No Man's Sky Orbital Update brings full ship customisation and a complete space station overhaul
No Man's Sky Orbital Update brings full ship customisation and a complete space station overhaul
One of those games I’m glad I bought at launch, although I’ve fired it up 3-4 times and struggled with the mechanics… it’s nice to know it’s still evolving and I can always start fresh again with the new content. If I wasn’t so deep into Helldivers I’d give it another go right now… but Democracy can’t wait!
Same. I keep picking it up every now and again but it really needs me to put a bit of time into it to understand all the new mechanics since launch. I’ll get to it one day!
I felt this same way until I jumped into the Omega expedition. It was an excellent crash course for all the game offers and I now feel way more comfortable jumping into the base game and doing whatever I feel up to.
I tried the game two or three times sitting down with the "I want to play a space sim" mindset and could never get past the tutorial. Then the next time, it had clicked that it's a survival crafter that just happens to have a space theme. When I sat down with that mindset and perspective on what I was in for, I suddenly throughly enjoyed the game.
The game just does a really bad job of showing you what it is trailers and other media. Sure, all the things it shows off are there, but they're not the core of the game.
I waited to get involved until after the Echoes update last summer, and I truly enjoyed 100+ hours of the game.
It still does suffer from inevitably feeling really empty, with billions of copies of the same 4 different coloured/temperatured planets and 8 creature types, but it was still a heck of an experience.
and struggled with the mechanics…
Are you speaking towards the UI/UX, or the gameplay?
Similar to Glide said above, wanted a space sim and realize it’s more of a survival game. On the opposite end I played a little Elite Dangerous which was WAY TOO INVOLVED space sim!
NMS development is the best redemption arc story in a long time.
The whole situation just made me believe Sean Murray really wanted to make a cool game but he got overwhelmed by the media attention and started running his mouth. Maybe he felt like he had to overpromise and say yes to everything he was asked? Hello Games was still an indie studio before it got all that attention.
If he had done it in bad faith it would have been much easier to cut his losses and run away with the money. Nearly 10 years of expansions wouldn't come out of it if not for legitimate passion.
It also made their next game announcement pretty funny.
I think the fans & press deserve equal blame for the initial hype. At some point I saw a supercut of things Sean Murray said, then the resulting headlines and Reddit posts.
In an interview, the journalist asks: "Will you be able to play with your friends in a shared universe?" The answer: "Well...we hope that eventually there will be at least some multiplayer functionality, though maybe not on day one...like maybe you could explore one another's planets or share pictures or something."
Headline: "NO MANS SKY WILL LAUNCH WITH MULTIPLAYER!"
Reddit comments: "I'm already forming a guild, we're going to play as bounty hunters chasing down other players who are pirates in glorious multiplayer space battles!!"
There were tons of examples of that. Journalists would poke and prod for a soundbite, take it out of context and exaggerate it, and the community would just go batshit with their expectations.
it might just be me but I come back to this game about once a year, play for about 4 hours before feeling like it feels almost exactly the same? I see these huge update drops but they don't ever feel like anything
Well, with ship customization this game is finished enough for me to play it again.
That was the only thing left keeping me from being interested in the game. Finally, ship customization. Finally.
Common Hello Games W
As someone who wanted to love Elite Dangerous but couldn't get behind the grind and monotony of it, would this game be worth getting now?
Ehhh, maybe. While the game is so much better than it was at launch, it's still pretty sandboxy and repetitive. I found myself dropping it after I realized I was trying to build bases to get better at gathering resources to make money to buy bigger ships to make more money to... What exactly?
Yea Elite Dangeous is kind of the same, you have to make your own objectives or you're just running missions to make money to buy ships to be more efficient at those runs and eventually even bigger ships to make more money.
I came to a realization a few years ago that I am too boring to play sandbox games. I need a tightly crafted narrative, I cannot be left to my own devices. After a long time of trying to get into every sandbox game that looked cool, it was such a relief to finally realize that about myself.
Isn't that most games, though?
Yeah once I had a fleet and some bases mining resources for a ton of money , and a ship I liked, I kind of lost interest.
It's a good game but it doesn't go on forever.
Unrelated but this is why I stopped play BotW after the first boss temple thingy.
If you don't like grindy monotony it is not the game for you.
So you're saying it's the perfect game to get for playing while AFKing redwoods in old school runescape
I would say I do to an extent, but elite dangerous solo is pretty egregious i just feel really confined even though you can get out of your ship now. If there were a few more things to do it would check all of the boxes such as things you could do in NMS like build bases, etc. And plus the ship customization is strictly internals and you don't have the ability to change the overall look of your ship besides skins.
One thing I loved about Elite was the collection of mini games. Navigating through the space station to your landing pad, finding a suitable patch of surface to touchdown on a planet, having to fight or yield to a supercruise interdiction, they all came together to make Elite feel like a driving game where your vehicle happens to be a spaceship.
In No Man's Sky landing and takeoff are achieved with a singular button press. And the ship combat is there to check a box. The game is mostly about taking pics of flora and fauna and digging trenches in planets for minerals.
Yea, I would have to agree wholeheartedly that the ship flying is awesome in Elite. The ambiance is great, such as the creaking of the ship when in hyper drive. I guess the games are two different kind of space Sims. If what you're telling me is accurate about NMS then Elite is probably better for me in the long run, I just wish I had a friend who would actually play it with me and make space a little less lonely - I guess I would have the same problem in either title come to think of it.
For me, yes. Its an award winning best seller. Its also dirt cheap and a labour of love for all the scifi they enjoy. They listened to what their players wanted and just ...... did it, like a bunch of psychopaths.
It also has one of the most meta storylines I've ever seen in a game. For me, its a very special game and as close as anyones come to the space game I always wanted growing up.
Its not for everyone of course. But, if its your kind of thing, it'll really work for you. Honestly, if anyone choses to play it, id recommend getting a buzz going on whatever poison you're into, don't Google any of it fot a bit and let it unfold as you play. Part of the game is figuring out the game.
There are a lot of things to do in nms now after years of updates. Right now it's 50% off so I say it's worth it
No. Every single gameplay mechanic in NMS is shallow and made by someone incompetent on game design.
The engine runs well and it's a weird giant sandbox and it gets tons of grindy cosmetic content updates. But the actual game aspects are terrible.
EDIT: Disagree? Name one game mechanic that's designed well compared to other games.
Yeah!
this game came out in 2016 btw
kudos HG! grah!
GRAH!!
...Interloper
Gave it a whirl. Basically, you can now scrap ships to get their components to create a new ship inside any station. Couldn't find any merchant within the station selling pieces, so you have to go out and explore, or scrap some of your own ships.
Stations now look slightly different from one another and no longer have those semi-hidden rooms that nobody cared about. Alien vendors now give a discount if you're at a good standing with their race. Guild "vendors" offer a list of stuff for free, but I don't get why the prompt is red instead of white. Performance is still mostly CPU bound.
Overall decent update, but the new features don't warrant playing more than 1 hour.
My last foray into NMS ended when I found a little town and was promptly attacked by sentinels that could heal each other through walls.
Wow finally!
I remember when this game was a dumpster fire. Is it actually a video game now?
Yes. But last time I played it (which was admittedly, idk, 2 years and something like 10 major updates ago now ? These guys just don't stop), barring a few exceptions the gameplay was all breadth and no depth. You could do a ton of different things but after you had done a thing once, every other instances of the same activity would feel extremely samey
Edit: I should point out that I'm very much ok with repetition if the gameplay is deep enough to keep me interested. I have easily played various horde shooter games for a total of ~2500 hours. Not including the ~800 hours in Warframe, where the gameplay isn't even that deep, but still interesting enough to make the grind for new toys bearable.
All breadth and no depth, still the same. Some 12 different planet types, a number of neat looking anomaly planets that exist only for sightseeing (one of my favorites was a planet where everything is covered in a metallic hexagonal mesh). As I said in another comment in this thread, the game is very repetitive with some activities being needlessly padded out to make you waste as much time as possible (learning alien words, going into derelict freighters to get upgrades)
Yes, for a while now.
Yeah. Kind of.
Some people have already given their take, so I'll add to it:
The game has a couple of hours of actual, fun content. After those couple of hours you'll start to notice that everything is the same. Oh sure, the creatures and plants are made of different parts, but that's as far as the differences go. Every planet has the exact same pattern, every system has a space station with the exact same functions, so eventually it really feels like exploration doesn't matter. Which kinda sucks for a game that's supposed to be about exploration.
I've always said that exploration would've been far more impactful if the universe of No Man's Sky had just a bit more realism in it. This would mean most planets would be frozen iceballs or low atmosphere dustballs with no life on them. This would make discovering a planet with life on it quite momentous. It would also eliminate the problem of quickly finding out all life on every planet is exactly the same.
Honestly I'm really thrilled to play the update tonight.
Do you guys do anything other than to pile on to shit on this game? Shit on Star Citizen? Shit on buying anything ever? Shit on Sean Murray and how naive he just was and you would just do such a better job right?
Thought this would be a cool place to talk about games. How do you not have any awareness that [removed for civility]
Makes sense though since Linux is [bad word] at running games unless you have a Steam Deck.
I recently switched my laptop over to pop os and I've had no issues running the games I want to play using Lutris. Hell I'd argue Linux runs old games better than windows because of lutris. I have a few games I tried running on windows 10 and no matter what I did the game would insta ctd. But after switching and installing them using a lutris config I've actually been able to play those games. I even thought for sure I'd lose some of the functionality of my laptop (key lights, touch screen, something) but nope it all worked straight after install.
Linux has come a long way since I last tried it ~15 years ago
Linux has come a long way since I last tried it ~15 years ago
100% this. Linux has been my daily driver since ~2005 and it seems like suddenly one day I went from playing tux racer and trying to get Skyrim to work to some degree with wine to buying games on steam with little fear of having to anything more than choose proton experimental and maybe add gamemoderun to the settings. It's a completely different world now.
I am still salty about equipment/cargo slots overhaul...
Why's that? Haven't really kept up with the updates recently.
It's not recent update but basically your ships gear slots - weapons, shields, landing gear, etc - and cargo slots were 1.
This way you could do interesting builds.
Ship which has all slots filled with ships equipment and your big ship is for cargo, etc.
Right now you have dedicated cargo slots and dedicated equipment slots. Ofc they are smaller than when they were combined...
Playing this on the playstation vr2 is mind blowing.
I've played through the game a few times and am at it again in VR. A good use of the $60 I probably spent for it.
I might try this again when I get home
Does it have proper roomscale VR yet?
Can you own more than 6 lousy ships now? Not that I am still playing the game,but IT was the only fun thing left to do for me last time I tried getting back into this game.
Wtf I thought the previous update was the last update?
So far they've literally ended every update video with something like "And there's more to come!", including this one.
Meh...I'm sure it's still NMS. Feels so empty and boring anytime I've trying to replay after getting screwed over with buying this game after I was lied too.
Won't be trying this new sticker or whatever new thing they are working on. No thanks.
I kind of feel you on this. I can build amazing things, find cool ships, kit out my freighter, and all that lovely stuff but theres no point to it. Theres no evil empire to fight, no galaxy to save, no dungeons to raid. Its a great sandbox, but not a lot of reason to be in it after a while.
It's basically space Minecraft. Not all people like that kind of game.
Yeah, I'm glad they put the work in and I've gotten a lot of hours, but...certain things about the game seem broken by design. I just don't feel like buying a more expensive ship is letting me do things that I couldn't do without it. So personally I'm looking forward to their next game, and seeing what they do with all the lessons they've learned here. But I'm probably done with NMS.
A mile wide, but inches deep.
Inch, singular I would argue. I don't think there's any gameplay mechanic here that can't be mastered in 2 minutes (artificial grind notwithstanding).
It's pretty amusing that this game went from over hyped to an absolute dumpster fire to probably one of the best space games ever made. One hell of a comeback story.
Honestly to me it's more promising to see a game studio stick behind their game like this rather than having the initial game be good. A good studio will still have bad games, but knowing that a studio will stand behind their bad game and work on it until it's good means a lot.
It's definitely cool, they could have pulled the rug and run away with the money.
I don't see why it's suddenly the best space game... The core mechanic seems to be the same as the original. Mine materials that are the same on every planet, so you can build space ships and better miners that take more materials and do it over and over again.
When I was playing on launch day, I had a really good first impression but it turned into disappointment, since all the planets had the same minerals. May as well stay on the first planet forever.
That is pretty reductive. Like, it's a sim. You could describe just about any sim the same way. "You just do this thing to do that thing". How is this any different from any other game?
I'm not saying it's the best space game, but I had fun when I played it and it definitely didn't just feel like I was mining materials just to mine more materials.
I think a lot of people are just very, very pleased with how well it's being supported compared to its initial launch and how this game company has become an outlier in the industry. They conflate their love for the company's business practices with the game's mechanics. So while the game may be great, many subconsciously give it a boost because of its legacy.
Every planet doesn’t have every material you need for crafting everything. But a single solar system likely has most of it. There are key elements on every planet that are meant to make sure a player never gets stranded. I guess one could argue for that to be a game mode though if it isn’t already where you very well could end up on a planet and have no way to survive.
A lot of people like the gameplay loop from day one but the initial lies about how multiplayer worked was a driving force behind the unhappiness. Once that was fixed it was a shallow experience but a lot of people would have been content with it. Instead Hello Games keeps supporting it and putting out new content updates. There are still a lot of features and improvements people would like for the game and those very well may see the light of day with the passion Hello Games has shown for improving it. That’s why so many people think favorably of them. There are a ton of other bigger studios that would never show this level of dedication and community support.
What, like Minecraft, still possibly the most popular game on Earth? I mean, all you do in Minecraft is mine the a couple of minerals that are the same on every seed, and use them to make better tools to mine minerals faster, and grow the same crops so you don't starve, and do it over and over again.
Theres no suddenly about it. They took the well deserved heat after launch very much to heart and spend the next 8 odd years crafting it into the best space game out there imo. Best VR game too.
Its version 4.61 and, essentially, at least its own sequal. Its nothing like the launch day game.
wait till you play the game of life bruh.
no respawns though.
It's the same shit game it was when it was released. It gained sprinkles though.
Meanwhile in Star Citizen.
And they're all "in stock". How lucky!
Whoa, false scarcity, virtual goods tied to an online service, and nosebleed prices? What's not to like?
Semi interestingly to me, I literally created my reddit account to sell my ships nearly a decade ago. Do not regret that...
Fwiw, you can get deep discounts CCU chaining ships. Ships can also be unofficially "sold" and "bought" after the fact. It's done through gifting. For example, you can get the Hammerhead at the impound for less then half the price. The impound is also one of the higher priced sites to. There are also unofficial ships sales on reddit to that have even lower prices.
Edit-Looks like a time limited sale, nevertheless, SC-trades on reddit has some Hammerheads for around 500.
Among the best space games? What the heck are you comparing it to?
IMO it's an okay giant sandbox but terrible as an actual game.
works in VR too
It is real purty in VR.
Just wait till star citizen releases. Anytime this century, just you wait.
Don't stretch it. Maybe it could be #10 in a top 10, but when you have the likes of Elite Dangerous, Space Engineers, X4, Freelancer, plus little known indies like Empyrion Galactic Survival and Evochron Legends, it'll hardly be anyone's top choice.
I mean, I generally agree with your assessment, but elite dangerous? I love Elite, but it is not a good game. Best thing to come from Elite Dangerous is the community.
Armada for the Sega Dreamcast is also better than NMS.