There seems to be a lot of whining from people who expecting a procedurally generated space exploration sandbox to be a structured theme park with quests and a story and lots of combat and RvR or something. I'm not sure that I wouldn't get bored after a certain amount of aimless meandering around the galaxy looking for resources and new life forms, but I feel like half the reviewers basically ignored the entire premise of the game before playing it. This is why gaming is stuffed full of shitty WoW clones. Every time someone releases another shitty WoW clone reviewers bitch about how it's kinda shitty and give it 7/10 and complain about why don't people make other types of games, but as soon as someone goes back to old-school sandbox make-your-own-fun gaming, they get a bunch of 4/10 reviews because the monkeys on youtube don't know how to entertain themselves without constantly having a teaser dangled under their nose.
I have no idea about this game or even saw much about it (even though I wanted to purchase it). Have the Devs said anything about Multiplayer at all? Future perhaps? Meandering about, while sometimes fun, is whole loads more fun when you're dodging tri-gendered Zebramutosauruses with friends. Anyways, as always thankful to my fellow Borfians in helping me make more informed purchasing decisions with money I don't actually have.
After watching several hours of gameplay vids, it doesn't even look really bad. Just rushed and WAY too overhyped. People can blame themselves for huge disappointments after swallowing the hypebait whole. I'm interested to get it from sale after all the problems get fixed. Hopefully. Seems like aimless and relaxing exploration game to kill some time with.
I have played it for about 25 hours now and have traveled through several planets/systems and can say that while I really liked it at first, it has become the same old thing over and over again. Get to a new system, explore the planet, make antimatter/warp cell to go to next system. repeat The point of the game is to get to the center of the universe or you can follow the Atlas story line, or just fly around discovering new places. But if you want spoilers, you can find out how the Atlas line ends already. Somebody finished the Atlas story line in less than 24 hours from the games release and posted the video on youtube. Anyway, you can upgrade your exosuit to have more inventory space and survive longer in various environments. You can upgrade your ship or buy a new one from random npcs that you meet in the space stations. Also you can find crashed ships on the planets and fix them, but you leave your old ship there. I left my pre-order ship on a random planet because I found one that had 3x the cargo space and had better weapons and upgrades. Also I had no issues with the PC version until I upgraded my nvidia drivers to the "game ready" version. It stutters and takes looks worse than before. I just rolled back my drivers to the previous version and it works great again.
If you're enjoying it, then that's great! I'm still kind of on the fence how I feel about it after a few hours of play. I really think what would tip me over the edge is being able to use VR with it. Immersion like that would really make the spectacle and exploratory nature of the game strong.
The usual way to fix that is to have some things that aren't procedurally generated or are only partially generated to break up the homogeneity. No idea how you'd do that on something the scale of NMS though.
I would like to see something like every X many planets generated has a civilization/city on it that you can interact with. They can mix up what level of development the civ is in too.
It's an insane amount of work to have all the civs be procedurally generated / randomized and have a lot of variability while also having a lot of content. Also there's the threat of creating tons of non-quality content. Hence it takes even longer to make a system that creates a lot of good content. Sometimes there's no getting around to making good content by hand. In procedural galaxy to get to the hand created stuff you'll need to cheat and use triggers, insert hand crafted thing at nth planet. Then people will figure out that "it always appears on nth planet so your only goal is to travel n planets as fast as you can". There's no pleasing everyone. In my view people often also play games the wrong way. Procedural and exploration games are mutually exclusive with "how to finish fast" type of gameplay. Some people are obsessed with speed and optimization and they reveal all the clockwork behind the curtain and ruin the fun. My suggestion: to enjoy this type of game; don't read any of the guides etc. The fun in these games is to learn things mostly on your own and imagine things. Like reading a book. Use your imagination and take your time. Don't go read the "every nth happens X". You don't want to take a peek behind the curtains if you're going to want to enjoy the show. This is also why there are no sims on consoles etc. Someone once made a flight sim on consoles that had first person view and all. Everyone was complaining about not being able to collect health upgrades and for the lack of "shoot missiles at every enemy" button. Also they complained about having to fly 2 minutes at your enemy after skipping the 3 hour patrol route. The 2 minutes during which the enemy closes in from 8km was "boring". So it was the last attempt to make such a game for consoles. Many PC gamers have that same attitude. "Hey, this isn't WoW! I hate it" I think there was a great Extra Credits (iirc) video about how WoW ruined RPG.
Which is why gaming niches usually only exist on PC's. PC gaming is far more diversified and not quite as focused as consoles. I love flying a desk, so I have a monster PC. My 14 year old nephew? Nah... thus, PS4.
I absolutely love PC. I'm also such a puritan that I refuse to play on most other things and I hate, I really hate and loathe mobile and I view consoles as some sort of abomination or chimera that exists in the purgatory between mobile and PC while having the worst of both worlds. But I feel at peace with how things are. I see consoles and mobile as some sort of breeding ground for future PC gamers. Play 10-20 years of those shitty games and chances are that they'll no longer be satisfied by shitty interfaces, clunky mechanics and knee depth. Chances are they will be craving for more, in their hearts they'll know they aren't happy with that shit. Inside every mobile and console gamer there's a PC gamer screaming to get out.
I agree with you PC is the one and only platform. Still I believe consoles and mobile gaming have their place. Mobile gaming is a great time killer if you are waiting for something especially if you can find a game that you like. Consoles have been the best choice for when you have friends over but PC have been getting better in that department. If all they play are shitty games how are they supposed to know that there is something good out there? In the end they will just believe that the shitty games are good.
PC is, and will remain for a long time, the only "Open" platform. People talk about cost, but cost over time (and cost of the games themselves) help offset that. I'll agree that Consoles and mobile are effectively the two previous steps. Most kids start on Mobile, then end up wanting more. They migrate to Consoles but the itch for a true MMO / World Builder will eventually bite and before long, the first PC rig gets built. So I see it as a sort of natural progression - which is why I don't wail on other platforms nearly as much as I used to. They have the power to introduce increasingly larger audiences to my beloved platform, which is where I'd guess most folks end up staying. PC just offers so much more - 4k, VR and it's arguably the best MMO platform. And you can still use it as a work/hobby tool once you exit your game. And bringing this back to NMS, I hear the port to PC is unsurprisingly bad?
That has been the consensus what I've seen from the videos. Lot of stuttering for no obvious reasons even for relatively powerful rigs. And the game isn't even that graphically intensive. Just very poorly optimized. Bisquit even compared it to the Arkham City PC port.
That's rough - and seeing as PC's my only platform, I'll hold off until NMS at least gets patched up.
