No Man's Sky - Interceptor

[siread]

1 hour ago, Mortis said:

It's a lovely trailer but that's the problem with the game - it's basically just a big screenshot generator.  The actual "game" is a thin veneer that feels tacked on - repeating the same grindy tasks for hours on end - not my idea of fun. 

Find your inner explorer. Embrace the beauty!

[Mortis]

I played it - after 3 hours I realised I was repeating the same thankless grind while trawling through a mire of awful menus, combat that's worse than 3D Starstrike on the speccy and the worst parts of games like minecraft/terraria/starbound (resource collection).

 It's clearly unfinished but released at £50 which no matter how you look at it is taking the piss out of the consumer.

[macosx]

When my second copy turns up, i'm just going to play it to drift around and find somewhere nice and get the best looking ship.

 

[Orbital2060]

Rocket League and Minecraft are 15 pounds

[robdood]

It's weird, now that I've played a lot, it definitely is very grindy, repetitive game, which doesn't have much in the way of systems to learn/get good at, but I chiefly think this is because at a fairly late stage they had to change some fundamentals.  There are hints in the game of it being a more slow-to-progress, more sparsely populated survival game at some point. 

 

(waffling, aimless post incoming, I should probably edit into something more coherent but I can't be arsed and should be working...!) 

 

I believe at some point you were supposed to start without a ship, or survival equipment, and that the beginning of the game would've been spent on foot looking for a ship & parts to equip yourself and the ship with basics.  This is because you can find blueprints for things like the hazard protection / shield, and basic ship components like Launch Thrusters that you can't destroy or make otherwise.   This is also backed up by the (practically useless) strange flowers you find around that restore your HP / shield / environment protection.   The shield / environment protection was probably changed to auto-recover at some point too (for the worse, imo - it's so bloody easy!), given there are flowers you can find which recharge it (and in the game files they are treated as separate items, which means they were cobbled into the one meter at some point too).    Imagine how cool it would feel when, having only been able to leave your ship on planets with a suitable atmosphere to begin with, you finally get that space suit!!   I imagine the specialist environment protection modules didn't require fuelling at some point too; at the very least I think it'd work a lot better if, for example,  hot planets were basically no-go until you get the lv1 thermal protection module, etc. 

 

Exploration really suffers thanks to the resource scanner too, imo - you don't spend any time looking at the landscape, trying to find caves because 'caves might have crystal resources', or looking for particularly big trees because they 'have usable amounts of carbon'; instead you basically run around constantly clicking the left stick and following giant icons.   I definitely feel like the way the scanner works is to make things 'easier' - earlier footage is devoid of those stupid icons, for sure.   I'd imagine the intention was for it to temporarily highlight items that could be interacted with in the vicinity (i.e. the now-permanent orangey glint / glow you get on pickups), but that's too tricky for most!!  Sigh. 

 

The signals you can search for (e.g. alien ruins) seem a bit strange too - reading the text on some of the messages, it makes out as if the signals are on another planet, not the same planet.   You know, like the ruins were a big deal.  Maybe these were going to be linked to those warp gates or something.  Regardless, why on earth would they choose to litter every planet with scores of these bloody things?   Maybe they were scared of people finding the planets to be empty?   Probably because they couldn't think of a good way to let players learn the language. 

 

The 'rare' items definitely seem like an ill-thought-out, late addition, they are absolutely ridiculous.  As is the economy in general.  It really feels like cash/money was thrown in so late.  The game would be objectively better without it imo - all it does in encourage farming.   I feel similarly about the boxes on the walls which give you upgrades / blueprints.   If their incidence rate was 1% of the current, maybe it'd be a rare treat to find one, but as it stands it's stupid; you find 90% of the blueprints within the first few hours (and on the very first planet if you can be bothered to hang aorund)!!   Then you spend 10-20 times that long trying to fly to the centre with nothing else to do but stop to repair /refuel. 

 

Animal scanning having a completion ratio and monetary reward also smacks of 'gaminfying'; especially the gamifying that a producer from a big company like Sony would do once they stick their nose into a project.   They could've left it way more mysterious; let me rename things for other people to maybe stumble on, sure, but don't pay me money, and don't tell me how many species are left on a planet!  You're just encouraging me to stay!!! 

 

I think the biggest failing of the game imo is not having a good way of pushing you forward - in fact, as I've highlighted above I think it actively encourages you to stay on a single planet;  which is literally going against the principle philosophy of the design!!  Which means you hang around rinsing a planet as much as you can, getting annoyed by the small inventory etc. I also wish it had a good way of forcing you to spend more time exploring on foot.   I think these problems could've been solved in a few ways.  Maybe having only a handful of potential waypoints per planet (i.e. the six on the upload screen), leaving you little else to wait around for other than resources.   Limit resources so they aren't as easy (or plentiful!) to find.  Having NPC rewards be things like resource locations, or landing pads for remote ship calling would be neat.  Change the fuel use on the ship so that even low-orbit flying consumes fuel, making sure you'd only fly if you really needed to.  (aside: god, asteroids being everywhere is crap too - SO WHAT if I run out of Thamium and it takes me 10 mins to fly to the space station? THAT'S MY FAULT, MY LESSON, and I should learn from it!!) Space stations should be a rare occurrence, and on-planet trading posts even rarer; this would encourage players to only stock up on things they need before making their next jump, instead of letting them sit around for weeks farming items.  

 

Actually, the best way they could've moved people on is with the Sentinels.  Omg the sentinels are rubbish.  Aren't they?   How about if they were a constant threat, meaning you had to actively hide from and avoid them?  Getting spotted on a planet would effectively (not literally) mean the beginning of a countdown until you have to leave, with an ever increasing wanted level that remains FOREVER on that planet.   Why it doesn't work like that I have no idea.   (aside: has anyone actually seen wanted level 5?  I'd like to know if anything bigger than walkers come for you!)

 

/ramble over. 

 

Weird that they apparently made the galaxy so much bigger as well - a smaller map, with more purposeful exploration would have been a lot more enjoyable imo.  A short form game where multiple playthroughs, using your skill and knowledge of applying the game's systems would be way more enjoyable for me. 

 

It's hard to feel hopeful though, I mean how can they make such fundamental changes to the game now?  I can't see them reducing the spawn count of outposts / etc, or changing how readily you find technology.   They're probably going to focus on fulfilling the broken 'promises' that reddit / gaf are shouting about.   It'll be interesting to watch, for sure.   I'm definitely crossing my fingers.  

 

And it's still all I can think about at the moment, so it's doing something right!! 

 

[Davros sock drawer]

2 hours ago, Mortis said:

It's a lovely trailer but that's the problem with the game - it's basically just a big screenshot generator.  The actual "game" is a thin veneer that feels tacked on - repeating the same grindy tasks for hours on end - not my idea of fun. 

 

And that's absolutely fine. I can totally get why someone would feel that way about it. I feel the opposite, and have had 60 or 70 hours out of both versions combined. 

 

I think the reason for that is that I've always "stopped to smell the roses" in games. I'm always taking screenshots and looking at incidental details for hours. For example, I would just wander about the village in RE4 during the bit where it's raining,  soaking up the atmosphere long after the Ganados had all been dispatched.

 

This is like someone just gave me those bits of a game, whilst also tapping into the Proust's Madeleine that for me is Mercenary etc, and giving me simple, relaxing tasks to perform.

 

There's no grind for me. Just a sort of moreish therapy.

[siread]

@dood You've absolutely nailed it there. They just didn't have the balls to go hardcore with the game, and the one thing that the likes of Dark Souls and Dirt Rally have shown is that even if it's not their cup of tea, people respect hardcore. Bombing around never worrying about anything, even death, just kills the experience if you are looking for excitement and peril, which is what games usually do. So we're left with a broken game but an incredible universe, and if you can step back and fight your gaming instincts and say, 'I'm not going to open every crate I see, I'm not going to grind until I get the 48 ton ship, I'm not going to farm these shiny balls until money has no meaning. No, I'm just going to explore this planet, looking for the one thing that makes it cool, whether that's a mountain, a cave system, a creature, a view of the cosmos, whatever - every planet has something - and then I'll move on. While I'm doing that, I'll nab a bit of gold here or craft an upgrade there, and not worry about bloody inventory space or the long haul into oblivion. I'm just gonna chill out and enjoy life in the stars.' If you can do that, then you might find that you have the most incredible experience a game has ever given you.

[Rowan Morrison]

14 minutes ago, Davros sock drawer said:

I think the reason for that is that I've always "stopped to smell the roses" in games. I'm always taking screenshots and looking at incidental details for hours. For example, I would just wander about the village in RE4 during the bit where it's raining,  soaking up the atmosphere long after the Ganados had all been dispatched.

 

That's me, too, and the RE4 village is a perfect example of the perfect location. The planets in NMS don't have the craftsmanship of that village, but there are billions and billions of them and they regularly generate unique moments of sublime sci-fi beauty. I don't know how many Quaaludes you can get for £40, but I strongly suspect NMS is a much better long-term investment.

 

My advice to Happy Games would be to ditch the gameplay elements entirely and repackage it as a trip simulator. Get Jeff Minter in to gussy up the hyperspace sequence, have a rolling selection of soundtrack artists streaming through psychedelic cosmic shortwave and tweak the DNA to accommodate four-dimensional creatures, see if the squares dig that.

[robdood]

I've C&P my last post on reddit for lols, will be interesting to see the response it gets

[p1nseeker]

6 hours ago, Mr Ben said:

Having gone from an 18 slot ship to 48 in about 2-3 days (I literally just got a 48 slot ship not more than an hour or so ago) I can tell you the secret. I'll spoiler this if other's dont want to read it by accident or whatever.

 

  Hide contents

Find one of the large buildings with an antenna of some sort on top of it; this is actually the hardest part, but it can be easier to find using one of those signal boxes you can hack (they have orange beams coming out of them, they are relatively easy to find) by clicking on transmissions. Once you've found one of these towers, complete the "puzzle". Once you've done that.......keep on using the same console as many times as you can, inputting the same solution each time, so the planet fills up with distress beacons. Your ship will quickly improve.

 

No idea if you're supposed to be able to use one of the consoles over and over like that, but I did it the once 10 times for instance, and got 10 distress beacons. I know its not how you're supposed to play the game and all that, but its a hell of a lot less grindy doing this when all you want is some more inventory space.

The tower you're looking for looks like one of these (depending on race):




 

I cant remember 100% which one is which, sorry, but I do believe the last one is a Korvax transmission tower.

Amazing! Thanks. 

[Danster]

Totally agree with the lack of peril. take my current location in Elite Dangerous. I have just spent the last five days jumping towards the centre of the galaxy (the real galaxy). My last station stop was over 25 hours ago. I have scanned planets and stars (including several Neutron stars) and will have first discovery on most of those if I deliver them before I die. I am carrying 64ts of goods to the Jaques outpost which is my ultimate goal and part of a community goal and so worth a lot more than the cost of the goods thanks to the rewards structure.

 

If I die now, I will lose 4m cr in ship insurance (which will put me into debt), 600k of stock and several million credits worth of exploration data. Can I die? How at risk am I? Well a good pirate could give me a kicking, I could travel too close to a Neutron star and get damaged, or even get overheated in a close binary system. These would be unlikely to kill me outright, but they could damage me (or god forbid my fuel scoop!) if I am not careful on every single jump that I make. 

 

Once at Jaques I will be racing for that station, but there may well be NPCs waiting for me trying to attack (i am not playing on Group, because if a human player killed me at that point I would probably rage quit the game for ever ). It's likely to take me another 15 hours or so to get there and I will be soooo gutted if I die now.

 

 

EDIT: Oh and if I die, I will be back in the main "bubble" at that station I left behind 25 hours and thousands of lys before!

 

NMS could do with a bit more of that, exploring the galaxy should not be easy.

[Rowan Morrison]

13 minutes ago, Danster said:

NMS could do with a bit more of that, exploring the galaxy should not be easy.

 

I haven't played ED, but that's pretty much how I remember the original Elite. You'd get excited about a potential trading route, you'd plan for it and you'd implement it with baited breath and sweaty palms. NMS seems to offer that at the start, but it soon fades away. I'm not sure how easy it would be to successfully add it to the game - there'd need to be a reason to put yourself at risk, and I've no idea what that could be with the game as it currently stands. So my earlier suggestion to just sack those elements and go all-in on the generative wonderland is around 80% serious. I think it's one way or the other, basically, and I also think the game's strength is its limitless potential for planetary gawping. So focus on that, make that as weird and wonderful as it can be, and you'll have something distinct from Elite and endlessly rewarding in its own way.

[Danster]

Yeah, i can't argue with any of that. I think I just prefer the Elite style to NMS, albeit I want those generated atmosphere planets in Elite! Or something akin to them.

[dr_manhattan^]

3 hours ago, Mortis said:

I played it - after 3 hours I realised I was repeating the same thankless grind while trawling through a mire of awful menus, combat that's worse than 3D Starstrike on the speccy and the worst parts of games like minecraft/terraria/starbound (resource collection).

 It's clearly unfinished but released at £50 which no matter how you look at it is taking the piss out of the consumer.

 

Totally agree.  I had such high hopes for this too.

[robdood]

Already got called a retard on reddit. 

 

*fist pump*

[Davros sock drawer]

5 hours ago, siread said:

@dood You've absolutely nailed it there. They just didn't have the balls to go hardcore with the game, and the one thing that the likes of Dark Souls and Dirt Rally have shown is that even if it's not their cup of tea, people respect hardcore. Bombing around never worrying about anything, even death, just kills the experience if you are looking for excitement and peril, which is what games usually do. So we're left with a broken game but an incredible universe, and if you can step back and fight your gaming instincts and say, 'I'm not going to open every crate I see, I'm not going to grind until I get the 48 ton ship, I'm not going to farm these shiny balls until money has no meaning. No, I'm just going to explore this planet, looking for the one thing that makes it cool, whether that's a mountain, a cave system, a creature, a view of the cosmos, whatever - every planet has something - and then I'll move on. While I'm doing that, I'll nab a bit of gold here or craft an upgrade there, and not worry about bloody inventory space or the long haul into oblivion. I'm just gonna chill out and enjoy life in the stars.' If you can do that, then you might find that you have the most incredible experience a game has ever given you.

 

That's basically how I've played the game from the start. I haven't been farming anything, I've just grabbed stuff when I've seen it, sold it when I was passing a trade point. I'm still in the second ship I bought (20 slots) although I do have 30+ slots in my Exo Suit.

 

When I land on a new planet, it's enough for me if there's just an interesting bit of landscape or whatever. In fact, that's the point of the game for me, seeing those things. And I'm still seeing new stuff, it's just not anything that's "gamey" like a new Blueprint or whatever.

 

Take this planet for example. Usual toxic hellhole. But it had these huge broken cylinders of rock everywhere, almost like pieces of a huge pipe. Inside each one is a tiny, perfectly round tunnel, from one end to the next.

 

 

Finding weird alien stuff like that is the whole point of the game for me. But you know, it's just some weird rocks. So I can understand people not caring and moving on. I'll just stay here a couple more hours though...

 

[robdood]

That is fucking cool! I love the things like that you stumble across. 

[macosx]

Fair play, that does look pretty epic with the ship in shot to scale.

[Gorf King]

But don't you think after you've seen two dozen of those places - if that's all there is to the game - you kinda feel 'yeah, that's enough now'? It's like you say - apart from that particular shape/length of hole-in-rock, that planet looks practically identical to at least half a dozen I've been to. Probably more.

 

Actually, that's a rhetorical question - obviously, I know the answer. But as much as I enjoyed many of my planetfalls, in the end I just don't (and I do have to say this) think that's enough to make a £50 game. I know, I know! I mentioned money, and value is subjective. But it just doesn't feel like there's much of an actual game at all that the planet generation tech is built into. It feels, to be frank, anaemic. And I can't help but feel that this is a £20 indie 'experience' dressed up by Sony into something else. (It was marketed as an 'epic journey' but, apart from the physical scale of the galaxy, it's more like a series of short Sunday rambles. Epics usually have more than a few paragraphs of repeating text to them.) 

 

I can't blame a tiny studio like Hello Games (16 people at max!) for not being able to build the gameplay structures to support that experience; to give form to the thing they created. Properly rewarding gameplay, or an actual story, that sort of thing. But after doing essentially the same thing for 20 hours or so, playing another few hours in the hope of seeing a differently-shaped hole in a differently-shaped rock, as pleasurable as it might be, isn't what you'd expect from a full-price game.

 

I think it's an interesting piece of tech which provides some funny moments and some nice chill-out ones, and I've enjoyed playing it as much as I've been disappointed by where its various paths and upgrades led (which is nowhere; you could stay in the starter ship and basically get the same experience, just have less cash in the bank), but it's been obviously mis-sold. It should have been marketed as a £20 screenshot generator that you could use to share alien postcards with friends, or else developed into something else a lot more substantial. Hopefully they'll add in some more features over time, and I'll be back to check them out. But I doubt they're big enough to build all that much more into it, if it weren't for Sony offering AAA status, I think that's exactly what Hello would have done with it - just made it a chill-out postcard generator. Because that's basically what it is, and it's what every single one of us does with it.

[TehStu]

Honestly, I would have preferred that. I don't know whether to blame the Sony PR machine, or if Hello Games genuinely had technical or legal issues, but it would have been better left as a genuinely lower key indie affair.

[robdood]

9 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

 But it just doesn't feel like there's much of an actual game at all that the planet generation tech is built into. It feels, to be frank, anaemic. And I can't help but feel that this is a £20 indie 'experience' dressed up by Sony into something else. (It was marketed as an 'epic journey' but, apart from the physical scale of the galaxy, it's more like a series of short Sunday rambles. Epics usually have more than a few paragraphs of repeating text to them.) 

 

I actually feel it became what it is precisely because of Sony's involvement; had they not been involved, it could have ended up being a lot more indie, and as a result, more of a game!  

 

(complete supposition on my part, obviously, but a lot of the design decisions just seem so weird...  I can imagine some producer from the publisher being like "Hmm we're not finding much on these planets", and as a panicked/time pressured response HG just up the spawn incidence on EVERYTHING)

[robdood]

14 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

But I doubt they're big enough to build all that much more into it, if it weren't for Sony offering AAA status, I think that's exactly what Hello would have done with it - just made it a chill-out postcard generator. Because that's basically what it is, and it's what every single one of us does with it.

I actually disagree with this bit - small teams make lots of interesting games!!  People should check out Subnautica for an idea of what surviving an Alien world can be like. 

[TehStu]

Yeah, the blueprints you guys are finding, and the flowers, suggest much more of a Don't Starve affair. Maybe they'll patch that in later. If there's genuinely 3 ways to end it, I'd be tempted to replay.

[Pob]

8 minutes ago, dood said:

 

I actually feel it became what it is precisely because of Sony's involvement; had they not been involved, it could have ended up being a lot more indie, and as a result, more of a game!  

 

(complete supposition on my part, obviously, but a lot of the design decisions just seem so weird...  I can imagine some producer from the publisher being like "Hmm we're not finding much on these planets", and as a panicked/time pressured response HG just up the spawn incidence on EVERYTHING)

 

In the earlier interviews Sean Murray was slagging off games where there are icons everywhere and big 'go here' waypoints, which is funny because NMS is actually choc-full of that. I definitely think a load of that stuff was added after everyone started bleating on about "but what do you actually do???" and Sony pressured them into making it more gamey.

 

Same with the hardcore survival / roguelike elements. Wasn't Dark Souls a touchpoint?

 

I think the Murray's vision for what it should be was probably compromised by it taking on a life of its own.

[Davros sock drawer]

15 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

I can't blame a tiny studio like Hello Games (16 people at max!) for not being able to build the gameplay structures to support that experience; to give form to the thing they created. Properly rewarding gameplay, or an actual story, that sort of thing. But after doing essentially the same thing for 20 hours or so, playing another few hours in the hope of seeing a differently-shaped hole in a differently-shaped rock, as pleasurable as it might be, isn't what you'd expect from a full-price game.

 

 

It might not be what you'd expect, but I'm more happy to pay full price for this, than something with more "game" to it. I mean, there really isn't much to debate here - as you say, it's rhetorical to ask if I'm bored with it. I find this sort of thing massively rewarding, others clearly don't. It's as simple as that. The VFM is off the scale for me, others think it's worth £15 or whatever.

 

And it's not just finding a differently shaped hole. That's one example. I also just found a planet with torrential rain and what I can only describe as underwater lakes. Not just little caves, but huge lakes. And in the lake were sharks, and the sharks did bite me. I've not yet run out of new discoveries, but I think maybe that's because I'm looking for smaller moments, things that other people wouldn't even think about, but which for me are the entire point of the game.

 

 

[p b]

After 1 hour I can safely say that this will be the first game I'll ever return in my life (partly because you can't usually do that here in Switzerland, there's just one chain which accepts return for the entirely logical reason that "the game is shit and I don't like it")

[robdood]

21 minutes ago, Pob said:

 

In the earlier interviews Sean Murray was slagging off games where there are icons everywhere and big 'go here' waypoints, which is funny because NMS is actually choc-full of that. I definitely think a load of that stuff was added after everyone started bleating on about "but what do you actually do???" and Sony pressured them into making it more gamey.

 

Same with the hardcore survival / roguelike elements. Wasn't Dark Souls a touchpoint?

 

I think the Murray's vision for what it should be was probably compromised by it taking on a life of its own.

Yep. Totally.  I hadn't seen the comments about big icons and stuff, interesting. 

[Gorf King]

27 minutes ago, Pob said:

In the earlier interviews Sean Murray was slagging off games where there are icons everywhere and big 'go here' waypoints, which is funny because NMS is actually choc-full of that. I definitely think a load of that stuff was added after everyone started bleating on about "but what do you actually do???" and Sony pressured them into making it more gamey.

 

I agree. I think the 'big stuff' (Atlas etc) feels bolted on, and probably was; and also all those icons people hate so much (mainly because you can't turn them off and they get in the way of the pictures, which is the essence of it all). That's what feels completely underdeveloped. The game without any of that would be what Davros describes, which is an alien postcard simulator - fly around, discover something cool and show it to others. Or if it had gameplay added to that, it needed to be more challenging/rewarding/satisfying than what it ended up with.

[TehStu]

If the tech tree had continued, a la Minecraft, there might have been more reason to hang about and take your time. I would have loved to have started off as Jason Bourne dropped dropped off on a random planet on the arse edge of nowhere with nowt but a pen, because of {tantalizing reasons}.

[p1nseeker]

15 hours ago, Mr Ben said:

Having gone from an 18 slot ship to 48 in about 2-3 days (I literally just got a 48 slot ship not more than an hour or so ago) I can tell you the secret. I'll spoiler this if other's dont want to read it by accident or whatever.

 

  Hide contents

Find one of the large buildings with an antenna of some sort on top of it; this is actually the hardest part, but it can be easier to find using one of those signal boxes you can hack (they have orange beams coming out of them, they are relatively easy to find) by clicking on transmissions. Once you've found one of these towers, complete the "puzzle". Once you've done that.......keep on using the same console as many times as you can, inputting the same solution each time, so the planet fills up with distress beacons. Your ship will quickly improve.

 

No idea if you're supposed to be able to use one of the consoles over and over like that, but I did it the once 10 times for instance, and got 10 distress beacons. I know its not how you're supposed to play the game and all that, but its a hell of a lot less grindy doing this when all you want is some more inventory space.

The tower you're looking for looks like one of these (depending on race):




 

I cant remember 100% which one is which, sorry, but I do believe the last one is a Korvax transmission tower.

This doesn't work for me