No Man's SkyPS4 

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Interesting post on Reddit:
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You won't see players come back till they add some more content and even then it needs to be pretty decent and free.
 
Joey D
You won't see players come back till they add some more content and even then it needs to be pretty decent and free.
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I think they've put themselves into an incredibly difficult position. Making anything procedurally generated is difficult enough....an entire game? Yikes.

I've been designing procedurally/parametrically defined furniture/millwork for the past year and it is a very gruelling process. Just to draw a simple box requires feeding the computer/program at least 6 instruction sets, and that's starting from a predefined coordinate system. The current iteration of the furniture item I've been developing (which still requires a considerable amount of hand modeling at the end) has 25 inputs and 40 instructions. The coordination of many different parametrically defined objects in a parametrically defined code base is mind boggling. It's quite remarkable that the 'game' even made it this far, in my eyes. It's just a shame they promised so much....
 
Had a go of this yesterday, because it's had a ton of patches since the last time I played it. At the point I'm at, with max suit slots, a ship with lots of upgrades, and a good enough multi-tool (just about any multi-tool is good enough TBH), the game become an incredibly boring grind to just mine the stuff to make hyperdrive fuel, and then warp a bunch of times until you run out of fuel, and then start the process again. I honestly can't see anything else worth doing.

I could save up to buy a better ship, because mine doesn't have very many slots, but the prices are completely ridiculous. Before I bought my current ship, I was finding 30+ slot ships for 5 or 6 million units, and now, for whatever reason, a 30 slot ship costs more than 16 million. There's no way I'm grinding for hours and hours mining emeril (the only worthwhile way to make money) to save that much up for a ship that would have cost a third of that much not long ago, because even though my ship doesn't have many slots, it's more than good enough to finish the game. It annihilates other ships in seconds, and has all the hyperdrive upgrades, and since the amount of slots is the only difference between ships, that makes it completely pointless to change ships once you have a half decent one.

Exploring is boring now, because after so many warps to so many systems, all practically identical, there's just nothing exciting of surprising on any of the planets now. The only reason I even go down to a planet now is when I run out of hyperdrive fuel. I mine enough stuff to fill my suit inventory up with fuel, and then go back out and start warping again. The only things to see on any of the planets are the same old minerals and elements you've seen hundred of times before, the same handful of buildings scattered around at random, with the same generic alien creatures in them, and the same handful of lame "puzzles" (using that term lightly), which reward you the same blueprints you've been getting repeatedly since about 10 hours into the game, and the same lego creatures that are on every planet, which all look utterly ridiculous.

The only thing I can think of doing is to resume the atlas path next time I find a space anomaly, but since I sold all my atlas stones, because, y'know, the game doesn't bother telling you you need them, I'll probably end up like a lot of people needing to grind to save up millions and million to buy atlas stones, and then not be able to find the last atlas thingy again. Choosing the other options at the space anomaly are pointless anyway. Choosing resources just gives you stuff you already have, and choosing "shortcut to the centre" to get a black hole is just a simple way of breaking things on your ship, since most of the black holes don't get you any closer to the centre than one or two warps anyway.

One annoying thing I wanted to ask you guys about though, is that when warping, if I go directly towards the galaxy centre, and warp at my max linear distance of 1600 lightyears, I only ever get about 400 lightyears closer to the centre of the galaxy. Why does it do that? If you just fly through the galactic map towards the centre, the distance you travel from your position, and the distance gained to the centre, don't match up, even if you're flying directly toward the centre. I went 50,000 lightyears from my position, flying directly towards the centre, and it said I was only 10,000 lightyears closer to the centre...
 
So they finally posted 1.09 patch notes.
  • The game is now much more robust at recovering corrupted save files.
  • It was possible for players to circumnavigate obtaining the Antimatter blueprint using very specific steps, leaving some players stranded in their second system. This is no longer possible.
  • PC and PS4 galaxy generation more robust during compiling.
  • Exosuit messaging system no longer confuses “on planet” and “docked in station” visor notifications, removing all doubt as to the location of the player’s Starship.
  • Improved framerate when scanning colossal structures such as Space Stations or Outposts.
  • Fix for some terrain resources being indestructible and therefore unmineable.
  • Exosuit messaging system now able to correctly differentiate between resource types. Deposits discovered by scans will now display as the correct element.
  • Gek Factory door manufacturing standards have been improved; they no longer take critical hits from Grenades.
  • Drone vandalism detection improved. Wanted level now increases when destroying Factory doors however powerful the players Multitool may be.
  • Pulsedrive systems now fully offline during warping.
  • Players are no longer able to open crates of any type if their inventory is full, no matter the contents, preventing loss of resources.
  • When interacting with a Terminal, it will print out the players Journey progression. Some strings in this print out where cut-off in Asian languages, these now display correctly in all supported languages.
  • Fixed an occasional bug within the Exosuit system that caused controller prompts to display the wrong button.
  • Changes to player Standing with the Gek, Vy’keen and Korvax now display correctly within the stats menu.
  • Fix for loss of resources when transferring fully stacked items between the player’s Starship and Exosuit in a specific order.
  • Fix for stacking products exploit. Resources salvaged from dismantled technologies now fill inventory slots as expected.
  • Exosuit and Starship messaging system now always displays the correct number of collected resources.
  • Discovery menu improvements, including fixes for incorrectly displayed planet names and creatures displaying as their molecular structure.
  • Discovery menu now supports planets with an abundance of life. Specifically, planets featuring 15 creature types can now reach 100% completion.
  • Multitool Beam Coolant and Exosuit Aeration Membrane upgrades now increase their respective stat wheels as expected.
  • The player can no longer buy multiple products when they do not have enough slots to do so, preventing loss of both the unit cost and the extra products.
  • Japanese localization fixes. Including: scrolling text issues, overlapping prompts in the ship messaging system and Multitool names displaying incorrectly.
  • Fixed clipped text on save game restore buttons in all supported languages.
  • Fixed errant title bar on the menu screen.
  • Player Standing now updates in real time when interacting with members of the Gek, Vy’keen and Korvax races.
  • Minor fix for saves of a duration less than 2 minutes displaying as “1 minutes”.
  • Improvements to various settings within the options menu, including advancements in mouse smoothing and refined gamma settings allowing for increased tenebrosity.
  • Fix for creature generation crash.
  • Fixes to prevent FPS spikes when encountering momentary performance bumps on PS4.
  • Fixed a rare issue where pressing and holding a button would cause the game to crash under specific circumstances.
  • Creature footfall now audibly echos within caves.
  • Fix for perpetual day time if the player updated in a specific order.
  • Bump shader version numbers for patch 1.09
  • Fix for a rare situation where a player’s save could get stuck in a crash loop due to saving at very specific point in planet generation.
  • Improved detection of available PC CPU cores and optimised settings for low-end CPUs with few CPU cores.
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I can't believe I'm actually enjoying it still. Just love seeing what new worlds I come across. Finding new and different construct of planets.
 
Magdelayna
Has such a hyped game ever died a death so fast as NMS? Has Sean Murray said anything since release?
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Nothing from Murray. There was a rumor that he was going to speak at a podcast but nothing has come to that either.
 
Tired Tyres
How can the head of a dev team be embargoed on his own game?

Being told to keep it shut cos' it's not helping is more likely.
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But that's more or less the same, no? Whether it's their own lawyer, publisher (under threat of legal actions), his team or all of the above, my guess is he got told to not say anything anymore.

And it's probably for the better. :lol: Just curious if (and when) they'll come with new content.
 
I guess base building is expected this "holiday" season from the blog post.
There is still some hope for the game and I guess they will release the details when it gets closer.
 
Does anyone still play this though. I mean it's a perfectly good game from the start. You get a start planet, fix your ship and discover stuff. It's interesting. The trouble is that's it. You've done everything. Then you just do the same stuff when you get to the next planet. It gets old really fast.
 
Tired Tyres
Does anyone still play this though. I mean it's a perfectly good game from the start. You get a start planet, fix your ship and discover stuff. It's interesting. The trouble is that's it. You've done everything. Then you just do the same stuff when you get to the next planet. It gets old really fast.
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Agree. I will admit the first week or so I was so into this game, I would actually come home on lunch to play.....but once I realized eventually planet environments and creatures look the same just different default names I lost all interest immediately, havent played since few weeks after release.
 
Yeah even ignoring the ridiculous amount of lies we were told about the game, and the fact that what we got was nothing like what was advertised and hyped up for so long, the game is objectively shallow. Even if I hadn't seen any of the hype building bollocks, and went into the game blind, I would have wondered why it was so expensive, and gotten bored of it after a few short hours. It plays like a $20 game. Actually, I have a lot of $20 indie games that are considerably more enjoyable.

I will be surprised if the devs ever bother adding anything to it. Why bother? The majority of gamers were disgusted with how they duped everyone into buying their game for way more than it was worth, and even the most hardcore of fanboys who defended them would have stopped playing by now. What would base building add to the game anyway? You can get early access survival games on steam with a thousand times more depth than NMS, that all have base building, so I can't see it adding anything of worth to the game, especially without any way of marking planets or fast travelling to them.
 
I think most of the fault lies with gamers who hyped themselves up.

Yes there were a lot of half-truths and even some outright lies coming out of Murray's lips, but anyone with two brain cells could look at the actual gameplay being shown and tell it was Molyneux-speak. And personally I think the whole idea to try and bill this thing as a AAA $60 experience was Sony's

Game honestly never looked any better than "okay"... that being said, the concept appeals to me and I'll pick it up when it's available for a deep discount. And if they're continuing to work on and support the game, the less severe of a discount I'll likely wait for.
 
Lain
I think most of the fault lies with gamers who hyped themselves up.

Yes there were a lot of half-truths and even some outright lies coming out of Murray's lips, but anyone with two brain cells could look at the actual gameplay being shown and tell it was Molyneux-speak. And personally I think the whole idea to try and bill this thing as a AAA $60 experience was Sony's

Game honestly never looked any better than "okay"... that being said, the concept appeals to me and I'll pick it up when it's available for a deep discount. And if they're continuing to work on and support the game, the less severe of a discount I'll likely wait for.
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You can't be serious... A game dev outright lies about their game, and it's the gamers' fault? It's not like it was a couple of small lies either, he lied about the basic fundamentals of the game. Also, looking at early gameplay and promotional videos doesn't tell you much, if anything at all, about whether these things were in the game. You can't tell from the videos that planetary and star system physics aren't in place, or that the crafting system he spoke of isn't there, or the lack of multiplayer. Some things, like the huge space battles, freighters flying around, creatures having an impact on the environment, are all in the videos, but not in the game. So it's not the gamers' fault for believing what Murray consistently said was in the game. It's Murray's fault, and his fault alone.

When a game dev bags out other games for having sky boxes, and says his game has star system physics that properly simulate planetary movements for it's day/night cycle, you can't blame the gamers when they buy the game and it's nothing more than loading a bunch of sky boxes with static planets that are all identical to one another.
 
It was mostly half-truths, though I don't deny there were some outright lies. And they were fairly easy to see through IMO.

Regardless, I saw a LOT of people superimposing their own wild imaginations onto what they thought No Man's Sky was going to be, and yes I absolutely do think it's their own fault for setting themselves up for disappointment.
 
Lain
Regardless, I saw a LOT of people superimposing their own wild imaginations onto what they thought No Man's Sky was going to be, and yes I absolutely do think it's their own fault for setting themselves up for disappointment.
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Thanks in part to Sean selling the game the way he did, there were even a few times where he said something was going to be featured in the game that clearly wasn't. Whether or not people hyped themselves up on something that wasn't there is somewhat immaterial as that's always going to happen, though I can't think of anything off the top of my head. If you have examples, please share.

It's a different story entirely to promote the game the way they have and then have next to no interaction with the community after its release. And now after months of silence I'm supposed to care about base building? Why? What is it going to add to a game when there are so many puzzling and awkward design choices?

Hm. I'm realizing now I'm not so much replying to what you said, more so just expressing frustration. :lol:
 
To be clear, I'm not saying Sean & co are blameless in this whole fiasco. But the insane amount of vitriol directed at them following the game's launch far exceeded what they deserved, when Sony was also at fault for trying to market this thing as a big AAA PlayStation exclusive, and gamers somehow fell for this thing hook line and sinker like a bunch of gullible bakas and allowed themselves to get faaaaaaar too overhyped for something that never looked all that remarkable outside of its core gimmick.

I'm not at all surprised that they decided to go completely PR silent in response, even if that only fanned the flames.

In short, yes Hello Games deserves some flak... But keep in mind that pressure from Sony was probably also problematic. And if you were burned by NMS, you're due for some introspection on getting hyped for games.
 
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Lain
when Sony was also at fault for trying to market this thing as a big AAA PlayStation exclusive
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That's another thing, but Sony seemingly threw them right under the bus. Probably to save face.
 
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Update 1.10 with new stuff followed by 1.11 bug fix downloaded now. Predictably enough, the game crashed on a hyper jump. I almost fell over laughing when that happened.

You can buy freighters, after you've rescued them from hostile ships. You then dock with the freighter for a reward.
 
Tired Tyres
Update 1.10 with new stuff followed by 1.11 bug fix downloaded now. Predictably enough, the game crashed on a hyper jump. I almost fell over laughing when that happened.

You can buy freighters, after you've rescued them from hostile ships. You then dock with the freighter for a reward.
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Can you recall how big the update download was?
 
Tired Tyres
Does anyone still play this though. I mean it's a perfectly good game from the start. You get a start planet, fix your ship and discover stuff. It's interesting. The trouble is that's it. You've done everything. Then you just do the same stuff when you get to the next planet. It gets old really fast.
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Not anymore. It was OK i didnt have the issues most people had with crashes and such. I was more dissapointed on the under delivery of promised items but it was still a pretty solid game. Once i ground out my platinum I deleted it to save hard drive space.
 

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