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No Man's Sky previews (03-03-2016)

I plan on upgrading my jetpack and the blasting around at a low height right above the ground to get around on 'foot.' will probably be faster than sprinting.
 
Considering Minecraft is like the best selling game ever, ARK and Terrarria and other sandbox survival exploration games have sold a ton, and space sims where you make your own way like Elite have made a resurgence...I'd say a lot of people will enjoy that gameplay loop just fine

The difference is, those games are priced right, with a low entry point.
 

Mahonay

Banned
The difference is, those games are priced right, with a low entry point.
This implies you are somehow the judge of what games should or shouldn't be priced at $60.

How about we wait until reviews to see how much is in NMS until making those kind of sweeping statements.
 
With regards to VR, this game is funded by Sony...I just can't see a PC only VR release....I'm worried it will go the other way and get locked in as a sclusie...
 
This implies you are somehow the judge of what games should or shouldn't be priced at $60.

How about we wait until reviews to see how much is in NMS until making those kind of sweeping statements.

I may not be a judge, but I have an opinion that's no more or less important than the rest.
 
With regards to VR, this game is funded by Sony...I just can't see a PC only VR release....I'm worried it will go the other way and get locked in as a sclusie...

To be clear, the game is not published by Sony. I can't say how much Sony money went into the development, but Hello Games self-published the game just like they did Joe Danger.
 

Mahonay

Banned
I may not be a judge, but I have an opinion that's no more or less important than the rest.
You straight up just stated that it's priced wrong. Just comes off trying to prove a fact rather than presenting an opinion.
I doubt at $60, NMS will come close to the overall sales and active users than a Minecraft or Terraria. Price plays a huge part in that.
Ok sorry wasn't clear on what you were saying. And you could very well be right in that sense.
 

Kyoufu

Member
Elite also has full multiplayer modes like the CQC stuff or being able to fly around with friends and people you just meet at stations.

Elite also lacked planetary exploration which they only added later for additional cost.

The fact of the matter is, Elite: Dangerous was also priced at the high end of the spectrum and that was fine too. I did not regret my purchase and I don't see myself regretting purchasing NMS.
 

Grief.exe

Member
Oh, and you can land on asteroids. That should be cool to walk around on an asteroid.

Interesting. Asteroids could potentially be a source of material mining that would avoid having to fight a planet's defensive bots.

Fun fact, the amount of material in our asteroid belt is equivalent to 1 trillion US dollars for every person on Earth.

I believe that is just the pure value of the metals too, the value only skyrockets if you consider governments buying water mined from the Asteroids in the future.
 

Grief.exe

Member
My questions are mainly related to the PC version of the game.

Will it support HOTAS?
Will it support framerates greater than 60 FPS?
Will it support all versions of VR (Vive/Rift/PSVR)?

EDIT: Meant to copy/paste this into my first post.
 

Wreav

Banned
It just occurred to me that all of the flying footage I've seen, the only control they use is yaw (rudder left and right) and pitch. Is there no roll?
 
I doubt at $60, NMS will come close to the overall sales and active users than a Minecraft or Terraria. Price plays a huge part in that.

Minecraft is basically the best selling game of all time, I think they would be ok with missing that target. Terraria is a more reasonable goal and depending on WoM I think this could do just as well or better.
 

kaching

"GAF's biggest wanker"
I doubt at $60, NMS will come close to the overall sales and active users than a Minecraft or Terraria. Price plays a huge part in that.
Is there a particular reason why it has to? If they do even half what Minecraft has done in sales, I'm sure they'll be swimming in profit just fine, and it would still be a significant sales success the kind that plenty of other games just dream of.
 

Kaz42

Member
Is there a particular reason why it has to? If they do even half what Minecraft has done in sales, I'm sure they'll be swimming in profit just fine, and it would still be a significant sales success the kind that plenty of other games just dream of.

It certainly is a weird statement that NMS won't sell as much as minecraft due to pricing. Like, most games won't come close to Minecraft's 70 million copies sold at any price. And you're right No Mans Sky can do far less than Minecraft level of sells and still be rolling in money.
 

RedSwirl

Junior Member
The Reddit tidbit about water flowing sounds really cool. What if I'm digging through a cave and suddenly hit a river?
 

Danlord

Member
can you have multiple saves?

Can you have an offline save and an online one?

I can't remember the source, but it was said that there's only one save. Things could have changed, especially since some people would like multiple profiles depending on their play through preference.
 
Something I thought was weird about the RPS preview. At first Murray says:
“I would be disappointed if all anyone wants to do is go towards the centre as soon as possible. I would be happy if some people wanted to explore a single planet. I don’t want everyone to do that, it would be such a shame, but it would be such a shame if one person didn’t feel that way about one planet."

But then he says:
Encouraging players to move is also the reason the game currently doesn’t have temporal aspects like seasons or the deaths of suns or different biomes on a planet. “I don’t want [players] to be just staying on one planet. I think some people will but I don’t want people being like, ‘I can’t leave this until I’ve gone to the North Pole!'”

I find it kind of odd that they'd create these planet-sized planets with endless wonders to take in, but then shape the game mechanics so that you're encouraged to keep moving to other planets. And why did Murray say that he wants some people to just stay at one, and then turn around and say that he wants people to keep exploring the universe? It seems inconsistent, and I wonder if they left seasons and more complex biomes out more due to time constaints or difficulty rather than to push players from behind by making a planet a little bit boring eventually.

To be clear, the game is not published by Sony. I can't say how much Sony money went into the development, but Hello Games self-published the game just like they did Joe Danger.

Regardless of the specific financial details, let's be real... Sony is effectively publishing the game. Giving development money to Hello (enough to lock it in as a console exclusive), huge advertising pushes (there's no way an indie studio would get on Colbert's show without the Sony marketing machine) and E3 spotlights – Sony has given this game a massive PR boost, and without that I doubt NMS would be on the radar of a general gaming audience. That's what good publishers do. And that's why if NMS comes to any VR platform, you can bet that it will go to PSVR first.
 
Elite also has full multiplayer modes like the CQC stuff or being able to fly around with friends and people you just meet at stations.

NMS also has fully destructable environments and wildlife (creatures), as well as language learning.

We could go on all night.
 

Carn82

Member
I find it kind of odd that they'd create these planet-sized planets with endless wonders to take in, but then shape the game mechanics so that you're encouraged to keep moving to other planets. And why did Murray say that he wants some people to just stay at one, and then turn around and say that he wants people to keep exploring the universe? It seems inconsistent, and I wonder if they left seasons and more complex biomes out more due to time constaints or difficulty rather than to push players from behind by making a planet a little bit boring eventually.

I think it's just a bit badly worded. I think he knows that because of the procedural nature there will be a lot of 'not so interesting' planets. Sounds to me that he really hopes that everyone finds a planet (or a few of them) that they somehow really adore/like and explore; but staying put on the planet(s) is not the goal of the game. I also think that the planets themselves (who aren't 'planet sized' in my eyes, they seem pretty smallish, but still big enough to get lost!)

I do hope that they keep supporting the game with all kinds of new features. I'm sure that because of the procedural nature some things might / will not be possible, but if they can keep coming up with new features I would really like that.
 
I think it's just a bit badly worded. I think he knows that because of the procedural nature there will be a lot of 'not so interesting' planets. Sounds to me that he really hopes that everyone finds a planet (or a few of them) that they somehow really adore/like and explore; but staying put on the planet(s) is not the goal of the game. I also think that the planets themselves (who aren't 'planet sized' in my eyes, they seem pretty smallish, but still big enough to get lost!)

I do hope that they keep supporting the game with all kinds of new features. I'm sure that because of the procedural nature some things might / will not be possible, but if they can keep coming up with new features I would really like that.

Yeah, it could be that Sean just doesn't want people to have a mediocre experience because they are completionists and stayed on a mediocre planet for a month.

Regarding the planet size, in one of the previews the player landed on a space station after exploring around on the surface, and when they looked out a porthole onto the planet Sean said something to the effect of, "Your targeting reticule is the same size as the area we just explored." So if you can imagine a planet filling your screen with a few pixels taking up an hour of exploration time, I'd say that's a fairly planet-sized planet. Maybe smaller than Earth, but pretty damn big.
 

amnesiac

Member
I wonder if it'll be helpful to keep a notepad nearby to decode languages or if they'll be simple enough to memorize.
 
Regardless of the specific financial details, let's be real... Sony is effectively publishing the game. Giving development money to Hello (enough to lock it in as a console exclusive), huge advertising pushes (there's no way an indie studio would get on Colbert's show without the Sony marketing machine) and E3 spotlights – Sony has given this game a massive PR boost, and without that I doubt NMS would be on the radar of a general gaming audience. That's what good publishers do. And that's why if NMS comes to any VR platform, you can bet that it will go to PSVR first.

I just don't know enough to make that assumption. There's clearly a financial tie, but I don't think Sony could literally stop them from supporting PC VR if they can't/won't bring the game to PSVR.
 
A new interview with Sean

"I have had other indie developers say to me 'oh, you're not indie anymore' and I sort of find that super strange, because nothing's changed actually," Murray says. "We're around the same size of company as we were when we made Joe Danger. We're still self-funded, we're still pretty poor -- everything's to the wire. We still work all night."

"I definitely struggle to find a definition for 'indie'," he continues. "I know that we're still independent, that we still live or die on our own, and that this is our game that we have creative control on. We're not some big studio, we haven't become huge in size or anything. But 'indie' is this term that brings lots of other meaning with it. I think it means to me is being innovative and left of field, experimental -- kind of like I would think of in music, or like it used to be in music, 'indie' used to mean that. I would argue that we're still those things."

The success of No Man's Sky feels simultaneously swift yet slow-burn, the result of three years build up. "We've been announced and ready to come out for a normal amount of time. I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing that it feels like forever!", Murray offers. It's led to a game that seems to only just be on the cusp of reality. But the pressure of delivering a hit has naturally isolated the team from their fans.

It's a situation that Murray wants to correct once the game is out. "My life is a weird one now," he says. "We probably aren't 'allowed' to make Joe Danger 3; we're probably not 'allowed' to make No Man's Sky 2. What I would really like to do, even though we're absolutely killing ourselves on this game at the moment, is work on No Man's Sky even more once it's out. Expand it, be able to speak to the community. I feel like that opportunity has been kind of stolen from us by the game becoming popular. I feel like when it's out and it's a real thing, then we can have a more normal conversation with people and ask them what they think about this real thing, rather than this concept."

"The No Man's Sky 2 thing is kind of a joke. We would probably never do that," he laughs. "What I'd love to do, [being] in that sandbox genre, is increase the feature set after the game comes out. I actually think we don't want more content in the game, what we want is lots more opportunities and different ways for people to play the game. Whether that's simple things like different weapon types and abilities and ways to upload and share things about the game, or whether it's being able to play in totally new ways. Almost the same way that Minecraft started out as a survival game and that's kind of where we see ourselves, and that's really expanded. Now it's best known as a creative game."

Ultimately, No Man's Sky is science fiction at its purest, challenging players with big ideas and concepts. It wears its sci-fi inspirations on its sleeve too, from its otherworldly art style, intended to evoke the weird painted cover art of classic SF novels, to quotes from notable authors of those novels that pepper the game's few loading screens. Those quotes aren't just Murray and co. showing off their literary credentials to earn geek cred though -- they want the game to become a gateway to turn players into readers.

"I hope that we're going to get at least one person to look some of those books up who might not otherwise have," Murray says. While the likes of Asimov and Clarke are among many writers that get references, there is one quotable figure who won't make it to the final release of the game though.

"We've currently got some Jaden Smith quotes in there -- we need to remember to take those out before the game ships!"

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2016-03/04/no-mans-sky-sean-murray-interview
 

GribbleGrunger

Dreams in Digital
What happens if you die in this? Respawn back at your ship/home base?

You either respawn back at your spacecraft (if you die) or respawn back at a space station (if you die and your spacecraft is destroyed) but Access said there are save points too and they respawned back at that after they saved.
 
Man seems to me this game either going to be groundbreaking in the gaming industry. One of the greatest or great or a complete failure. I hope the former is true as it does look very interesting.
 
I think people should maybe temper their expectations regarding the size of planets, and more importantly, the time needed to explore them fully, whatever that might mean. In any case, I highly doubt you would need a month, let alone a year to explore a single planet. I'd even go as far to say it'll probably be in the ballpark of a few hours, a day at most.

By fully exploring, I mean discovering and visiting every relevant point of interest and fully stripping the planet of resources. You might want to visit every nook and cranny and (arguably) needlessly waste time if that's fun to you, but even in that case you'll probably spend a couple of days at most.

Also, having even an Earth-sized planet doesn't mean much when you have a super-fast spaceship able to land and take off anywhere and very quickly. You would basically go around the Earth extremely fast as well, go over all the most popular landmarks etc, it's just that Earth has an insane amount of diversity of biomes, flora, fauna, is heavily populated by various human cultures, so that almost unfathomable complexity makes exploring Earth take a bit longer. Nobody can possibly expect even a fraction of such complexity on the planets of No Man's Sky. It's actually going to be so much simpler that there'll be a single biome per planet, and I don't really expect more than a dozen species per planet, and that's being generous, and also that's on planets that actually have any form of life at all. To be clear, having life on a planet doesn't mean it's automatically interesting, just different, meaning I'm sure there'll be a lot of lifeless planets that are extremely interesting as well, but that's besides the point.

So I'm imagining that the usual playthrough of a single planet will look like this:
- Approach planetary orbit, ping the scanner to reveal a few nearby points of interest
- Land at one POI, discover what it is and exploit it if possible (learn language, get blueprint, mine mineral etc.)
- Walk around a bit, maybe notice a weird lake, mountain formation or a cave, explore, spend maybe even an hour mucking about, then walk all the way back to your ship
- Find an Atlas beacon, upload data so you don't loose the last hour's progress
- Get back on the ship, maybe even fly into orbit again, go to another larger area and ping the scanner
- Rinse and repeat

This is all very simplified of course, the point is you'll have a few different activities you'll be doing, mostly surviving in harsh environments just to get that extra ore, blueprint, alien word or better your relations with a faction, going up and down from planet to station, do a lot of spelunking and mining etc.

The point is, every planet is a dungeon floor in a procedural survival/rogue-lite of sorts, and, if the gameplay mechanics are captivating enough, you will feel the need to plunder its riches, discover its secrets and move on to the next floor of the dungeon to see what new similarly fashioned wonders you'll find. The variety of activities and cosmetic differences help greatly, but in the end the important thing is whether landing on a planet, seeing a creature and scanning it is fun/exciting/fulfilling enough for the player.

Because a tree is a tree, a fish is a fish, a monolith is a monolith, but that doesn't mean that searching for lots of different kinds of fish needs to be boring, it just means that the act of searching for the fish needs to be engaging enough for the player, and then even forever searching for and finding a single type of fish can be almost as fun.

Remember that this game is an homage not just to the classic sci-fi books and their cover art, but also to an age of the UK and EU boom of home computer games, they were played on a TV or a small monitor, and then the action would be shown on an even smaller screen, with a large HUD covering most of the screen, lots of stats, management and a mish-mash of genres, all there to create a feeling of actually controlling this awesome futuristic spaceship system, mining for resources, talking to aliens, saving the galaxy.

These games, like most games really, had a lot of repeating gameplay loops, lots of jumping from planet to planet, sending probes down the surface, seeing if there's something there, getting resources, fuel, trading, talk with aliens, it was very repetitive but (arguably) not as boring as you'd think. And that's the whole point, it's the challenge of discovery and survival that should be enough for a genre like this.

EDIT:
As perhaps a simple example, FTL is an extremely repetitive game, also relatively simple in its design, but you can potentially play it forever, and it does in fact have a very captivating gameplay loop, especially because it's pretty hard to survive the whole thing. Spelunky as well. You get to the second world (jungle temple) and you marginally know what to expect, frogs, a possible snake pit, ghosts, but you have no idea what combination you'll be thrown into, and it's (almost) as exciting and challenging each and every time like it's your first. Not saying No Man's Sky will succeed in doing these gameplay loops well, but then there's really no reason to think it won't.
 
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