in this game already; such as a desperate escape from a pirate attack (which I BARELY got out of, and which was super exciting and fun), and also the point when I found a planet where the Sentinels were labelled as "aggressive"; in other words, where they didnt bother waiting for you to DO things. They'd fly up, turn red, call their friends, and go berserk; this process takes about 1.5 seconds. Over and over and over... there was no end to them, and they kept summoning what I swear are big robotic laser cats. I suspect if I were further along in the game, that planet would have been putting larger robots up against me (but I'm still fairly early on, so it maxed out at laser cats).

Alot of survival games are like that: They have the potential to be pretty darned tough. But it's like the devs just dont want to commit to that, like they're afraid it might push players away. Granted, in this day and age.... that's likely true. But as you say, this is why these need difficulty settings. I dont understand why more games cant have difficulty settings. It's bloody baffling. I remember a similar thing happening (and still happening) with Enter the Gungeon, which is a very difficult game... too much for some poeple, that it actually pushes away some possible sales. All the devs need to do is add difficulty settings... but apparently that's not even worth considering (despite more sales potential). Really, it's baffling.

I could rant all day about difficulty settings, but I'll save that for some other time...


I could ALSO rant all day about games getting dumbed down, too. Granted with this one it's a bit moot in some ways, though that's hard to explain... but I mean with games in general. Just... bah. Bah!

I will say I'm at least still quite enjoying this one. I'm REALLY hoping to see mods for it. Mostly, in fact, to increase the difficulty, like how I play Minecraft.

PC version works fairly well for me. I'm having some frame rate issues, but nothing too bad. I've played about 40 hrs since Friday...

I'm in love. Here's my Steam review:


If this game gets community mod support like X3 did, I'll be playing it every spare minute for the next few years!

Yeah, hoping for modding here as well.

As you said the game isnt perfect, and not for everyone, which is what I keep telling people too, and even for as much as I've praised it there are flaws (well, flaws to me anyway) that I think could be worked on. Mods are usually the way to do that. If Minecraft has taught me anything, it's that some flaws will *never* be fixed by the devs, despite their good intentions. That's not a strike against Minecraft mind you, I freaking love Minecraft. But there's a reason why I keep both a vanilla world and an ultra-modded world. I'm also playing Starbound recently and am probably going to end up going after some mods for that, for certain reasons.

I'm really tempted to. I've been holding off on buying a PS4 for several years now, waiting for the one killer app to come out. I'm not saying NMS is it, but it is a intriguing concept for a game. Once the PS4 Neo event goes down next month, I'll probably know what direction to head in as far as console buying.

This video is fascinating and probably should be watched by anybody who doubts that Sean Murray isn't wholly honest.

It's not a matter of not being honest... with the exception of E3 itself, which I'll get to in a minute.

The thing about all of this is that the guy said too much. Just too much.

People often wonder: Why do game developers keep so much of their games to themselves until release? Why arent they more open? Doesnt this just mean they're really shady and they're just trying to trick us?

And from experience I can say: No. This is because they know one hard and irritating truth about ALL of this: *any* gameplay element, absolutely any one, no matter how big, could get halfway through development.... and then suddenly, there's a need to change, or even outright remove it. This isnt like, avoidable. No amount of careful planning stops this. This is something that happens, and I'd bet that it happens during the development of *every* game. Developers normally dont like showing/explaining things any more than they're absolutely bloody forced to, because they know full well that said thing could end up not at all existing in the final game. I've DONE the "say something is coming in an update later, then 3 days later decide that it isnt" thing. Which sounds absolutely horrible, every time, but on those occaisions, the decision needed to be made. If I simply hadnt SAID that thing, it wouldnt look so horrible, is what I thought to myself on those couple of occaisions. And that's with a smaller indie game, not some big budget thing. With NMS they had to be SO much more careful.... but frankly they had no experience with dealing with the press, or anything of that nature, and a game that's as complicated internally as this one is. And then you've got.... Sony. And we get to the E3 bit. When you're dealing with a big publisher, and you deal with events like that, YOU follow THEIR rules. And a group like Sony is going to say something like "We want you to show THIS thing and THIS thing over here during your presentation". Which makes sense, they're the damn publisher, a huge part of their job is knowing how to SELL your game to consumers. Something that devs themselves very, very often have no bloody clue how to do.

But the point I'm getting at is that one way or another, there's no way in the darkest pits of hell that a big publisher was going to ACTUALLY let the guy go in there, genuinely say "I'm going to click on this at random and I'll never have been there before" while actually letting him pick at random. It just wasnt going to happen. No publisher in their right minds would have let him hit that button on a random planet/system. Quite frankly, I wouldnt be surprised if there had been some major behind-the-scenes arguements before this actually took place. Were I in his position, I know I sure as hell wouldnt have wanted to do that... but being contracted, I would have done it ANYWAY.

And that's why I dont like large publishers. When you're dealing with Big Corporate, you have to put up with and DO stuff like that. It's nasty. I dont know how the actual developers behind all the big-name games out there manage to put up with that stuff without going mad.

But yeah, I remember watching that and thinking "of course this was scripted.... why cant everyone see that? It's obvious and logical!" which is part of the issue here for me, in that I'm still so baffled that people expected things from this game that CLEARLY werent going to happen. "Never listen to E3 or trailers" is something I've told people alot. This is an example of why.

Though in this situation also, again, you've got a developer in a position he's clearly never been in, talking too much. Not smart, though somehow I also get the impression that he wasnt exactly the one that set up all those interviews and such (no dev does this themselves).


Ugh. I wouldnt want to be in his shoes for this. And I dont just mean the aftermath. I wouldnt have wanted to be in his shoes from the very start. Dealing with the corporate guys and being forced into a song & dance without actually being PREPARED for it.


Though frankly I will say I find stuff like this fascinating, all of the things related to publishing/advertising, all of the non-design stuff that happens behind the scenes... some of it can be pretty loopy during game development. Or stupid, sometimes it's just stupid.

The player count has rapidly dropping in the past few days, many people have refunded the game and the steam reviews are at 54%

If the game had realized as an early access title at a competitive price, people wouldn't have been as critical towards the game.

I enjoy the concept of procedural generation in a game, it offers the player endless content over a linear experience. I haven't played No Man's Sky as I am concerned that it isn't optimized well and optimization is a very important factor for me.

I want to play this type of game at 144hz with G-Sync enabled, I will wait for a few optimization patches before purchasing the game.

The game isn't early access, but many of these big games have tons of bug fixes and huge patches right away.

Well, the HUGE problem that PC players are running into is simple: The PC version is buggy as all hell. Like, we're talking super glitched-out. Unplayable. Crashes and framerate issues and all sorts of stuff. And Steam users haaaaaaaaate that. It leads to instant refunding (rather than, you know, just waiting for some patches...) and negative "reviews", which needless to say arent ACTUALLY reviews in that case, they're just "BLARGH THIS GAME DOESNT WORK FOR ME, THUMBS DOWN".

I wouldnt expect there to be many players right now on Steam, just since so many CANT play it until some fixes are done. That's how buggy it is.

If you're aware of the game's limitations and flaws though and can accept the inevitable repetitiveness of a procedural game (as they *all* have that aspect, regardless of which game it is) then I think this one is worth the wait.

But for right now... yeah, the PC version is a no-go. Dont buy the game unless you're getting the PS4 version, which seems to work just fine.

It isn't a big game, it was developed by a small team.