No Man's Sky - Interceptor

[Rev]

1 hour ago, Hewson said:

While I totally understand it's not for everyone - and that it has real faults - I'm genuinely mystified by the wider reaction to the team and what they've achieved with it. Way back in the day along with Elite and Starglider and Mercenary, Infogrames released one of those games that continually sprung up back then: a project that was just too ambitious to even come close to being realised with the technology. It was called Captain Blood and a significant portion of it was about interacting with and gaining the trust of alien races. The version I played was a stripped down Amstrad CPC version of the Atari ST original. It was broken beyond belief and I absolutely loved it. No Man's Sky is pretty much the game that I was playing back then in my imagination. I'm sure the way in which my expectations of games back in the 80s were constantly knocking up against reality is one of the reasons I'm able to enjoy this so much, including its flaws.

 

I think being British and playing computer games (rather than videogames) is a massive, massive first step towards being able to enjoy NMS. If the first games you were playing were, say, GTA3 and MGS2 (as will be the case for many who are moaning) I can only imagine how weird NMS feels.

[JPickford]

It seems 'Emmerdale' is banned by the profanity feature.

[Gorf King]

It's cos it's shit.

[JPickford]

11 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

It's cos it's shit.

 

This is Gorf King's shortest post.  

[TehStu]

20 minutes ago, Rev said:

 

I think being British and playing computer games (rather than videogames) is a massive, massive first step towards being able to enjoy NMS. If the first games you were playing were, say, GTA3 and MGS2 (as will be the case for many who are moaning) I can only imagine how weird NMS feels.

 

Great point, although yanks had the C64, so not sure enjoyment is regional. But yes, it's a throwback to games we as old farts in our late 30s played in our heads while actually playing Elite on a BBC micro.

[Rev]

8 minutes ago, TehStu said:

 

Great point, although yanks had the C64, so not sure enjoyment is regional. But yes, it's a throwback to games we as old farts in our late 30s played in our heads while actually playing Elite on a BBC micro.

 

The games being British (well, Elite and Mercenary were, at least) would have made them more played over here, I'd assume.

[PaB]

37 minutes ago, Rev said:

 

I think being British and playing computer games (rather than videogames) is a massive, massive first step towards being able to enjoy NMS. If the first games you were playing were, say, GTA3 and MGS2 (as will be the case for many who are moaning) I can only imagine how weird NMS feels.

I concur

[PaB]

26 minutes ago, TehStu said:

 heads while actually playing Elite on a BBC micro.

Ohh get Mr La-de-dah fancy pants here.

 

 

[pulsemyne]

37 minutes ago, Rev said:

 

I think being British and playing computer games (rather than videogames) is a massive, massive first step towards being able to enjoy NMS. If the first games you were playing were, say, GTA3 and MGS2 (as will be the case for many who are moaning) I can only imagine how weird NMS feels.

I agree. I think this is why a lot of Americans on forums don't get it. I think they are not quite used to using their imagination in a game. Today's games are all layed out for you. Like was said earlier it is very similar to Captain Blood with it's language learning idea etc. Being a child of the micro computer age it does feel like a bit of a throwback and that's no bad thing. There's lots of scope for improvement of course and if it can fulfill what you would want to see then it can become something quite special. 

[pulsemyne]

39 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

It's cos it's shit.

It's full of shit when they stick a hand up a cows bum. Although they may not do that anymore. They are probably shagging each other all the time and getting into fights at the Wool pack.

[Danster]

I've backed myself into a corner with my naming convention....

 

I started with Rll-Danter's Folly, just cos I bought the game on the back of this thread... Then I went Rll-Danster's Brolly.... then Molly... I'm thinking of saving golly for an unusual system. Still got wally, knolly, nollie, ollie... grolly.

 

Oh dear

 

[K]

I think it's very true that you'd be more forgiving of this if you grew up playing stuff like Hunter or Midwinter. This totally feels like those massively overambitious games you’d get back in the 1980s and early 1990s, which were so broad in scope as to tax a modern computer, let alone an Atari ST with its 512K of memory and its 8mhz processor. Like, the manual for Midwinter II promised a game where you would foment a revolution across an archipelago hundreds of thousands of square miles in size, where you could choose to fight your way through enemy forces in a tank, sneak into an occupied town by night in a submarine and swim ashore as a saboteur, or use persuasion and sex appeal to win people to your cause. You could even ignore all of that, hijack a bus, and go on a cruise down the coast, or just go for a jaunt in a biplane around one of the islands, then bail out and go for a swim in the sea.

 

And you could actually do all of that, in full-colour 3D polygonal graphics, except the draw distance was about six feet, the frame rate was about one frame every two seconds, and the major cities on the islands consisted of one grey box. The standard now is obviously a lot higher, but it’s easier to ignore the flaws in No Man’s Sky than it was in Midwinter II. Come to think of it, it was barely possible to even play Midwinter II.

 

God knows how you’d cope with this if you’re twelve and the earliest, most basic game you’ve ever played is Killzone 3.

[Frosty]

It's incredibly rich to suggest that the Minecraft generation are somehow incapable of the feats of imagination required to make No Man's Sky an enjoyable experience.

[TehStu]

I wouldn't say imagination, but very different expectations from games. 

[Frosty]

Was it exclusively those who owned a BBC Micro back in the day that made Dwarf Fortress and Undertale popular?

 

I saw a post on GAF that put it well.

 

[No Man's Sky] isn't a bad experience.  But it isn't a good game.

[K]

21 minutes ago, Frosty said:

It's incredibly rich to suggest that the Minecraft generation are somehow incapable of the feats of imagination required to make No Man's Sky an enjoyable experience.

 

I don't think it's a lack of imagination, so much as a willingness to forgive the limitations of the simulation. NMS is properly wonky in places - much more so than the vast majority of high-profile game releases. I suspect that you'd be more willing to ignore those bits of wonkiness if you spent your youth in a time when that kind of wonkiness was the state of the art; Minecraft has heavily stylised visuals, but it's also pretty slick. 

 

I could be wrong on this, it's just that it rang very true for me that the game's biggest champions in this thread are people who are around my age, and whose main points of reference for NMS are Mercenary, Elite, and Captain Blood.

[Gorf King]

True, and it's also true that epigrams such as 'NMS isn't a bad experience. But it isn't a good game' depend entirely on what your definition of a 'good game' is. It'd be interesting to see if people who agree with that think Mercenary or Damocles are 'good games', and if they aren't, why. (And if they are, why NMS differs.)

[boxoctosis]

Conversely I'm of that age, played a lot of Elite, and those sort of games of that era, and NMS tired for me very quickly. 

 

I think it's because one of its biggest flaws (inventory management) could have been so easily avoided. Unless the devs wanted you to be constrained deliberately. Which would be an odd choice. I dunno, technically it's properly astounding. Just not such fun. 

[Gorf King]

I think they did want you to be constrained, until you'd travelled and earned enough to upgrade enough make it a non-issue (which it is for me now). I think it's quite deliberate, and not odd at all - though that doesn't mean you should like the game for it or not consider it a flaw.

[jonamok]

I think I might be broken. I actually enjoy the inventory management. I get a little frisson of endorphins when moving two stacks of 250 Emeril or Plutonium from my suit into my ship where it all takes just one 500 stack. It's like it's own mini-game.

 

Edit: Cool! 9,000th post. Slowly getting there...

[Mr Hatfield]

3 hours ago, Hewson said:

Captain Blood

 

amen to this

 

good times, sigh

[Davros sock drawer]

9 minutes ago, jonamok said:

I think I might be broken. I actually enjoy the inventory management. I get a little frisson of endorphins when moving two stacks of 250 Emeril or Plutonium from my suit into my ship where it all takes just one 500 stack. It's like it's own mini-game.

 

*Puts hand up gingerly for fear of getting told off for being "too gushing..."

[ph0rce]

I've never played Elite, Mercenary or Captain Blood, nor do I know how old you are ( sorry ) but I don't really think that's got as much to do with it as you think.

 

This is a game for people who are quite happy making up their own fun, who don't need their hand holding through a story filled with gruff space marines or CGI cutscenes & it's all the better for it. I appreciate there's a good number of people experiencing technical issues but I've only had the 'straight to orbit' glitch once & aside from the pop-in being a bit slow at times, it has been fine.

 

The comparison to Minecraft is pretty much how I feel about it; initially it didn't have the 'story' you have now & there was no defined End, you quite literally just mined for resources & built shit that no-one else would ever see, for fun. And when that launched, albeit it in Alpha, it was buggy, there was an awful lot wrong with it & over time, it's become what it is now, which is hopefully what will happen with NMS.

 

I just spent half an hour mining Emeril to get enough cash to buy a couple more slots in my suit, so I can mine more stuff, so I can ... you see where I'm going. To me that's time well spent, for others it wouldn't be. Perhaps my time would have been better spent shooting some people in the latest CoD to unlock a leopard print skin for my AK-47, maybe, maybe not but at the end of the day as long as everyone is having fun, that's all there is to it.

 

 

[TehStu]

Well, Minecraft isn't everyone's cup of tea either, although the concept is a little easier to convey.

[ph0rce]

Not entirely sure I agree, neither has a defined story / game within it, both of them rely on exploration, one in space & one on land, both requiring mining / collecting resources & using those to improve your tools / stuff.

 

Minecraft has a better tutorial system, which technically does lead you on a path to the End & NMS has a galactic path to follow to the centre, which technically leads you to the End.

 

 

[Davros sock drawer]

I don't think that not being 40 with a history of playing Mercenary/Elite/Captain Blood precludes someone from enjoying NMS, but if you are then I think it makes it more likely that you will.

 

It seems like there should be a better way of phrasing that, but it eludes me. I'm very tired for some reason...

 

 

[boxoctosis]

37 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

I think they did want you to be constrained, until you'd travelled and earned enough to upgrade enough make it a non-issue (which it is for me now). I think it's quite deliberate, and not odd at all - though that doesn't mean you should like the game for it or not consider it a flaw.

 

Yeah I'm thinking it's deliberate too. I say odd, as to me it's an odd choice to structure the early game around forcing you to do a lot of menu-driven busy work, rather than just letting you explore this fantastic universe they've constructed. Minecraft was a bit similar but had a better sense of progression I think. 

 

[Uncle Mike]

I've never played Minecraft, but it's a building game, virtual Lego thing isn't it (primarily?) I know there's walking about and some peril, but I thought it was largely a thing about building a base and using materials to do stuff. There's none of that in NMS, obviously. It's just exploring and seeing different stuff.

[TehStu]

I don't think I expected a game in Minecraft, but you can draw on past experience to do so for NMS. I mean, look in the XB1 thread to see what's purported as an equivalent: what looks like a purely arcade space combat affair.

 

Edit - Minecraft has the same survival stuff, if you enable it. But yeah, it can be played in virtual Lego mode.

[Uncle Mike]

I looked at the GIF of that XBone space game, the arcadey one. I want that one too. Haven't had a good space shooter for ages. It must be time for a Colony Wars or Freespace this-gen game.