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 KingCracker wrote:

 Soladrin wrote:
Game still sounds like this gen's Spore to me.

You're sounding just like my little kids complaining about food they've never tried. You wanna take your negativity elsewhere until you actually give the game a chance?

It's almost as if I've been burned before by insane promises.

I certainly understand why many people don't like this game. If you don't like survival/crafting/exploration games, then you won't like this game. If you're expecting shooty-bang-bang space/ground combat every time, all the time, then you will be disappointed (Wing Commander and Overwatch, this ain't). There is certainly room for improvement, as the game is not without its flaws, but I do feel that there is a very solid foundation upon which to build a game that people will still be playing years from now.

Can you build facilities on planets? I see the pic of the big fleet, is that a player fleet or the NPC pirates or something?

Col. Dash wrote:
Can you build facilities on planets? I see the pic of the big fleet, is that a player fleet or the NPC pirates or something?

NPC ships.

Can't build anything...yet. It is planned to add in base-building eventually. Not sure I see much point in that, though, given the general idea is to keep moving from system to system. But, there may be incentives for it.

Col. Dash wrote:
Can you build facilities on planets? I see the pic of the big fleet, is that a player fleet or the NPC pirates or something?

No base building. I wouldn't be surprised if this was implemented, but it's not really the focus of the game.

Big ships are NPC that you can either destroy the cargo pods for loot, or help defend if attacked by NPC pirates.

I've just been ambling through so far, I might need to get a little more organised so I can buy a better ship.
I quite fancy one of those TIE fighter looking things the Gek run around in.
I found a crashed ship I could have repaired, but it only had one more slot than my starter ship, and I didn't think it was worth repairing everything for that.
I'm finding the limited slots in my suit and ship quite restrictive at the moment. I did find a better multi tool though, so that's helping.
I've managed to get completely lost in a cave system so far, some kind of local mapping software would come in handy.

Space management is a big thing and it'll always bite you in the ass. Because you'll toss out junk you don't use of need and the next space station will probably want that same junk for a song! I had a stack of some material and that same thing happened to me. I literally threw away like 500k units worth. Made me feel sick

Eventually though you'll find enough suit expansion slots that space becomes much easier. I've got a bunch now and rarely complain of needing more space, though my ship doesn't have enough by a long shot. I've got 22 slots in it and after all the upgrades and whatnot I only have like 6 slots left for storage. I've thought about buying a bigger ship but it took me so long to get mine where is at that i don't want to spend the hours it took on another ship

So if you are not building bases, or building your own ships, all you do is go from one system to another and look around?

I was kind of hoping to build a trading station or bar in a junction system(knowing of course people are few and far between). And you only get small little fighters? No destroyer or corvettes, or even small freighters(ie Fireflys or Falcon size vessels)

So whats the purpose of advancement? I love sand box games but there has to be some sort of purpose for sand box games. Even in EVE if you didn't PVP you could become a badass at mining or trading or construction. Wheres the motivation for doing stuff in this?

 marv335 wrote:
I've just been ambling through so far, I might need to get a little more organised so I can buy a better ship.
I quite fancy one of those TIE fighter looking things the Gek run around in.
I found a crashed ship I could have repaired, but it only had one more slot than my starter ship, and I didn't think it was worth repairing everything for that.
I'm finding the limited slots in my suit and ship quite restrictive at the moment. I did find a better multi tool though, so that's helping.
I've managed to get completely lost in a cave system so far, some kind of local mapping software would come in handy.

From what I've read and experienced, crashed ships you can find will only have one more slot than your current ship. But they're usually so easy to repair that unless you're giving up some expensive upgrades on your current ship, it's an easy choice.

Suit slots have been crazy easy to get for me. Even before I finally got the first Atlas pass (opens a door on space stations leading to a room with suit upgrade), I had already found ten drop pods with suit upgrade scattered around on different planets.

One way I've found to make money is to fly around in space, mining the big asteroids. The small ones you see everywhere are just fuel, but the random big ones are usually copper or nickel, with some gold, aluminum, and emeril ones appearing. Don't forget you can hold the shift key to fly faster with afterburners to find them. Get a full load, and then fly back to the space station to sell it all.

IIRC Soladrin also thinks Skyrim is trash so just keep in mind YMMV there ...

As for "what is the point" type questions, the point is to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

The "adversity" the player faces in doing so is principally resource gathering and inventory management. But even this need not figure in to your jouney toward the galactic center overmuch, if you don't want it to. But to the extent that you don't care about going to a place to have a look around, to see what kind of strange plants and animals you can find, and to research alien languages and cultures, NMS is going to be very boring for you.

Also - it's really a single-player game. I'm not sure who is responsible for this bizarre expectation of MMO features (whether Hello Games or all the folks who have ramped up the echo chamber of hype over the last couple of months) but you aren't going to be interacting with other people in NMS.

My one gripe so far is that you can't get any value out of your existing ship when you are trying to tade for a new one and when you find and repair a derelict you are forced to simply abandon your existing ship, the equivalent of ditching millions of units worth of resources. Feels bad man.

I was VERY excited about this game.

I heard the biggest complaint is that we basically "strip-mine" what we need getting attacked by the various guardians and then we move-on.
For the more eco-conscious, it would be interesting to see what we could do to "give back" in some way to what we take.
Due to it being a fairly relaxed game, inventory management appears to be a time consuming thing.
People are posting just the crazy creatures they find.
It is a bit of a tease since anyone else may not see that type... ever.

What is an amazing thing about this technology is "procedurally generated", insanely vast, insanely varied.
I would echo the Star Trek sentiments "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations" springs to mind.
I have always liked sci-fi explorer based games so this seemed to be my thing.
My one concern is despite the developer saying "it is highly unlikely a player will find another" two people did.
It appears they arranged to meet and were in the same spot at the same time but could not see each other.
That would make the rather cathartic experience of loneliness and the vastness of the universe that much more but to be denied meeting other fellow travelers is rather sad really.
I hope they fix that little issue in particular.

I personally have one HUGE problem with this game: the ACTUAL hardware requirements were not properly listed.
I ran afoul of a processor compatibility issue with the game which they could have fixed if they compiled with CPU legacy options: I own an AMD Phenom processor.
They simply do not work with this game due to not having "SSE 4.1" support.
I have six freaking processors and hardware that should still make this game rock and it will not work out of the gate.

So, AMD users get messed with again... so I regretfully hit the "Refund" button and will wait for a proper fix (ensuring I have OpenGL4.5 as well which I am pretty sure I do) or I upgrade my computer: whichever comes first.

Please feel free to make me jealous however!

I picked it up this Friday and got a good chunk of playing in and I can say this; I love the game but at the same time I totally understand why it isn't for everyone or all tastes.

The best way to describe the playing for me is meditative and relaxing. Most of the planets are sparse, but that's actually okay, if they were super packed with things, discoveries would have less meaning. And thanks to the sheer scale, my completionist "look under everything" reflex is actually kept back because I know that it would be truly impossible to see everything on a world or in a system. So it makes the gameplay into something I can put in a couple of hours on finding money, materials or languages without a huge amount of stress or action stimulation. It is perfect for me, but I can see why others would want more.

I'll certainly keep playing, though as far as things to add, I'd love to see two things:

First is some kind of speeder or local travel craft. It'd be cool to land on a ship and pop out my speeder bike equivalent to explore a region in, rather than having to hop back into the starship and burn thruster fuel to jump to the next area.

Second is a way for me to leave logs and messages in the off chance that other people stumble on my world at some point. To pipe dream it further, integrate a headset so I can leave a genuine audio log.

 curran12 wrote:
Second is a way for me to leave logs and messages in the off chance that other people stumble on my world at some point. To pipe dream it further, integrate a headset so I can leave a genuine audio log.

That actually is a fantastic idea and has huge relevance.
There is a fine tradition of explorers leaving a cache for others to find.
Would be cool to have "buried treasure" for stuff you do not have enough room to take with you.
I would at least like to make something like this:


It seems fitting.

<edit> Actually, I can see why all we are allowed to leave behind is naming things: Can you imagine if each of us left a geocache on every tenth planet?
How much data would that take up?
Everything is made on the fly by an algorithm, could you imagine adding custom stuff to various planets and everyone having that data pushed to them all the time?
Cool if they could do it anyway though.

Isn't each system procedurally generated when you visit it? Wouldn't that cause problems with leaving something behind, whether a log or a base, basically anything that would have physical form in the game?

I thought once a planet is discovered and generated, then it was there permanently. Thus the whole coolness of finding unexplored planets vs planets people have already been to.

 Manchu wrote:
Isn't each system procedurally generated when you visit it? Wouldn't that cause problems with leaving something behind, whether a log or a base, basically anything that would have physical form in the game?

Not necessarily. The procedural generation follows the same seed for everyone, so two players who both happen to find the same planet will, in fact, find the same planet. I suspect, however, that the game will only save the state of that planet for each individual player. So, if I find and stripmine planet X, and then you come along, planet X will still be in an untouched condition for you (apart from any name changes I might have made). I think that's how it currently works, but it may change when more multiplayer aspects get added.

 Manchu wrote:
IIRC Soladrin also thinks Skyrim is trash so just keep in mind YMMV there ...

Over rated =/= thrash but thanks for trying to silence me, good job mister Mod.

How dare I be skeptical? Just because you invested money into a game doesn't mean it can't be criticized. And people are calling me a child here.

 Soladrin wrote:
thanks for trying to silence me

Silence you? Silencing you would be suspending your account - so please don't be so melodramatic. I'm not silencing you, mate. I'm just being skeptical of your skepticism. I mean, how dare I, right? Bringing up your opinion about a game that is at least somewhat similar to the one we are actually discussing that, unlike regarding NMS, you have actually played - how dare I! Or, back in the land of common sense, it's not surprising that a guy who didn't even like Skyrim would be "skeptical" of NMS.

 Manchu wrote:

 Soladrin wrote:
thanks for trying to silence me

Silence you? Silencing you would be suspending your account - so please don't be so melodramatic. I'm not silencing you, mate. I'm just being skeptical of your skepticism. I mean, how dare I, right? Bringing up your opinion about a game that is at least somewhat similar to the one we are actually discussing that, unlike regarding NMS, you have actually played - how dare I! Or, back in the land of common sense, it's not surprising that a guy who didn't even like Skyrim would be "skeptical" of NMS.

Okay, Skyrim is similar to NMS. Right.

I guess I am done here, enjoy the circle jerk.

 Soladrin wrote:
enjoy the circle jerk

 Soladrin wrote:
And people are calling me a child here.

...

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
The procedural generation follows the same seed for everyone, so two players who both happen to find the same planet will, in fact, find the same planet.

Sure - but the existence of a planet really boils down to its name, ecosystem data, and relative position in the galaxy. What I mean is, let's say you find a trading post right next to a monolith and an abandoned building. I think the way it works is, you can find that exact configuration of landmarks on that planet so long as you stay in that system BUT the surface of the planet will be re-generated if your leave the system and return, so that you wouldn't necessarily find that set of locations together. I guess the way it would have to work with a base is, the game would know that in X system on Y planet you have a base. But exactly where that base is on the surface of Planet Y, what is around it in terms of landmarks, would change upon each instance of a entering and leaving the system. FWIW I think this is why those two players could not find each other, and that the instances of the planet in their respective games were seemingly were not even in the same place relative to the star.

I was pretty excited about this game, but after playing it for about 2 or 3 hours (PC), I'm really not feeling it. I haven't had any performance issues or anything, It just wasn't a great time for me. It's hard to quantify "fun", but I definitely did not have as much fun as I thought I would. It does seem to be very, repetitive. Everything seems to be very the same, no matter where you go, and it feels a bit pointless: go to a planet with more or less the same stuff, do the same stuff, repeat. I played Minecraft for at least a month, but NMS doesn't seem to even be able to hold me for that long; I got off work early today and just didn't feel like playing it at all. Maybe it gets better when you go a little further in than I did, and maybe it's just not my genre.


Apparently they are putting in base building at some point? I'll have to revisit it then.

I had a slow Day 2 and a much more exciting Day 3 (full explanation posted above). But Day 4 was back to humdrum. I basically figured out that it's not a game that I want to play in all my waking hours outside of work, like what I do with a newly released Bethesda RPG.

EDIT - although I guess I should clarify that I played this game about 8 hours for about five straight days, so ... a fair bit more than 2-3 hours of play

 Manchu wrote:

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
The procedural generation follows the same seed for everyone, so two players who both happen to find the same planet will, in fact, find the same planet.

Sure - but the existence of a planet really boils down to its name, ecosystem data, and relative position in the galaxy. What I mean is, let's say you find a trading post right next to a monolith and an abandoned building. I think the way it works is, you can find that exact configuration of landmarks on that planet so long as you stay in that system BUT the surface of the planet will be re-generated if your leave the system and return, so that you wouldn't necessarily find that set of locations together. I guess the way it would have to work with a base is, the game would know that in X system on Y planet you have a base. But exactly where that base is on the surface of Planet Y, what is around it in terms of landmarks, would change upon each instance of a entering and leaving the system. FWIW I think this is why those two players could not find each other, and that the instances of the planet in their respective games were seemingly were not even in the same place relative to the star.

As long as the seed is saved server-side (or is stored in the game's files to begin with), then everyone who visits that planet gets the same planet. That's how procedural generation using seeds works, because it technically isn't random at all as it creates things using that seed to fake randomness following a preprogrammed set of world creation rules. Just like in Minecraft, I can generate a world, look up and give you the world's seed, and you will get literally the exact same world that I got if you use it. The only real question is how much data regarding the state of the world after it's been visited, renamed, explored, and mined is saved to the server vs. my own save files.

So that location I described as an example will still be there when I leave and come back?

Well this more or less sums up my opinion on the game. I don't even own the game and I'm sick of hearing about all the drama. I can only imagine how worse the devs and reviewers who didn't like it are feeling.

I warped into a big ol space battle today, that was awesome! Like 5 freighters and 12 or 13 pirate ships just going to town on one another, it looked like something from Battlestar Galactica. So I dug in and blow up a ton of pirates and got a milestone for shooting down 80 shipped so far. Apparently I'm a menace in the sky.

... that sounds super interesting actually.

I had one of those encounters and accidentally hit a cargo pod on a capital ship, which then proceeded to engage me as well as the pirates.

Ooops...

Grimdark wrote:
Still, a 60$ price tag comes with 60$ AAA game expectations.

Strange, in Australia $60us games go for $110au. sometimes $120au. This seems to be pretty universally at $80au, which is at the price point of smaller, less well known titles.

I'll be giving this a go when I get some money to spend on a game.

 -Loki- wrote:

Grimdark wrote:
Still, a 60$ price tag comes with 60$ AAA game expectations.

Strange, in Australia $60us games go for $110au. sometimes $120au. This seems to be pretty universally at $80au, which is at the price point of smaller, less well known titles.

I'll be giving this a go when I get some money to spend on a game.

Around here it's priced at 59.99E, which is the upper tier of AAA games(e.g. the new Deus Ex sits at 49.99)
At the moment it's not worth that much money, I'll keep playing E: D and Empyrion for my space opera fix.