No Man's Sky - Early Impressions/Reviews-in-progress Thread

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DrArchon said:
I wonder if the survival stuff was tacked on later in development as more and more people kept asking "what do you do?". They could've intended for the game to just be about zipping from planet to planet and checking out neat stuff, but as the pressure mounted to have NMS be a $60 AAA game they felt the need to add more gameplay so their game wouldn't be a walking simulator.
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i'm enjoying the game so far, but, while experiencing my rather punishing intro involving surviving on a toxic rain planet, this was the first thing that occurred to me. because starting this supposedly grandiose space exploration game stuck on a dark, ugly, toxic rain planet was a serious 'wtf?' moment for me :) ...
 
One more thing about Jim's review: I see his perspective and agree with most of his observations. That said, he's clearly unforgiving of things like pop-in, which I willingly suspended my disbelief and made up that it's a malfunction in my visor. Or things like aliens not getting out and walking around their ship.

Honestly I think this all comes down to the billing and the billing. The hype on this thing was huge but specifically because the promises were huge -- no two worlds the same and over a quintillion to explore. But let's be real: this is a really neat, kinda buggy and somewhat broken indie game with a lot of promise. For $59.99.

They need to go to a freemium route more or less immediately. Here's what I'd do, or what I would've done:

1. Lower expectations from the outset by pricing this as an indie game with optional, microtransactional upgrades. This literally solves every problem.

2. Sell it for $20 or $25 and then make necessary inventory upgrades for something like $1-$2 each. Cap it however you deem fair. Immediately they're right back around the $60 per buyer mark while also getting more generous reviews.

3. This desperately needs to be a cooperative MMO with alliances and guilds and different base ships -- science vessels, traders, hunters, battleships. The ability to stake out, claim, protect, and fight for additional territory. Building your own space stations. In-game community building.

4. With a lower price point, you get more generous reviews while also lowering expectations. With microtransactions, you solve the game's biggest broken mechanic with limited inventory. And then building an MMO on top of this with 4 different play styles -- zoological discovery, money making, combat (say hunting traders and popping them for their spoils, protecting your traders, and hunting other hunters), and alliance conquests -- you make this game infinitely more enjoyable with a lot of ways to approach your own personal style.

5. A quintillion is too many to make all of the above fun. Lower it down to say, 1 million planets. 1 galaxy. Resets every 3 months. Go.
 
travisbickle said:
Between different players they'll be the same storylines/quotes, we're not at the point of procedurally generating storylines / conversations trees, but for an individual player there seems a lot of unique storytelling elements which is probably my favorite part ... I do hope the maths puzzle become a little more difficult.

Also, my weapon has movement-seeking bouncing grenades and laser beams that deflect off inanimate objects ... has no one met any difficult enemies on planets yet?
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I ran into a tiger like animal that nearly killed me.
 
PantherLotus said:
They need to go to a freemium route more or less immediately. Here's what I'd do, or what I would've done:
.
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Oh god please no... worst idea ever. All the sudden it's hard to find plutonium for your jump drive... but you can buy packs of plutonium for 5 dollars. Oooh, for a deal you can get 100 packs for 100 dollars! Now wait 5 minutes before you can fuel your tank (or pay money for this extra thing that speeds up refueling).

And everything people dislike about this game? Would be amplified to encourage you to pay to skip the annoyance (pay to skip grind, pay to increase your inventory, pay to refuel faster). I mean why would you ever want a game to go freemium? Especially one that already has mechanics in place that could really be abused to make an unfun game (unless you keep paying) to play. I mean I love these type mechanics/games but balanced wrong those mechanics can make for a horrible game.

Freemium isn't free. It's actually quite expensive (if you want the game to be fun). Or if you don't pay a really long drawn out not fun game. You pay for it with either money or a very compromised to encourage you to pay game system if you don't want to pay.
 
DrArchon said:
I wonder if the survival stuff was tacked on later in development as more and more people kept asking "what do you do?". They could've intended for the game to just be about zipping from planet to planet and checking out neat stuff, but as the pressure mounted to have NMS be a $60 AAA game they felt the need to add more gameplay so their game wouldn't be a walking simulator.
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This wouldn't surprise me honestly. It would explain why Hello Games always seemed a bit cagey about showing off gameplay until the latter months.
 
DrArchon said:
I wonder if the survival stuff was tacked on later in development as more and more people kept asking "what do you do?". They could've intended for the game to just be about zipping from planet to planet and checking out neat stuff, but as the pressure mounted to have NMS be a $60 AAA game they felt the need to add more gameplay so their game wouldn't be a walking simulator.
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Crazy talk. It´s obvious NMS was built around these systems.
 
PantherLotus said:
They need to go to a freemium route more or less immediately. Here's what I'd do, or what I would've done:

1. Lower expectations from the outset by pricing this as an indie game with optional, microtransactional upgrades. This literally solves every problem.

2. Sell it for $20 or $25 and then make necessary inventory upgrades for something like $1-$2 each. Cap it however you deem fair. Immediately they're right back around the $60 per buyer mark while also getting more generous reviews.

3. This desperately needs to be a cooperative MMO with alliances and guilds and different base ships -- science vessels, traders, hunters, battleships. The ability to stake out, claim, protect, and fight for additional territory. Building your own space stations. In-game community building.

4. With a lower price point, you get more generous reviews while also lowering expectations. With microtransactions, you solve the game's biggest broken mechanic with limited inventory. And then building an MMO on top of this with 4 different play styles -- zoological discovery, money making, combat (say hunting traders and popping them for their spoils, protecting your traders, and hunting other hunters), and alliance conquests -- you make this game infinitely more enjoyable with a lot of ways to approach your own personal style.

5. A quintillion is too many to make all of the above fun. Lower it down to say, 1 million planets. 1 galaxy. Resets every 3 months. Go.
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So you would have made an entirely different game which sounds like a dogshit freemium sci-fi MMO? Roger
 
you give the game 5/10? Your site goes down. *scary face*
I watched his early impressions video and he clearly wasn't enjoying the game for what it had to offer. which seems fair since, from what I've read, the core of the game is something that you either like / enjoy or you don't.

Reckheim said:
As much as I didn't like that game (because of the story), there was a lot of varied game-play and content in the game.
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ya, like grinding the same 10 copy-pasted missions in the same map for 50 hours so you could buy new decorations for your never-actually-relevant base.
 
DrArchon said:
I wonder if the survival stuff was tacked on later in development as more and more people kept asking "what do you do?". They could've intended for the game to just be about zipping from planet to planet and checking out neat stuff, but as the pressure mounted to have NMS be a $60 AAA game they felt the need to add more gameplay so their game wouldn't be a walking simulator.
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george_us said:
This wouldn't surprise me honestly. It would explain why Hello Games always seemed a bit cagey about showing off gameplay until the latter months.
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Well then they tacked it on early last year cause most of the stuff that is in the game they described early last year at least (may have even been late 2014 honestly but at least early/mid 2015). Minus talking with NPCs/learning language. Pretty much about the time you started having people ask, "What do you do?" I mean I started seeing that question in the same thread that had a long list of what they described gameplay was going to be like. You could even quote the long list of gameplay description and people would retort they still didn't see what you did (and it pretty much described the game today minus a few things.. mainly the sentient beings you talk to/learning language).
 
ME1 side quests the game actually sounds really appealing to me...

I would give the same advice to both the people panicking over Jim's review and the people piling on the game because of it, and that would be that this is one man's opinion and you should either wait for other reviews to form a consensus or form your own consensus by playing it yourself like many people already have.

I think Jim is usually spot on with his reviews, but he does give out scores here and there that I 100% disagree with(his 5/10 score for Arkham Knight is one of those).
 
I really want to like this game but there is completely no depth to any of the systems except the math behind the galaxy generation.

The inventory system is woeful. The crafting is extremely basic. The mining is hold button basic. I was really hopefully of the exploration aspect but I see there is no local map that you can record your travels against. You find something interesting and then it's gone. Ifor you leave the area is nearly impossible to find it again as the world generation doesn't really create any memorable landmarks. POI spoilers:
Do they provide anything other than a word and faction increase at later game? Again very underwhelming if not.

NPC interaction is another half baked mechanic. I might as well be talking to a computer system as they have basically no animations.

I really do appreciate the work the guys at Hello put in and I can see what they are trying to do, but every mechanic seems a good few iterations away from being interesting.

Maybe they can fix this with updates but I think the budget they'd require to make it deeper just won't be available.
 
GSG Flash said:
ME1 side quests the game actually sounds really appealing to me...

I would give the same advice to both the people panicking over Jim's review and the people piling on the game because of it, and that would be that this is one man's opinion and you should either wait for other reviews to form a consensus or form your own consensus by playing it yourself like many people already have.

I think Jim is usually spot on with his reviews, but he does give out scores here and there that I 100% disagree with(his 5/10 score for Arkham Knight is one of those).
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Yeah, that's what intrigued me about this game. I really liked just exploring the planets in ME1, and mining for minerals in ME2, so ... it's sort of my kind of game.
 
spookyfish said:
Yeah, that's what intrigued me about this game. I really liked just exploring the planets in ME1, and mining for minerals in ME2, so ... it's sort of my kind of game.
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Yes :)

I was really disappointed they dropped that instead of improving it. It was definitely one of the things that got me into NMS.
 
Hmm.

So in the end for all the shit people like me got for repeatedly asking "I still don't get what you do in this game moment to moment?", we were kinda right?

I need to play it for myself but these impressions seem to be confirming all my worst fears. Still, I'm always down to play a bad game if it is at least interesting, and if this is a failure (jury is still out, I know) then it at least appears to be an interesting failure.
 
meanspartan said:
Hmm.

So in the end for all the shit people like me got for repeatedly asking "I still don't get what you do in this game moment to moment", we were kinda right?
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Not in the slightest. It was always pretty obvious what you were going to do moment to moment. Whether or not it was something that would have been enjoyable to you is something you would have had to figure out based on previous experiences with survival games.
 
DrArchon said:
I wonder if the survival stuff was tacked on later in development as more and more people kept asking "what do you do?". They could've intended for the game to just be about zipping from planet to planet and checking out neat stuff, but as the pressure mounted to have NMS be a $60 AAA game they felt the need to add more gameplay so their game wouldn't be a walking simulator.
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Glad I'm not the only one who thought of this, seems like a plausible scenario to me. My question is, why was it priced at $60 and who called for that? Maybe Sony encouraged them to make it a fully fledged $60 title?
 
That slogan about quintillion planets to explore is so meaningless if you consider that there's not that many variations/things to do on them

jhUivB6.png
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Steejee said:
Stirling's review more or less confirmed my expectations for this game and pushed me into pass mode. The combat, survival, and trading stuff all looked pretty...bland in the trailers, with the exploration really being the key. But it sounds like the survival gets in the way of the exploration, and the exploration itself doesn't really break the trappings of procedural generation in a sufficient way to make up for it.

I do hope it does well enough to keep the team going though. They went ambitious and shouldn't be chided if they didn't live up to expectations for a lot of people.
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Same, after reading Stirling's review I went into steam and got my money back. Maybe I will look at it again down the road.
 
The game should have never been hyped up as a AAA $60 type game. It's an indie game made by a small number of talented folks. That's all it should have been. I hope Hello Games can weather the backlash and continue to make good games in the future.
 
DrArchon said:
Too be fair, earlier this year we had Doom hidden behind an embargo and that game is phenomenal, so it's not like embargos are proof that a game is going to be underwhelming.
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Its probably a good indicator the publisher lacks confidence in how the game will be received, regardless of how good the game is.
 
looks like this will be one of those games that is going to get shit on in reviews, but i happen to love. I'm having so much fun with it.

Question regarding the jimqusition review. did he find the center of the universe or whatever in a day? i didn't think the day one patch was live until tuesday. can't access his page.
 
Zombie James said:
It's not. I can see where the comparison is coming from, superficially, but this is like comparing a grain of rice to a paella.
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It was a bit flippant and, despite saying so, I still feel strangely compelled to run out and get this game. Perhaps now if I know if there is a future roadmap, as I got Elite on that promise. But the comment does seem to capture something.

For some people, Mako and Mass Effect was the defining moment of the game. Reading up about the different planets, roaming about and poking around, sometimes driving to find a perfect vantage to step outside and just look up at the stars.

For others, it was a jaunt around three different building types on command by Michael Ironsides with a text window as a reward.

Some people can make fun out of a cardboard box, others need a present to be inside the box. This game is going to be nothing but polarising.
 
So how much of it is Sony's meddling with the message and marketing?

If this was just a cool indie game, I don't really see people going super crazy over it.
 
zeorhymer said:
The game should have never been hyped up as a AAA $60 type game. It's an indie game made by a small number of talented folks. That's all it should have been. I hope Hello Games can weather the backlash and continue to make good games in the future.
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Me too. Their hearts are clearly in the right place (though one might question starting from a 'what if?' and then trying to make it fun vs. taking a fun mechanic and building a game around it aka The Miyamoto Way) and they clearly are very talented and have an eye for design.
 
It is never good for a bunch of you, right?

Watch Dogs - Too much filler quests!
Assassin's Creed Unity - Too many collectables!
Witcher 3 - Too many meaningless monster contracts!
GTAV - Too many; 'go here, kill that, drive back' missions!
Metal Gear Solid V - Barren open world!
No Man's Sky - Too many planets!

You can never, ever please the entire audience. This thread alone is the pure acknowledgement that GAF is filled with countless of gamers that have different tastes, different standards and different hopes and dreams.

Why not just agree that the game isn't for you? State your opinion. Fine by me. Just don't go force your opinion into someone's throat until they are forced to choke on it just because they can see past the flaws and actually enjoy the game for what it is.
 
As I expected, people are better of by buying Subnautica. And for a more hardcore experience even The Long Dark. I think the "infinite procedural planets" hurt NMS a lot. I´d easily take 100 or so hand made planets filled with interesting stuff over what we got.
 
Its going to divide a lot of people on scores. Its a very niche type of game, like Elite or Star Citizen and those Survival / Resource Collecting type games. People who enjoy games like that will probably like NMS a lot more than the average gamer.

With Base Building and other new features coming in the future, I can see NMS getting better / more feature rich over time, I can't see this changing how people see the game though but review scores are not the end of the world these days, as modern games like this are always evolving and getting worked on after launch, which can vastly improve a game from what it was at launch.

I'm still looking forward to playing it later when I finish work though. Like Elite, this is something I will dip in and out of from time to time.
 
Rivyn said:
It is never good for a bunch of you, right?

Watch Dogs - Too much filler quests!
Assassin's Creed Unity - Too many collectables!
Witcher 3 - Too many meaningless monster contracts!
GTAV - Too many; 'go here, kill that, drive back' missions!
Metal Gear Solid V - Barren open world!
No Man's Sky - Too many planets!

You can never, ever please the entire audience. This thread alone is the pure acknowledgement that GAF is filled with countless of gamers that have different tastes, different standards and different hopes and dreams.

Why not just agree that the game isn't for you? State your opinion. Fine by me. Just don't go force your opinion into someone's throat until they are forced to choke on it just because they can see past the flaws and actually enjoy the game for what it is.
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Rivyn
"There is absolutely no way this should be reviewed that low despite it just being an opinion."
 
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