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Comrade Koba posted:I often heard the phrase "a mile wide and an inch deep" used to describe NMS pre-NEXT, and while the variety has certainly improved since then it's still pretty accurate. One of the downsides of using only procedurally generated content, I guess. Next added basic poo poo and polish that should of been in the game at launch but they didn't really add much in the way of interesting content or player interactions, all of that is exactly the same as it was in vanilla.
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Mar 20, 2019 20:16
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There is also plenty of weird bugs and issues that still make the game feel like a beta. Like structures improperly generating so that they end up floating and buildings that seem to be missing geometry or textures so that parts of them are invisible. Honestly them opening the game up to modding (to allow people to add assets to the game to increase variety) would be great, but it would also probably fundamentally "break" stuff since they are insistent on pushing this as an online game despite being almost completely single player.
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Mar 20, 2019 20:24
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ThomasPaine posted:is this a good game yet It's unironically a better game than minecraft. It's not a super deep game, it never was supposed to be. It's a casual exploration game and it's a good one. A shame base building is locked behind a bunch of repetitive quests with arbitrary timers on them like a loving mobile game.
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Mar 20, 2019 21:06
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ToastyPotato posted:There is also plenty of weird bugs and issues that still make the game feel like a beta. Like structures improperly generating so that they end up floating and buildings that seem to be missing geometry or textures so that parts of them are invisible. Honestly them opening the game up to modding (to allow people to add assets to the game to increase variety) would be great, but it would also probably fundamentally "break" stuff since they are insistent on pushing this as an online game despite being almost completely single player. The game is open to modding though? You can add assets and change all kinds of different parameters. Lots of decent mods on the nexus already. Next big adventure adds and changes a bunch of stuff and makes it a lot better than vanilla. There was an old overhaul by some dude called rayrod but he stopped updating it to work on some new, much bigger overhaul. I'm not 100% sure how modding actually works, but the game uses mostly modular lumps of data so mods work over multiplayer somehow? Don't know how the additional assets work out.
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Mar 20, 2019 21:12
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The game definitely has more to do, and a bit more to see than Minecraft, but I wouldn't call this a particularly great exploration game. You can see pretty much all there is to see in under 40 hours. Probably way under that. I wouldn't be surprised if a determined casual player could land on one of each type of planet in about 10 hours or so. And that is the problem, since once you find a type of planet, you have basically seen every planet of its type, and where ever you land is more or less going to be the same as the entirety of the rest of the planet. There are also no planetary maps so outside of dropping things that make markers, you will never really know where you have and haven't been. Base building can be fun if you are willing to grind for materials or cheat or play creative. Bases have slightly more purpose than MC atleast, with the farming aspect and the crafting, but even then, much like with MC, you reach a point where unless you are inspired to make some crazy looking base, there really isn't much reason to build or expand. Especially when you get a freighter. Much like with MC, if you do complete some cool building project, it will ultimately just be a big empty structure. So to summarize, this game has: Exploration, but no real mapping and very little variety. Crafting and gathering/farming, but a super low hard cap limit on storage, so you can't really stockpile things. Tons of randomized starships, but a hard cap of 6 owned ships, so you can't collect them. Tons of randomized multitools, but a hard cap of 1 owned tool, so you can't collect them. Tons of randomized animals, that all behave 1 of 2 or 3 ways, and generally fall into a handful of categories in terms of appearance variance. Dont Touch ME posted:The game is open to modding though? You can add assets and change all kinds of different parameters. Lots of decent mods on the nexus already. Next big adventure adds and changes a bunch of stuff and makes it a lot better than vanilla. There was an old overhaul by some dude called rayrod but he stopped updating it to work on some new, much bigger overhaul. By assets I mean adding things to increase variance to the RNG of the world generators. Adding Star Trek ships and banners is not what I meant. I will give nexus another look, but I didn't see anything particularly interesting last week, with most of the stuff being themed replacements and graphical mods. And cheat style mods. Edit: Ok I see the next big adventure mod now. I will have to check it out and see how playable it is. It might be what I wanted. ToastyPotato fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Mar 20, 2019 |
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Mar 20, 2019 21:19
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I enjoyed it, but there was just so much busywork and some of the stuff I don't know how anyone had the patience for (scanning all the animals on planets for example). I liked base building but there was just so much back and forth with materials that I got bored after a few hours and can't really be bothered going back.
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Mar 20, 2019 21:24
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A huge issue is that there's also no interesting progression, the ship you start with? Well, it handles like every other ship in the Universe. The gun you start with? Same as the others except for look and if they shoot a laser or bullets. You experience one thing that you're only going to see variations of said things. Your first dogfight is interesting, but it's exactly the same as all other dogfights after because enemy ships don't vary at all. It's not just the small things but core gameplay mechanics. Your shields and jetpack are the same, only ever getting buffs to their duration and the few unlockable skills you get are attained within a half hour (the scanner and poo poo). The worst part about all of the upgrades you get, is that they're basically all loving pointless. You have no need for a maxed out shield ever, or the strongest gun because there isn't anything in the game that requires you to have anything that powerful. Then once you have all that stuff that takes a ton of grinding with nothing to fend off or destroy... there's nothing left to do.
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Mar 20, 2019 22:50
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The one exception is Sentinel super freighters because those will always pose the risk of loving you up no matter how good your ship is. Otherwise yeah, your ability to upgrade vastly outstrips the game's ability to challenge you.
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Mar 20, 2019 23:04
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Having planets with several distinct biomes as opposed to just being Ice Planet, Desert Planet, Forest Planet, etc. would make exploration at least a bit more interesting, but I doubt it’ll ever happen.
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Mar 20, 2019 23:39
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Console memory limitations probably guarantee NMS will never be the game it could have been.
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Mar 20, 2019 23:42
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I'm not sure that's a "console limitations" thing so much as it is to do with their terraforming algorithm. And if they change it now it's guaranteed to break discovered planets everywhere.
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Mar 21, 2019 00:12
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Thundarr posted:I'm not sure that's a "console limitations" thing so much as it is to do with their terraforming algorithm. And if they change it now it's guaranteed to break discovered planets everywhere. They have broken discovered planets at least once since launch already. Also multiple biomes per planet means more memory/RAM needed to load all the different stuff that will generate. Single biomes that all look the same means loading a fraction of the models and textures into memory.
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Mar 21, 2019 00:15
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I think it's more the limits of procedural generation in making unique content. It sounds impressive, millions of planets with unique animal and plant life. But they mostly end up being pretty similar. It's the same thing with Elite:Dangerous. I love the game, but even with its billions of solar systems- once you've visited a dozen or so of them you've pretty much seen everything there is to see.
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Mar 21, 2019 00:34
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Yeah that's pretty much what I'm getting at. Making the planet generation more complicated than it already is may not be realistic regardless of what platform you put it on, assuming you want the results to be coherent and not, say, a thousand straight systems of planets with random biome placements that make even less sense than the monobiome planets we have now. Assuming it was done properly, I'm not even sure texture loading would be that big an issue anyway since most of the stuff doesn't get loaded until you're really close to it anyway.
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Mar 21, 2019 00:39
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Well it could also be both or either one, but seeing as how there are a handful of different looking planets in the game, the lack of the ability to combine them seems to indicate that it probably can't. Especially simple stuff like lush worlds and cold worlds. But yeah the generation in general is also fairly shallow. But considering the performance issues I saw constantly reported for the PS4 version, and the issues on PC, even when people had beefy computers, I feel like the engine just can't handle trying to load too much poo poo. Which is probably also why people get bugs where some stuff gets deleted from their bases, or how terrain would regenerate and bury poo poo people dug out.
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Mar 21, 2019 00:43
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Zazz Razzamatazz posted:I think it's more the limits of procedural generation in making unique content. The pool that the game pulls from to make it's variations is way too tiny, it's the curse of procgen. I made a post about this in the Bloodborne thread in regards to the Chalice Dungeons; there's only so many prefabs to pull from, things that someone put thought into, and variations made by a computer don't hold up to things that human thought went into. Plus, the human brain is quick to notice patterns and that's all algorithms poo poo out in procgen games so things not only become familiar but predictable. The scope that NMS takes on though, you'd need a triple A studio just to make assets for years that can be tweaked by the algorithm so things remain fresh. It also doesn't help that there's no sentient life to encounter that isn't sitting down. There's so much you could do with dudes running around with guns, swords or fists and poo poo in a sci-fi setting.
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Mar 21, 2019 01:04
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That's not true - the majority of space stations is standing room only.
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Mar 21, 2019 01:17
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Yeah as someone pretty familiar with procedural generation, NMS was exactly what I was expecting it to be on release, a more game-y Noctis IV. Game development isn't magic! A small studio can only do so much in such a short amount of time. Game probably could have worked a lot better if it was more of a permadeath, see if you can make it to the center kind of a game. But its too slow and easy for that kind of thing. Oh well.
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Mar 22, 2019 23:32
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A lunatic hybrid between No Man's Sky and FTL would be awesome. Much faster gameplay, vastly less grinding, you're on a time limit with each jump and have to jump away again after a limited amount of exploration, and you can only jump towards the core - because the universe is swiftly corrupting from the outside in and you have to hit the reset button before reality crashes. As you get closer to the core, poo poo starts to get really unhinged with rampant security systems, increasingly vicious pirate fleets, and wars breaking out between the factions as it starts to dawn on everyone that doomsday is coming.
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Mar 23, 2019 00:33
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NMS occupies this weird space for me where as it is now all patched up, it’s a dream game. But only on paper. Actually playing it the novelty wears off fast. I find I’m more inclined to play it if I’m in the mood for something Minecraf-y. But if I want space and exploration, I just dig into Elite.
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Mar 23, 2019 01:21
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In Elite when I fly into a system that nobody else has ever entered and land on a planet that nobody has ever touched, the feeling of utter solitude is thick enough to cut. I actually feel lonely in a way, sitting on a barren lump in nowhere. No Man's Sky mostly doesn't have that same feeling. Now that it actually has abandoned systems where there isn't a Space Walmart every mile on every planet and there aren't dozens of freighters chilling in space, it helps a lot, but it's still not quite the same.
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Mar 23, 2019 04:44
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Valatar posted:In Elite when I fly into a system that nobody else has ever entered and land on a planet that nobody has ever touched, the feeling of utter solitude is thick enough to cut. I actually feel lonely in a way, sitting on a barren lump in nowhere. No Man's Sky mostly doesn't have that same feeling. Now that it actually has abandoned systems where there isn't a Space Walmart every mile on every planet and there aren't dozens of freighters chilling in space, it helps a lot, but it's still not quite the same.
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Mar 23, 2019 15:25
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I think what I wanted in NMS is the sense of exploration Mass Effect 1 gave you. Exploring a planet, coming across strange artifacts, little bases, etc. NMS does all that, but with a very ‘so what?’ feeling, there being no sense of adding to a greater context.
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Mar 23, 2019 18:12
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The_Doctor posted:I think what I wanted in NMS is the sense of exploration Mass Effect 1 gave you. Exploring a planet, coming across strange artifacts, little bases, etc. NMS does all that, but with a very ‘so what?’ feeling, there being no sense of adding to a greater context. Then again, most of the random stuff you come upon in ME have little to no greater context either. The 47th geth outpost/pirate hideout/Cerberus base you find will look just like the 46 previous ones. A few of them have associated sidequests (of the "go here, kill everything" variety), but even those use the same prefab buildings and enemies as the rest. It's easier to ignore in ME, though, because the exploration part is an optional minigame instead of the main goal (as opposed to NMS).
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Mar 23, 2019 19:25
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chaosapiant posted:NMS occupies this weird space for me where as it is now all patched up, it’s a dream game. But only on paper. Actually playing it the novelty wears off fast. I find I’m more inclined to play it if I’m in the mood for something Minecraf-y. But if I want space and exploration, I just dig into Elite. Babby’s first procedural content game? We’ve done this exact thing with Spore. There’s been umteen other games between then and now that are vast oceans that are only an inch deep. Elite Dangerous included. If Star Citizen ever gets released, you’ll see the exact same thing but a much grander scale of outrage. These kinds of games make promises that can’t possibly deliver on what people extrapolate. NMS was particularly bad because it showed us a lot of fake gameplay trailers that they couldn’t make happen.
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Mar 23, 2019 22:28
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Zesty posted:These kinds of games make promises that can’t possibly deliver on what people extrapolate. Someone should convince the Dwarf Fortress guy to make a sci-fi themed procgen game. 
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Mar 24, 2019 06:32
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Zesty posted:fake gameplay trailers Ugh. This poo poo. I haven't seen it in years and now I'm watching it after having played through all the content. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLtmEjqzg7M
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Mar 24, 2019 07:34
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Even after two and a half years and numerous content patches the creature proc gen and behaviour isn't even remotely that interesting.
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Mar 24, 2019 08:30
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Xik posted:Even after two and a half years and numerous content patches the creature proc gen and behaviour isn't even remotely that interesting. But look! We added new quests chockfull of multi-hour cooldowns! Isn't that exciting?? Our biggest update yet is coming, where we completely redo the crafting recipes for the 3rd time and add in new economy items! It's technically more content!
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Mar 25, 2019 00:04
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They've done good work with their updates, give them credit. But it hasn't made the game into something it's not. It's forever going to have the weaknesses of being a procedural game, and all the updates are going to ever do is add another inch or two to the puddle ocean. I'm okay with that; I feel at this point that I've gotten my money's worth, so any further upgrades are gravy. Anyone expecting otherwise is setting themselves up for a disappointment.
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Mar 25, 2019 04:12
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I have also spent many hours with the game and enjoyed it. I guess they get some credit for not immediately dumping support after the negative launch, though it was still a commercial success so not really that surprising? I am glad they keep making content updates after so long, it means I can probably come back in a year or so and get some more enjoyment out of it. It's a bit disingenuous to say "if you expected the game to ever be like the launch trailer then you're setting yourself up for disappointment". The game is still full price, double or triple what some "mid-size" publisher games are on release. They also still have a couple of the original release screenshots up on steam and the press kit also contains a bunch of the BS trailers which were pulled from Steam.  I don't think there is any need to defend their crummy marketing practises, even if you are a fan of the game.
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Mar 25, 2019 04:50
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So The game is getting VR on ps4, hopefully other platforms as well.
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Mar 25, 2019 22:13
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Thank goodness. I would hate to see people wasted many hundreds of dollars.
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Mar 25, 2019 22:30
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RpKmuRX0CM I really thought this game pushed the console too hard to support VR in recognizable form, but I guess they found a way to do it. Either that or they've been doing something terribly wrong performance-wise this entire time. It probably also has other compromises that aren't visible in that short, compressed video. haveblue fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Mar 25, 2019 |
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Mar 25, 2019 22:32
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What do I win?
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Mar 25, 2019 22:39
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Twibbit posted:So The game is getting VR on ps4, hopefully other platforms as well. Steam VR as well. Good reason to break out my rift this summer.
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Mar 25, 2019 23:27
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Sounds like they put a lot of work into the VR. https://twitter.com/NoMansSky/status/1110314658320125952
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Mar 25, 2019 23:59
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Not shown: Inventory and crafting UIs which are already terrible with traditional input...
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Mar 26, 2019 00:02
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haveblue posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RpKmuRX0CM I don't think that is PSVR footage though. Looks more like steam vr to me.
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Mar 26, 2019 00:06
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Not gonna lie, VR seems like a complete waste unless they also hammer out all of the QoL poo poo as well.
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Mar 26, 2019 04:50
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