Lol
Reminds me of my most viewed video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFq_z7oRr_0
Sentinels don't care.
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No Man's Sky 1.3 Update releasing this week (portals, expanded story, and more)
- Thread starter Karspankey
- Start date
Reminds me of my most viewed video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFq_z7oRr_0
Sentinels don't care.
themadcowtipper
Smells faintly of rancid stilton.
dreamstation
Member
Still waiting eh? I was really hoping to have a long list of patch notes to peruse while I had my morning coffee!
I'm there with you bruh. Doing the same.
themadcowtipper
Smells faintly of rancid stilton.
You done up an done it in here
The à¹ÛBronx
Member
Whoo boy.
DOBERMAN INC
Member
A scam implies intent from the beginning, it was more like negligence.
Ballistics
Member
It's the worst scam in gaming history, because they forgot to run away with the money, and instead put it back into the game.
SirMossyBloke
Member
That's not how you spell Ark: Survival Evolved.
bitbydeath
Gold Member
They would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those pesky kids.
If it really were a scam it has to be the worst done scam in history. Because they came back and invested some of that money right back into the game. Good scammers run and disappear with the money. They don't spend the money back into the scam that already worked (and oh yeah, start trying to help other small developers with teh money by pubishing them). The whole point of the scam is to get away with as much money as quickly as possible and only put in as much as needed to pull the wool over people's eyes (you want to put in as little as possible).
Oh yeah, also, not a great scam when it took so long to pull off too.
/s
I can't believe there are people who still think Hello Games was scamming...
themadcowtipper
Smells faintly of rancid stilton.
Yeah fucK that game. Lets release an expansion while the game is in EA.
MoonsaultSlayer
Member
Here's a video of when I discovered you could finally ride on the animals.
https://youtu.be/RKXRMAjNIxo
Don't think anyone knew until I made that vid.
________________
About "scamming", I recently re-read that letter Sean put out just before release since it showed up in my facebook memories and he was completely humble and honest about the game and how he thought it'd be received. Simply viewed it as a player getting lost in a sci-fi book cover. And that's the game I played.
https://youtu.be/RKXRMAjNIxo
Don't think anyone knew until I made that vid.
________________
About "scamming", I recently re-read that letter Sean put out just before release since it showed up in my facebook memories and he was completely humble and honest about the game and how he thought it'd be received. Simply viewed it as a player getting lost in a sci-fi book cover. And that's the game I played.
themadcowtipper
Smells faintly of rancid stilton.
I think Sean was lying about the game up until release, but that is off topic.
I enjoy the game and can't wait for the patch or atleast the patch notes to hit.
Aside from the early access label and the optimization not being great, I feel like that is a bit unfair. The game was $30 and even back when I played 2 years ago, there was more stuff to do than I could handle.
I quite like it. Are people sour that it's still labeled as early access? Or that they are selling DLC despite being in 'early access' still?
To me, it's just a label for continued support for this game. I've put more time and had more fun with this 'early access' game than I have most full fledged releases. They also constantly update this game.
Foundation and Pathfinder have both already given a lot more purpose to exploration, so I'm imagining that this latest one will do even more. They definitely seem to be gearing the updates towards people that don't like to "make their own fun," so to speak. More structure has been added to the gameplay loop, while still keeping it open for the player to just aimlessly explore.
I think, at the end of the day, the core gameplay loop is going to be the same. They're building on that foundation. They may add more structure (ie, "radiant quests,"), but ultimately, you're still going to be mining, exploring, and trading/stealing goods. There will be people that that will never appeal to, and that's fine. But for the people that that does appeal to, they get sucked into it.
Personally, I prefer No Man's Sky to Elite: Dangerous. I find Elite overly complex and cumbersome (I'm playing on PS4), but I just enjoy the drop in and drop out feel of NMS in comparison. For sim fans, I'm sure Elite is fucking amazing. I am personally not a sim fan, but I like that a game like Elite exists. I'll come back to it eventually, but I finally deleted it off of my PS4 after two weeks of being frustrated by it (and losing my special ship that came with my purchase. lol). This update can't come soon enough!
Still don't fully understand how the narrative around this game got so toxic.
Developers overpromise all the time, partly because it's a cynical tactic and partly because stuff changes and gets scaled back during development. That's why you wait for reviews.
I get that Hello Games ended up on the wrong side of how much you can overpromise without pissing people off. But the idea that it was somehow criminal...
Anyway, I found the game enjoyable but shallow and had fun for a week or so around launch. Definitely intrigued by how diligently they've updated things and will dip back in on PS4 Pro at some point.
Developers overpromise all the time, partly because it's a cynical tactic and partly because stuff changes and gets scaled back during development. That's why you wait for reviews.
I get that Hello Games ended up on the wrong side of how much you can overpromise without pissing people off. But the idea that it was somehow criminal...
Anyway, I found the game enjoyable but shallow and had fun for a week or so around launch. Definitely intrigued by how diligently they've updated things and will dip back in on PS4 Pro at some point.
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themadcowtipper
Smells faintly of rancid stilton.
Yeah if you don't like the core gameplay loop no amount of patches will fix that.
SirNinja
Member
LOL. If it was a scam at all, they'd have closed shop and changed their names after taking the money...rather than committing to working on making customers happier through more than a year's worth of free updates. Come on now.
I hope more people come back to it, especially v1.0 players. There's a lot that's changed, almost all of it for the better. v1.3 may be even a bigger improvement from 1.0 to 1.2, if they manage to do right by the story this time and give the universe a better sense of purpose.
valkillmore
Member
I hope we get that new cloud rendering tech in this patch. Sean has talked about how it's been in development a while. Well let's see it, release the kraken
SirMossyBloke
Member
I'm genuinely surprised we haven't seen anything yet even though its the 1 year anniversary of the game today. We still have some time but I figured it would be out by now, at least a video.
Yeah, silence on the one year anniversary is a surprising move.
Dirtyshubb
Member
Anyone else hoping for another 11:30 announcement?
would be nice lol
eyeball_kid
Member
Depends whether or not they improve the Combat and Trading tentpoles. Given the amount of weapon upgrades introduced in the last patch, I wouldn't be surprised if they improve the base mechanics. Not to the level of a modern shooter, but hopefully better than the PS1 shooter it currently is. And the janky flight mechanics. It doesn't need to be some Elite sim flight model, but even the old TIE Fighter and Wing Commander games felt more fun to fly in.
Hopefully they can also make trading a more viable "job" for making money by increasing the dynamism of the economy and increase the monetary returns, as well as add QoL features to reduce the tedium. Also, we should be able to buy most anything that we want if we have the money, instead of forcing us to go farm. Han Solo doesn't go mining crystals when he needs supplies, he just buys them (or "buys" them).
The game is kind of a grinding hell, and they've actually made that worse in the last couple of updates. They really need to address this in 1.3 for people who don't enjoy grinding and crafting as the main purpose of the game. If they can add a job system or procedural quest system, I think it would remove a lot of the aimlessness and tedium that some people feel when playing.
blastprocessor
The Amiga Brotherhood
It's a tenner on Amazon (used) so might be worth a punt but only if Sean Murray can deliver this time round.
I think a lot of the reason why developers are so hesitant to announce a game too far from launch is because game development is never set in stone. There are schedules, milestones, and goals you attempt to reach, but sometimes, the reality of development, technology, resources, time, and budget set in, and all of those best laid plans fall apart.
Shortly after announcing the game, Hello Games was hit with a massive flood that took out their office. They lost data, but fortunately had backups that they could continue to work from. Then money began to thin out, and they had to release the most "complete" version of the game they could, or else there'd be no more Hello Games.
It's a shame when that happens, but I think they fully intended to realize the vision they showed when they announced it, but things didn't play out that way in the end. Making video games is hard, and it's one of the things I didn't fully appreciate until I started working in the gaming industry myself.
I've worked at quite a few developers and publishers, both big and small, and it can be a job of extremes. Extreme highs as things gel and come together, and extreme lows, as things break and fall apart. There's of course feelings in between those extremes, but the love of what you're doing gets you through the rough stuff.
I knew from the moment Sean Murray stepped out on stage during the No Man's Sky reveal at the PlayStation conference that he was not a PR guy. He was a developer who, by virtue of being a tiny indie studio had to be the voice and face of the company. His awkwardness, and discomfort at having to be in the limelight was evident, but his enthusiasm for the game he was making was palpable, and infectious. He clearly loves what he's doing, and was proud of what his team and himself had accomplished. It was a shame to see that all come crashing down because of features that had to be "cut," or just weren't ready at launch.
There's this point in game development where the team has to sit down and discuss reality. Sometimes hard decisions have to be made, and content that was intended to be in the game at launch has to be "cut." And by "cut," I simply mean that the feature is post-poned until whatever is holding it back can be ironed out. And what's holding it back could be time, money, resources, tech, the usual.
I didn't see the launch of No Man's Sky as a series of "broken promises," but as a small developer that had bit off more than it could chew, had showed a game that was waylaid by real life stuff (floods and money shortage), and instead of packing it in, they put together the most "polished and playable" version of the game they could, in the hopes that they could expand on the "cut" features later. Fortunately, it seems that that is exactly what they've been doing the past 12 months.
The vitriol, hate, and "Sean Murray lied!!!!!" reaction to the launch of the game was, as a gamer and gaming enthusiast, embarrassing and pathetic to behold, and as a developer, horrifying and anxiety inducing. Nobody that comes in to work, sometimes putting in 12-16 hour days to create a game they truly love does so with the intention of fucking over their audience. Nobody that sits down at their desk, poring over code, art, design docs, or QA testing is doing so to break promises and disappoint players and their fanbase.
No Man's Sky and Hello Games became a kind of frightening cautionary tale about a worst case scenario, in which your game gets too big for your studio to handle, with expectations so high there was no way you'd be able to meet them, and you don't have a trained PR voice to get the real message of your product out there, or mitigate expectations before they got out of control. It's honestly no wonder that developers nowadays tend to announce projects closer to release. Fear of the kind of backlash and the gaming community turning on you was enough to give you pause. You want to do nothing more than share your cool new game with the world, but know that if even a single feature has to be cut in the 6-12 months before release, the tide could turn on you. For a small studio, that turning tide could destroy your company. A Sony, EA, Microsoft, or Nintendo could weather those kind of blunders, but a tiny indie studio? Good luck.
You don't want to keep everything quiet, but you also don't want to promise things that may end up being unfeasible for some reason or another. That's the balancing act that happens when it comes to revealing games/features. It's also why PR people are very important for spreading that message. Not everyone can afford a PR face to promote their work, and sometimes that responsibility has to fall on the person completely unprepared for the job.
2blackcats
Member
^great post.
Thanks for the reply. I'm still in recovery over how pointless exploring the same buildings became once you had a majority of the blueprints. I enjoyed the game quite a bit until the point where exploring was simply for profit to buy a better ship.
I wish there was more terra forming options and gardening of some sort.
Uhm, it was released on August 9th 2016. The announcement on August 9th 2017 was patch 1.3.
Every thread about NMS should be appended with this post.
If you had only been alive for the last 2 years this still would not rank in the top 50
Indeed.
The worst thing is Sean HAD to go out to press early, to generate buzz for the game, to get funding. When he formed the company he remortgaged his own home to hire a few friends, and then the rest came from funding off the back of press.
In fairness, he also tried to get in front of online hype at times. I remember him talking about how he would say one sentence about something, and Reddit would take that one sentence and decide meant 28 different features. So they would try to clarify it, and then that would spin conversation about it REALLY meaning 48 other features on top. It got totally out of hand. Some of that was on Sean not being clear, and I've mentioned that a few times, but a lot of it was on the community (and press, too, as some of the questions being put to him were... interestingly put).
Like I mentioned earlier in the thread, I remember somebody here saying they were never going to buy another game pre-release, because they said the game contained everything they ever needed in a video game. I remember that person returned to the OT when the game launched to RAGE about how it didn't do this... I had no idea how they got those expectations. They had built a game in their head which, in fairness, nobody had actually detailed.
The best thing with No Man's Sky, I think, is to lower expectations and go in as blind as possible. You can almost guarantee when the trailer drops people will crawl over every detail, every frame, and the community will get carried away again. For you look at the ARG topic here, the first post speculates about things like waterfalls and such. Maybe.. play it and experience it?
Oachkatzlschwoaf
Member
True, it was hyperbolic. Also I didn't play too much after the foundation update, so most of my experience comes from before that. It's just a point that makes angry for some reason, probably I can literally taste the wasted opportunity. If only I came across a big mountain or something like that every once in a while. The highest elevations barely qualify as hills. The planets feel like a certain pattern repeated around a sphere.
I land my ship on a nice looking planet, looking around, enjoying the vista. It's beautiful, sometimes even stunning. But in the very same moment I get sad because I just saw almost everything this planet has to offer. Maybe earth is the only planet with a vast variety of biomes and being "samey" is actually the standard?
It may be an unreasonable expectation, but I wish they would work on that at some point.
For sure. I think with the Foundation or Pathfinder update (I forget which), they stopped giving you blueprints at the empty bases, and I think instead they give you resources like nanites. I haven't played in a while, since I was holding off for the new update, but there is more reason to find those bases now, because the resources/nanites you get is more valuable than the thousandth blueprint for the same fucking mod you already have.
I had reached the point where I'd ignore bases and just take pretty screenshots of the planet I was on before moving on. Now I feel more compelled to explore and find bases. I just wouldn't mind there being genuine "towns" and "cities" on some of the populated planets. I'd love to be tooling around on a planet, and see some massive skyscrapers looming over the horizon as I clear a bluff. I don't care if it's just stock NPCs wandering the streets. Give me procedurally generated cities and settlements with trading posts and vendors and maybe a "school" where I can pay credits to learn some of the local language (dependent on whether it's a Vykeen, Korvax, or Gek system). I want to walk through some Blade Runner-esque streets during a rainstorm, or pilot a hovercar through skyscrapers...
Sweet thanks!
MoonsaultSlayer
Member
Imagine scanning a planet can point you to different biomes or natural landmarks. The algorithm can create maybe three unique biomes and up to five or six interesting vistas per planet that you can spot from high altitude flight. These landmarks can be scanned and marked at certain terminals and at all bases with lifeforms for the ones found within the current biome.
I know it's easier said than done, but worth throwing out there for a potential update or dare I say sequel?
Th3BranMan92
Member
Your entire post is spot on.
In fact, I think the flood is undoubtedly one of the biggest reasons why the game we have now doesn't reflect the 2014 footage of the game. A lot of people claim the 2014 footage was either fake, pre-rendered, or staged "Sean Lied!!" That was undeniably a real build of the game in 2014. While the creature / wingmen / space combat instances were likely staged for the reveal to show the games variety, they really lost a LOT of progress in development. Even after the 2014 reveal trailer at VGX, there were many other trailers that showed off many other aspects that were also lost. Crashed ships, large constructs, tall trees, desert planets, portals, sand worms, wingmen, faction battles, etc. These were all in the game, I have no doubt about that.
ichtyander
Member
I generally agree with this and it's the way I saw things probably transpired. The one very important thing that Sean and the team could've done to avoid the whole post-release nightmare, no matter the expectations, was to not be cagey and secretive about the game.
I mean, it's easy to say that in hindsight, but even so, they must have been aware at some level at the state of the game 3-4 months prior to release. yet Sean still naively (or deceptively, depends on who you ask) wanted to keep the whole mysterious, "I want you to find out for yourselves" approach. Frankly, that's not even a PR problem, it just sounds like the hundreds of other game projects that are going through development hell and you're hoping you're gonna get there in time. It must've been just excruciating for them during that final year of development at the very least.
We can't know this for sure, but I'm feeling pretty confident they decided to wrap up as much as they can and then cross their fingers and hope nobody will notice some of the things like actually not being able to see other players, there being no payoff for reaching the center of the galaxy and a bunch of other obviously missing or undercooked things. And of course, players managed to discover all this within days, and HG's reaction was "holy shit guys, we couldn't imagine you pulling that off so fast lol". And all of that on a fully priced console game. I can't think of a single other example where a developer released an unfinished, in-early-access-state, fully priced physical console title without so much saying a word about the state of the game. There's stuff there that's pretty baffling and kinda crazy from a business and management standpoint, so it's understandable that people got upset. It's the uniqueness of the circumstances that made that shit explode like crazy post-release.
What's not understandable is all of that getting out of control and the vitriol that followed, because that's just shameful, but that's how things are these days, it's just that we should try to be better.
And I know this gives ammo to people that continue to crucify Hello Games, but I really love some of the things they've done in No Man's Sky and I like for things to be cleared up and out in the open, I don't really like avoiding the obvious issues and just praise the game either. I've worked with people that lead projects into development hell, biting more that they could or knew how to chew, and this whole thing just reeks of overreaching and mismanagement. And these guys at HG are smart people, and I still applaud them for trying to make one of those "dream game" projects, they're still pioneers in pulling off some pretty great technical things, but these space exploration ideas are gigantic, money draining, soul crushing projects that nobody's done well so far (and boy, people are trying), so it was naive to think that it wasn't going to take so long and cost so much money.
Anyway, I ranted a bit, but the bottom line is I believe HG weren't actively trying to deceive everyone, but the circumstances lead them into making some questionable and downright terrible choices, which objectively isn't an excuse in the end, but I sympathize with them all the same. I can't even imagine being in their situation and I would probably crawl under a rock somewhere (although, you know, a bit of money helps keeping your sanity), so good on them for supporting and updating this game for a whole year now.
Oachkatzlschwoaf
Member
I would prefer to see it from the distance, not via scanning. Imagine you fly trough the galaxy and you spot a blueish area on a mostly red planet. That alone would make me super curious. Or maybe you see a very dark spot. An endless hole? Or a gigantic mountain peaking through the atmosphere...
I don't even want every planet to be this exciting - one in fifty is plenty. It would be very rare, making it even more special to find such a planet, without getting old too quickly.
On the other side, there should be absolutely awful planets. Make it full of spikes and cliffs, impossible to traverse by foot. Make it completely covered in liquid. Let it be one flat desert where there is literally nothing. There are so many planets, it's fine if I can't land on all of them.
But right now every sphere seems to have the same mix of hills and caves. It's just a question of how they are distributed. I can almost see the sliders used in the world generator.
Ballistics
Member
They are certainly there, and they are not hills. I wish I had recorded the time I crash landed on a planet (I had my PS4 settings on 3 minutes and missed it). My ship was marked almost underneath me and I was pissed that it was making me walk around the planet. As it turns out, I was walking up a barely perceptible incline and suddenly found myself with a slope I could have skied down.
If anyone has seen Sean talk at GDC, you might remember him talking about amplifying features with a technique they didn't use. I hope the do use it.
nicoga3000
Saint Nic
I've also installed the game for the first time! I want to boot it up, but I am telling myself to wait for 1.3 to get the best experience to date. I hope those sand worms and other weird large creatures are put in...
valkillmore
Member
I haven't played the game since the Foundation Update and can't wait to start up a perma run. But not until 1.3 drops. I shall continue to wait with great anticipation.
I actually think they might have been knowingly taken out due to gameplay reasons. I mean if you think about it, it probably wouldnt be too fun to be on hard mode, land on a planet and then realize 5 seconds later your dead cause the entire floor was just destroyed by a worm. They would need to build all sorts of warning systems and everything to work around it. I think though they can probably get away with putting in more manageable large creatures, maybe stick them in caves so the player can land without issue but then if they choose to go into the cave they die.
valkillmore
Member
'WARNING - Sandworms Detected'
Then nothing for a minute, until one pops up from the ground right in front of you. Would be awesome!
AusRoachman
Member
This is still one of my favourite game trailers ever
https://youtu.be/fP9t_2OJdK8
There are still a few things that never made it to the final release however
- animals formations
- freighters in atmosphere and crashing
- large structures on planets
I really hope they can bring some of those back in. My biggest hope is they make mining not the sole gameplay loop. Would like to earn money without mining (leave that as an option for those who love it) . I would be happy making less money but being able to take random bounty hunter missions , find a randomly crashed freighter , rescue some trapper prisoners (make a sentinel planet that has prisoners you must try and extract) , corrupted sentinels , stuff like that.
Let me potential find another aliens ship and steal it (wave based defense for x minutes against sentinels until time expires) . My biggest gripe is not being able to afford some ships with rediculous prices because I can't be bothered mining for 20 hrs .
https://youtu.be/fP9t_2OJdK8
There are still a few things that never made it to the final release however
- animals formations
- freighters in atmosphere and crashing
- large structures on planets
I really hope they can bring some of those back in. My biggest hope is they make mining not the sole gameplay loop. Would like to earn money without mining (leave that as an option for those who love it) . I would be happy making less money but being able to take random bounty hunter missions , find a randomly crashed freighter , rescue some trapper prisoners (make a sentinel planet that has prisoners you must try and extract) , corrupted sentinels , stuff like that.
Let me potential find another aliens ship and steal it (wave based defense for x minutes against sentinels until time expires) . My biggest gripe is not being able to afford some ships with rediculous prices because I can't be bothered mining for 20 hrs .