It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing.
It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game
A big name in proc gen is Kate Compton who coined the term "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" to describe this phenomenon of technically unique but not different enough to matter - I googled "10000 bowls of oatmeal" to see if there was a good article and the second link was about it and nms
That's pretty much the perfect description of NMS. Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way. Oh look...this planet has 4 legged animals that are green and bumpy and the last one they were brown and spiky...but they move the same and act the same. Yawn.
I haven't played it myself, but surely an article written one month after the game's release doesn't do it justice, considering there have been multiple major updates attempting to address the gripes players initially had with the game in the 10 years since then (And review trends on steam indicate that these attempts were successful)
One thing this article lacks is any tips on how to still do procedural generation while partly mitigating the oatmeal issue. In other words, define a more sophisticated generation procedure that can add character and identity.
It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.
I vaguely recall an episode of the Triple Click podcast around 2023 where they had a serious AI fanboy who was rah rah-ing about future procedural generation in games. It might have been Casey Anthony, but I'm unable to re-listen while at work.
The fanboy started saying how they could have endless different levels in Destiny 2... which is absurdly off-base since the entire game is just running through the same 9 sandboxes and 12 raids over and over and over again
He then went on to talk about AI creating an album as perfect as OK Computer on-demand, which was gently putdown by Kirk (who is an exceptional musician but also chill enough to suffer fools)
This is something I realized about game design: if you have a procedurally generated world like XCOM, almost every playthrough (or "dungeon") has to produce something new to the player. Something like 10% of each run should actually have something new and unique. That's what makes games like Enter the Gungeon and XCOM 2 work and games like early No Man's Sky fail.
even as someone who enjoyed NMS as a nightly bowl of oatmeal, a second screen game while I listened to a podcast or a documentary, I can't dispute the accuracy of this metaphor. After a while it became brain off semitainment, and when paired with hands off semitainment I ended up with a full experience, but years later it still costs $70 to become nearly entertained and its become obvious that there are limits to how much you can make procedural generation not such as the core, heart and soul of a gaming experience.
The best things about the game (and it is a good game at this point, they continued to add to it at a steady pace since launch) are the human written stories.
But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast. But also, the worst thing about the human-written stories is that they're often transparently designed around getting you to visit more abandoned malls. The procgen infinity of space is almost a negative, even though it's the game's whole schtick.
I guess now that I think of it like that, it's really impressive they made a fun game despite having to make it fit a boring repetitive universe.
> But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast.
Ironically, that’s how I always imagined actual space exploration to turn out once the initial wonders are exhausted.
Space is huge, yes, and everything is kinda unique, but also not in a meaningful sense. Most of the continued amazement we associate with the idea of space exploration comes from human-written stories that fill space with a human variety that just isn’t there.
On that last point, when I first played Dyson Sphere Program (DSP), I left the starting planet without enough resources and didn't understand the inter-planetary warp drive system .. I just drifted out into space and couldn't get back with the fuel I had left. It was almost scary; the vastness of the space was so apparent, it was very immersive to me.
Early game you don't have enough resources to travel quickly through the solar system you start in, nevermind between systems, it takes time. It gives a real impression of scale and wonder imo. You have to plan taking the scale into account - and it's nowhere near realistic. They got a good balance there.
There are levels to this. The NMS day/night cycle is geocentric.
It's a sandbox game yet when it comes to its "space" premise everything is thrown out the window. Dogfights carry no difficulty or skill. Flying around a system is pretty much pointless other than to stumble upon quests
(100% RNG). Most of the fun you'll get at planet surface.
I don't think that simulating the vastness of the universe is ever going to be fun, but approximating a theme park ride that evokes the vastness of the universe can be breathtaking, like Outer Wilds was. (The gameplay is confined to a single solar system, but it certainly makes you feel both the a sense of adventure, and the vastness of space-time.)
I found a barren planet in a black hole system where the vibe was all dark and shadowy with the light being tinted purple, and just some crystals or something on the surface, alongside a damaged robot that you could interact with.
There was also a world that had high Sentinel activity where I founded a settlement (well, more like took over managing it), however as it turns out it’d have those gravity storms often during which you could soar through the air.
There was also a world where the surface was toxic and you couldn’t stay on it for long, so I excavated a base underground, like something out of Red Faction.
For what it’s worth, a lot of it can feel samey (most of the scanning) and kinda boring, but while there aren’t that many insanely huge and cinematic moments, sometimes RNG hits just right and you get something nice.
That sounds cool, but it's either a handcrafted world (if NMS has those) or pure luck. If it's the latter, then it can't have any depth. At best it can have some procedurally generated content that's going to be something you've seen before. Looks cool, but no substance.
Are you sure that you've played it recently? They added an actual story, a huge quest hub, unique items, tons of stuff to do really. I'm quite overwhelmed with the amount of things to do and I don't typically enjoy sandboxes.
Not OP, but my main issue is that after visiting a few systems and a bunch of planets, you kinda saw everything the procedural generation has to offer, and visiting planets becomes boring quickly, at least for me. There are differences, and as someone mentioned there are some unique planets for sure, but for the most part they all look samey. Wildlife is also just walking/flying around doing nothing.
This takes away the incentive to go and explore, which is supposed to be the main attraction to the game
I've bounced off NMS several times, but each time I come back, I reason that they've added so many systems now that the procedural generation must finally feel genuinely deep and interesting.
And maybe it has, but the first 60 minutes of the game still feel like enough of a slog that I have yet to get to any of the good stuff.
Because most of the new feature are not connected to each other.
Take a gravition coil. It's like in Half Life - but You can only use with very limited set of objects, that were added in same update as gravition coil. Make it useless and not fun...
Same. Every time i re-download it and start a new game I never get past the tutorial because i was so incredibly bored so soon, i always wanted to like this game and i love how much effort they keep making but... sandboxes games are just so boring.
I like to tinker with making games now and then, and I have learned that there are lots of game ideas I have that are more fun to make than play. A lot of those look like No Mans Sky. I feel like the devs fell in love with procedural generation and never thought about what kind of experience they want to have.
I say this because I feel the same thing as you when I go back, and I really want to like it.
considering the company still exist and servers are still up I assume not everyone shares your opinion. its a pretty good milestone for an online game.
I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse". A thought that comes to me as I type this is what if you try to co-evolve the ecosystems so it doesn't feel like it's just a mix of the same base components in different quantities.
I think a procedural generated space opera is a bit difficult to do.
Space operas are closer to fantasy than hard science fiction: they are about extraordinary people and their extraordinary interactions, you aren't supposed to think hard about the physics.
Procedural generation, on the other hand, is all about emergent behavior, which is closer to hard science fiction: tweak the rules and see what happens. You have to build some deep core physics that are robust, make all the other systems interact in sensible ways over a wide range of conditions, and not worry when balance goes completely off the rails in some cases (in fact, that's the fun part).
No man's sky is a space opera. You could imagine it being hard science fiction: digging into the ground could be deadly (as opposed to a reliable shelter), water / atmosphere mechanics could change (as opposed to just... water and air), gravity could have a much greater range, resource concentrations could vary more, etc. You'd need some mechanics updates to avoid making this frustrating, but maybe not so many as you need to keep the space-opera plot moving.
I don't know that it's possible. Once you see 5-10 of "new thing" you sorta understand the base layer + different modifiers. We're pretty good at recognizing patterns. It's cool the first 3 times, but then you catch on and it feels fundamentally the same as all the other things you've seen.
All procedural games feel like this to me at least. I've been playing Diablo / POE recently. Same deal, once you're at the endgame - the goal just becomes bigger numbers. The maps have different themes, the monsters are different, but you sorta just look past that part as you're gathering generated gear with bigger numbers. It's why I typically get about 10% into the endgame and eventually stop playing.
Minecraft is also a decent example, at some point you stop exploring, build a base and focus on the progression rather than seeing what the system generates in the next biome.
I am but an armchair expert here, but I do think most of what's missing is the complexity of real-life ecosystems and "connections". Having biomes that are substantially large on a given planet and diversity among them, animals unique to each, and some kind of connections between the sparse settlements (even just like 3-5 actual cities per planet would be a start) would be a big difference. It would be a bit less about the 'wonder' and more about understanding the interplay.
For now, all I can see is "optimization" and "system limits on numbers of unique objects for things to work at 60+ FPS".
> I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse"
A good start is not to try and build an entire galaxy. Procgen that focuses on the fine detail of a relatively small world have a big leg up over these "everything generators" (i.e. think of something more on the scale of Tiny Glade or Bad North)
The best proc gen experience I have had is with minecraft modpack called hexxit.
The world is procedural generated, but then there is a library of ~200+ hand built structures/features that are scattered throughout the generated terrain. So you wander through a forest and find a cave into a volcano full of diamongs but guarded by angry dwarves, then head over into the desert and find a castle with a witch king, etc etc
There are enough hand built things that you don't quickly start running into repeats, and they are just melded into the generated terrain.
I think it has to be hand crafted with some mix of procedural generation. I worked on the Division Underground DLC, and the way we did it is we had artists create dozens of various room variations, describing how they could connect each other, then I wrote an algorithm to populate the map with these "dungeons" and their rooms in a semi-random order. In the end I think the map had about ~200 unique dungeons, but rooms could repeat between them, so you'd sometimes go "oh hang on I've seen this metro station before" but the entire dungeon would be different almost every time, unless you played hundreds of hours of it(the game kept track and wouldn't give you the same dungeon again until you played them all, iirc)
I think you're on to something here. The problem with procgen is hard because the various things in an environment have to interface with one another and in NMS they don't really meaningfully interface. The geography is generated, and the animals are generated, and the mineral deposits are generated, but the geography never affects the animals or the mineral deposits. You don't see, as an example, vast highland regions with animals adapted for living in the cold and huge mineral veins exposed in cliffs at high altitudes. You also don't see older mountains where the average mineral deposit would sit lower in altitude but be smaller due to erosion, with more cave systems and more critters evolved specifically for caves (colorless, blind, chemautotrophic, specializations like that). There's a range of ways the landscape can be, there's a range of ways animals can be, there's a range of ways resource distribution can be, but they don't affect one another and it makes it feel bland and same-y.
If you are interested in the sandbox element, and space, and building - but want character - Satisfactory pulled me in for roughly 1200 hours over three years. I"ve got the scenery, and new discovery's burned in to my brain - elements of the landscape are more vivid in my memory than a lot of real places I've visited.
What's interesting is that there is zero procedural generation - single world with about 20 Biome, each one with all sorts of character. Monsters are incredibly well balanced, and the sheer terror I got from the spiders (which I think are a tad OP - especially the ones that launch)_ triggered my fight-flight reflex (mostly flight) more than any other game I can recall.
The game can be played in so many different ways too - you can take the factorio/big factory build out approach and speed run that, or just spend your time exploring, or, perhaps best of all - watch hundreds of hours of Youtube Videos to get a sense of the architect aesthetic that some of the top players bring to it. Epic Tech Tree. Cute back story.
I consider it the greatest Sandbox/space game ever - I don't know if we'll ever see anything like it again.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. I have tried coming back to the game multiple times and every time I just feel bored and underwhelmed by the whole experience.
Yeah...I played it for probably a couple of hundred hours...and it wasn't that fun. In fact, it's boring. And I've come back a too many times because someone (like some of the commenters here) said "no, man...get the new update! It's a Totally Different Game!". So I jump back in, and it's different to varying degrees...and still boring. Just because there's "lots to do! new quests! rare items to find!", doesn't mean doing them is fun.
When it first released I correctly predicted that the game was overhyped and destined to flop, making fun of friends who bought the game and ending up being disappointed.
The internet historian video made me buy it, thinking it was maybe worth it now.
I think I got like 5 hours in before feeling like I was just doing an endless grind. I felt like I had fallen for the hype, which I think was deserved ;)
Maybe the game doesn't get good until you grind past the first N hours, but I just don't have the time any more.
Agreed. I want to like this game _so bad_ but I think the problem is that I'm looking for a feeling of fulfilling progression when in reality this game is just a bunch of disjointed sandboxes which is certainly not my type of game.
NMS's art-style is low-detail, but highly aesthetic. It can look amazing at times, but only when you're looking at grand cinematic vistas. It rarely looks good in closeups. This parallels the game's systems in many ways.
NMS is a technically impressive game. You can build a custom-spaceship, either with the in-game editor or by importing one from outside the game, dogfight in it, land on alien worlds, etc. and that's just one of the loops. However, the spaceships you build aren't simulated physical objects. They don't even feel as substantial as styrofoam fins tacked onto a model train. There's no real challenge to flying them. They all just float through space like nothing.
The game has dozens of ways to progress, finding resources and earning cash. They're all so easy to break that you have to consciously resist doing so. Craft a few donuts and you're rich. You don't have to worry about finding buyers for your obscenely high-end pastries. The market board will buy anything at the listed price. Game breaking bugs that trivialize finding resources have been left in the game forever because the developers were afraid that some people might be upset if they actually had to grind for resources. Why what is, ostensibly, a single player game with multiplayer support tacked on even has grind mechanics is another valid question.
I log into NMS occasionally, but my big problem with it is that it's gameplay devolves into a sequence of grinds that are all optional. The things that should offer a challenge (e.g. ship combat) don't. Every play session becomes a case of, "Where do I find this stupid mineral I need to build an upgrade that will make what's already too easy even easier?".
The technology on display in NMS is absolutely impressive, but the gameplay isn't. I'd love to see a fork of this game where they focus on more challenging gameplay with less focus on grinding and sandbox elements. I see the expeditions as an attempt at this, but they don't go far enough.
It's been years since I last played it, but when I did I finally did so for a while until I finally found myself at a space station with other players and whatnot. And some random dude just gives me something like tens and tens of millions in cash. And my friend. And a bunch of other people in the same station.
At that point I was still rather new to the game. I had little money, few resources, understood little - which was the whole game for me. Discovering new stuff and trying to make money. And being given all that money sort of just .. ruined the game for me. What was left was the very meh storyline and maybe exploration, neither of which had any appeal to me.
I recently tried star citizen and it's kind of trying to be something like that but it's way too half baked with lots of game breaking bugs like you'll just lose the entire cargo of your ship which can completely bankrupt you after days of saving up. Also they keep releasing bigger and fancier pay to win ships at ridiculous price points like hundreds and even thousands of dollars instead of fixing the game. I tried it during a free week and I legitimately enjoyed it a lot but I was also extremely frustrated a lot by the bugs and the pay to win crap really rubs me the wrong way so I didn't buy it after the free trial ended.
It's a weird mix of amazingly well done and absolute garbage. And pay to win. Don't forget about the pay to win bullshit.
I remember first hearing about NMS' concept and wishing that they would take the general idea but downsize it by at least 10 orders of magnitude. A universe with 1-100 millions of planets would still feel absolutely massive and way more than individual players would be able to exhaust, yet it would allow the creators to do a bit better curation, allow players to actually meet, maybe add more hand-crafted experiences. Basically, give up on technical purity in favor of fun.
They added real multiplayer several years ago. If you go to the same system another player is in, they'll be there. (As well as everything anybody has ever built there).
I bought it on day one in 2016, and like everyone else, I was wowed by the planet hopping experience for about an hour or so. Then I put it down and didn't think about it again.
Then I picked it up a few years later, and discovered base building. Had more fun than the first playthrough, but it didn't click. Eventually I hear about something called the Galactic Hub, which is a star system marked by players as a central spot to build their bases. Kind of like a human home in the vast empty universe of NMS.
I get curious about it, and look up instructions on how to get there. I did some quick napkin math and realized it would take literally dozens of hours of grinding - nonstop travel - to get there. However, as it turns out, there's a loophole with black holes. When you enter a black hole, it spits you out into a totally different place in the galaxy. From the players perspective its random, but players got together and figured out that each unique black hole always sends you to the same spot in the galaxy. So they constructed a black hole "highway", along with an app that let you input your desired coordinates, and it would give you the list of black holes that would most optimally get you near your destination.
So I spend an evening playing the game, switching back and forth from the game to my laptop, inputting coordinates and slowly making my way closer and closer to the hub. Eventually I find it, and what was amazing was that it was the first time I'd seen any evidence of another player in the game.
That moment felt utterly magical, because while I was playing a game, I had an actual, real objective that I formed entirely on my own.
So yes, the game is an odd duck, but it can really open up with the right mindset.
Weird take cause the game is definetely there and it has tons of content. Admitedly it is not for me because I just do not like the way resource gathering works. Does not tickle my fancy. But saying there is nothing substantial is an odd take, there is base building, space battles (fighter and corvette), expeditions. You can even do a little automatisation if you are into it.
Yeah, that is exactly my issue with the game - they crammed so many mechanics into the game, but all of them are incredibly shallow & even unfinished.
The RNG space is part of the problem - planets and biomes kinda start to repeat after while and it is not really important any more on which weird planet or station you are.
It is actually interesting how many games with much smaller RNG generated world maps work just fine because you don't travel so much like in NMS & kinda learn to know the landscape and also shape it yourself or with your friends. Like you know there is a lake next to you base and that deserted town, then there is that forested mountain where you got ambushed by zombies once & built a secondary mining base later, etc.
In NMS you land on a random planet, build a base on it and - like, what is it good for, if there are millions of similar planets & coop multiplayer is almost non-existent.
Every time these epic announcements go out, I try co-op multiplayer again, realize it's still miserable, then close it and wait for the next release. I'd love to play it with my wife but completing our own objectives, building our own bases, not being able to directly interact like in other games this decade, progressing forward separately, fixing our own ships, etc. etc. etc. is just a non-starter. Good luck to them though!
I tried it a few years ago, following all the "It's actually good now!" stories.
But a few hours into the tutorial, at a point of yet another "go gather 20 wolf Pel^H^H Ores from that other planet and bring it back", and I lost interest.
The inner gameplay loop didn't work for me, and I need that hook.
Have there since been improvements to that inner loop?
In contrast, Destiny 2 keeps hooking me back in because its inner loop, the gunplay and abilities, and variety of builds, really works for me.
Disney found this out the hard way with Infinity. On v3.0 a large chunk of their IP was staged into a fully customizable and open universe.. and it was so unremarkable that they shutdown the servers and killed all development a few years later.
Starfield is IMO worse. NMS at least has sandboxes that can entertain you and expeditions can be fun. NMS just doesn't have "goal" to work towards, so unless you can create your own goals its boring. Starfield, bugs aside, had the most boring base-building/operations I've seen in my life.
i played it day 1 back then and even bought a PS4 only to play it and played it over the years repeatedly after every larger update for about 1000 hours in total. The fundamental promise they made was never shipped, which was originally a large variety of procedural flora, fauna, and planet. It is still the same uninspired boring stale core that it was day 1 with minimal extensions which produce absolutely boring world that immediately repeat. The game was always Waiting for Godot, waiting for a game that was originally announced with an interesting procedural feature but never shipped. Meanwhile I discovered the history of procedural games, which is a story of fails.
I still sometimes hope that the actually rewrote the entire procedural variety system but it cant happen because people built persistent shit on those planets. They probably have to launch a new game.
I kinda feel the same way. I loved slowly going through the main story and probably put 50hr into the game, but the sandbox alone (amazing as it is) just doesn't do it for me.
This is why a cool tech solution (procedural generation of "levels") by itself isn't good enough. The core gameplay loop is fundamentally the same on every planet. The graphics and descriptions may change but once you've played it for a bit, it gets boring.
I think video games are art, so take my opinion in context of if this is right up your alley and you really love it, then keep on keepin on!
Every year social media hits me hard with "No Man's Sky is good now!" — and I bit and dove in with a few buddies.
To say everything in this game is half baked is giving it too much credit. It's 10% baked at best. This isn't a game; it's an underwhelming tech demo. The only cool feature of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great.
Everything else is baaaad: the quests have less logic than entry MMO quests, and are mainly fetch missions. The planets are randomly generated slop. The economy of building up your ship/fleet isn't fun (you just sell your ships over and over again). Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)
It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that are clearly just trying to trick folks into buying an elaborate space game tech demo. Can we move on from this "game"?
> Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)
FWIW, most of the systems in the game that have been there since the beginning have changed significantly since v1.
IIRC, back in the v1 days you'd give an NPC a species-specific valuable trinket and they'd teach you a randomly-selected word of their race's language. Learning words was useful for when you'd encounter a historical relic that presented an important scene from history, and when you encountered an NPC that was requesting assistance. In both cases, they'd make their speech or request in their native language, you'd be given a few context clues in the form of dialog describing gestures, NPC attitude, etc, and then you'd have to guess what action you needed to perform or resource of yours they needed. If you get it right, you get something nice.
Like many other systems in the game, this got reworked several times into what it is now: "Find an NPC, ask for language assistance, select a category of word to learn, and Bob's your uncle.". I won't claim that either the v1 or current methods of learning language are fun, but the v1 method did consume a resource that was often difficult to come by... so it made learning the language much more difficult. They could have cooked up three whole-ass conlangs and built in gradual language tutorials for each... but that'd be a surprising choice for a game whose most difficult puzzles are "Can you do basic arithmetic?" and "Can you understand which direction this list of numbers is rotating?".
There's never been much _game_ in NMS... and most any player who's made it to the center of the galaxy and both got what they were being told by the story and weren't enraged by the implications gets why. The game's first story (such as it is) is why I'm always amused by people who don't dislike it, but also take it very seriously and want there to be a ton of stuff to do in it.
Having said that, Hello Games has apparently been more than happy to add in a bunch of stuff [0] over the years. I'm amazed that they're making enough money on the game to still be working on it a decade later, but here we are.
> It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that...
Eh. As someone who pops back in for a few hours when there's a major change, I don't mind at all the detailed patch notes.
> Can we move on from this "game"?
Go for it! I'll still be popping in every now and again to screw around with it.
[0] ...some of which is clearly playtesting for things planned for Light No Fire...
bout 5 months ago i gave it 2 hours of my life and asked for a refund once i realized i had basically seen the whole game in that first like 30 minutes of playing.
the only game that seems to hit the mark of what im actually itching for is star citizen that is in a perpetual state of never-finished but i can't even quite put a finger on what it is i'm after. beauty, art, real weather, being able to fly up through the atmosphere and just let me escape into a sci fi movie. i can acknowledge star citizen has actually come a long ways and i think they do deliver that, though i haven't played it myself just going off vids ive seen.
NMS somehow feels like a visual and playable interpretation of depression to me with a Dr. Seuss world backdrop lol. Like it reminds me of times in my life where I've just been stuck in the motions, unhappy, resigning myself to the fate of doing absolutely nothing of inspiration because I felt like I had no other options and gave up.
Shout outs to steam for refunding when my reason was "This game is actually depressing"
Agreed. And this tech demo was a day 1 purchase for me back in the day. While it has gotten better since then it just doesn't hold my interest. I do like using it whenever every few months I feel inclined to get my PC VR headset out (I'm using an old HO Reverb G2 with the Oasis driver) I think it's a great VR title.
I remember when it first came out, there was so much hype but I immediately wondered, “where exactly is the game loop?” I also remember how aggressively defensive fans were about it.
I feel the same. I want Rust in space, where there are constant stakes. NMS either takes too long to get to a part of the game where stakes become relevant, or doesn't have any.
If anyone has any recs on PvE/looting/base building games in space with the polish of NMS, please share.
Agreed. It's incredibly boring. It lacks an interesting and interactive story with good pacing. What they have done is cool, don't get me wrong, but I think they got carried away by the tech coolness without enough attention to what makes a game fun or interesting.
I think this kind of game needs another innovation to make it interesting. I don't think adding more generative or LLM generated content is the solution.
I felt this way for a while until I decided to sit down, start a new game, and engage with it.
It's a completely different game, it just doesn't look like it if you picked back up where you left off. Without the right context, you have a tendency to just repeat what you were doing before, and it feels like nothing changed.
But believe me, everything changed. You should revisit it, because I don't think you've seen the actual changes to the game.
they add feature after feature. but never a good drive for the player. 'why should i go to this planet?'
i have an idea for it,
Let users populate the universe with custom quests. Scriptable quests with dialog and multipart structure. You need a custom script language and some limitations on it. Example quests:
- "Bandits have occupied our town", but actually bandits are tax collectors. You instead may help them document the goods.
- "Our star is dying", instead a huge starhip is recharging and refusing to move without some condition.
also add a rumor system to lead players to quests.
you can use my idea Hello Games, you have my permission.
How people interact with LEGO varies. Some people like to buy specific sets and make them. That's fine. Some people see a random pile of bricks and build a massive city [1]. There are also competition events for what people can build from a random pile of bricks. There was a TV show about this too (ie Lego Masters).
Some games are problem solving, others are competitive, yet others are elimination but an awful lot of games have a component that requires you to inject imagination. The Sims and even Minecraft (despite it having a survival mode too) spring to mind.
That's what NMS is. Some people like to find the perfect looking ship. Others build bases to look a certain way. Others just explore. Yet others make money.
If that's not for you, that's OK. But NMS can't be dismissed as being repetitive or boring.
>but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay.
to me that has become a big positive aspect of the game. The non-teleology of it, that you just run around and immersive yourself in it is pleasant in its own right. Especially modern games to me seem to have substituted games as an experience with reward system driven busy work. Everything is always instrumental.
I started to notice this when games like Journey came out, or Death Stranding during the stress of the pandemic. No Man's Sky is obviously not as artistically strong as either one but the exploration only for explorations sake has me come back to it very regularly. It genuinely is a game about nothing (so is Seinfeld, never hurt the show) but to me that boredom is a genuinely good thing.
NMS seems to epitomize the excesses of the Agile development philosophy with most of their release updates -- small targeted tack-ons to the game engine that provide something tangible yet shallow for users to explore, usually disconnected from narrative. The same cargo drop configurations, how damaged containers always require removing the same rusted metal or goop, and how shelters have the same exact configuration, never ever evolve or change. It has such a strangely repetitive ghost town character. They could easily target their "agile" deliverables around diversifying and breathing more life into the worlds if they could span more "sprints". Unfortuntately, the tack-ons feel hollow, empty, and often ship incredibly buggy. They used procedural modeling to create an impressive array of planets, but never modeled the planet drops with the same care and diversity.
That's because there were no idea behind it in the first place. It was an ambitious overpromising project that hasn't delivered almost anything they promised. They didn't have any story or interesting gameplay in mind too. Pity.
It's a great game to play with friends. Explore, find cool animals, and most of all - build your fantasy space home. It's relaxing, fun, and can be a great shared experience. I imagine it wouldn't be quite as engaging completely by yourself.
It's kind of like ARK, they spent so much time on all the "cool" stuff that looks great in trailers without focusing on what actually would make a game like this incredible, which is a real persistent singular world with consequences and meaningful group based PVP or PVE that works at scale. What you end up with is just a simulacra of multiplayer that basically boils down to a visually represented Xbox Live lobby.
This game just doesn't scale well from mid game on - it's way too easy, even on permadeath + hardest difficulty. Like, making money is way too easy, combat is way too easy, everything is too forgiving. And the entire loop is centered on like, 3 things to do that are all variants of the same exact thing. Really hope they do a much better job in Light No Fire.
To the guy who replied to me: Our genius overlord moderators rate limited my responses so I'll post here.
> I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding
You and I have very different ideas of what forgiving means. A reasonably intelligent 7 year old that enjoys and has experience playing video games could play this game on max difficulty settings and not have any issues. And while I never had an issue finding anything (shit is literally everywhere), resource scarcity doesn't equally an unforgiving game mechanic unless it's gated by some sort of difficult fight or something, which this game doesn't have. Combat is laughably easy and repetitive. I've got a couple hundred hours in the game, and at one point I was running the same bounty missions over and over again for some outrageous amount of money - the mission took 7 minutes round trip, the combat encounter was literally the exact same every time, same number of enemies just with different names. And that was the most efficient way I could make money in late game on the permadeath server on max settings. If that's the best economy loop a game can come up with, a 100% brainless combat encounter, then the developer has done something very wrong.
it's because it's a sandbox farming game, it's not meant to be difficult
you spend most of your time finding/farming resources and unlocking builds
most of your time is traveling between planets/systems/galaxies for different resources
I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding, which is the core gameplay, you can easily miss it if you don't play for 40+ hours but there are entire varieties of star systems you can't access initially, an entire race you literally can't see without completing some strings of missions, etc
> I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.
A lot of people simply aren't as enamored with the shallow gameplay, even in the current version. I'm not surprised that they've sold a lot over the years since they've been putting out free content updates year after year to lure people into reinstalling it every six months or so.
As someone who played this game on start I want to share that I enjoyed it. This game was and still is a chill exploration experience at the core. There’s a lot of stuff bolted on top, but it’s just a busywork. If you enjoy that kind of games you’ll love it.
Another thing to point out: technical patching is top notch. I’m talking about how fast they come around to support new console, new VR helmet etc.
Somewhat of an aside but, personally, I also found GTA V and Red dead redemption 2 to be boring because these games didn't respect my time. I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world".
That’s fine, it has a sustained concurrent players online of > 7k every day for the last 6 months [0]. Few games on Steam achieve that.
While several people are complaining about a one-time-cost game with an absurd amount of updates that had a rough launch, thousands of people are continuously happy, the subreddit expresses joy. It’s okay to “not get it”; but at some level, this much hate and dogpiling over a game that’s not harmful and not fostering a toxic community is … embarrassing for those participating in the hate.
> I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.
It's the sandbox concept. Some people load into Minecraft and think, "AWESOME! I'M GOING TO BUILD A MALL!" Some people load into Minecraft and think, "WTF is this? Why is there no story? What the hell am I meant to do?"
I'm not going to cast judgement. It's a preference. The people who bounce off NMS are the latter. NMS is a very fun sandbox. The story is secondary to making your own fun.
What are people on about, there is tons to do in NMS, tons of missions, expeditions, build bases, build a corvet, hunt rate parts, ships, rifles, creatures, manage a settlement, automate crafting chains, find a lucrative trading route, and this new update apps even more things. I'd never consider NMS anything close to empty, there is so much variety in the content
The game has so much stuff to do its actually overwhelming. The game is definitely a sandbox though and I think for some reason a lot of people don't like going out and doing the different things you can do in the game if the game doesn't force you to or if there's not heavy progression.
I feel like the same thing happens to other sandbox games too. Minecraft is one of my favorite games of all time and I could easily spend a thousand hours in a vanilla world and still find things to do, however the game gets constantly shit on by the community no matter what it does. They speedrun through the progression and then lack any creativity to do anything else in the game.
I personally love building bases and customizing and collecting things, which is a large part of the gameplay in NMS. I could spend hundreds of hours doing that but I guess some people just need a constant sense of progression and the game telling you what to do because they aren't capable of setting their own goals. Anyone who says NMS lacks content or things to do has barely touched the game.
I think what most of the commentary is on is the initial gameplay loop which has to do with planetary exploration and learning words. After that there's a multitude of new gameplay loops that become intertwined. I don't think most players get that far unless they have a very old account.
I think it comes from a difference in what people want. Some people want to achieve goals, while others want to be given tools to be creative. There's a whole spectrum in between, plus other motivations as well.
I enjoy being creative to an extent, but I like to solve problems, so I naturally gravitate to something with a long-term goal to achieve like Factorio (I rapidly lose interest after launching a rocket though).
Saying the game is a space sandbox and then implying that the inability to find fun falls onto the player's inability is what every online NMS fan says in discussions about not enjoying NMS. Calling a game a sandbox doesn't spawn game mechanics into existence, the game is still limited by what the devs put into the game. Your goals are still limited by what the game provides to you.
But a game can have 1000 hours of collectables content and still not be an enjoyable game to people. For example, I don't really enjoy collectables purely for the sake of collecting or building without having some sort of meaningful functionality. Every time I've tried to get into NMS (and when I ask others about what you can do in the game), I get the impression that 99% of the game is just flying/walking around, scanning things, collecting some random doodads, base building, and hoping to find a "cool" ship in a station to buy. Which is to say, the same things every base building survival game has, but in space.
I don't necessarily need forced goals, but I need things to work toward that aren't just collectables. For example, in certain other space sandbox games I can build up or destroy political factions. The universe around me dynamically updates in ways that actually affect me meaningfully. I can build up industry to harvest resources, refine them, and produce various goods either to use or to sale. I can have a goal of building all of the infrastructure needed to produce ships, or colonies, or what have you. With a larger industry, maybe some of the political factions try to attack me, so I then need to defend against them. I could build up a fleet of ships that handle defense and transportation of resources. I want to feel like the universe actually responds to my input.
I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development - the game of the last few years is absolutely nothing like the early one and I agree, there is a surprising amount of stuff to do.
FWIW, I was there from the beginning, and stopped fairly quickly (maybe 20 or so hours in).
I hopped back in a couple years later after a few updates, and agree that the quantity of content was pretty big. But the quality was not -- it still felt "empty", and never held my interest long.
Last year, the same thing happened. I hopped back on after a few big updates, probably spent another 10 or so hours on it (I think I started over), and felt like I had explored all there was.
I feel like all the criticisms it gets are valid. I agree that the effort of maintaining a game after 10 years is incredibly admirable, especially since ever update has been free. That's amazing. And the devs should be acknowledged for that.
But the game itself still feels largely empty. The progression feels mostly repetitive without feeling like you're really moving forward in a meaningful way. And, as others have said, the proc gen still feels "vanilla".
I probably won't hop back in after this update. I've learned, by now, that while many praise the new content, it'll probably just feel like more of the same to me.
I have never played, but I watched all the drama unfold on reddit. It makes me wonder, is this what happens when you have an underwhelming launch? "You only make a first impression once" - and there is a huge price to pay for that?
In SaaS and YC, it's ship early and ship often, right? Is that absolutely not the case in games? Also, how true is it in SaaS? Genuinely curious here.
Oh, I don't think so. The systems in the game are very shallow, and overall, everything is too easy, which makes the game feel bland. There are almost no stakes. That leads to a feeling of nothing to do because none of it feels worth doing.
As someone who played it for the very first time just last year, those 10 year old takes ring absolutely true to my experience in the game. It was fun for a little while, but it became repetitive and shallow quickly.
I think maybe you're discounting that people have agency and can decide that a game they are playing actively doesn't tick their boxes. I reinstalled it last week and put in about two hours before uninstalling again. Mile wide and inch deep is exactly the way to describe it.
> I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development...
Some are, sure. But -I say as someone who enjoys the game for what it is and still pops in every now and again to mess around with it- there's not much game in the game. Like BoBaitlyn said, it's a sandbox game. It has always been a sandbox game, and there are some folks who spend a few minutes fucking around with the sand in the box, go "WTF, this is boring as shit. I'm out!" and are boggled at the folks who enjoy playing with all the sand.
There's nothing wrong with being boggled or talking about how much you hated the sandbox. Specific sandboxes tend to appeal to specific sorts of people... each one often has its own gimmick that will pull in different sorts of folks. Suggesting that most complainers are complaining from a position of ignorance when they're complaining about a lack of things to do in a game that doesn't have much game in it kinda sucks. I've been playing off and on since v1, and have played for about half of the major patches. Hello Games has added a lot of stuff, but they haven't really added in much game to the game, if you see what I'm saying?
I think some people don't understand what a procgen survival-craft game is. They're not wrong about it being an open sandbox, that's kinda the point. People talking about taking too long getting to space might not know about the limited time expeditions you can just start in for a different take, or turning the game to creative mode so they don't need to spend time resource farming to get their ship working so they can go fly around if that's all they want from the game.
The story and those quests will be rooted in building something. The space exploration will be rooted in finding a cool place loosely intended for your next base. The space battles and encounters will be part of the same core procgen survival craft cycle.
I won't deny there's probably only 20-40 hours of "real content" in the game. Most of what is there is shallower, or easilly missable, without the expedition(limited-time event) that launched it. A lot of things do seem like "grind X yourself, order team to do Y every few hours, fly to Z and talk to someone" which will get repetitive if/when you keep getting the same ones.
When it first released, the criticism that it's mostly empty procedural generation what what got currency and stuck to the no man sky name.
That still sticks around as people who've never played it comment & upvote the same things.
I've never played it. Just witnessing the cargo culting. If I were wanting to give an opinion on this post without actual information, the 'empty procedural generation' critique is exactly what I'd say, since that's all I associate with this game from the briefest commentary when it was released.
There are lots of things to do, but the actual mechanics are for doing them are shallow. The best example of this is the trading system; the way trading works is there are 7 economy types a star system can have, which determines which goods they produce (can buy in large quantities) and demand (can sell for a higher price than at normal systems). Thus the best way to make money from trading is to simply find a loop of systems which chain together the production -> demand goods. For instance, the economy types trading -> advanced materials -> scientific -> trading each produce the goods demanded by the next economy type in the chain.
So the system is fairly shallow, since what you end up doing is just jump from system to system and buy and sell everything.
And all of it is like, run around, press x. load stuff in processor. take stuff out of processor. wait. load stuff in processor. take stuff out of processor. wait. oh your crops are ready. pres x, x, x, x, x, x, x. go to sales terminal, sell crops, go to processor, take stuff out of processor load in processor again. oh hey crops are ready again, x, x, x, x.....
Missions: fly to randomly chosen planet in solar system and to same generated structure and find the object in the same spot as it always is in this generated structure. fly back. your crops are ready again for harvest, press x, x, x, x, x, x...
My hot take on why these games get popular (including some like PowerWash Simulator that are 'press x, then x again' type games): it gives people satisfaction of completing something in a world that it is increasingly harder to accomplish what the prior generation did.
Different people find different things fun. I've never been grabbed by multiplayer FPS (I never git gud) - or souls-likes (same). I do sometimes get sucked into some Bethesda games but I need to get over the initial hump. I had a serious Minecraft problem (solo play - not groups) and had a big Beat Saber phase. I still play OG Doom but never liked Quake. I usually hate games with narratives except when I don't. Journey nearly made me weep with joy and sadness but I don't tend to go for slow, arty games in general... And - in general I want to like games, find them fascinating as a medium - but find most of them tedious when I sit down to play.
People who didn't follow up their post-launch recovery still have the impression made at the launch (first impressions matter a lot). I didn't play the game (yet) but I have followed their recovery path. It is an incredible story and it seems that the game has evolved a lot.
I wonder if they won't add generative AI to create infinite stories/missions inside it, that would get rid of the 10K bowls effect.
at the time of posting, i think every top-level comment except one is negative. so, i'd like to balance it by saying that i have never seen a better executed turnaround than what the no man's sky team did. they cratered their reputation on launch, worked hard and long to restore it, and then continued to offer free updates long after they needed to. lots of respect there. (i will reward the effort by purchasing their next game on day 1, sight unseen.)
no matter what, that always happens with this game. Any news about it causes the people who played for 10 minutes at launch however long ago come back to tell you how much they didn't like it.
It appears that the go-to response from certain fans is to accuse anyone critical of having only played it at launch. I assure you that's not the case. I find the game just as shallow today every time I try a new content update. What do you want me to do? Convince myself I don't feel that way about it? I can't make myself like something.
I have 65 hours logged on Steam, am I allowed to say that I have also bounced off of several updates and find the game empty and lacking meaningful goals?
It's simultaneously an amazing achievement, worth the money I paid, a redemption story for Hello Games, and yet disappointing in a way that e.g. BOTW is not.
One of these years I plan to dive back in again, hoping to find that the sum of all the updates has provided some new story progression I will find meaningful and give me a reason to exercise all the new game mechanics. I'm hopeful!
My perspective on this is that it’s fine to not like things and bounce off them. I also bounced off NMS, no big deal. It just isn’t for me and that’s fine.
All I know is that they worked hard on this game and found plenty of people who enjoy playing it a lot and that’s that. Doesn’t mean they are wrong, doesn’t mean I’m wrong in bouncing off. I do think it is interesting to explore why I bounced off and others might not – I can identify with many of the negative comments here, especially the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal one regarding the procedural generation which probably was the one thing I was most fascinated by when I decided to install the game – but there are so many other systems and elements in this game that if you more into those I can easily see why the game works much better for you.
That is a predictable consequence of their decision to launch before the game was ready. The game as it is now may not deserve that kind of contempt, but it's the price they chose to pay forever at launch.
I don't really enjoy the game for more than 10-20 hours after picking it up (gets boring fast for me), and have problems with it, but kudos to the dev team. I agree, huge turnaround
For sure. Even as someone who bounced off the game several times, the scope of their post-launch additions are truly impressive, even matching up against a lot of the subscription games (whose whole deal is regular content drops)
There is no such thing as a turnaround. People wait for a game to be released. When you give a release date, you must give one that shows the almost complete state of your game. Not something that is half done, not something that will feel completely different 1 year later. When you buy a thing you get an experience. If your game is a different experience 1 year later, well, I couldn't care less about it. I'm not gonna sink another 10+ hours into it, just to see what you have done in one year's time. Imagine you go to the matrix and you get a half movie, bad coloring and the like. Just ridiculous.
Early access, early release, beta, whatever is just an euphemism of becoming a backer. You thought you buy something final, and in the end you become a financier. You lend your money upfront. All this because a group of pampered kids can't keep a deadline. And think that the world is a playground and they can keep their game 5 years in early access. Get a grip.
Sorry. You release your shit, it gets evaluated, end of story. Nobody cares the rest. Gaming space is already half dead because people think that sitting at a game company means you get to have knitting lessons during workhours, and you can daydream and chitchat all day long. Ridiculous.
They launched an empty, hollow game. And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. Most of their new systems are half baked—confusing and only adding to the game design mess the game came out with.
I'm convinced the reputation that they executed a "turnaround" is based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
The benefit to the NMS team for this is they'll have people half willing to try their next game because they "didn't give up". Not the worse idea, but I think we're over stating the heroicness of this.
I think it looks like a variety of game that it's not, and there's a dissonance there... it's not an action/adventure game, it's a sandbox of procedural generated worlds where you gather resources to unlock new builds.
You can build bases, manage settlements, maintain a fleet, build ships and exocraft, build multi-tools, have pets battle each other, cook food, manage the economy... but there's only a thin relationship/lore system and not much of a difficulty ramp at any point.
You're space farming, if you expect anything else you won't like it.
NMS is an amazing game with no soul. A metaverse. A monument to technology without the depth or people or narrative (prewritten or emergent) that makes it interesting.
I'm certain there are some people whose brain is wired exactly right to love it.
But I have more fun playing the n100th Call of Duty clone hearing real voices on the headset in a tight, fun game loop.
But the company behind it deserves to be applauded. Might be the best value for money / care / support of any game, especially one so poorly received initially...
I think you have it in reverse, it's pure soul but very little game. It's just like Noctis IV, an interactive piece of art. This one has more pretense to looking like a game with its crafting system and survival mechanics that you can thankfully disable. It also has a narrative, several well-executed threads of them. It's a very introspective game with things to say about itself and the experience of living. You might not like it, you might have found it unengaging, but to deny it lacks humanity, artistic substance and a story to tell is crazy.
There's also not very much I would say is technically impressive about it at all, and definitely not anything people normally reach for. The bandwidth of the asset streaming they accomplished on the PS4, with such a small team that still had to build the rest of the game, is the only thing that makes me raise an eyebrow. In fact, that may as well have been the real gain of crunching down how planets are described rather than the huge number of planets themselves. Even that's not particularly groundbreaking if you take away the context of the small team. And at that point we have to ask ourselves if it's groundbreaking, or just very intelligent and clever pragmatism. Impressive in a labor lens, not a technical one.
I really like this game and have played it for years but I think it's popularity outgrew it's niche. It's a very niche game, the devs have made the ultimate space Lego kit, but I see lots of people complain about it being boring because there are no stakes, no challenge. I think they are trying to play the game they want it to be not the game it is. The overwhelming scale of the meme this game has become I think is the cause of that.
I like playing the game in abandoned mode in single player, just me, my ship, a lot of dead space stations and planets and some fauna here and there. I explore every planet (except aggressive sentinel ones) and make short hops to nearby systems. If I run across too many systems that have already been explored I made a large hop in a random direction and try there. There's something about playing this way that keeps bringing me back. I tend to nope out of the main game as soon as I get a freighter, I'm not that into a lot of game mechanics, but I love exploring planets, even if they are ultimately not that different from one another. I like going on hikes even though it's just the same trees with some variety in real life.
I belive no Mans Sky is a great game but I could realy never get through to the newer stuff because the base resource gathering gathering does not grip me. The lasering of resources is just not satisfying to me. I love resource gathering but it needs to be satisfying like mining ores in minecraft (or Hytyale).
Additionaly I do not like flying Fighters I enjoy larger Ships. Put it as me enjoying space combat like Star Trek more than Star Wars.
If a Star Trek game similar to NMS came out, that would be my JAM imagine flying a smaller explorer vessel beaming down on procedural worlds and interacting with flora and fauna there. That would be up my jam.
But I still have to stress what Hello Games did is probably the best Redemption Story in Gaming. And they deserve all the good for it. Also please finall get me light no fire.
NMS is one of the best comeback stories in gaming, but I'll keep dying on this hill: the game is an ocean wide and a puddle deep. I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours. Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials. It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content. The UI isn't intuitive and badly needs modernizing. It feels so clunky after all these updates.
> I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours.
Yep, me too. It's a decent sandbox to spend a bit of time in, and it's fine that that's all it is.
> Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials.
They have spent substantial amounts of time on UI, UX, and tutorials... several times. Unless you're proposing they convert everything into a brain-dead "mobile" game UI (which would be a significant downgrade), it'd be very difficult to do much better than they already have with the inventory management and conversation UIs.
> It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content.
I mean, it's a sandbox. If they did all of the UI overhauling and tutorial creation you wanted from them -and nothing else- would that keep your interest for weeks and months... or would you play for a few hours and get bored? There's not much _game_ in the game and it's been that way since the beginning.
I have hundreds of hours with my son in creative mode just building bases, fishing, battling our animals and hanging out. We’ve explored hundreds of systems just cataloguing all the animals and flora. We’ve learned all the languages. We basically have infinite money.
It’s all very shallow but it’s also “cozy”. This game is much more Animal Crossing than Minecraft. Other than the planets with extremely dangerous atmospheres and storms (and only in survival mode) it’s all pretty chill. If you like making your own fun and just like doing stuff like using photo mode and chatting with friends this is a great game.
My son was really excited to see the new customizable base station any space station updates. It’s like they made this update just for us.
Really looking forward to see what they’re cooking up for Light No Fire.
This game came out before my son was even born and it’s his favourite game and it’s a constant source of bonding for us. Thank you Hello Games.
I'll echo a sister comment saying that NMS still feels like a tech demo. However, I'll also use the occasion to mention slash shill Noctis IV, a game that NMS more than likely owes a lot to.
Noctis IV is an old DOS game, or perhaps more of an art project about flying through a galaxy and exploring (sections of) planets on foot. Notably, you can name stars, planets, and place markers with notes on planetary coordinates, and then you can share those with other players via an "INBOX" system. While it technically has even less gameplay than NMS ever did, its primitive but custom 3D engine produces absolutely striking landscapes to explore [0]
While the author's webpage seems to have died at some point in the recent years, the project lives on through two community made mods, Noctis IV Plus [1] and Noctis IV Community Edition (NICE) [2].
Part of me is secretly hoping / assuming they’re releasing new features as a testing bed for the changes in Light No Fire. I’m also very hopeful for Light No Fire. *VERY* hopeful, but I have to assume all these updates are for their broader engine. I hope..
A huge vastness of nothing. The game has no soul at all. Worlds are ugly, animals are ugly, plants are ugly. With the first trailer I thought it could've been the game of my life, but it's just horrible, besides the feeling of moving around in the vastness of the universe, but once you get to a planet, it's just a turn off
I have at least 100 hours in the game, and I have to disagree with you. There's a surprising amount of variety in the creatures and the world generation.
I spend a lot of time building / designing my base. In that aspect, the enjoyment of the game is limited only by my creativity. I've definitely got $25 worth of entertainment from it. I will say, though, it is more fun if you have others to join your squad.
It's vastly better, imo, than Starfield. That was a game which really let me down -- I wanted Skyrim in Space, but I got 1,000 planets with the same cookie cutter quests on each. Or a team member saying something like "I can't believe we're the first ones to set foot on this temple" when there is a randomly generated outpost plopped down right next door.
It did well commercially looking just at steam stats, not to mention the other platforms.
It seems like alot of that was used to turn it around to save their reputation to keep going not only with one game, but to make sure the next isn't "stay away" labeled even it is "wait and see" for many.
AFAIK, there is no in-game microtransactions or anything, so basically retail sales I suppose? The studio is relatively small (indie-scale) last time I checked, and the launch was pretty big and I'm sure they pulled in a ton of money, even though as always on the "vocal internet" the launch was a huge failure, they still sold a lot of copies. "Just" 1-2 million copies would go a long way to fund a small passionate team. The all-time peak for simultaneous players on Steam (PC only) was 200K, so I don't think 1-2 million copies sold is far off as a minimum.
Small studio, don't have to generate a lot of sales to keep them afloat. Updates push visibility and generate new sales. Obviously, they need new projects to keep them afloat in the future.
The enhancements they're making to NMS appear to be backports from the Light No Fire engine, so my impression is that they are releasing updates to No Man's Sky as a marketing effort while the actual technical work is predominantly on the next game.
I’m one of those weird people that liked the game from the very beginning, and I’ve bought it at least twice for myself (different systems). I played it like 50 hours at the start. I always wanted a simple, procedurally generated space exploration game.
They’ve done an incredible job fleshing out the universe, giving us new things we can build, simple city management for people that want that, and the same exploration system for those that wanted that.
It was sold as, is, and will always be a sandbox game with some simple, procedurally generated “missions” to get you going to the next point of interest or having the next, relatively low-stakes fight.
And that’s okay. People play Animal Crossing and Minecraft. People can play this. Some of us are happy to. Some of us see a $50 game and say “yeah, 50-100 hours of time in this is my money’s worth”. And some of us spend 3000 hours in the game because we love the creating and sandbox feel of it.
Some people like Farming Simulator 2020 - I’ll never understand it and it’s not for me, but plenty of people do. Some people like Powerwash Simulator.
It’s okay if No Man’s Sky wasn’t the *specific* game you were hoping for and if it hasn’t become it; but that doesn’t make it a bad game, it just makes it “not for you”.
I wish these threads weren’t always filled with people complaining about a game that wasn’t made for them. It’s been a decade. It’s time to move on.
I feel like NMS is definitely catered to people who prefer to define their own way of having fun. There’s practically zero hand-holding. There isn’t much emphasis on narrative either, and the story is almost completely optional. It’s more about finding your own game within the game, where simply existing and exploring such a vast universe can be the whole point.
In that sense, I’d argue it’s almost more of an environment simulator than a traditional game. I can totally see why someone coming into it expecting a strong narrative, memorable characters, and lots of character development might end up disappointed.
For me, though, this is the game I keep coming back to. There’s just nothing quite like heading into a world that nobody has ever visited, with a pretty good chance that nobody else will ever visit it, and still leaving your little mark there.
Looks great. I just hope these alliances won't turn into the sort of thing like EVE Online Corporations but I guess this game is too different for that. Eve online makes me sick, its corporations are everything I hate in the real world :) I like games to be better than the real world.
What's also great about NMS is its all running on a custom bespoke engine they've built for the game and properly invested in. Wish they'd do more talks and deep dives into how it has all progressed, and how much it paid off for them. Things are getting far too homogenised around UE5 in game dev.
I need to revisit this game. I played at launch briefly then tabled it, but it's wholesome to see the creator stick with something, adding new features, and really see it evolve into something else. I wonder how wildly different it will be from my launch day experience?
The first time flying a ship in the game in VR was a pretty cool feeling. If you have a headset and this game (and you're not prone to motion sickness) it's worth the trip.
Outer Wilds (not The Other Worlds) gives you a very similar feeling on that first flight. It's not a VR game, but I made a VR mod for it a few years ago.
I still haven't got around to playing Outer Wilds despite knowing enough to know I should. Because I keep thinking "I can only play it once - I should play it in VR" and then never getting around to it.
My Legion Go came with a free Game Pass trial. I spent 20 minutes playing No Man's Sky in VR and liked it, bought it on Steam, but haven't actually played it yet.
Maybe this is the nudge to move it higher in my queue.
I think the multiplayer is very smartly implemented. The big "Anomaly" space stations can feel very busy. I don't feel very alone playing tbh, unless I want to be. MMO raid-like expeditions are right there if I wanna join up with people.
in a roguelike game, my incentive for playing is the discovery of weird new stuff. this might be the opposite of procedural. because procedural is just the same old stuff in new combinations. right?
how would we get a procedural thing or an AI thing to spit out truly new weird cool stuff? connect it to a good random number generator?
Sadly NMS could get 1000 years of updates and it still wouldn't be even 1% as complicated or deep as Eve - and I'm not an Eve fanboy, I stopped playing that more than 10 years ago at this point.
It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing.
It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game
A big name in proc gen is Kate Compton who coined the term "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" to describe this phenomenon of technically unique but not different enough to matter - I googled "10000 bowls of oatmeal" to see if there was a good article and the second link was about it and nms
https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowl...
That's pretty much the perfect description of NMS. Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way. Oh look...this planet has 4 legged animals that are green and bumpy and the last one they were brown and spiky...but they move the same and act the same. Yawn.
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I haven't played it myself, but surely an article written one month after the game's release doesn't do it justice, considering there have been multiple major updates attempting to address the gripes players initially had with the game in the 10 years since then (And review trends on steam indicate that these attempts were successful)
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This quote applies to so much more than just gaming
One thing this article lacks is any tips on how to still do procedural generation while partly mitigating the oatmeal issue. In other words, define a more sophisticated generation procedure that can add character and identity.
It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.
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I vaguely recall an episode of the Triple Click podcast around 2023 where they had a serious AI fanboy who was rah rah-ing about future procedural generation in games. It might have been Casey Anthony, but I'm unable to re-listen while at work.
The fanboy started saying how they could have endless different levels in Destiny 2... which is absurdly off-base since the entire game is just running through the same 9 sandboxes and 12 raids over and over and over again
He then went on to talk about AI creating an album as perfect as OK Computer on-demand, which was gently putdown by Kirk (who is an exceptional musician but also chill enough to suffer fools)
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This is something I realized about game design: if you have a procedurally generated world like XCOM, almost every playthrough (or "dungeon") has to produce something new to the player. Something like 10% of each run should actually have something new and unique. That's what makes games like Enter the Gungeon and XCOM 2 work and games like early No Man's Sky fail.
> A procedural universe may be technically impressive but it is also bland, empty, purposeless.
Why doesn't this apply to Minecraft? People love Minecraft even though it's equally purposeless and arguably bland and empty.
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That article is 10 years old. NMS then versus now are two very different games.
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even as someone who enjoyed NMS as a nightly bowl of oatmeal, a second screen game while I listened to a podcast or a documentary, I can't dispute the accuracy of this metaphor. After a while it became brain off semitainment, and when paired with hands off semitainment I ended up with a full experience, but years later it still costs $70 to become nearly entertained and its become obvious that there are limits to how much you can make procedural generation not such as the core, heart and soul of a gaming experience.
Totally agree. But I'm still wondering why was Escape Velocity so fun yet NMS is a nothing burger? They are very similar, except EV was goofier.
The best things about the game (and it is a good game at this point, they continued to add to it at a steady pace since launch) are the human written stories.
But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast. But also, the worst thing about the human-written stories is that they're often transparently designed around getting you to visit more abandoned malls. The procgen infinity of space is almost a negative, even though it's the game's whole schtick.
I guess now that I think of it like that, it's really impressive they made a fun game despite having to make it fit a boring repetitive universe.
The thing is they could probably have easily had the pvp and economy and soverignty of eve, and that would have been amazing
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> But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast.
Ironically, that’s how I always imagined actual space exploration to turn out once the initial wonders are exhausted.
Space is huge, yes, and everything is kinda unique, but also not in a meaningful sense. Most of the continued amazement we associate with the idea of space exploration comes from human-written stories that fill space with a human variety that just isn’t there.
It more or less reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode. They were playing an asteroid shooting.
> Morty: it's boring. crank up the realism slider to max
> Rick: why does it get even more empty? Wait, I got it... because the universe is empty.
At the end, I think there is little point in simulating the vastness of the universe in a video game (even just a fraction of it).
On that last point, when I first played Dyson Sphere Program (DSP), I left the starting planet without enough resources and didn't understand the inter-planetary warp drive system .. I just drifted out into space and couldn't get back with the fuel I had left. It was almost scary; the vastness of the space was so apparent, it was very immersive to me.
Early game you don't have enough resources to travel quickly through the solar system you start in, nevermind between systems, it takes time. It gives a real impression of scale and wonder imo. You have to plan taking the scale into account - and it's nowhere near realistic. They got a good balance there.
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There are levels to this. The NMS day/night cycle is geocentric.
It's a sandbox game yet when it comes to its "space" premise everything is thrown out the window. Dogfights carry no difficulty or skill. Flying around a system is pretty much pointless other than to stumble upon quests (100% RNG). Most of the fun you'll get at planet surface.
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I don't think that simulating the vastness of the universe is ever going to be fun, but approximating a theme park ride that evokes the vastness of the universe can be breathtaking, like Outer Wilds was. (The gameplay is confined to a single solar system, but it certainly makes you feel both the a sense of adventure, and the vastness of space-time.)
That's the problem every Elite after the first one had.
The first one was dogfighting in space, all the others were so. much. space.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1uLHmxmcg
You do occasionally find some pretty cool stuff.
I found a barren planet in a black hole system where the vibe was all dark and shadowy with the light being tinted purple, and just some crystals or something on the surface, alongside a damaged robot that you could interact with.
There was also a world that had high Sentinel activity where I founded a settlement (well, more like took over managing it), however as it turns out it’d have those gravity storms often during which you could soar through the air.
There was also a world where the surface was toxic and you couldn’t stay on it for long, so I excavated a base underground, like something out of Red Faction.
For what it’s worth, a lot of it can feel samey (most of the scanning) and kinda boring, but while there aren’t that many insanely huge and cinematic moments, sometimes RNG hits just right and you get something nice.
That sounds cool, but it's either a handcrafted world (if NMS has those) or pure luck. If it's the latter, then it can't have any depth. At best it can have some procedurally generated content that's going to be something you've seen before. Looks cool, but no substance.
Are you sure that you've played it recently? They added an actual story, a huge quest hub, unique items, tons of stuff to do really. I'm quite overwhelmed with the amount of things to do and I don't typically enjoy sandboxes.
Not OP, but my main issue is that after visiting a few systems and a bunch of planets, you kinda saw everything the procedural generation has to offer, and visiting planets becomes boring quickly, at least for me. There are differences, and as someone mentioned there are some unique planets for sure, but for the most part they all look samey. Wildlife is also just walking/flying around doing nothing. This takes away the incentive to go and explore, which is supposed to be the main attraction to the game
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I've bounced off NMS several times, but each time I come back, I reason that they've added so many systems now that the procedural generation must finally feel genuinely deep and interesting.
And maybe it has, but the first 60 minutes of the game still feel like enough of a slog that I have yet to get to any of the good stuff.
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I also recently came back to it and liked the story and progression system a lot more, especially on their "casual" mode.
Because most of the new feature are not connected to each other. Take a gravition coil. It's like in Half Life - but You can only use with very limited set of objects, that were added in same update as gravition coil. Make it useless and not fun...
Same. Every time i re-download it and start a new game I never get past the tutorial because i was so incredibly bored so soon, i always wanted to like this game and i love how much effort they keep making but... sandboxes games are just so boring.
I like to tinker with making games now and then, and I have learned that there are lots of game ideas I have that are more fun to make than play. A lot of those look like No Mans Sky. I feel like the devs fell in love with procedural generation and never thought about what kind of experience they want to have.
I say this because I feel the same thing as you when I go back, and I really want to like it.
considering the company still exist and servers are still up I assume not everyone shares your opinion. its a pretty good milestone for an online game.
not everyone enjoys the same kind of gameplay.
Exactly sums up my experience. Bought it day one. Still bores the hell out of me.
I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse". A thought that comes to me as I type this is what if you try to co-evolve the ecosystems so it doesn't feel like it's just a mix of the same base components in different quantities.
I think a procedural generated space opera is a bit difficult to do.
Space operas are closer to fantasy than hard science fiction: they are about extraordinary people and their extraordinary interactions, you aren't supposed to think hard about the physics.
Procedural generation, on the other hand, is all about emergent behavior, which is closer to hard science fiction: tweak the rules and see what happens. You have to build some deep core physics that are robust, make all the other systems interact in sensible ways over a wide range of conditions, and not worry when balance goes completely off the rails in some cases (in fact, that's the fun part).
No man's sky is a space opera. You could imagine it being hard science fiction: digging into the ground could be deadly (as opposed to a reliable shelter), water / atmosphere mechanics could change (as opposed to just... water and air), gravity could have a much greater range, resource concentrations could vary more, etc. You'd need some mechanics updates to avoid making this frustrating, but maybe not so many as you need to keep the space-opera plot moving.
I don't know that it's possible. Once you see 5-10 of "new thing" you sorta understand the base layer + different modifiers. We're pretty good at recognizing patterns. It's cool the first 3 times, but then you catch on and it feels fundamentally the same as all the other things you've seen.
All procedural games feel like this to me at least. I've been playing Diablo / POE recently. Same deal, once you're at the endgame - the goal just becomes bigger numbers. The maps have different themes, the monsters are different, but you sorta just look past that part as you're gathering generated gear with bigger numbers. It's why I typically get about 10% into the endgame and eventually stop playing.
Minecraft is also a decent example, at some point you stop exploring, build a base and focus on the progression rather than seeing what the system generates in the next biome.
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I am but an armchair expert here, but I do think most of what's missing is the complexity of real-life ecosystems and "connections". Having biomes that are substantially large on a given planet and diversity among them, animals unique to each, and some kind of connections between the sparse settlements (even just like 3-5 actual cities per planet would be a start) would be a big difference. It would be a bit less about the 'wonder' and more about understanding the interplay.
For now, all I can see is "optimization" and "system limits on numbers of unique objects for things to work at 60+ FPS".
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> I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse"
A good start is not to try and build an entire galaxy. Procgen that focuses on the fine detail of a relatively small world have a big leg up over these "everything generators" (i.e. think of something more on the scale of Tiny Glade or Bad North)
The best proc gen experience I have had is with minecraft modpack called hexxit. The world is procedural generated, but then there is a library of ~200+ hand built structures/features that are scattered throughout the generated terrain. So you wander through a forest and find a cave into a volcano full of diamongs but guarded by angry dwarves, then head over into the desert and find a castle with a witch king, etc etc
There are enough hand built things that you don't quickly start running into repeats, and they are just melded into the generated terrain.
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I think it has to be hand crafted with some mix of procedural generation. I worked on the Division Underground DLC, and the way we did it is we had artists create dozens of various room variations, describing how they could connect each other, then I wrote an algorithm to populate the map with these "dungeons" and their rooms in a semi-random order. In the end I think the map had about ~200 unique dungeons, but rooms could repeat between them, so you'd sometimes go "oh hang on I've seen this metro station before" but the entire dungeon would be different almost every time, unless you played hundreds of hours of it(the game kept track and wouldn't give you the same dungeon again until you played them all, iirc)
I think you're on to something here. The problem with procgen is hard because the various things in an environment have to interface with one another and in NMS they don't really meaningfully interface. The geography is generated, and the animals are generated, and the mineral deposits are generated, but the geography never affects the animals or the mineral deposits. You don't see, as an example, vast highland regions with animals adapted for living in the cold and huge mineral veins exposed in cliffs at high altitudes. You also don't see older mountains where the average mineral deposit would sit lower in altitude but be smaller due to erosion, with more cave systems and more critters evolved specifically for caves (colorless, blind, chemautotrophic, specializations like that). There's a range of ways the landscape can be, there's a range of ways animals can be, there's a range of ways resource distribution can be, but they don't affect one another and it makes it feel bland and same-y.
I feel like this is where AI would come in handy. An AI can get a lot more 'creative' than a procedural generation algorithm.
If you are interested in the sandbox element, and space, and building - but want character - Satisfactory pulled me in for roughly 1200 hours over three years. I"ve got the scenery, and new discovery's burned in to my brain - elements of the landscape are more vivid in my memory than a lot of real places I've visited.
What's interesting is that there is zero procedural generation - single world with about 20 Biome, each one with all sorts of character. Monsters are incredibly well balanced, and the sheer terror I got from the spiders (which I think are a tad OP - especially the ones that launch)_ triggered my fight-flight reflex (mostly flight) more than any other game I can recall.
The game can be played in so many different ways too - you can take the factorio/big factory build out approach and speed run that, or just spend your time exploring, or, perhaps best of all - watch hundreds of hours of Youtube Videos to get a sense of the architect aesthetic that some of the top players bring to it. Epic Tech Tree. Cute back story.
I consider it the greatest Sandbox/space game ever - I don't know if we'll ever see anything like it again.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. I have tried coming back to the game multiple times and every time I just feel bored and underwhelmed by the whole experience.
Yeah...I played it for probably a couple of hundred hours...and it wasn't that fun. In fact, it's boring. And I've come back a too many times because someone (like some of the commenters here) said "no, man...get the new update! It's a Totally Different Game!". So I jump back in, and it's different to varying degrees...and still boring. Just because there's "lots to do! new quests! rare items to find!", doesn't mean doing them is fun.
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When it first released I correctly predicted that the game was overhyped and destined to flop, making fun of friends who bought the game and ending up being disappointed.
The internet historian video made me buy it, thinking it was maybe worth it now.
I think I got like 5 hours in before feeling like I was just doing an endless grind. I felt like I had fallen for the hype, which I think was deserved ;)
Maybe the game doesn't get good until you grind past the first N hours, but I just don't have the time any more.
Agreed. I want to like this game _so bad_ but I think the problem is that I'm looking for a feeling of fulfilling progression when in reality this game is just a bunch of disjointed sandboxes which is certainly not my type of game.
NMS's art-style is low-detail, but highly aesthetic. It can look amazing at times, but only when you're looking at grand cinematic vistas. It rarely looks good in closeups. This parallels the game's systems in many ways.
NMS is a technically impressive game. You can build a custom-spaceship, either with the in-game editor or by importing one from outside the game, dogfight in it, land on alien worlds, etc. and that's just one of the loops. However, the spaceships you build aren't simulated physical objects. They don't even feel as substantial as styrofoam fins tacked onto a model train. There's no real challenge to flying them. They all just float through space like nothing.
The game has dozens of ways to progress, finding resources and earning cash. They're all so easy to break that you have to consciously resist doing so. Craft a few donuts and you're rich. You don't have to worry about finding buyers for your obscenely high-end pastries. The market board will buy anything at the listed price. Game breaking bugs that trivialize finding resources have been left in the game forever because the developers were afraid that some people might be upset if they actually had to grind for resources. Why what is, ostensibly, a single player game with multiplayer support tacked on even has grind mechanics is another valid question.
I log into NMS occasionally, but my big problem with it is that it's gameplay devolves into a sequence of grinds that are all optional. The things that should offer a challenge (e.g. ship combat) don't. Every play session becomes a case of, "Where do I find this stupid mineral I need to build an upgrade that will make what's already too easy even easier?".
The technology on display in NMS is absolutely impressive, but the gameplay isn't. I'd love to see a fork of this game where they focus on more challenging gameplay with less focus on grinding and sandbox elements. I see the expeditions as an attempt at this, but they don't go far enough.
It's been years since I last played it, but when I did I finally did so for a while until I finally found myself at a space station with other players and whatnot. And some random dude just gives me something like tens and tens of millions in cash. And my friend. And a bunch of other people in the same station.
At that point I was still rather new to the game. I had little money, few resources, understood little - which was the whole game for me. Discovering new stuff and trying to make money. And being given all that money sort of just .. ruined the game for me. What was left was the very meh storyline and maybe exploration, neither of which had any appeal to me.
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I was just about to say this. I have a lot of respect for the dev team but man is it so not my type of game.
I wish somehow the complexity of eve could meet a game like this. I would sell a kidney for that
It will be interesting to see if the new space station takeovers will be PVP or just chill feature. It seems to suggest they can be owned by groups.
The X games?
X4?
I recently tried star citizen and it's kind of trying to be something like that but it's way too half baked with lots of game breaking bugs like you'll just lose the entire cargo of your ship which can completely bankrupt you after days of saving up. Also they keep releasing bigger and fancier pay to win ships at ridiculous price points like hundreds and even thousands of dollars instead of fixing the game. I tried it during a free week and I legitimately enjoyed it a lot but I was also extremely frustrated a lot by the bugs and the pay to win crap really rubs me the wrong way so I didn't buy it after the free trial ended.
It's a weird mix of amazingly well done and absolute garbage. And pay to win. Don't forget about the pay to win bullshit.
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I remember first hearing about NMS' concept and wishing that they would take the general idea but downsize it by at least 10 orders of magnitude. A universe with 1-100 millions of planets would still feel absolutely massive and way more than individual players would be able to exhaust, yet it would allow the creators to do a bit better curation, allow players to actually meet, maybe add more hand-crafted experiences. Basically, give up on technical purity in favor of fun.
They added real multiplayer several years ago. If you go to the same system another player is in, they'll be there. (As well as everything anybody has ever built there).
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I had a different experience.
I bought it on day one in 2016, and like everyone else, I was wowed by the planet hopping experience for about an hour or so. Then I put it down and didn't think about it again.
Then I picked it up a few years later, and discovered base building. Had more fun than the first playthrough, but it didn't click. Eventually I hear about something called the Galactic Hub, which is a star system marked by players as a central spot to build their bases. Kind of like a human home in the vast empty universe of NMS.
I get curious about it, and look up instructions on how to get there. I did some quick napkin math and realized it would take literally dozens of hours of grinding - nonstop travel - to get there. However, as it turns out, there's a loophole with black holes. When you enter a black hole, it spits you out into a totally different place in the galaxy. From the players perspective its random, but players got together and figured out that each unique black hole always sends you to the same spot in the galaxy. So they constructed a black hole "highway", along with an app that let you input your desired coordinates, and it would give you the list of black holes that would most optimally get you near your destination.
So I spend an evening playing the game, switching back and forth from the game to my laptop, inputting coordinates and slowly making my way closer and closer to the hub. Eventually I find it, and what was amazing was that it was the first time I'd seen any evidence of another player in the game.
That moment felt utterly magical, because while I was playing a game, I had an actual, real objective that I formed entirely on my own.
So yes, the game is an odd duck, but it can really open up with the right mindset.
Weird take cause the game is definetely there and it has tons of content. Admitedly it is not for me because I just do not like the way resource gathering works. Does not tickle my fancy. But saying there is nothing substantial is an odd take, there is base building, space battles (fighter and corvette), expeditions. You can even do a little automatisation if you are into it.
Exactly how I feel about this game. While its redemption arc is one for the history books, every time I come back to it, I feel nothing.
A mile wide, and an inch deep
Yeah, that is exactly my issue with the game - they crammed so many mechanics into the game, but all of them are incredibly shallow & even unfinished.
The RNG space is part of the problem - planets and biomes kinda start to repeat after while and it is not really important any more on which weird planet or station you are.
It is actually interesting how many games with much smaller RNG generated world maps work just fine because you don't travel so much like in NMS & kinda learn to know the landscape and also shape it yourself or with your friends. Like you know there is a lake next to you base and that deserted town, then there is that forested mountain where you got ambushed by zombies once & built a secondary mining base later, etc.
In NMS you land on a random planet, build a base on it and - like, what is it good for, if there are millions of similar planets & coop multiplayer is almost non-existent.
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Every time these epic announcements go out, I try co-op multiplayer again, realize it's still miserable, then close it and wait for the next release. I'd love to play it with my wife but completing our own objectives, building our own bases, not being able to directly interact like in other games this decade, progressing forward separately, fixing our own ships, etc. etc. etc. is just a non-starter. Good luck to them though!
I tried it a few years ago, following all the "It's actually good now!" stories.
But a few hours into the tutorial, at a point of yet another "go gather 20 wolf Pel^H^H Ores from that other planet and bring it back", and I lost interest.
The inner gameplay loop didn't work for me, and I need that hook.
Have there since been improvements to that inner loop?
In contrast, Destiny 2 keeps hooking me back in because its inner loop, the gunplay and abilities, and variety of builds, really works for me.
By 'coming back', do you mean actually firing it up and playing it?
Disney found this out the hard way with Infinity. On v3.0 a large chunk of their IP was staged into a fully customizable and open universe.. and it was so unremarkable that they shutdown the servers and killed all development a few years later.
I feel the same way about Starfield. Just soulless projects instead of engaging video games.
Starfield is IMO worse. NMS at least has sandboxes that can entertain you and expeditions can be fun. NMS just doesn't have "goal" to work towards, so unless you can create your own goals its boring. Starfield, bugs aside, had the most boring base-building/operations I've seen in my life.
A played it, got stuck in a giant crater with seemingly no way to get out of it. That was basically the extent of my experience.
When up against a wall you have infinite jetpack but the game doesn’t really tell you this.
i played it day 1 back then and even bought a PS4 only to play it and played it over the years repeatedly after every larger update for about 1000 hours in total. The fundamental promise they made was never shipped, which was originally a large variety of procedural flora, fauna, and planet. It is still the same uninspired boring stale core that it was day 1 with minimal extensions which produce absolutely boring world that immediately repeat. The game was always Waiting for Godot, waiting for a game that was originally announced with an interesting procedural feature but never shipped. Meanwhile I discovered the history of procedural games, which is a story of fails.
I still sometimes hope that the actually rewrote the entire procedural variety system but it cant happen because people built persistent shit on those planets. They probably have to launch a new game.
Video games have always been part tech demo
And the story aspects are played out no different than Hollywood
NMS has more in common with Minecraft. It's a virtual chat room that looks Star Wars-y
Also don't discount simply not being a kid anymore. Biology isn't static. Memory does not allow for that same initial burst of excitement.
I kinda feel the same way. I loved slowly going through the main story and probably put 50hr into the game, but the sandbox alone (amazing as it is) just doesn't do it for me.
This is why a cool tech solution (procedural generation of "levels") by itself isn't good enough. The core gameplay loop is fundamentally the same on every planet. The graphics and descriptions may change but once you've played it for a bit, it gets boring.
I think video games are art, so take my opinion in context of if this is right up your alley and you really love it, then keep on keepin on!
Every year social media hits me hard with "No Man's Sky is good now!" — and I bit and dove in with a few buddies.
To say everything in this game is half baked is giving it too much credit. It's 10% baked at best. This isn't a game; it's an underwhelming tech demo. The only cool feature of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great.
Everything else is baaaad: the quests have less logic than entry MMO quests, and are mainly fetch missions. The planets are randomly generated slop. The economy of building up your ship/fleet isn't fun (you just sell your ships over and over again). Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)
It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that are clearly just trying to trick folks into buying an elaborate space game tech demo. Can we move on from this "game"?
> Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)
FWIW, most of the systems in the game that have been there since the beginning have changed significantly since v1.
IIRC, back in the v1 days you'd give an NPC a species-specific valuable trinket and they'd teach you a randomly-selected word of their race's language. Learning words was useful for when you'd encounter a historical relic that presented an important scene from history, and when you encountered an NPC that was requesting assistance. In both cases, they'd make their speech or request in their native language, you'd be given a few context clues in the form of dialog describing gestures, NPC attitude, etc, and then you'd have to guess what action you needed to perform or resource of yours they needed. If you get it right, you get something nice.
Like many other systems in the game, this got reworked several times into what it is now: "Find an NPC, ask for language assistance, select a category of word to learn, and Bob's your uncle.". I won't claim that either the v1 or current methods of learning language are fun, but the v1 method did consume a resource that was often difficult to come by... so it made learning the language much more difficult. They could have cooked up three whole-ass conlangs and built in gradual language tutorials for each... but that'd be a surprising choice for a game whose most difficult puzzles are "Can you do basic arithmetic?" and "Can you understand which direction this list of numbers is rotating?".
There's never been much _game_ in NMS... and most any player who's made it to the center of the galaxy and both got what they were being told by the story and weren't enraged by the implications gets why. The game's first story (such as it is) is why I'm always amused by people who don't dislike it, but also take it very seriously and want there to be a ton of stuff to do in it.
Having said that, Hello Games has apparently been more than happy to add in a bunch of stuff [0] over the years. I'm amazed that they're making enough money on the game to still be working on it a decade later, but here we are.
> It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that...
Eh. As someone who pops back in for a few hours when there's a major change, I don't mind at all the detailed patch notes.
> Can we move on from this "game"?
Go for it! I'll still be popping in every now and again to screw around with it.
[0] ...some of which is clearly playtesting for things planned for Light No Fire...
To me it feels like what i actually want is Eve's economy, PVP/PVE strapped onto the noman gameplay, at least personaly
I've heard it described as "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle"
bout 5 months ago i gave it 2 hours of my life and asked for a refund once i realized i had basically seen the whole game in that first like 30 minutes of playing.
the only game that seems to hit the mark of what im actually itching for is star citizen that is in a perpetual state of never-finished but i can't even quite put a finger on what it is i'm after. beauty, art, real weather, being able to fly up through the atmosphere and just let me escape into a sci fi movie. i can acknowledge star citizen has actually come a long ways and i think they do deliver that, though i haven't played it myself just going off vids ive seen.
NMS somehow feels like a visual and playable interpretation of depression to me with a Dr. Seuss world backdrop lol. Like it reminds me of times in my life where I've just been stuck in the motions, unhappy, resigning myself to the fate of doing absolutely nothing of inspiration because I felt like I had no other options and gave up.
Shout outs to steam for refunding when my reason was "This game is actually depressing"
Agreed. And this tech demo was a day 1 purchase for me back in the day. While it has gotten better since then it just doesn't hold my interest. I do like using it whenever every few months I feel inclined to get my PC VR headset out (I'm using an old HO Reverb G2 with the Oasis driver) I think it's a great VR title.
I remember when it first came out, there was so much hype but I immediately wondered, “where exactly is the game loop?” I also remember how aggressively defensive fans were about it.
This is why you really need a good geologic, climate etc models. Like a full blown simulation.
I feel the same. I want Rust in space, where there are constant stakes. NMS either takes too long to get to a part of the game where stakes become relevant, or doesn't have any.
If anyone has any recs on PvE/looting/base building games in space with the polish of NMS, please share.
EVE online?
Agreed. It's incredibly boring. It lacks an interesting and interactive story with good pacing. What they have done is cool, don't get me wrong, but I think they got carried away by the tech coolness without enough attention to what makes a game fun or interesting.
Do you think the same of Minecraft?
I think this kind of game needs another innovation to make it interesting. I don't think adding more generative or LLM generated content is the solution.
I had some great moments in NMS. But, you're right, it needs a plot or storyline to follow.
This perfectly describes how this game makes me feel.
I felt this way for a while until I decided to sit down, start a new game, and engage with it.
It's a completely different game, it just doesn't look like it if you picked back up where you left off. Without the right context, you have a tendency to just repeat what you were doing before, and it feels like nothing changed.
But believe me, everything changed. You should revisit it, because I don't think you've seen the actual changes to the game.
Yepp. Biggest buy misstake ever.
they add feature after feature. but never a good drive for the player. 'why should i go to this planet?'
i have an idea for it,
Let users populate the universe with custom quests. Scriptable quests with dialog and multipart structure. You need a custom script language and some limitations on it. Example quests:
- "Bandits have occupied our town", but actually bandits are tax collectors. You instead may help them document the goods.
- "Our star is dying", instead a huge starhip is recharging and refusing to move without some condition.
also add a rumor system to lead players to quests.
you can use my idea Hello Games, you have my permission.
Right on the nail.
How people interact with LEGO varies. Some people like to buy specific sets and make them. That's fine. Some people see a random pile of bricks and build a massive city [1]. There are also competition events for what people can build from a random pile of bricks. There was a TV show about this too (ie Lego Masters).
Some games are problem solving, others are competitive, yet others are elimination but an awful lot of games have a component that requires you to inject imagination. The Sims and even Minecraft (despite it having a survival mode too) spring to mind.
That's what NMS is. Some people like to find the perfect looking ship. Others build bases to look a certain way. Others just explore. Yet others make money.
If that's not for you, that's OK. But NMS can't be dismissed as being repetitive or boring.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfVCmkexl2E
>but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay.
to me that has become a big positive aspect of the game. The non-teleology of it, that you just run around and immersive yourself in it is pleasant in its own right. Especially modern games to me seem to have substituted games as an experience with reward system driven busy work. Everything is always instrumental.
I started to notice this when games like Journey came out, or Death Stranding during the stress of the pandemic. No Man's Sky is obviously not as artistically strong as either one but the exploration only for explorations sake has me come back to it very regularly. It genuinely is a game about nothing (so is Seinfeld, never hurt the show) but to me that boredom is a genuinely good thing.
NMS seems to epitomize the excesses of the Agile development philosophy with most of their release updates -- small targeted tack-ons to the game engine that provide something tangible yet shallow for users to explore, usually disconnected from narrative. The same cargo drop configurations, how damaged containers always require removing the same rusted metal or goop, and how shelters have the same exact configuration, never ever evolve or change. It has such a strangely repetitive ghost town character. They could easily target their "agile" deliverables around diversifying and breathing more life into the worlds if they could span more "sprints". Unfortuntately, the tack-ons feel hollow, empty, and often ship incredibly buggy. They used procedural modeling to create an impressive array of planets, but never modeled the planet drops with the same care and diversity.
That's because there were no idea behind it in the first place. It was an ambitious overpromising project that hasn't delivered almost anything they promised. They didn't have any story or interesting gameplay in mind too. Pity.
It's a great game to play with friends. Explore, find cool animals, and most of all - build your fantasy space home. It's relaxing, fun, and can be a great shared experience. I imagine it wouldn't be quite as engaging completely by yourself.
It's kind of like ARK, they spent so much time on all the "cool" stuff that looks great in trailers without focusing on what actually would make a game like this incredible, which is a real persistent singular world with consequences and meaningful group based PVP or PVE that works at scale. What you end up with is just a simulacra of multiplayer that basically boils down to a visually represented Xbox Live lobby.
How I feel as well.
This game just doesn't scale well from mid game on - it's way too easy, even on permadeath + hardest difficulty. Like, making money is way too easy, combat is way too easy, everything is too forgiving. And the entire loop is centered on like, 3 things to do that are all variants of the same exact thing. Really hope they do a much better job in Light No Fire.
To the guy who replied to me: Our genius overlord moderators rate limited my responses so I'll post here.
> I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding
You and I have very different ideas of what forgiving means. A reasonably intelligent 7 year old that enjoys and has experience playing video games could play this game on max difficulty settings and not have any issues. And while I never had an issue finding anything (shit is literally everywhere), resource scarcity doesn't equally an unforgiving game mechanic unless it's gated by some sort of difficult fight or something, which this game doesn't have. Combat is laughably easy and repetitive. I've got a couple hundred hours in the game, and at one point I was running the same bounty missions over and over again for some outrageous amount of money - the mission took 7 minutes round trip, the combat encounter was literally the exact same every time, same number of enemies just with different names. And that was the most efficient way I could make money in late game on the permadeath server on max settings. If that's the best economy loop a game can come up with, a 100% brainless combat encounter, then the developer has done something very wrong.
it's because it's a sandbox farming game, it's not meant to be difficult
you spend most of your time finding/farming resources and unlocking builds
most of your time is traveling between planets/systems/galaxies for different resources
I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding, which is the core gameplay, you can easily miss it if you don't play for 40+ hours but there are entire varieties of star systems you can't access initially, an entire race you literally can't see without completing some strings of missions, etc
I opened the game.
Played 30 minutes. Found a start of game bug that blocks progression.
Looked online, everyone claims this exact bug had been squashed years before.
Started a new game. Bug returned. Left it for a few days. Bugs still there. No workaround.
Raised a thread somewhere. Got yelled at for "Pretending" to have the bug.
Uninstalled the game.
My 2 cents is that it looked like a really shitty MMO with nothing on top, but I cant really say because it never let me leave the tutorial.
I think facts would be helpful for this discussion:
1. Total Revenue - ~$500m-$700m
2. Copies Sold - ~15-20m
3. Steam Review Score: 84.36%
4. 40 Free Major Updates
I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.
NMS is a great example of a developer who was devoted to their customer base, kept updating the game for free, and saw great market success in return.
This is a story to be celebrated.
> I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.
A lot of people simply aren't as enamored with the shallow gameplay, even in the current version. I'm not surprised that they've sold a lot over the years since they've been putting out free content updates year after year to lure people into reinstalling it every six months or so.
As someone who played this game on start I want to share that I enjoyed it. This game was and still is a chill exploration experience at the core. There’s a lot of stuff bolted on top, but it’s just a busywork. If you enjoy that kind of games you’ll love it.
Another thing to point out: technical patching is top notch. I’m talking about how fast they come around to support new console, new VR helmet etc.
I don't think anyone disagrees and I don't really see negative comments about the devs or the studio.
The problem is the game itself, gameplay wise. It's just boring for many (including me)
Somewhat of an aside but, personally, I also found GTA V and Red dead redemption 2 to be boring because these games didn't respect my time. I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world".
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That’s fine, it has a sustained concurrent players online of > 7k every day for the last 6 months [0]. Few games on Steam achieve that.
While several people are complaining about a one-time-cost game with an absurd amount of updates that had a rough launch, thousands of people are continuously happy, the subreddit expresses joy. It’s okay to “not get it”; but at some level, this much hate and dogpiling over a game that’s not harmful and not fostering a toxic community is … embarrassing for those participating in the hate.
[0] https://steamcharts.com/app/275850#6m
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Do you enjoy similar games (vast open worlds, resource collection/management, crafting)?
> I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.
It's the sandbox concept. Some people load into Minecraft and think, "AWESOME! I'M GOING TO BUILD A MALL!" Some people load into Minecraft and think, "WTF is this? Why is there no story? What the hell am I meant to do?"
I'm not going to cast judgement. It's a preference. The people who bounce off NMS are the latter. NMS is a very fun sandbox. The story is secondary to making your own fun.
The developer is great. The game isn't.
I enjoy games based on content and gameplay, not volume.
Also no layoffs, ever. Who would've thought that providing your people stability would lead to a better product.
What are people on about, there is tons to do in NMS, tons of missions, expeditions, build bases, build a corvet, hunt rate parts, ships, rifles, creatures, manage a settlement, automate crafting chains, find a lucrative trading route, and this new update apps even more things. I'd never consider NMS anything close to empty, there is so much variety in the content
The game has so much stuff to do its actually overwhelming. The game is definitely a sandbox though and I think for some reason a lot of people don't like going out and doing the different things you can do in the game if the game doesn't force you to or if there's not heavy progression.
I feel like the same thing happens to other sandbox games too. Minecraft is one of my favorite games of all time and I could easily spend a thousand hours in a vanilla world and still find things to do, however the game gets constantly shit on by the community no matter what it does. They speedrun through the progression and then lack any creativity to do anything else in the game.
I personally love building bases and customizing and collecting things, which is a large part of the gameplay in NMS. I could spend hundreds of hours doing that but I guess some people just need a constant sense of progression and the game telling you what to do because they aren't capable of setting their own goals. Anyone who says NMS lacks content or things to do has barely touched the game.
I think what most of the commentary is on is the initial gameplay loop which has to do with planetary exploration and learning words. After that there's a multitude of new gameplay loops that become intertwined. I don't think most players get that far unless they have a very old account.
I think it comes from a difference in what people want. Some people want to achieve goals, while others want to be given tools to be creative. There's a whole spectrum in between, plus other motivations as well.
I enjoy being creative to an extent, but I like to solve problems, so I naturally gravitate to something with a long-term goal to achieve like Factorio (I rapidly lose interest after launching a rocket though).
Saying the game is a space sandbox and then implying that the inability to find fun falls onto the player's inability is what every online NMS fan says in discussions about not enjoying NMS. Calling a game a sandbox doesn't spawn game mechanics into existence, the game is still limited by what the devs put into the game. Your goals are still limited by what the game provides to you.
But a game can have 1000 hours of collectables content and still not be an enjoyable game to people. For example, I don't really enjoy collectables purely for the sake of collecting or building without having some sort of meaningful functionality. Every time I've tried to get into NMS (and when I ask others about what you can do in the game), I get the impression that 99% of the game is just flying/walking around, scanning things, collecting some random doodads, base building, and hoping to find a "cool" ship in a station to buy. Which is to say, the same things every base building survival game has, but in space.
I don't necessarily need forced goals, but I need things to work toward that aren't just collectables. For example, in certain other space sandbox games I can build up or destroy political factions. The universe around me dynamically updates in ways that actually affect me meaningfully. I can build up industry to harvest resources, refine them, and produce various goods either to use or to sale. I can have a goal of building all of the infrastructure needed to produce ships, or colonies, or what have you. With a larger industry, maybe some of the political factions try to attack me, so I then need to defend against them. I could build up a fleet of ships that handle defense and transportation of resources. I want to feel like the universe actually responds to my input.
I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development - the game of the last few years is absolutely nothing like the early one and I agree, there is a surprising amount of stuff to do.
FWIW, I was there from the beginning, and stopped fairly quickly (maybe 20 or so hours in).
I hopped back in a couple years later after a few updates, and agree that the quantity of content was pretty big. But the quality was not -- it still felt "empty", and never held my interest long.
Last year, the same thing happened. I hopped back on after a few big updates, probably spent another 10 or so hours on it (I think I started over), and felt like I had explored all there was.
I feel like all the criticisms it gets are valid. I agree that the effort of maintaining a game after 10 years is incredibly admirable, especially since ever update has been free. That's amazing. And the devs should be acknowledged for that.
But the game itself still feels largely empty. The progression feels mostly repetitive without feeling like you're really moving forward in a meaningful way. And, as others have said, the proc gen still feels "vanilla".
I probably won't hop back in after this update. I've learned, by now, that while many praise the new content, it'll probably just feel like more of the same to me.
>stuff to do
This is the whole problem in a nutshell. I want a Game™ and they're providing "stuff to do".
I have never played, but I watched all the drama unfold on reddit. It makes me wonder, is this what happens when you have an underwhelming launch? "You only make a first impression once" - and there is a huge price to pay for that?
In SaaS and YC, it's ship early and ship often, right? Is that absolutely not the case in games? Also, how true is it in SaaS? Genuinely curious here.
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Oh, I don't think so. The systems in the game are very shallow, and overall, everything is too easy, which makes the game feel bland. There are almost no stakes. That leads to a feeling of nothing to do because none of it feels worth doing.
As someone who played it for the very first time just last year, those 10 year old takes ring absolutely true to my experience in the game. It was fun for a little while, but it became repetitive and shallow quickly.
Different strokes, I guess.
I think maybe you're discounting that people have agency and can decide that a game they are playing actively doesn't tick their boxes. I reinstalled it last week and put in about two hours before uninstalling again. Mile wide and inch deep is exactly the way to describe it.
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> I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development...
Some are, sure. But -I say as someone who enjoys the game for what it is and still pops in every now and again to mess around with it- there's not much game in the game. Like BoBaitlyn said, it's a sandbox game. It has always been a sandbox game, and there are some folks who spend a few minutes fucking around with the sand in the box, go "WTF, this is boring as shit. I'm out!" and are boggled at the folks who enjoy playing with all the sand.
There's nothing wrong with being boggled or talking about how much you hated the sandbox. Specific sandboxes tend to appeal to specific sorts of people... each one often has its own gimmick that will pull in different sorts of folks. Suggesting that most complainers are complaining from a position of ignorance when they're complaining about a lack of things to do in a game that doesn't have much game in it kinda sucks. I've been playing off and on since v1, and have played for about half of the major patches. Hello Games has added a lot of stuff, but they haven't really added in much game to the game, if you see what I'm saying?
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I think some people don't understand what a procgen survival-craft game is. They're not wrong about it being an open sandbox, that's kinda the point. People talking about taking too long getting to space might not know about the limited time expeditions you can just start in for a different take, or turning the game to creative mode so they don't need to spend time resource farming to get their ship working so they can go fly around if that's all they want from the game.
The story and those quests will be rooted in building something. The space exploration will be rooted in finding a cool place loosely intended for your next base. The space battles and encounters will be part of the same core procgen survival craft cycle.
I won't deny there's probably only 20-40 hours of "real content" in the game. Most of what is there is shallower, or easilly missable, without the expedition(limited-time event) that launched it. A lot of things do seem like "grind X yourself, order team to do Y every few hours, fly to Z and talk to someone" which will get repetitive if/when you keep getting the same ones.
I know what a procgen survival-craft game is. I just don't think it's a very fun one. It's actually too easy, in fact.
When it first released, the criticism that it's mostly empty procedural generation what what got currency and stuck to the no man sky name.
That still sticks around as people who've never played it comment & upvote the same things.
I've never played it. Just witnessing the cargo culting. If I were wanting to give an opinion on this post without actual information, the 'empty procedural generation' critique is exactly what I'd say, since that's all I associate with this game from the briefest commentary when it was released.
There are lots of things to do, but the actual mechanics are for doing them are shallow. The best example of this is the trading system; the way trading works is there are 7 economy types a star system can have, which determines which goods they produce (can buy in large quantities) and demand (can sell for a higher price than at normal systems). Thus the best way to make money from trading is to simply find a loop of systems which chain together the production -> demand goods. For instance, the economy types trading -> advanced materials -> scientific -> trading each produce the goods demanded by the next economy type in the chain.
So the system is fairly shallow, since what you end up doing is just jump from system to system and buy and sell everything.
Well there is piracy and smuggling now. The latter is easy way to make cash with minimal risk.
But if you want to get rich just find a few player farms and harvest. You will make millions in no time.
And all of it is like, run around, press x. load stuff in processor. take stuff out of processor. wait. load stuff in processor. take stuff out of processor. wait. oh your crops are ready. pres x, x, x, x, x, x, x. go to sales terminal, sell crops, go to processor, take stuff out of processor load in processor again. oh hey crops are ready again, x, x, x, x.....
Missions: fly to randomly chosen planet in solar system and to same generated structure and find the object in the same spot as it always is in this generated structure. fly back. your crops are ready again for harvest, press x, x, x, x, x, x...
My hot take on why these games get popular (including some like PowerWash Simulator that are 'press x, then x again' type games): it gives people satisfaction of completing something in a world that it is increasingly harder to accomplish what the prior generation did.
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Noone said it was empty. Noone said there wasn't a lot of 'stuff' in NMS. What many of us are saying is that all that stuff doesn't make the game fun.
Different people find different things fun. I've never been grabbed by multiplayer FPS (I never git gud) - or souls-likes (same). I do sometimes get sucked into some Bethesda games but I need to get over the initial hump. I had a serious Minecraft problem (solo play - not groups) and had a big Beat Saber phase. I still play OG Doom but never liked Quake. I usually hate games with narratives except when I don't. Journey nearly made me weep with joy and sadness but I don't tend to go for slow, arty games in general... And - in general I want to like games, find them fascinating as a medium - but find most of them tedious when I sit down to play.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49628715
top comment is all about the game being empty
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People who didn't follow up their post-launch recovery still have the impression made at the launch (first impressions matter a lot). I didn't play the game (yet) but I have followed their recovery path. It is an incredible story and it seems that the game has evolved a lot.
I wonder if they won't add generative AI to create infinite stories/missions inside it, that would get rid of the 10K bowls effect.
stuff to do != fun stuff to do
at the time of posting, i think every top-level comment except one is negative. so, i'd like to balance it by saying that i have never seen a better executed turnaround than what the no man's sky team did. they cratered their reputation on launch, worked hard and long to restore it, and then continued to offer free updates long after they needed to. lots of respect there. (i will reward the effort by purchasing their next game on day 1, sight unseen.)
i also happen to enjoy the game itself.
no matter what, that always happens with this game. Any news about it causes the people who played for 10 minutes at launch however long ago come back to tell you how much they didn't like it.
It appears that the go-to response from certain fans is to accuse anyone critical of having only played it at launch. I assure you that's not the case. I find the game just as shallow today every time I try a new content update. What do you want me to do? Convince myself I don't feel that way about it? I can't make myself like something.
I have 65 hours logged on Steam, am I allowed to say that I have also bounced off of several updates and find the game empty and lacking meaningful goals?
It's simultaneously an amazing achievement, worth the money I paid, a redemption story for Hello Games, and yet disappointing in a way that e.g. BOTW is not.
One of these years I plan to dive back in again, hoping to find that the sum of all the updates has provided some new story progression I will find meaningful and give me a reason to exercise all the new game mechanics. I'm hopeful!
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My perspective on this is that it’s fine to not like things and bounce off them. I also bounced off NMS, no big deal. It just isn’t for me and that’s fine.
All I know is that they worked hard on this game and found plenty of people who enjoy playing it a lot and that’s that. Doesn’t mean they are wrong, doesn’t mean I’m wrong in bouncing off. I do think it is interesting to explore why I bounced off and others might not – I can identify with many of the negative comments here, especially the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal one regarding the procedural generation which probably was the one thing I was most fascinated by when I decided to install the game – but there are so many other systems and elements in this game that if you more into those I can easily see why the game works much better for you.
I am grateful that the devs and their commitment to continuously improving the game have long left those people behind.
The gameplay is completely engaging and this update looks like it fills in even more spaces than were hoped for.
Many of the day 1 game breaking bugs still exist and every time I play it every couple years, they’re still there.
That is a predictable consequence of their decision to launch before the game was ready. The game as it is now may not deserve that kind of contempt, but it's the price they chose to pay forever at launch.
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I don't really enjoy the game for more than 10-20 hours after picking it up (gets boring fast for me), and have problems with it, but kudos to the dev team. I agree, huge turnaround
For sure. Even as someone who bounced off the game several times, the scope of their post-launch additions are truly impressive, even matching up against a lot of the subscription games (whose whole deal is regular content drops)
There is no such thing as a turnaround. People wait for a game to be released. When you give a release date, you must give one that shows the almost complete state of your game. Not something that is half done, not something that will feel completely different 1 year later. When you buy a thing you get an experience. If your game is a different experience 1 year later, well, I couldn't care less about it. I'm not gonna sink another 10+ hours into it, just to see what you have done in one year's time. Imagine you go to the matrix and you get a half movie, bad coloring and the like. Just ridiculous.
Early access, early release, beta, whatever is just an euphemism of becoming a backer. You thought you buy something final, and in the end you become a financier. You lend your money upfront. All this because a group of pampered kids can't keep a deadline. And think that the world is a playground and they can keep their game 5 years in early access. Get a grip.
Sorry. You release your shit, it gets evaluated, end of story. Nobody cares the rest. Gaming space is already half dead because people think that sitting at a game company means you get to have knitting lessons during workhours, and you can daydream and chitchat all day long. Ridiculous.
>There is no such thing as a turnaround.
this is very obviously untrue, as evidenced by no man's sky.
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I agree with you in principle, but "nobody cares" clearly isn't true given the steam review history.
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I disagree with this logic.
They launched an empty, hollow game. And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. Most of their new systems are half baked—confusing and only adding to the game design mess the game came out with.
I'm convinced the reputation that they executed a "turnaround" is based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
The benefit to the NMS team for this is they'll have people half willing to try their next game because they "didn't give up". Not the worse idea, but I think we're over stating the heroicness of this.
>And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't
why scare quotes around for free? they were free.
>haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it.
i went from hating it to really enjoying it. i am not the only one.
>based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
my comment comes from my opinion and my experience, not social media. i think its a good game, and i would say it's absolutely worth the money.
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Bolted on? A lot of the core mechanics were rebuilt or added over the 10 years.
> based on them staggering a few nonsense releases
This has to be a troll. Or you haven’t touched the game in years.
What other game has had 10 years of free updates that has dramatically changed the game?
I think it looks like a variety of game that it's not, and there's a dissonance there... it's not an action/adventure game, it's a sandbox of procedural generated worlds where you gather resources to unlock new builds.
You can build bases, manage settlements, maintain a fleet, build ships and exocraft, build multi-tools, have pets battle each other, cook food, manage the economy... but there's only a thin relationship/lore system and not much of a difficulty ramp at any point.
You're space farming, if you expect anything else you won't like it.
NMS is an amazing game with no soul. A metaverse. A monument to technology without the depth or people or narrative (prewritten or emergent) that makes it interesting.
I'm certain there are some people whose brain is wired exactly right to love it.
But I have more fun playing the n100th Call of Duty clone hearing real voices on the headset in a tight, fun game loop.
But the company behind it deserves to be applauded. Might be the best value for money / care / support of any game, especially one so poorly received initially...
I think you have it in reverse, it's pure soul but very little game. It's just like Noctis IV, an interactive piece of art. This one has more pretense to looking like a game with its crafting system and survival mechanics that you can thankfully disable. It also has a narrative, several well-executed threads of them. It's a very introspective game with things to say about itself and the experience of living. You might not like it, you might have found it unengaging, but to deny it lacks humanity, artistic substance and a story to tell is crazy.
There's also not very much I would say is technically impressive about it at all, and definitely not anything people normally reach for. The bandwidth of the asset streaming they accomplished on the PS4, with such a small team that still had to build the rest of the game, is the only thing that makes me raise an eyebrow. In fact, that may as well have been the real gain of crunching down how planets are described rather than the huge number of planets themselves. Even that's not particularly groundbreaking if you take away the context of the small team. And at that point we have to ask ourselves if it's groundbreaking, or just very intelligent and clever pragmatism. Impressive in a labor lens, not a technical one.
In a way, it might reflect accurate space and our universe. We really might be alone.
Ironically less so as they've added more to do but:
> NMS is an amazing game with no soul.
I found the game in the early days to be incredibly soulful - it was almost an interactive poem. Full of emptiness and loss. I loved it back then.
I really like this game and have played it for years but I think it's popularity outgrew it's niche. It's a very niche game, the devs have made the ultimate space Lego kit, but I see lots of people complain about it being boring because there are no stakes, no challenge. I think they are trying to play the game they want it to be not the game it is. The overwhelming scale of the meme this game has become I think is the cause of that.
I like playing the game in abandoned mode in single player, just me, my ship, a lot of dead space stations and planets and some fauna here and there. I explore every planet (except aggressive sentinel ones) and make short hops to nearby systems. If I run across too many systems that have already been explored I made a large hop in a random direction and try there. There's something about playing this way that keeps bringing me back. I tend to nope out of the main game as soon as I get a freighter, I'm not that into a lot of game mechanics, but I love exploring planets, even if they are ultimately not that different from one another. I like going on hikes even though it's just the same trees with some variety in real life.
I belive no Mans Sky is a great game but I could realy never get through to the newer stuff because the base resource gathering gathering does not grip me. The lasering of resources is just not satisfying to me. I love resource gathering but it needs to be satisfying like mining ores in minecraft (or Hytyale).
Additionaly I do not like flying Fighters I enjoy larger Ships. Put it as me enjoying space combat like Star Trek more than Star Wars.
If a Star Trek game similar to NMS came out, that would be my JAM imagine flying a smaller explorer vessel beaming down on procedural worlds and interacting with flora and fauna there. That would be up my jam.
But I still have to stress what Hello Games did is probably the best Redemption Story in Gaming. And they deserve all the good for it. Also please finall get me light no fire.
NMS is one of the best comeback stories in gaming, but I'll keep dying on this hill: the game is an ocean wide and a puddle deep. I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours. Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials. It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content. The UI isn't intuitive and badly needs modernizing. It feels so clunky after all these updates.
> I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours.
Yep, me too. It's a decent sandbox to spend a bit of time in, and it's fine that that's all it is.
> Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials.
They have spent substantial amounts of time on UI, UX, and tutorials... several times. Unless you're proposing they convert everything into a brain-dead "mobile" game UI (which would be a significant downgrade), it'd be very difficult to do much better than they already have with the inventory management and conversation UIs.
> It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content.
I mean, it's a sandbox. If they did all of the UI overhauling and tutorial creation you wanted from them -and nothing else- would that keep your interest for weeks and months... or would you play for a few hours and get bored? There's not much _game_ in the game and it's been that way since the beginning.
I have hundreds of hours with my son in creative mode just building bases, fishing, battling our animals and hanging out. We’ve explored hundreds of systems just cataloguing all the animals and flora. We’ve learned all the languages. We basically have infinite money.
It’s all very shallow but it’s also “cozy”. This game is much more Animal Crossing than Minecraft. Other than the planets with extremely dangerous atmospheres and storms (and only in survival mode) it’s all pretty chill. If you like making your own fun and just like doing stuff like using photo mode and chatting with friends this is a great game.
My son was really excited to see the new customizable base station any space station updates. It’s like they made this update just for us.
Really looking forward to see what they’re cooking up for Light No Fire.
This game came out before my son was even born and it’s his favourite game and it’s a constant source of bonding for us. Thank you Hello Games.
I'll echo a sister comment saying that NMS still feels like a tech demo. However, I'll also use the occasion to mention slash shill Noctis IV, a game that NMS more than likely owes a lot to.
Noctis IV is an old DOS game, or perhaps more of an art project about flying through a galaxy and exploring (sections of) planets on foot. Notably, you can name stars, planets, and place markers with notes on planetary coordinates, and then you can share those with other players via an "INBOX" system. While it technically has even less gameplay than NMS ever did, its primitive but custom 3D engine produces absolutely striking landscapes to explore [0]
While the author's webpage seems to have died at some point in the recent years, the project lives on through two community made mods, Noctis IV Plus [1] and Noctis IV Community Edition (NICE) [2].
[0] https://mooses.nl/nice/screenshots/city2.gif
[1] https://github.com/jorisvddonk/Noctis-IV-Plus
[2] https://mooses.nl/nice/releases/R11dot6a/
Spent a lot of time in this game… The team is excellent and they ship incredible ambitious work.
I really wish they would just focus 100% on Light No Fire.
Part of me is secretly hoping / assuming they’re releasing new features as a testing bed for the changes in Light No Fire. I’m also very hopeful for Light No Fire. *VERY* hopeful, but I have to assume all these updates are for their broader engine. I hope..
Sean has said so explicitly in multiple videos, including the "deep dive" video for today's update.
I assume as well. I’m concerned that it’s in development hell. Sean mentioned that they’ve been working on it for 7 years.
In hindsight I think the great thing about NMS was that it shipped in such a raw state and they continually improved it based on community feedback.
I have faith though —- they know a lot more from building NMS and managing the community. They absolutely know what a good game feels like.
A huge vastness of nothing. The game has no soul at all. Worlds are ugly, animals are ugly, plants are ugly. With the first trailer I thought it could've been the game of my life, but it's just horrible, besides the feeling of moving around in the vastness of the universe, but once you get to a planet, it's just a turn off
I have at least 100 hours in the game, and I have to disagree with you. There's a surprising amount of variety in the creatures and the world generation.
I spend a lot of time building / designing my base. In that aspect, the enjoyment of the game is limited only by my creativity. I've definitely got $25 worth of entertainment from it. I will say, though, it is more fun if you have others to join your squad.
It's vastly better, imo, than Starfield. That was a game which really let me down -- I wanted Skyrim in Space, but I got 1,000 planets with the same cookie cutter quests on each. Or a team member saying something like "I can't believe we're the first ones to set foot on this temple" when there is a randomly generated outpost plopped down right next door.
I am just wondering where do they get the money to keep pushing out big content updates like this
It did well commercially looking just at steam stats, not to mention the other platforms. It seems like alot of that was used to turn it around to save their reputation to keep going not only with one game, but to make sure the next isn't "stay away" labeled even it is "wait and see" for many.
AFAIK, there is no in-game microtransactions or anything, so basically retail sales I suppose? The studio is relatively small (indie-scale) last time I checked, and the launch was pretty big and I'm sure they pulled in a ton of money, even though as always on the "vocal internet" the launch was a huge failure, they still sold a lot of copies. "Just" 1-2 million copies would go a long way to fund a small passionate team. The all-time peak for simultaneous players on Steam (PC only) was 200K, so I don't think 1-2 million copies sold is far off as a minimum.
Small studio, don't have to generate a lot of sales to keep them afloat. Updates push visibility and generate new sales. Obviously, they need new projects to keep them afloat in the future.
The enhancements they're making to NMS appear to be backports from the Light No Fire engine, so my impression is that they are releasing updates to No Man's Sky as a marketing effort while the actual technical work is predominantly on the next game.
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No Mans Sky has sold over 10 million copies. I'll let you do the math. They are still basically an indie company as well.
I’m one of those weird people that liked the game from the very beginning, and I’ve bought it at least twice for myself (different systems). I played it like 50 hours at the start. I always wanted a simple, procedurally generated space exploration game.
They’ve done an incredible job fleshing out the universe, giving us new things we can build, simple city management for people that want that, and the same exploration system for those that wanted that.
It was sold as, is, and will always be a sandbox game with some simple, procedurally generated “missions” to get you going to the next point of interest or having the next, relatively low-stakes fight.
And that’s okay. People play Animal Crossing and Minecraft. People can play this. Some of us are happy to. Some of us see a $50 game and say “yeah, 50-100 hours of time in this is my money’s worth”. And some of us spend 3000 hours in the game because we love the creating and sandbox feel of it.
Some people like Farming Simulator 2020 - I’ll never understand it and it’s not for me, but plenty of people do. Some people like Powerwash Simulator.
It’s okay if No Man’s Sky wasn’t the *specific* game you were hoping for and if it hasn’t become it; but that doesn’t make it a bad game, it just makes it “not for you”.
I wish these threads weren’t always filled with people complaining about a game that wasn’t made for them. It’s been a decade. It’s time to move on.
I feel like NMS is definitely catered to people who prefer to define their own way of having fun. There’s practically zero hand-holding. There isn’t much emphasis on narrative either, and the story is almost completely optional. It’s more about finding your own game within the game, where simply existing and exploring such a vast universe can be the whole point.
In that sense, I’d argue it’s almost more of an environment simulator than a traditional game. I can totally see why someone coming into it expecting a strong narrative, memorable characters, and lots of character development might end up disappointed.
For me, though, this is the game I keep coming back to. There’s just nothing quite like heading into a world that nobody has ever visited, with a pretty good chance that nobody else will ever visit it, and still leaving your little mark there.
Not a single comment here about the actual Cosmos update content?
Looks great. I just hope these alliances won't turn into the sort of thing like EVE Online Corporations but I guess this game is too different for that. Eve online makes me sick, its corporations are everything I hate in the real world :) I like games to be better than the real world.
Love the game, insane work from devs. Can't play it for too long, have to make a pause from time to time, which is similar in feel to Minecraft.
It has strong sales so must assume the gameplay loop is enjoyable by a lot of players, but I don't think I'll ever understand
10 years, i wonder what the codebase look like now !
Probably better than most given how quickly they're able to push out updates this big.
What's also great about NMS is its all running on a custom bespoke engine they've built for the game and properly invested in. Wish they'd do more talks and deep dives into how it has all progressed, and how much it paid off for them. Things are getting far too homogenised around UE5 in game dev.
I need to revisit this game. I played at launch briefly then tabled it, but it's wholesome to see the creator stick with something, adding new features, and really see it evolve into something else. I wonder how wildly different it will be from my launch day experience?
The first time flying a ship in the game in VR was a pretty cool feeling. If you have a headset and this game (and you're not prone to motion sickness) it's worth the trip.
Outer Wilds (not The Other Worlds) gives you a very similar feeling on that first flight. It's not a VR game, but I made a VR mod for it a few years ago.
I both love you and curse you for that mod.
I still haven't got around to playing Outer Wilds despite knowing enough to know I should. Because I keep thinking "I can only play it once - I should play it in VR" and then never getting around to it.
Any word on if they will be fixing the flight model? Didn't see it in there but could have missed it.
My Legion Go came with a free Game Pass trial. I spent 20 minutes playing No Man's Sky in VR and liked it, bought it on Steam, but haven't actually played it yet.
Maybe this is the nudge to move it higher in my queue.
Perlin Noise: The Video Game
Give me Master of Orion II, please. Incredible gameplay. Never played this NMS, but based on the comments here, it seems the most boring thing ever.
i wish they considering making it multiplayer MMO, that would kill all its emptiness in one second (:
I think the multiplayer is very smartly implemented. The big "Anomaly" space stations can feel very busy. I don't feel very alone playing tbh, unless I want to be. MMO raid-like expeditions are right there if I wanna join up with people.
If you haven't seen this video about no man's sky, it's really really good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ
Explore an empty cosmos.
Seems like some people are expecting it to be World of Warcraft or Elite
It's not
It's a chill sandbox and that's fine.
Props & respect to the devs for so many years of free updates!
Is it just me or am I more excited for the upcoming Light No Fire more than GTA6 in some ways.
Valheim had its 1.0 release today too
in a roguelike game, my incentive for playing is the discovery of weird new stuff. this might be the opposite of procedural. because procedural is just the same old stuff in new combinations. right?
how would we get a procedural thing or an AI thing to spit out truly new weird cool stuff? connect it to a good random number generator?
How the hell could that cookie consent form ever be legal? Fuck them.
Holy shit, they're charging $60 for a 10 year old game that only runs on windows.
Not even worth pirating if I have to set up a container with wine, I'd rather spend that time drinking wine.
It runs great on Linux and Steam Deck
https://www.protondb.com/app/275850
I don't pay for games that require using proton/wine. If a dev wants my money, they can add a Linux target to their makefile.
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> ... only runs on windows.
The version I bought on Steam runs fine on Linux (in Proton of course). I just click "Play" and it plays.
It's $23.99 on Steam right now.
I don't use steam, the price I saw was the GoG price.
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Are we EVE yet?
Sadly NMS could get 1000 years of updates and it still wouldn't be even 1% as complicated or deep as Eve - and I'm not an Eve fanboy, I stopped playing that more than 10 years ago at this point.