Here's my big update from another day with NMS before I go to bed.
A heads up - I'm probably going to take a couple days off from playing. At least, not as feverishly, and I won't be patrolling reddit answering questions nearly as much. I need a small break, the frustrations of apparent bugs or design implementations that aren't quite finished have been driving me mad. I'm pretty much full on expecting a version update any day now - hopefully this break gets me to that update, or at the very least gets me to a point where HG / Sean address the concerns of the glaring problems and tells us if a Day 1 patch is coming or not.
All that aside, let's talk about some cool stuff!
THE GOOD
- I found an entire system of pretty badass planets! It was such a shift in my gameplay. It was like 4 for 4 planets I really enjoyed playing on - two of them were Fauna: Generous and one of those was very green and seemed flush with life. The planets have a healthy supply of pretty solid resources, and one of the other two lesser-life planets had a blob-like "creature" that was harvestable for a resource I'd never seen before! All in all, I've probably spent more time in this one system than I have any other 8-10 systems combined. This is a huge positive step for me in accepting that cool planets can and do really exist!
- I saw some really wild looking creatures tonight! I don't know if this has anything to do with me playing near the center, or if it's just dumb luck, or what... but I had a lot of woah look at that weird mofo moments tonight. I'll post some in screenshots down below! (Some I don't have screenshots of because I had to kill it before it killed me!!!)
- I messed around with a lot of upgrades tonight to experiment, and while I've still been unable to "fix" a few and they definitely seem bugged / tweaked for whatever purpose etc, many do seem to work. Almost all of the Multitool Cannon upgrades work, and I've made a BEAST of a weapon. 17 of my 24 upgrade slots are now Cannon Upgrades, haha. That thing is a monster! I tested it out on some Sentinels, and did the ol' maximum GTA wanted level ride-or-die to see how long I could last. I did pretty good! Killed many of the AT-ST Chicken Walker things! There's one lil bug that kind of got me upset, in that there's a Homing Bullet Upgrade (which kicks ass! seriously!) and yet in a lot of scenarios when firing at the AT-STs the bullets were "homing" down toward their feet - and in the process completely missing them. I was dumping entire clips at them screaming WHY WON'T YOU DIE until I went back and watched the tape to see what was going on. While this is kind of an annoying bug, it's beatable - I started hovering up on my jetpack and fired down at them. Death from above, assholes! They need to just fix it so the homing aspect is centering in to a part of the enemy it can definitely hit, instead of inbetween it's legs!
- I swam to the bottom of an ocean! I didn't find any sweet giant sharks or anything, but I can say this... they did a great job of really making the deep ocean feel kind of scary. The audio gets quiet like it would if you were underwater, stuff can and will sort of just swim up at you out of nowhere... it's immersive and it bothers me. Well, this game does a pretty good job of that... when you're really deep, your maneuverability is pretty limited. And it's pretty dark, too. So IF something does start swimming at you, you're kind of fucked - start firing and hope for the best! You can use your jetpack to kind of start a boost to the surface, though, and I admit that I don't know for sure if this is faster than the enemy will be swimming or not. It might be. I will say that it's really fun (and kinda cheesy!) to use your jetpack to boost yourself up above the water surface, and fire down at aggro'd enemies while you do. When your jetpack kicks it, you land back in the water and don't take fall damage, so you have nothing to lose! And they can't get you while you're in the air! Death from above again, suckers!
THE BAD
- I messed around with space combat tonight. Big time. It was the last trophy I needed for my plat (Kill X/Y ships) so I went all in with it. I beefed up my poor Space Dick ship as much as I could and started to get to work. Well, it was so-so. First, the shield upgrades are either outright not working or just very underwhelming - I felt like I was taking massive unavoidable damage constantly in some of the more intense fights. You can only do so much in the way of maneuverability - the game doesn't really let you "speed up" when you're in combat, which I think is stupid. There's no zipping around and bobbing and weaving, in fact you kind of feel like a slow as shit asshole vs the obviously-much-quicker-than-you enemy ships. They die in a reasonable amount of hits and most of the Cannon upgrades seemed to work just fine, especially the damage boosters, but the rapid fire shot upgrades seemed backwards like the beam cannon bug. Every time I'd equip a Cannon Fire Upgrade, it'd shoot slower - default was the fastest shots I could find. Go figure.
The reason this is in the "bad" section is because I feel like some things aren't as magnificent and in-depth as we may have thought. First, the cargo ships were kind of a dud. I'd assault one, break open the cargo bays like Sean always demoed, then kill the turrets firing at me, deal with the enemy ships that spawned and then... that was it. As far as I can tell, you cannot actually destroy these cargo ships. If Sean said you can't or you can I'd love to see the quote, but I fired at one for literally twenty minutes and nothing happened. Now, this may be wrong - they may be destroyable, I don't know. But if they are, it felt so damn boring firing at it for so long that I almost didn't even care any more. I just shrugged and gave up and moved on to the Space Station. Which brings me to
- The Space Station combat is outrageous for many reasons. First, unlike the Cargo ships, this seems like endless waves of ships and they just keep coming to defend. And coming and coming and coming. And with so many coming at you so quickly, you get swarmed and take massive damage. So much damage that my maximum Upgraded shields depleted and needed recharging something like 15 times in one engagement, and I think I killed maybe two dozen ships in that time and had barely any time to actually dent the Space Station whatsoever. Second, if the Space Station is taking damage, you'd be hard pressed to really know... it showed no signs of wear and no matter how many times I shot at it, I never felt like I was getting anywhere on it. It was like the Cargo Ship that I fired at for 20 mins, except this time I had dozens of friggin lil ships firing at me no matter what I did. Safe to say, I never even came close to defeating one, and let me say right up front I AM OKAY WITH THIS BEING AN INTENSE CHALLENGE and I have no issues with the difficulty of it - my issues are with the lack of really understanding what the hell is going on. Is it actually taking damage? Do you just shoot the damn thing and eventually it just randomly blows up? Are there weak points on it somewhere I just haven't found yet? (Keep in mind, I tried EVERY spot on the Cargo Ship and nothing registered to me as a "weak spot")
Lastly, Space Station combat needs some major tweaking because it's actually outright exploitable. You can dock and land in the Space Station even while engaged and at war with it. The stupid door doesn't close. Here's why this is kind of a big deal - you can't be attacked while in the Space Station. The enemy ships can't and won't fire at you. In fact (and this is hilarious to me) once you dock they sometimes accidentally dock in the station too, because the game starts treating them like passer-by ships since they're out of combat. This is not a joke, I thought it was so funny I actually took a screenshot of it:
http://i.imgur.com/o0ayo66.jpg
I'm the white Space Dick ship and all of those are enemy fighters. They docked and just sat there like dickheads, waiting for me, sucked in to the station like a tractor beam. Too funny.
The reason this is exploitable though is that when you dock and get out of your ship, your shields immediately heal back to full. I tested this - I docked, healed up my shields, immediately flew back outside and started attacking. Killed one or two fighter ships, got some quick hits on the Space Station, and then flew back in to re-dock once my shields got low. You could theoretically rinse-repeat this infinitely if you were so inclined. Kind of weird. Safe to say, after my 20 minute endeavour on the Cargo Ship, I definitely had no interest in confirming this theory, so after my trophy popped I boned out and flew back to my peaceful Fauna: Generous planets.
Anyhow, that's about it for me tonight!
The TLDR is: found some sweet planets, saw some awesome creatures, didn't really enjoy the space combat. All in all, this is fine with me. This game was hyped up as being a planet exploration game, and it's succeeding in that for me. If some of the lesser hyped and less important systems such as space combat aren't all that, I'll deal. I have plenty of other space fighter games I can play if that's my thing. I'll wait for the Day 1 patch, if and when it comes, and boot up the space combat and try again to see if anything's improved.
Now for a bunch of screenshots since I won't be around for a couple of days!
http://i.imgur.com/nM0MZFe.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/eTx4vzs.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/cnqFBZc.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/EXaigPS.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/RBYWtw0.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/4gdCkhh.jpg
Enjoy!
I'll pop in and answer some questions here and there. Fingers crossed for a Day 1 Patch update!
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