No Man's Sky...Spoilers (if you can call them that?)

[MartyS (Gromit)]

A thread for rants about NMS, and yeah, spoilers, although is it really a spoiler to say "there's nothing there"?


Just over 60 hours into No Man's Sky and starting to see basically the same stuff over and over.

So, before giving up on it I decided to run a save game editor and give myself those Atlas keys to see what I've been missing behind those locked doors.

You know what's behind those doors?  A few plants!  I did find a storeroom once that had basically the same stuff you find scattered around on the planets, so again, not anything useful behind those doors.

Don't know how many hundreds of hours it would take playing the game to get the recipe for all 3 atlas passes, but that's not much of a reward for a lot of grinding away.

That's basically the story of this game, it goes nowhere, a lot of grinding away for very little reward.  Save up your atlas stones and complete that path and you get a new star that you can't even go to or name.  Sell some of your atlas stones so you have less than 10 when you reach the last station and you are kicked off the path with no way to get back on it.  Take black holes to the center of the galaxy and your reward is to be sent to a new galaxy starting the game over again with your ship crashed and broken.  Even the obelisks that give you bits of history are starting to repeat, they had years to write up stories and a few pages of text was all they came up with?

All of that would be OK if the massive number of generated planets had more variety, I love exploring, I'd use the god mode cheat in Skyrim just to wander around places for hours and hours exploring without worrying if I would be killed.  So for a game all about exploration to make me sick of it is saying something.....

I did use the editor to give my ship max (38) slots, am now upgrading weapons and shields to max to see if killing pirates is at least something interesting left to try....

OK, rant over, anyone else want to rant about this thing here's a thread to do it in.

[Variety of Cells]

Pretty sure I've seen random travelers selling atlas stones, so you're not exactly screwed if you sell a few.

But yeah, I have no desire to play further.  The planets aren't exactly pretty enough and cool enough to inspire further exploration.  And when you do find one that is kind of neat then... well, then you move on, cause it's the only thing you can do, with no way to get back to it. 

It has made a bunch of money, and good on it for that.  But it does fall a little short of interesting.  I will say this though: I think it inspired and pushed Star Citizen to get proceduraly generated planets working sooner than they were going to (and they look a lot better than the ones in NMS).  So tech wise it has pushed the industry forward, which it can be commended for.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Pretty sure I've seen random travelers selling atlas stones, so you're not exactly screwed if you sell a few.

Actually, you are screwed, if you don't know you need 10 when you hit the last station you get kicked off the path (your only 2 options are to give ten stones or refuse), and the guys in the anomalies won't give you the option to get back on the path after that.  Of course if you know ahead of time that you can't get back on the path you could back out of that station and go and try to buy some stones, but in the game you have no idea that refusing closes off the path for good.

Also, you sell those stones for something like 70 thousand units, and the cheapest I've seen one for sale is around two million...

I hope Star Citizen can be played like this game but be much better, with being able to avoid the first person shooter aspects and be able to play as an explorer.

Thinking of combat, I laugh when ever I read the snips of history or interact with an alien that talks about the war with the sentinels.  These things wiped out entire races?  These same things I farm for the stuff they drop?  I stopped worrying about those things probably around 15 hours into the game when my weapons were only a third as upgraded as they are now....

[Variety of Cells]

A big rant on Star Citizen that I spoilered as to not highjack the thread.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Not to highjack the thread, but yes, you will be able to avoid the first person aspect and play as an explorer in the MMO version of the game (not so much in the single player game, as things are much more scripted and I'm sure you'll run into some FPS combat.)

There's a slight chance you will have to get out of your ship to sell your cargo, but you might be able to do it from your iwatch while still inside your ship on the landing pad. You'll definitely have to get out of your ship to physically load and unload your cargo (as it will all be physically rendered in game), unless you want to pay robots at a station to do it for you. But can robots pack a truck better and tighter than you?  (Well yeah, but for gameplay purposes, no they can't)

Now let's say you don't want to deal with physical cargo, and instead you just want to explore and find new stuff. That'll be in the game too, and will be a lucrative profession. There are a few ships geared toward information collection that have beefy scanners so you can find potential mining sites, derelict ships, asteroids, worm holes, positions of alien species, and other stuff. Then you can turn around and sell that information to people who find it useful, be it the in game government, NPC miners, or even other groups of players.

Now you won't be finding an endless number of planets to explore. In fact I don't think you'll be the first person to discover any planet, as there will be a set number of them.  But you might be the first to find a rich vein of ore on a planet, so they will still be worth exploring. Plus most of them will look a lot better than any given planet in NMS. Plus you can do some proper exploring on a speeder bike or atv if you like. It's unclear if there will be fauna on some planets, but some will definitely have flora.

Sorry for the rant. I've been following the game closely for years, and it's just now getting close to something that I can recommend. But not quite. Around the end of the year they are going to release a patch to the Alpha that, if all goes as intended, will make it a game that I can recommend trying out. You'll be hearing a lot more about it from me then.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Found a system that had the resources I needed to upgrade the weapons on my ship (aluminum takes forever to find and mine),  one planet had lots of those glowing ball things that you need 10 of to upgrade your plasma weapon.  I guess making it so the "elite" sentinels attack every time you pick one up was supposed to be hard, but nope...  I had already upgraded my shields fully.

Went near a space station and took out a few random traders, 3 sentinels showed up and with an upgraded plasma beam it was nothing to deal with them.

Been looking at the Star Citizen website, maybe I'll try it.  But I might try Starbound first.

Oh, and because the flying controls suck so badly space combat is not a fun dogfight like WWII flight simulators were able to do 20 years ago, easiest way to kill attacking ships is to go in reverse and wait for a ship to come straight at you, you take some damage but a few plasma shots and they are done.

[Variety of Cells]

The flying controls really are awful. And it's difficult to know when your shot will auto aim. They have that lead indicator (that only shows up AFTER you start firing), but a lot of times shots will auto aim even when you're not pointed at it. And sometimes they won't auto aim when you are pointed at it. Which becomes an issue when you're trying to protect big ships from swarms of bad guys and one of your shots decides not to auto aim and hits a big cargo hauler. And all of a sudden everyone is firing at you when you only had 5 of 20 enemies left to kill.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

I've thought about remapping the steam controller just to use it while in flight, not sure it's possible to have the joystick take over for mouse and use the buttons for ASDW, but that would probably make flying more fun, maybe?   So it would be grab the controller when in the cockpit, and go back to keyboard and mouse when walking....

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Big update just came out, adds some stuff that is kind of interesting.

2 new modes of play added for if you want to just explore or pure survival.

You can now buy freighters and build home bases.

You have to save a freighter from an attack before you can land on it and make an offer to buy it.

Home bases, kind of stupid that you have to find an unused one and claim it before you can start building.  This game just can't seem to get things just right, you should be able to buy a kit or plans somewhere and build a base where ever you want, but nope, you've got to explore systems until you find one available.