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No Man's Sky Review Thread: The Scores Have Arrived (read OP)

icespide

Banned
Some of the price gripes I've seen don't have any substance (obviously, players who get into the groove of things will be getting a lot of hours of play out of it), but I can understand what some people mean when there are games with a similar enough structure that maybe excel in one area or another being sold closer to the $20-30 range. Experiences aren't interchangeable, but I get that reaction from people already into the genre.

yeah I can empathize more with an argument that "it shouldn't be $60 because the game lacks all of these things, etc." but those arguments where its just "it's an indie game! shouldn't be $60!!" just baffle me
 

Kaversmed

Member
This game looks God awful, in both aesthetics and performance. The landscapes look like what you get when you buy a Slushie and ask for 'a mix'.

In the game's defense, this is a pretty dull planet.. there are far more interesting planets in my opinion.
 

brau

Member
Insane. I don't really have any reason to not wait for a price drop and/or a slew of performance patches right now, doubt I'd even hit 60fps on my computer.

There are reddit pages full of these same problems as well. So its not just his rig. Startup crashes, slow downs, hitches in the game... its a mess.

He is running it at 1080p and with AA mind you.
 

Figboy79

Aftershock LA
It's not my first time either.

I know the Minecraft comparison keeps getting thrown out there, but I couldn't help but think about it while I was playing yesterday. There's a similar amount of "chores" to be done there with mining, growing crops, harvesting resources, etc. But those are also all centered around a core mechanic of creation, i.e., I do these chores so that I can make some crazy, neat building.

In NMS, I'm not really sure why I'm doing these chores. There doesn't seem to be as entertaining of a "reason" holding them together.

The reason you're doing those chores is so that you can upgrade your equipment. The reason for upgrading your equipment is so that you can explore further, survive longer, defend yourself better, etc. The real issue is whether or not you find those reasons compelling. I totally, 100% understand why someone wouldn't.

Last night, I spent a lot of time hunting for Drop Pods so I could increase my exosuit's storage slots. I think I found three or four, but it felt great to be able to hold more inventory, or add an upgrade (like toxicity protection, or being able to stay underwater for much, much longer). I found a better multi-tool as well, and it had some great upgrades built into it already, and then I slotted more upgrades into it. Now my multi-tool mines faster, and I can blow the doors off of a building in one shot, meaning I don't have to fight with sentinels when I break into a facility to find new tech.

It's not that the game doesn't have reason for it's function, it's that the reasons for those functions may not be compelling for people, and that's a fair criticism. On the flip side, some people might find those reasons absolutely engaging and that's a fair assessment too. What's annoying is that people don't want to respect other people's opinions. It's one thing to shit on something (or gushingly praise something), just for the schadenfreude, which is a dick thing to do, and it's another to express why you don't like the thing you don't like, or why you like the thing you like. Saying it's "dogshit," or "OMG, the best thing ever!!!" isn't really useful for anybody. I like to read why people like or don't like something. I find that more informative than a single word or sentence descriptor, and definitely more informative than a review score. Your 5/10 or 9/10 means nothing to me. Why you feel the game deserves those scores is, in my opinion, worth more.

I personally have no desire to police what people do and don't enjoy. If I'm having a good time, I'm having a good time. If I'm not having a good time, I'll play another game where I am having a good time. It doesn't bother me that people aren't liking what I like.

I've mentioned it before, but I just can't get into Minecraft. I've played it for hours trying to find the "fun," but it's not there for me, so I dropped it. On the flip side, I've been playing No Man's Sky for about 10+ hours, and I love it. It's frustrating and imperfect, but I'm enjoying myself way more than I ever did in Minecraft. I also love Terraria. I own Starbound, but I haven't had the time to play it much, even before NMS released. I've owned it since it was in Early Access, and it was rough as fuck, but from the little I played of the released version, it has changed a LOT, and that seems like a good thing so far! My hope is that NMS continues to get updates like the Day 1 Patch, that improves quality of life and builds upon the core gameplay loop. Base building and owning a freighter coming in the 2nd update sound interesting. I'm sure there'll be further bug fixes and gameplay tweaks beyond that as well.
 

Hupsel

Member
I really like the idea behind NMS, but...

. Don´t fall into the hype of a developer that still has to prove itself and only made a small (although good) downloadable game.
. Don´t fall into Sony BS hype.
. Sean Murray looks like a nice dude but his objective is to sell as many copies as possible of his product. That´s why he won´t talk about multiplayer and shit like that.
. Don´t say stupid shit like "this game can change gaming forever" and other things like that we saw in the preview thread for a game with vague informations from... Hello Games. They are not Nintendo from the 90s. Sean Murray isn´t Myiamoto in his prime to change gaming.
 

aravuus

Member
There are reddit pages full of these same problems as well. So its not just his rig. Startup crashes, slow downs, hitches in the game... its a mess.

He is running it at 1080p and with AA mind you.

Man, it's such a fucking bummer too. It looks like a fantastic podcast game, just explore around brainlessly while listening to whatever hilarious podcast has released their newest episode at the time.

Gotta stick to Just Cause 3 for my podcast needs for now.
 

TheMan

Member
Having only played a few hours so far, I will agree that the shiny veneer is wearing off and the sameness of the environments (especially the fucking buildings) as well as the repetitive gameplay elements are wearing thin. I still think there's enormous potential here, but the game needed more time in the oven. Should have been a Christmas release.
 

kiguel182

Member
Well, tbh he kinda makes the gameplay look bland by repeating "is this all there is to it? how can anyone enjoy holding down a button for an entire game?". He's being extremely facetious. My guess is he already decided he didn't want to like the game before going into it. I do get his criticism with the framerate pops, though - that's awful. :/

Listening to game criticism by Total Biscuit is a waste of time.
 

thelatestmodel

Junior, please.
This game looks God awful, in both aesthetics and performance. The landscapes look like what you get when you buy a Slushie and ask for 'a mix'.

I completely disagree, I think it looks gorgeous and the landscapes are spectacular.

Probably explains why the reviews are all over the map, it's a very divisive game. I'm buying it for sure.
 

brau

Member
Man, it's such a fucking bummer too. It looks like a fantastic podcast game, just explore around brainlessly while listening to whatever hilarious podcast has released their newest episode at the time.

Gotta stick to Just Cause 3 for my podcast needs for now.

That it does. Mindless exploration. Just wait and grab the game when it drops price and its updated a whole bunch and more features go into the game.

For $60 bucks that is totally not worth it.
 

Syder

Member
In the game's defense, this is a pretty dull planet.. there are far more interesting planets in my opinion.
I think they're pretty rare though. I've been watching a lot of streams/videos and you seem to spend most of your time staring at boring planets or UI.
 

mishakoz

Member
I love this game but I can see where the negativity comes from. There's a lot of things that are baffling.

1) planets dont have biomes or regions, mountain ranges or rivers. They are star wars planets with one geological feature dominating the entire planet.

2) there are a lot of geological features missing. Volcanoes, sand, islands, etc. (Haven't seen more than a handful of planets but that's my impression.

3) no cities and stuff. No like "oh wow this place is super different than everytging I have experienced so far"

4) base building and larger ships (FTL style with systems you can purchase) should have been in the game from the get go.

But yeah, i still love it. It's a shame because I wish It was the game everyone hoped it would be. I'm sad that some people aren't enjoying it as much as I am, because I think much of it is truly wonderous.
 

cHinzo

Member
Thank god I held off preordering this game. Was planning to see how good the game was gonna be in the first week, but I'm not convinced by all the streams of this game. Looked too much of the same on every planet.
 

Seventy70

Member
What's going on with the aesthetics of this game? The UI seems like a big rip off of Destiny. The robots look like they are ripped straight from Portal. The pickup crates look like they are ripped from Borderlands. Like I'm fine with developers taking inspirations from other games, but doing it this closely and blatantly just makes the game feel cheap. It reminds me of that game on Steam that got removed for ripping assets straight from other games. Obviously it's not as serious in this case, but it does ruin any uniqueness this game could've had aesthetically. It just comes off as cheap and out of place.
 
Was easy to tell from the beginning. Just thinking through it logically, there is no way that some man made procedural algorithms with our limited tech could possibly match the variety and depth that a game like this would need to be a truly great game.

It's a novel concept and I'm glad it exists. It's very cool, but it most certainly isn't worth the $60 price tag. If it was $20 I might have dipped in. *shrug*

Listening to game criticism by Total Biscuit is a waste of time.

Ridiculous. It might be a waste of time to you, but he has a specific idea about how a game is analyzed. If you don't enjoy it or agree with it, that's fine.
 
Man is this guy always so insufferable? He's like that friend who doesn't have many friends, that when you finally bring him along to watch a movie or something, he plays the cynical pessimist to look cool in a desperate attempt to get you to like him.

I'm suprised there wasn't more hostility from other reviewers with the delayed review copy shenanigans. Like, he's the only one that didn't just let them get away with it.
 

DedValve

Banned
Pretty low for a $60 game. Kind of a shame people were ok with the publisher/developer not allowing reviews at launch.
I seem to remember the Division doing the same, there's not even online multiplayer focus here (or at all) as an excuse

Are we doing this now? Holy fucking shit. And the "excuse" here is the exploration.

Why did i even come in this thread.
 

Kaji AF16

Member
I really like the idea behind NMS, but...

. Don´t fall into the hype of a developer that still has to prove itself and only made a small (although good) downloadable game.
. Don´t fall into Sony BS hype.
. Sean Murray looks like a nice dude but his objective is to sell as many copies as possible of his product. That´s why he won´t talk about multiplayer and shit like that.
. Don´t say stupid shit like "this game can change gaming forever" and other things like that we saw in the preview thread for a game with vague informations from... Hello Games. They are not Nintendo from the 90s. Sean Murray isn´t Myiamoto in his prime to change gaming.

Absolutely agree with this. Even the Sean Murray-Peter Molyneux comparisons are inconsistent, given that the latter had a legendary pedigree before transforming himself into a paradigmatic example of over-promising developer. The cult of personality towards Murray still surprises me.

I had never seen, in my 25+ years of gaming, such a hype for a game. Not even for Spore. There was undeniable creativity behind No Man´s Sky, but the expectations were impossible to be met; Sony (which, since it dominates the current generation, has been riding an almost impervious positive-image wave) and Hello Games obviously knew this but chose to (given the PS4 popularity and the monstruous hype for the game) still charge $60 for it and to be deliberately vague in the description of several key features. Now we almost have a virtual civil war between disappointed believers and "I-told-you-so" veterans / Xbox warriors.
 

Tain

Member
It's especially funny to be playing Shiren the Wanderer as this goes down.

It's just eeeeven more evidence to me that you need to get your hands dirty and design a lot of interesting things for a game to be interesting. Shiren has randomly generated dungeon floors... full of incredibly considered and manually-tweaked things. It isn't "emergent gameplay", nah: Chunsoft thought these things out, and thoroughly. And the game is great because of it.
 

domlolz

Banned
Five step guide to enjoying No Man's Sky:

1. Get it on PC.

2. Download Cheat Engine.

3. Use Cheat Engine to remove anything related to inventory management and resource gathering so you can focus on looking for cool ass aliens.

4. ???

5. Profit.

save yourself £40 and:

1. get a piece of paper

2. fold that piece of paper up several times along the length (4 segments should be fine)

3. pass the piece of paper around several of your friends/family and ask them to draw a part of any animal from head to feet, don't peek!

4. when everyone has had a go unfold the paper

congratulations you've now experienced No Man's Sky's amazing procedural animal creation system for the price of a piece of paper!
 

RPGam3r

Member
I don't really get stuff like this from page one:







So many words just to talk something bad into something good. Game reviews should be based on facts. Whether expectations are met, how good the graphics are, how big the scale of the game is and all of that. Not whether or not the game "is for you".

I'm happy for people who are enjoying it. I don't agree with the price tag and rather see it as an early access game, but that's me. I'm probably playing games who are bad and boring to other people. But to be honest II can't wait for the twenty thousand trillion planets, the devs are so much smarter than we are, it's more interesting because it's bad stuff to go away.

"Reviews... based on facts... expectations."

Reviews are mostly opinion, rarely ever do they delve into nothing but hard facts.
 

Kathian

Banned
Steam reviews look pretty god awful but one really weird thing is the game does not show in the top charts in Steam. I don't think its accurate, seems to be removed for some reason?
 
Have played a few hours of the PS4 version so far and so far I like it. It's definitely ambitious, but seems more like a style over substance game. I love the 70's sci-fi book atmosphere the game conveys and the exploration, but the core gameplay loop of mine resources to craft into game-advancing components isn't that compelling and can see that getting old after awhile. I'll probably just critical path to the center of the universe, which supposedly takes 30 to 40 hours? and call it a day. Now, if you going to be playing this for 300 plus hours/forever, I can see how you would be disappointed.
 
From the PC performance thread in case anyone hasn't seen it.


Turn off in-game vsync.
Set the framerate cap to max.
Run in borderless window mode.


People have been saying that doing those things fixes framerate issues and hitching.
 

OmegaDL50

Member
No Man’s Sky is a game that promised far more than it could ever deliver

What did NMS over promise on.

As far as I'm aware we recieved everything we were supposed to get.

What are these other promises of things that did not end up in the finished product?

I have no issue with people being disappointed with the game. It's reasonable that this game may not be for everyone. It's something entirely else to claim the developers made grandiose marketing claims and we only ever recieved what was always on offer.

Beyond the ambiguity of the online and possible multiplayer, which even still Sean Murray said it was unlikely. There isn't anything else that was claimed for this game to have that isn't here in some sort of fashion at least.
 

icespide

Banned
What did NMS over promise on.

As far as I'm aware we recieved everything we were supposed to get.

What are these other promises of things that did not end up in the finished product?

I have no issue with people being disappointed with the game. It's reasonable that this game may not be for everyone. It's something entirely else to claim the developers made grandiose marketing claims and we only ever recieved what was always on offer.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1260567
 
Looks like this generation continues on the quota of games that do not deliver on the hype.

To be fair, a lot of the hype from this game was created by the fans who let their imaginations run wild with what they'd be able to do instead of thinking about what's actually feasible.
 

Scotia

Banned
This game is so fucking repetitive. On my third system and I just can't be bothered to continue. 5/10 is an accurate score.
 

Indelible

Member
I was expecting polarizing opinions on this game, the hype made people think this would be more than it actually is.
 
Decent enough. 8/10 game for me. Has a few niggles and crashes and some design choices I don't agree with but other than that it's great. Play it for yourself before deciding.

Btw this guy seems to be getting around 80fps no drops on his rig. SLI support is probably the issue https://www.twitch.tv/lirik
 

CrisKre

Member
For 60 I´ll pass. If they add a substantial ammount of things then I´ll take another look but yeah, for now: no. I´ll get Abzu instead.
 

catilio

Member
I love this game but I can see where the negativity comes from. There's a lot of things that are baffling.

1) planets dont have biomes or regions, mountain ranges or rivers. They are star wars planets with one geological feature dominating the entire planet.

2) there are a lot of geological features missing. Volcanoes, sand, islands, etc. (Haven't seen more than a handful of planets but that's my impression.

3) no cities and stuff. No like "oh wow this place is super different than everytging I have experienced so far"

4) base building and larger ships (FTL style with systems you can purchase) should have been in the game from the get go.

But yeah, i still love it. It's a shame because I wish It was the game everyone hoped it would be. I'm sad that some people aren't enjoying it as much as I am, because I think much of it is truly wonderous.


So, from thin air? Because none of the above statements were to be expected in the game.

1.- Was revealed a looong time ago.
2.- Islands, there are plenty depending on the Planet. Volcanoes were never confirmed (IIRC)
3.- Never confirmed. They even revealed the existence of aliens around 2 months ago.
4.- Crafting was never a feature. They wanted you to explore, not stand on a planet. However, this may change with coming updates.

So basically, you wanted a game that was not real.
 
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