Is anyone actually enjoying No Man's Sky?

[Gilberreke]

All I see are people angry at it being a non-game that gets boring after a few hours, enraged that the marketing for the game was just plain lies and it not being even half as pretty as the trailers and such suggested.

Is anyone actually enjoying the game or is it just one of the more colossal fuckups of the last decade of gaming?


I was thinking of picking it up whenever I can get a decent discount on it, but from what everyone says, it's best to just stay clear? I'd love to hear thoughts from people that actually played it.

[Caboose]

I'm enjoying it, but I wasn't paying attention to the hype because I thought it was PS4 exclusive, and I'm playing it from my brother's steam library. So that severely toned down my expectations, as it were.

The game is pretty sedate so far, as I've only hit the first Space Station, but mining and flying and jetpacking all feel pretty good. Haven't done much combat yet. Critters are pretty neat so far, but their AI doesn't seem too much more advanced than Minecraft's, just wandering around making noise.

I really like how you interact with other races, collecting language fragments and trying to figure out what action to take based on observations of their behavior.

I see some bad omens of it quickly becoming stale if it stays course on 'grabbing X minerals and scan everything' on every planet. Hopefully that isn't the case and that there's more variety down the road.

One annoyance is how sluggish the player feels walking/running. Maybe there's a good reason for it but it feels like I'm walking at half the speed I should be.

But so far so good!

[mc_isaac]

The main problem with NMS is the complete lack of goals, which makes it feel like there isn't any gameplay. (Something that can be patched in and hopefully will be later.) It feels like a very early alpha, almost like the first time I played Minecraft.

It just drops you in this super huge sandbox gives you the parts to build the pieces to that make up a shovel and let's you go from there.


I have rather enjoyed the peace of just flying around mining and blasting stuff and trying to learn the languages of the races in my current system so that I understand more things then them calling me an interloper.
My playtime though consists of this:
Scan > find something interesting 10 minute walk or 30 second flight, so I fly > land > grab some plutonium for fuel as you can only take off 4 times without refueling > do whatever it is that was interesting (which is trade or try to not fail at some language test that I only know 6 words of) then rinse and repeat. When I get bored I fly into space to the next planet to see if it's any different than where i'm at.
Currently all the planets I've been to have almost no life (plant or animal) but have crap tons of gold. So I mine gold fly to a space station and sell it all. I made like 200k units in 2 play sessions of about an hour each. I have no idea if that's a lot but a new ship costs like 800k so I feel like it's decent.

I just hope they add gameplay so i'm doing these things for more of a reason then just to do them. :)

[Wafflewaffle]

A friend is playing it and had the best description of it i've heard so far "Its an awesome large scale universe that actually makes you feel small but you can only interact with one button. Then you reduce its awesomeness into 2d sprites, combine those into other 2d sprites in order to make it so you need to interact even less with it."

I found that to be pretty telling. This is "progression by dumbment", when you dumbdown or render null game elements to make the game easier. That's kinda boring.

[Taleric]

I can't help but feel frustrated when games are designed for multiple platform release. I respect devs needing the game to have more reach so long as they do not reduce features and play.

There have been some enjoyable PC releases that later ported to peasant platforms that did ok like KSP, Prison Architect, and 7DtD.

I am just baffled by people that would drop $60 blind for NMS while stuff like Empyrion Galactic Survival is out there in development and already has more play.

There needs to be a total biscuit level reviewer that dissuades people from overpriced releases to existing titles in development or released that are already superior.

[DaveYanakov]

They were going for the scale of the universe as the selling point but they wound up making it pointlessly large. There's not a whole lot of point trying to come up with names for a hundred different planets if no one is going to ever see them. If everyone were starting from a handful of different points rather than functionally infinite, it would have been a far more interesting game as players raced off in different directions, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind that helped springboard players who followed.

[TheGatesofLogic]

Honestly, having played and refunded it, it seems like exactly what FC would avoid in designing a game. Its core gameplay loop is boring and barely changes at all throughout the game. It doesn't have any depth to it at all. The game they marketed is not the same one they are selling and that alone bugs me Peter Molyneux-style.

Race interactions are so dumbed down they're inconsequential. Space-battles are incredibly small-scale and don't really do much for the game, and the controls on PC are wonky as shit. Ground combat is uninspired. Inventory management is godawful. The resource system is unnecessarily stripped down to a handful of materials homogenously spread across all planets, which essentially makes each planet identical to the last one in gameplay (IMO probably the biggest shortfall in the development of the game).

That said, I don't think it's a bad game in and of itself, it's merely very uninspired. It's mediocre. The problems are 1. that they're selling it at $60, and it isn't worth half of that to me, and 2. They marketed the game into failure.

[Gilberreke]

That said, I don't think it's a bad game in and of itself, it's merely very uninspired. It's mediocre. The problems are 1. that they're selling it at $60, and it isn't worth half of that to me, and 2. They marketed the game into failure.

I'm in the same boat. I see it and I want to play it, but for, like, $30 tops. At $20, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

I like dicking around in space, but I paid like less than half for Space Engineers and that one also has a game?

[kazerima]

There's also Rebel Galaxy, which I have yet to play but is supposed to be $20 and focuses more on large naval-like capital ship battles.

[DaveYanakov]

There's also Rebel Galaxy, which I have yet to play but is supposed to be $20 and focuses more on large naval-like capital ship battles.

It's sort of broadsidey, yes. It's also restricted to a single plane of travel, which adds to the at sea feel. Unfortunately your opponents are not restricted to that plane so sometimes they are too high or low to see and aim at. Also when I played it earlier this year it was quite buggy, but even with that it was one of the better Freelancer-'em-ups I've played.

Elite: Dangerous seems to be doing pretty much everything NMS was trying to do, but is a better game in pretty much every way, if a bit hardcore. Where NMS made it impossible to crash, E:D leaves you with a ship that is easier to crash while docking than not.

Other options include X3 with it's expanded universe and long list of available mods, Evochron Legacy, and possibly the closest alternative, Rodina

[Wafflewaffle]

Guys you are not really accounting the fact that NMS is revolutionary and you can name shit! Sure other games are doing it better for the same price, sure they have better graphics, sure they were available first in one way or another. But No Man Sky is revolutionary and you can upgrade passive systems!

What hurts me the most is that if this game came out for 30-40 bucks and Sony didnt hype the shit out of it, it would have been highly praised instead of mixed reviewed. I really hope the guys at it's studio can cope with the pressure.

[Niyu]

A friend sent me this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAwB7ogkik

[jorgebonafe]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgfxo3CLdNM

Edit.

For a more serious review...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTTPlqK8AnY

[TheGatesofLogic]

Ending spoilers, but really you should watch it anyways, there isn't much to spoil:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wsFhv_Kz38

Spoiler

Show

Feature-rich screensaver, I can't get over that shit haha.

[Katalliaan]

Another perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw5D4W1AxGY

[DaveYanakov]

This breakdown actually made me think about why BTW is better than Minecraft
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR_RJ1Kfgu0