Experiences with No Man's Sky so far

Post Reply New Topic

Okay, so, since this game came out (and seeing an old topic about it suddenly move to the front reminded me of a post I made elsewhere), I figured I'd give a bit of an explanation about my experience, and what it's ACTUALLY like.

People are going into this game with a deeply absurd amount of misconceptions about it. This isnt Elite: Dangerous. This is a SURVIVAL game. Yes, there's going to be ALOT of exploration and resource gathering. Yes, there's going to be task repetition. And all the usual elements of a survival game (except the need for dealing with food, or sleeping).

But anyway, this is just to detail it a bit... for any others that may be interested. Provided there are any others that are interested.

This is actually a copy/paste from another forum I go to. No reason for me to re-type everything.

This is in two parts, I'll split it into two posts for easy reading.

First part:


Well, some interesting experiences so far.... the biggest issue I have is that the game has some... problems... with explaining itself. Which is to say, it doesn't. Good luck firing out where to find Thaumium and Zinc, for instance (which you need to repair a couple of things at the start, not to mention that they also have to do with fuel). It's obvious that you have a mining laser, sure. It's NOT obvious that these two things come from FLOWERS. No mining involved. Then there's the Pulse Drive... once I got the damn ship to move, after my eternal search for bloody Thaumium ended, it said I could use the Pulse Drive to get around faster. Okay, makes sense. Couldn't figure out how to get it to STOP at the spot I was aiming at. Eventually bounced off the nearest asteroid and sorta ricocheted a bunch. Immediately found out I wasn't using it properly, of course, but the game doesn't tell you this. It just says "hit these two buttons to use pulse drive!".

Though, that's not THAT much of a complaint: I've never, EVER seen a game of this genre that actually explains itself. Never. Some of them sorta make a pretense of doing it, but many seriously don't bother. So I'm used to this aspect.

As for the gameplay... yep, this is a survival game. It's very exploration focused, but as in most survival games you're going to have a lot of things you need to do in order to keep yourself going. Your suit needs power, your mining thingie and gun need power, your ship needs power, there's temperature to worry about in some places,you need various resources to craft important gizmos.... and as is also typical you never have even close to enough inventory space. There's always resources and items to find, you always WANT them, but you sometimes just cant HAVE them. The usual, really. And it can be easy to get lost in certain types of areas... best to be careful when exploring caves in particular.

Much of my time so far was spent doing a few things:

1. Wandering around looking for stuff
2. Mining
3. Getting shot at, running from horrible laser thing; this happened more than a few times
4. More gathering resources as I headed to various waypoints, displayed as "?" marks, they are where you're likely to find abandoned buildings or other interesting things, there's usually rewards for doing this; the trouble is getting to them, of course
5. Trying to figure out what interaction with animals does
6. Trying to figure out why I was being bitten by a tiny crab made of leaves
7. Falling in holes
8. Got lost in a cave for quite awhile (after all the survival/sandbox games I've played, you'd think I'd know to be careful about that by now, but noooooo)
9. Eternal search for blasted flowers. It eventually turned out that.... yeah, I needed to look near the big obvious place stuffed with a million plants and things. I suppose maybe I should have thought that out a bit harder. I'm blaming the weather. Still, they're oddly hard to spot...


Interestingly, the planet I started on seemed barren at first, but some exploration revealed that this wasn't entirely the case. There were places to find with lots of animals and big plant/tree/something things, but the planet wasn't drowning in them. Desert world, actually.

The game's controls work quite nicely, though obviously I'm stuck on a damn console with it for the time being. But there's absolutely no issue with that part. The UI works nicely too. All of this both for being on the ground, and being in space. Flying the ship is fun, though you have "liftoff thrusters" that have their own fuel source... every time you start up the ship it'll take a big blob of that away, so you cant just be constantly leaping from one spot on the planet to the next. This is good, because if this wasn't the case there'd be no need to ever actually be on foot for any reason. Considering how huge the game is though, sometimes some distances are just... too far, so you're going to want to do that. At one point, after finding a huge beacon thing, it marked down a location for an "advanced life form" on my radar thing. A quick look at it determined that it was a 20 minute walk away. ......yep, used the ship for that! Found some alien's home there, couldn't understand a damn thing he said.

I mighta not taken quite as long to leave the planet if it wasn't for my usual obsessive need to investigate damn near everything. I do that in Minecraft and the others as well. Got specific things I need to do? No no, that's gotta wait, there's a huge rock here, gotta see what's on the other side of that first, it's imperative, the universe will clearly collapse if I don't... Honestly, easily distracted players will find themselves... well, frequently distracted.


Graphics are just lovely, the game is gorgeous really. They did a great job with color schemes and lighting to make different areas stand out from one another. Also space is apparently green now. No, I don't know why...


Overall, the damn flowers aside, this is pretty much just what I'd hoped it'd be. Is it perfect? Ye gods, no. Of course it isn't. But the devs seem very committed to dealing with what problems it has and adding to it, so that's good. Overall though, I'm loving the game so far. This sure isn't going to be for everyone.... particularly those that for whatever utterly baffling reason were expecting a big AAA game that's extremely story driven. There seem to be more than a few people out there that are angry that the game ISNT that. Seriously, I don't know where they get some of these misconceptions.


Currently I must go to bed, and have stopped and saved my game in a nearby space station. Later I'll continue and see what happens. Hopefully further travel will not require bouncing off more asteroids.

Part two, this coming from today:


Okay, some more experiences thus far:

Firstly, I should point out a bit of a gameplay thing here. Combat, on the ground... pretty clunky. Now, it's absolutely possible this is an effect of the fact that I'm using a bloody controller for this. I mean, really. First person gameplay, controller. So it's hard to entirely judge this. But my experience with it so far, nonetheless, is "clunky".

Space combat on the other hand... here I was, thinking that this wasn't going to happen anytime soon... I'd wondered if maybe it was a bit too rare... when suddenly the ship went berserk with warnings, and BAM, pirates. In comparison to ground combat this is MUCH faster and more exciting. It's not going to be on-par with something like Elite... definitely not. But is it fun? I daresay it is. Fast and chaotic definitely sums this up. I came REALLY close to dying there; enemy pilots are very good at zooming around all over the place and not making easy targets of themselves, and are also good at shooting me, apparently. It is possible to recharge your shields mid-combat, but this isn't easy to do; you have to open your inventory for the ship and pump resources into the shields (typically Zinc, so far). This takes time, so you have to be careful about when you do it. I was able to survive the battle and defeat the pirates mostly because the ship I'd bought was a combat vessel, complete with four weapon upgrades already installed. But no shield upgrades, so I'm now on a quest to get the elements I need to complete this. Either way though, I'm REALLY glad I bought a new ship BEFORE leaving the first system. As many players have said, the starting ship is craptastic. It's expensive as all hell to buy a new ship, but it's worth it.

And following that bit of info, it's obvious that I did in fact figure out HOW and where to buy a new ship. There's no big dealers or anything where you go and select from a pile of ships... that's not how it works. How it works is you find other pilots that have landed somewhere. They can be found in space stations, or in various types of places on planets (these are pretty obvious once you see them). You can interact with the pilots, and buy/sell them things (each having their own inventories and things they want, affecting the prices on stuff), but you also have the option to buy their ship. They ALL offer this. You can have a look at their ship's setup and installed tech VS whatever you already have, so it's easy to make a comparison. Ships are expensive as all hell, and money isn't the easiest thing to get in this game (this is a good thing, by my view; when resources are too plentiful, particularly money, in a game like this, it's a problem). I saved up money for this due to a gold rush. I mean an actual gold rush, in that I found huge lumps of gold on a particular planet; bloody lucky find. Dug up TONS of it, sold it for massive amounts of money. This still took awhile, but it was worth it to get the ship.

The ONE thing I really, really, REALLY don't like about buying new ships: You outright LOSE your entire inventory in your current ship when you do this. It's just gone. So if you have valuable stuff... and you will.... you need to transfer as much of it to your suit's inventory as you can before making the trade. Or sell it, of course. Fortunately, most places where alien ships can land will also have a trading machine somewhere nearby, I've yet to find a spot where this isn't the case (they aren't JUST found on space stations). That's really the only complaint I have so far, when it comes to the economy and buying/selling stuff. The rest of it is pretty well done.

Upgrading your suit is a totally different matter. You have to find these "drop pods"... not an easy task... and those contain a suit "upgrade" that you can buy for a high price. By "upgrade" I mean "new inventory slot". When it comes to other types of upgrades, it's all about crafting and installing tech. Tech does take up inventory slots, but these are things you really want. There's tech for your suit, your ship, and your multi-tool (used for mining, shooting things, and launching bizarre grenades that aren't just for fighting). There's tons of different types of techs, and you cannot buy these; you have to find their recipes. After a time, you learn what sorts of places will have these, but finding them is never a fast process. It does make the acquisition of new techs pretty satisfying when you get them. Then all you have to do is craft them and install. I like this particular game mechanic quite a bit.


So yeah, I've managed to leave the first system... I'll not spoil the events that you need to go through to do this... and have done a heck of a lot more ground and space exploration than I had at the start. I also learned the value of asteroid mining. And the value of not crashing into asteroids. It is easy to crash into asteroids. I recommend not doing this.

I also had one moment where I'm using the accelerator system to zoom forward at high speed, travelling in space above a planet (what I was trying to do was reach an extremely distant spot on a planet without it taking FORTY MINUTES, which is how long it would have taken if I flew through atmosphere), when out of nowhere, this huge pile of cargo ships just warps RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. Like, nearly on top of me. Absolutely scared the crap out of me. Rather glad that nobody I know was around to hear my high pitched squeak of surprise. I mean, seriously, I just about jumped out of my chair. Needless to say this interrupted my space zooming. I cant even imagine what the chances of this event occurring must be. You'll see cargo ships and freighters warp into place every now and then, but for them to do THAT... yeah. Didn't expect it, nope.

I also had one moment on the ground where I landed my ship on my own head. Just... don't ask. I have no explanation that makes something resembling sense.

I also learned all the uses of the scanner, one of it's key abilities being the registration of new things. You can scan animals, plants, and rocks. These discoveries are registered into your data thingie (separate screen), and you can upload them to get some credits; this is a good way to earn them. Eventually I managed to register 100% of stuff on a particular planet, and learned that you get a really enormous amount of money for doing this. Needless to say, this is not easy to do. I was lucky in that it was a planet that contained no hostile animals. The horrible biting tentacle plants (no, seriously) were an issue though.

I like the scanning system overall... not just the registration bit, I mean the "wide scan" that flows over the landscape and reveals stuff. Without this, resource hunting would be all sorts of tedious. It's a good mechanic.

Lastly, I discovered how to buy new multi-tools. This is the most obscure bit of buying that you'll do; I expect a lot of players take quite awhile before they figure out just how to do this.



So there, that's some more experience with the game. Definitely enjoying it, particularly once I got it to stop crashing. The crashes really do seem network related, I haven't had even one since turning that off. I'm not going to put it back on until the servers have had a chance to stop being super stressed out.

I'm not into video games much lately, but I want to try this. There's lots of potential there for parametric based environments. I'm using similar algorithms to create variety in the world of product design.

comes out tommorow, i think i might buy it....recommend it?

the survival aspect of it is kind off putting....is it hard? like does it take a lot and need to be attended to alot?

It's not something like, say, Dont Starve, where it's a HUGE focus of the game and requires constant, constant attention. In that game it makes sense... I mean, the title says it all; half the point is not to starve, and everything in that game is built from the ground up to work around those survival elements.

In THIS game, they are not an absolute focus and are easier to deal with.

For instance, often in survival games you have hunger to deal with, right? Typically in those food is kinda scarce (unless you've set up some farm or something like that, and even then those can often get destroyed). In this, there is no "hunger", instead you have your life support system and various other systems that require power in order to function. As well as a personal shield, and your own HP (what there is of it). Any technology that requires power can be recharged from your inventory and will say what types of things can be fed into it. Many things, including your life support gizmo, require isotopes in general, and there are quite a number of things in the game that count as those. Plutonium is the big one, and that stuff is bloody everywhere; you cant miss it, it's the big red spiky crystals that grow out of the ground. Like any resource it's more plentiful in some places than others, but there's always a way to get it. Even if you dont have that, you could use Thamium9 to recharge (usually used for your ship's boosters, but you can stuff it into life support if you want) or carbon (if you cant find carbon, you must be asleep at the controls, that's how easy it is to get) though that one's not exactly a bucket of efficiency.

It ends up not really feeling quite like a "hunger" system, and moreso like, well, pretty much what it is: watching the power levels of various bits of technology. Not all of them are easy to deal with, mind you; recharging your personal shield (protects you from damage, of course) in a pinch is not easy. Recharging your environmental shield is ALSO not easy. You cant just stuff plutonium into these. They recharge on their own when not "in use", but particularly with the environmental one, that can be an issue. For example the environmental one protects you against things like extreme cold, heat, or radiation, among other things. When you're exposed to those, it's meter appears and begins to slowly empty. There are two, and only two, things you can do to fill it back up: 1, is to fill it with whatever hard-to-find thing it wants... it wants either difficult elements (ugh) or these items called shield shards/plates, which work on a variety of things. The other thing you can do is enter a protected area; like a building, or sometimes a cave (when dealing with temperature, but it does depend on just how horrible the temp on the planet is), which'll cause it to stabilize and quickly refill. Your personal shield can be refilled by the same shard/plate item, and also bizarrely by these rare pink flowers, because why not. There's other items that work with other charge types too.

The big nasty bit of tech, when it comes to recharging, is your hyperdrive. That requires warp cells. Warp cells are a massive pain to get, particularly early on; it probably gets easier to get these as you get further but I've only gone so far in my own save.

Lastly, you have techs you can find and craft that affect all these things. Like, I found one for the life support system last night that affects the efficiency of charging for it, making it a bit easier to refill it, meaning that I dont need to carry around as much plutonium (or waste mining laser power on getting more carbon or something) as I did before. Techs are useful like that and one of the reasons to try to explore special areas.



So that's some explanation on how that all works. It's never something that can be totally ignored... this IS a survival game, after all. Resource management is part of the challenge of it; you're always going to want resources for charging, crafting, selling, all sorts of possible uses, and this game mechanic feeds into that. But it's not like the more "hardcore" survival games where it has you in a constant panic about it. Even early on.

As for wether or not I recommend it?

Yes, I do, but as I keep telling others that have asked me that: Make sure you understand what you're getting with this game. TONS of people are going into this with TONS of misconceptions. I mean, seriously, it's gotten really absurd. I've watched SO many people complain that "it's the worst game ever, this isnt what they promised!! !" and when I look at their comments, it basically boils down to them having zero idea that this was of the survival genre; they seemed to be expecting something ENTIRELY different from what this game is (and this game is exactly what it was promised to be... that promise, though, was likely distorted heavily by the internet rumor mill, is my theory).

That's why I made this post here. To give some detail. Because I personally think it's a great game, though to be fair I also tend to love survival games in a general sense.

And I will say that this DOES have more content coming to it. Like, one complaint that people had was that there was no base building or anything like that... you know, games like Minecraft or others often have you doing that, but there's none of that in this. Base building, and the ability to build/buy/own/use freighters (huge ships, you'll encounter them frequently in space; I havent interacted with them yet as I suspect defense ships will go berserk at me if I try to) are two things that the devs have confirmed as "coming soon"; they seem quite committed to providing free updates to the game.

One last thing to be aware of though: Again, this is a survival game, which means that YES, it's going to be repetitive. That's absolutely the case. I mean, being absolutely honest, every game in existence has repetition to it. But survival games tend to have a little more than usual (such as, in fact, the repeated need to recharge techs in this game). Games like Dont Starve are repetitive, Minecraft and Terraria are repetitive, anything that counts in this genre is repetitive. If you dont like that, this is not the game for you.

Lastly: NO MULTIPLAYER. This is NOT a multiplayer game. Yes it technically has a persistent online world. TECHNICALLY. It's best to pretend this is not the case. The devs have said, however, that they intend on adding "proper" multiplayer to the game later on for those that want it, just because the feature has been requested THAT bloody often. Nobody knows what form this will take, but for now, it's not there. The chances of meeting another player are stupidly low without tons and tons of planning (and probably some cheating).

from what ive seen, its exactly what i expected, although don't see the point in base building, like why.......your just going to spend loads of time building it, exploring things, getting resources and then flying off to the next planet, your never going to see that base again so why do it?, but yes this game is what i expected, although the recharge on stuff and fuel was a surprise to see, i dont feel like it ruins what its meant to be, i guess it just gives stuff to do all the time, rather then just sitting there. i guess it unlocks at about 6pm today (in england). so ive got some time to think about it. but yeah, they delivered exactly what they promised, a survival experience with huge amounts of exploration, there you go, exactly what was promised right there, promise delivered. its not like they said "this is an action adventure with lots of stealth elements" and then we got this game. they said " a survival experience with emphasis on exploration" and we got a survival experience with an emphasis on exploration.


good that its getting more content and things to do, id probably like to see contracts, missions to get certain stuff, or go to a certain planet and investigate something, give a bit of direction and a way to get faction reputation up, id probably really like to do that, learn the entire language and become their friends, if you remember star wars galaxies? when chewbacca talks he just grunts and growls, but if your a wookie it comes out in english text wise, i was facinated with that and thought it was awesome so thats something that appeals to me (i was a wookie jedi...kinda miss that. but not the old jedi thing, the NGE jedi thing.)

If I had to guess, the way bases might work could be the same way they do it in Starbound: Teleporters.

Starbound is the same idea; lots of exploration, on lots of entirely different planets, with lots of travel time (and fuel spent) between each. Yet it's a Terraria-ish game, full of building. You cant very well have a building follow you from planet to planet.

So instead... the teleporter in your ship. It's not just for beaming to the surface of your currently orbited planet. "waypoints" can be created by various means, and that teleporter can take you to any of those, regardless of your location. Using other teleporters, for instance, immediately creates a waypoint to those that your ship... or any other teleporter... can access. You can also craft and place these flag things, which are waypoints themselves; you place these on the planet's surface somewhere. In my game, I have one right next to my house. Just use the teleporter in my ship, and boom, right back to the flag. And when I'm done, click "beam up", and I'm back in my ship, in orbit around whatever planet it was orbiting when I left it.

Fast travel of some sort is pretty much always used in games like this when it comes to bases. Terraria has it's mirrors, and even Minecraft has the Nether; one of the core reasons for creating Nether gate networks is this very concept, of being able to get to and from your base over massive distances without it taking 10000 years.