It's pretty amusing that this game went from over hyped to an absolute dumpster fire to probably one of the best space games ever made. One hell of a comeback story.
Honestly to me it's more promising to see a game studio stick behind their game like this rather than having the initial game be good. A good studio will still have bad games, but knowing that a studio will stand behind their bad game and work on it until it's good means a lot.
It's definitely cool, they could have pulled the rug and run away with the money.
we just have to do some work on the overhyping a game and preorder part, but its looking like i might pick up this game
I don't see why it's suddenly the best space game... The core mechanic seems to be the same as the original. Mine materials that are the same on every planet, so you can build space ships and better miners that take more materials and do it over and over again.
When I was playing on launch day, I had a really good first impression but it turned into disappointment, since all the planets had the same minerals. May as well stay on the first planet forever.
That is pretty reductive. Like, it's a sim. You could describe just about any sim the same way. "You just do this thing to do that thing". How is this any different from any other game?
I'm not saying it's the best space game, but I had fun when I played it and it definitely didn't just feel like I was mining materials just to mine more materials.
The problem is that NMS is very repetitive and bland. Learning alien words takes for-fucking-ever, finding freighter upgrades is one of the worst time sinks in the game, combat feels more tedious and padded out than that of Everquest, looking for "that one cool ship" or "cool looking weapon" is pure RNG and lucking out on it not coming as a C class, upgrading inventory space is either a system jumping time sink or "planetary exploration" time sink.
Nearly nothing you do in the game gives you a sense of accomplishment and, after 4-8 hours or so after first starting playing, you're unlikely to look forward to any specific activity because "it's fun". There's a lot "to do" but very little motivation to, like why even bother being the mayor of a settlement?
Even on permadeath the game offers no real challenge once you're off the starting planet.
I think a lot of people are just very, very pleased with how well it's being supported compared to its initial launch and how this game company has become an outlier in the industry. They conflate their love for the company's business practices with the game's mechanics. So while the game may be great, many subconsciously give it a boost because of its legacy.
Every planet doesn’t have every material you need for crafting everything. But a single solar system likely has most of it. There are key elements on every planet that are meant to make sure a player never gets stranded. I guess one could argue for that to be a game mode though if it isn’t already where you very well could end up on a planet and have no way to survive.
A lot of people like the gameplay loop from day one but the initial lies about how multiplayer worked was a driving force behind the unhappiness. Once that was fixed it was a shallow experience but a lot of people would have been content with it. Instead Hello Games keeps supporting it and putting out new content updates. There are still a lot of features and improvements people would like for the game and those very well may see the light of day with the passion Hello Games has shown for improving it. That’s why so many people think favorably of them. There are a ton of other bigger studios that would never show this level of dedication and community support.
Meanwhile in Star Citizen.
And they're all "in stock". How lucky!
Whoa, false scarcity, virtual goods tied to an online service, and nosebleed prices? What's not to like?
Among the best space games? What the heck are you comparing it to?
IMO it's an okay giant sandbox but terrible as an actual game.
One of those games I’m glad I bought at launch, although I’ve fired it up 3-4 times and struggled with the mechanics… it’s nice to know it’s still evolving and I can always start fresh again with the new content. If I wasn’t so deep into Helldivers I’d give it another go right now… but Democracy can’t wait!
Same. I keep picking it up every now and again but it really needs me to put a bit of time into it to understand all the new mechanics since launch. I’ll get to it one day!
I felt this same way until I jumped into the Omega expedition. It was an excellent crash course for all the game offers and I now feel way more comfortable jumping into the base game and doing whatever I feel up to.
I tried the game two or three times sitting down with the "I want to play a space sim" mindset and could never get past the tutorial. Then the next time, it had clicked that it's a survival crafter that just happens to have a space theme. When I sat down with that mindset and perspective on what I was in for, I suddenly throughly enjoyed the game.
The game just does a really bad job of showing you what it is trailers and other media. Sure, all the things it shows off are there, but they're not the core of the game.
NMS development is the best redemption arc story in a long time.
The whole situation just made me believe Sean Murray really wanted to make a cool game but he got overwhelmed by the media attention and started running his mouth. Maybe he felt like he had to overpromise and say yes to everything he was asked? Hello Games was still an indie studio before it got all that attention.
If he had done it in bad faith it would have been much easier to cut his losses and run away with the money. Nearly 10 years of expansions wouldn't come out of it if not for legitimate passion.
It also made their next game announcement pretty funny.
Well, with ship customization this game is finished enough for me to play it again.
That was the only thing left keeping me from being interested in the game. Finally, ship customization. Finally.
Common Hello Games W
As someone who wanted to love Elite Dangerous but couldn't get behind the grind and monotony of it, would this game be worth getting now?
Ehhh, maybe. While the game is so much better than it was at launch, it's still pretty sandboxy and repetitive. I found myself dropping it after I realized I was trying to build bases to get better at gathering resources to make money to buy bigger ships to make more money to... What exactly?
Yea Elite Dangeous is kind of the same, you have to make your own objectives or you're just running missions to make money to buy ships to be more efficient at those runs and eventually even bigger ships to make more money.
I came to a realization a few years ago that I am too boring to play sandbox games. I need a tightly crafted narrative, I cannot be left to my own devices. After a long time of trying to get into every sandbox game that looked cool, it was such a relief to finally realize that about myself.
One thing I loved about Elite was the collection of mini games. Navigating through the space station to your landing pad, finding a suitable patch of surface to touchdown on a planet, having to fight or yield to a supercruise interdiction, they all came together to make Elite feel like a driving game where your vehicle happens to be a spaceship.
In No Man's Sky landing and takeoff are achieved with a singular button press. And the ship combat is there to check a box. The game is mostly about taking pics of flora and fauna and digging trenches in planets for minerals.
Gave it a whirl. Basically, you can now scrap ships to get their components to create a new ship inside any station. Couldn't find any merchant within the station selling pieces, so you have to go out and explore, or scrap some of your own ships.
Stations now look slightly different from one another and no longer have those semi-hidden rooms that nobody cared about. Alien vendors now give a discount if you're at a good standing with their race. Guild "vendors" offer a list of stuff for free, but I don't get why the prompt is red instead of white. Performance is still mostly CPU bound.
Overall decent update, but the new features don't warrant playing more than 1 hour.
Wow finally!
My last foray into NMS ended when I found a little town and was promptly attacked by sentinels that could heal each other through walls.
I remember when this game was a dumpster fire. Is it actually a video game now?
Yes. But last time I played it (which was admittedly, idk, 2 years and something like 10 major updates ago now ? These guys just don't stop), barring a few exceptions the gameplay was all breadth and no depth. You could do a ton of different things but after you had done a thing once, every other instances of the same activity would feel extremely samey
Edit: I should point out that I'm very much ok with repetition if the gameplay is deep enough to keep me interested. I have easily played various horde shooter games for a total of ~2500 hours. Not including the ~800 hours in Warframe, where the gameplay isn't even that deep, but still interesting enough to make the grind for new toys bearable.
All breadth and no depth, still the same. Some 12 different planet types, a number of neat looking anomaly planets that exist only for sightseeing (one of my favorites was a planet where everything is covered in a metallic hexagonal mesh). As I said in another comment in this thread, the game is very repetitive with some activities being needlessly padded out to make you waste as much time as possible (learning alien words, going into derelict freighters to get upgrades)
Yes, for a while now.
Honestly I'm really thrilled to play the update tonight.
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