Still, there is no sense of that apparent scale at all. It all just feels so cramped and almost pointless.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
No Man's Sky Review Thread: The Scores Have Arrived (read OP)
- Thread starter Nirolak
- Start date
Still, there is no sense of that apparent scale at all. It all just feels so cramped and almost pointless.
Tomeru
Member
I care if it's snarky. It says alot about a reviewer and his review(s).
orthodoxy1095
Banned
Once again, correct.
The idea is that a survival game like Minecraft offers me a few things to work towards. It's a survival game, so obviously first is always going to be just surviving (duh). But it's also a sandbox, so whatever else I choose to do is really limited only by my own creativity. In NMS, we're headed towards "the center" for some arbitrary, pre-established reason and that's really it (and it sure sounds like getting there isn't worth it). There's nothing else giving me ownership of the experience.
Shipbuilding would have been a really neat idea to be honest. It would have added something really that was really "yours" to the experience, getting to choose layouts, colors, size, etc.
Yep!
Would have been totally rad.
I feel the resource gathering survival aspect hampers the game design. Like having to have space full of asteroids. They somehow think its compelling to constantly click on your inventory to load in the resources manually. Everything runs out so quickly.
They could have had it so in space you dont need power. The whole resource gathering is a mess in my opinion, theirs so much resources all over the place it nullifies any survival aspect to it and just creates a tedious loop of actions.
I think it would have been better if they'd had a simpler resource system. Made it rarer but last longer. Like you have a base survival that lasts a long time but you move slower actions, are slower etc. So you get carbon and power and and they increase your speed and abilities. Like 20 % power efficiency lasts for 5 hours, 100 % lasts for 1 hour. So its not too difficult to survive without dying, but its a bit difficult to be at 100 % all the time.
To upgrade your systems you have to get rare resources that dont grow on every planet, you have to calibrate scanners to look for systems.
They've made every planet the same with little compelling reasons to differentiate between them(except for the looks).
They could have had it so in space you dont need power. The whole resource gathering is a mess in my opinion, theirs so much resources all over the place it nullifies any survival aspect to it and just creates a tedious loop of actions.
I think it would have been better if they'd had a simpler resource system. Made it rarer but last longer. Like you have a base survival that lasts a long time but you move slower actions, are slower etc. So you get carbon and power and and they increase your speed and abilities. Like 20 % power efficiency lasts for 5 hours, 100 % lasts for 1 hour. So its not too difficult to survive without dying, but its a bit difficult to be at 100 % all the time.
To upgrade your systems you have to get rare resources that dont grow on every planet, you have to calibrate scanners to look for systems.
They've made every planet the same with little compelling reasons to differentiate between them(except for the looks).
I don't think the excuse that it is expectations flies. Some people just don't like it, find the core loop to be boring etc.
Tomeru
Member
A good reviewer says what is needed to be said without being condescending and snarky. Using snarky descriptions on something usually changes the meaning of what was talked about.
A good reviewer should say how they feel about a game in whatever way they feel. No need to walk on eggshells.
This reads extra weird in an age where personalities are trumping traditional dry content.
It's a question of style, it's fine to personally dislike a certain style of reviews, but some of the most respected reviewers and critics in history (and I'm not talking game reviewers here) have used snark quite often, and at least in my opinion, quite successfully.
A good reviewer can be anything they want as long as they entertain, inform, or do both. You can go further into comedic territory with something like Zero Punctuation or AVGN or further into purely informative territory like most gaming websites, I'd say gggmanlives is somewhere in the middle.
I'd still like an explanation as to why it's OK for you to dictate the style of other reviewers whilst it's not OK for gggmanlives to suggest what might have improved the game for him despite the latter being the very basis of what a review is.
Wdf really? Jeez...
orthodoxy1095
Banned
By this logic, Ebert wasn't a good reviewer since he always reserved the right to be snarky when appropriate.
And that's a load of horseshit since he was a legend, sooooooooo...
Trickster
Member
This is really nothing but your oppinion you are trying to force as some supposed standard for reviewing.
Agreed.
After seeing how NMS turned out, I'm not going to complain how long it's taking for Star Citizen to come out. They have a different approach to development than Frontier and I think it's better. We'll get to see some cool shit next week during Gamescom as well.
PepsimanVsJoe
Member
So you would deny a reviewer the catharsis that comes from skewering a game/movie/book/??? they hated?
That's just plain cold.
Tomeru
Member
There are good snarky reviews, I agree. Those are mostly in context and have done their homework. While some, like the review I commented on is just snarky with no substence. Obviously this is my opinion, but a review should'nt feeland read like something you would read in a thread like this (as in one sentence comments from people on the internet).
Haha, it IS cold.
GrizzleBoy
Banned
Just so you know, ad-hominem aka criticising tone or character rather than refuting arguments, is not exactly helping you here.
Your first comment was to say the reviewer did not talk about what the game is, and instead talked about what the game wasn't.
Numerous posters have pointed out your assessment does not seem to be the case at all.
Rather than solidify and further explain your original argument, you've gone straight into "yeah but I didn't like his tone, he's not really a good reviewer."
Yo seemingly forgotten that your actual problem with the review was what it was talking about, and are now just attempting to discredit the review by arguing about the way the words were said, instead of what the words actually were.
Ad-hominem isn't an argument.
Up till now, you have not yet actually articulated your actual problem past making claims with no attempt to back them up and ad-hominem.
Would you like to back up your claim that he is not talking about what the game is in the review?
Tomeru
Member
I wasn't trying to refute his criticism, just the way his review was done, which in my opinion was not good. It was childish and disrespectful to the listener, on top of not being professional.
I gave EGs review an an example of how to present crticism in a way that I find correct and convincing. You can be witty without being snarky, but if you are snarky without being witty? I tend to take reviews like tha with a grain of salt.
Fredrik
Member
Cramped and no sense of scale?? I've still only been to 3 planets, those planets has been gigantic in terms of landmass to travel and things to find, and if PS blog is right there are apparently 18,446,744,073,709,551,613 planets left for me to visit.
orthodoxy1095
Banned
They're massive planets and take forever to cross on foot, sure.
But I do think orava is right that the planets in NMS lack most of the geographic scale you'd associate with a real life planet.
Numbers and size mean nothing when they all are pretty much the same with few variables here and there. I see no ringed planets, no stellar phenomenon, no pulsars, no nebulas, no binary star systems, no comets, no actual black holes (the black holes in this game are basically wormholes), all the stars are a yellow dwarf like our sun, all planets have the same gravity.
When it comes to the planets themselves, first square km you see of a planet is the same as the rest of the planet. You don't even see a difference between polar region and equatorial region in terms of temperature.
The first system you see when you start the game is pretty much the same as the last system you'll ever see.
orthodoxy1095
Banned
That's a kicker for the scale issue. Planets don't really feel that big when the entire planet feels like a slim variation on whatever theme the planet shows in the first two minutes after landing.
Lets put it this way. Landmass means nothing if you can't distinguish your place in the world from what you're looking at.
You're using these numbers without actually understanding what they mean in the context of what people see. Given the complaints about sameyness that number ultimately means nothing.
oneils
Member
The first thirty seconds tells you what it isn't. I thought the next 7 minutes gave a good explanation of what it is.
Fredrik
Member
In what way? You need to explain how. I can only go by my own experience where it takes me minutes just to go with the spaceship from one important place on the planet to another, and you'll quickly get lost because of the scale, moving between the planets takes even longer, and this is just in one single system.
Kacho
Member
I decided to check out the Eurogamer review after reading the discussion going on in here about reviews and I see this:
I'm late to the party and all that jazz but is this true?! This is unbelievable. Why not just delay the game further until it's more polished, especially if you're charging $60. Christ!
I'm late to the party and all that jazz but is this true?! This is unbelievable. Why not just delay the game further until it's more polished, especially if you're charging $60. Christ!
orthodoxy1095
Banned
Do any of the planets have geographic feature of the real world? Mountains? Canyons? Waterfalls? Rivers? Plains? Biomes? At best there's some mild hills to be found.
I get lost too. But I get lost because of a lack of any geographic scale or notable landmarks, not because the world is convincingly realistic. Each planet is a massive landmass of sameness, and on top of that planets themselves are ridiculously samey to one another.
Snowman Prophet of Doom
Member
That video review isn't particularly snarky. He spends like 6 minutes sharing his basic opinions about the game - it runs poorly, it doesn't look that good, the gameplay is repetitive, planets look only superficially different from one another, the procedural generation makes a lot of things end up stupid-looking, the world is lifeless and lacks personality or depth - then spends two minutes at the end sharing how he thinks the game would have been better.
In what way was it 'disrespectful to the listener'? Disrespectful to a listener that likes the game? His choice of words is certainly unprofessional, but we are talking about youtubers here, making a living with this sort of thing. If he deemed the game good you could probably have replaced some of his words with 'badass' or 'fucking amazing' - either way it goes, I think it doesn't distract from what he's trying to convey.
I think the review is neither about 'what the game is not', nor is it uninformative. It describes what the game fails at, but also tries to come up with ways that could have improved the experience. If suggesting f.e. that it would have been cool to build your very own ship in a game like this was somehow unprofessional or misguided, then I don't really know what to say to that.
I mean, there is one sentence in the eurogamer review that I find pretty damning if we we're talking about 'what the game is not' or in general about reviews being solely about the product at hand:
It's to do with the fact that what you see when you enter a planet is how the rest of the planet will looks. You don't find colder regions near the poles and warmer regions near the equator, no rivers, mountain ranges etc...it's all just your regular uneven randomly generated terrain. Even a lifeless rock like our Moon has variations in its topography in one sq km than you would in an entire lush planet in NMS. There really is no point to actually wander around a planet because you've seen it all within the first 2 minutes, the planet isn't going to offer anything more. Then there is the fact that nothing on the planet actually exists outside of what you can see when you land, all that is randomly generated as you get closer to the area.
Say you play a game like Farcry and you are just roaming around doing nothing and then suddenly you come across a creek that leads to a hidden area that has beautiful views of a waterfall, you explore because there is a reason for the environment to exist so you continue to wander and exploration feels rewarding when that happens. You can't get that sort of experience in NMS because you won't see anything new no matter how far you go.
Fredrik
Member
Are they? I've obviously just started (15 hours in) but the 3 planets I've visited has been very different, windy desert planet, water planet with islands and mountains kind of like earth and a constantly raining lush planet with lots of vegetation. Two of them are radioactive though and the third one poisonous.
Council Pop
Member
Any reason why the Polygon review hasn't been listed in the OP? Polygon links aren't banned on GAF are they?
Polygon review- 6.0
Polygon review- 6.0
I was sitting on a 7, but I think a 6 is far more accurate after playing more.
Oppo
Member
that quote you posted is correct though. they do t use a skybox, they run simulation right down to the surface of the actual other planets and the sun in the system.
Fredrik
Member
Okay thanks for explaining, I can agree with lots of what you say here. Procedual generation is a bit tricky, maybe the planets need the biome variations from Minecraft, not the sharp jungle-to-snow-to-desert edges though but at least not the same biome for the whole planet. Something to wish for in NMS2 maybe?
Hence why I said "a few variables" also there are no mountains in this game, you are probably just talking about hills which is pretty standard for a terrain generator.
In any case I am confused over how you've spent 15 hours and only been to three planets.
GrizzleBoy
Banned
Then why was the only thing you thought necessary to say regarding his review before being challenged, this:
That's a direct refute of his criticism. You directly said that what he was talking about is where your issue lay. Therefore bad review. Read x review instead.
When challenged about what you thought was wrong with what he talked about, you completely ditched what was your only actual point at that time and decided that you just didn't like his tone and that there wasn't actually anything wrong with his actual points. Therefore bad review. Read x review instead.
I mean, if you're going to:
-disparage someone's review as simply a bad review because it talks about the wrong things and doesn't talk about the right things,
-fail to back up your claim and instead move directly to attacking the reviewer instead of any point he made,
-then deny you actually had any problem with what he was talking about when asked why you said you didn't like what he was talking about.......when your whole original point was that you didn't like what he was talking about......
I find people who twist, fold and bend their arguments mid discussion, as if nobody can see what they're doing to be far more disrespectful and childish than a review using negative language to describe things they find negative.
But that's just my opinion.
Fredrik
Member
I'm in no hurry
I'm exploring the planets, identifying the wildlife, learning the language, upgrading my gear etc. I've been away to a nearby space station to trade things but I just don't see the point of rushing away to new systems until I'm ready with this one. Edit: It's actually 17 hours ;P
MythicReclaimer
Member
As a $20 early access Steam title I would be willing to give it an "in-progress/development" 6/10 but as a released $60 product I give it a 4/10 after 20+ hours of game time.
I actually like the concept and framework and enjoyed it up to around the 20 hour point. I feel that they have laid the foundation for something really fun, it just needs more content, some tweaks and bug fixes. But I definitely enjoyed enough of it to give it at least a 6 as it is.
I'm in no hurry
Edit: It's actually 17 hours ;P
Well you only have about 3000 planets or so to explore before you get to centre of galaxy.
The thing with RNG is that it does not really matter if you miss something because the next planet/system has about just as much of a chance of having something that the current planet/system has..if not more (since you won't find everything in a planet, and say if you don't find a resource in the first few minutes then it's unlikely you'll find it any later). I don't even bother going to all planets in a system, for instance the chances that an undiscovered planet in my system turns out to be a lush planet full of loot is pretty much the same as a random planet in the next system. They are just blank templates for the RNG to work on, same for plant you are already on.
I am pretty sure that you'd also progress/upgrade faster if you move away since you can make more money that way (say for example if none of the three planets in your system have gold then you could go to the next system and look for gold which you can sell for a price). There's also the fact that moving to a new system can results in things that can lead to game giving you stuff once it realises that you have jumped a couple of systems and you don't have a particular thing.
forknknife
Banned
After checking a few gameplay videos there's something I cannot understand. When you fly to a planet is it always the case that wherever you decide to land the game automatically generates a space station at that spot? I find that a bit ridiculous if that's the case.
I wish, but for me- no.
I get a space station every single time I warp to a new system.
travisbickle
Member
Have you got anything to back this up? Have you cracked open the files on your PC version?
Some players are currently looking at similarities between the different classifications of star system, which if true obviously goes against your sound theory.
No it's doesn't work like that however if you have a marker on the planet by discovering something like an outpost you can highlight the icon from space and hyper drive directly to it and that's probably what you saw. Usually each planet has a few outposts you can find and land on.
Kaffeemann
Banned
Are there even stars in the star systems? I can only see one major light source and that is the center of the galaxy.
cleveridea
Member
You can sign up at their website. Not sure if its too late for you to get the beta key though.
I was disappointed that I couldnt get the VR mode working, game looks good otherwise - demo is quite simple, you arent missing much if you cant get into the beta
blastprocessor
The Amiga Brotherhood
Angry Joe will probably do another live stream then do the review...
How do you think the planets get lit ?
The lightsource you see inside star system when you are going about in your ship is a star...it's not the centre of the galaxy. It wouldn't make sense for that lightsource to be the centre of galaxy as then it'd be lighting up the planets from hundreds of thousands of light years away.