avatar_PZ

Anyone on the fence about this game...

Started by PZ, November 29, 2016, 01:28:49 PM

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PZ

... might be interested that it is on sale 40% off at Steam

Art Blade

[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

fragger

That's more like the price it should have been upon release, but yeah, I'd say if you have any interest in seeing what NMS is all about, grab it while it's on special.

Sure, there's been a lot of negative criticism about it which is largely justified and we've done our share of griping here, but there is definitely fun to be had with NMS. It certainly isn't a rotten game, and for a while at least, it can be very addictive. It hooked me in for the first couple of weeks in a way that very few games have ever done, for what that's worth :-()

Art Blade

[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

Dweller_Benthos

Yeah, with the recent update and the promise of more, it's worth the $40 they have it for on Steam. I already put over 60 hours into it, so even the initial price is still a decent deal for me. Just treat it as early access for now, and see how things develop.
"You've read it, you can't un-read it."
D_B

OWGKID

My friend who bought on launch says that he enjoys the game now :) He have already bought a freighter and is now building a base on a high alert moon. Everything attacks him, but there's alot of valuable resources there ;)
LEGACY

fragger

Just wondering, has anyone here been playing NMS at all? I played with it for a little while after the last big patch, but the still painfully slow frame rate killed it for me and I lost interest. Damn, I wish they would address that - fix the guts of the thing before they add more flash.

OWGKID

I guess they are working on it. It wouldn't surpirse me that they sold a pre-alpha of their product  ???? Heck, even TB was annoyed that there was no review copies available for any media outlets. Bethesta also went the same way (because f**k our customers). Dishonoured 2 runs like s#!t on PC and no-one had a chance to get pre-release code to inform the public about those issues. Doom would be an exception to that, it runs great on all platforms.
LEGACY

Art Blade

[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

Dweller_Benthos

I didn't even build what you could with that last update. I may try it out now that I'm pretty much done with Astroneer until that gets updated again. Right now I'm between games and just floating from one to the other and not really staying long on any of them.
"You've read it, you can't un-read it."
D_B

OWGKID

I didn't bothered to jump on the hype train either ;)
LEGACY

Binnatics

I didn't play the game either. I didn't even try the updates. I was too disappointed at a certain point. And I believe the game is unfixable.
"Responsibility is not a matter of giving or taking, responsibility is something you share" -Binnatics

Art Blade

yep, somehow I think that's entirely possible :-D
[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

fragger

I think you're right Binn. Funny how I went from not being able to stop playing it for the first few weeks to not wanting to bother with it any more. I don't think I ever had such a love affair with a game come to such a sudden and final end after such a short time ????

Art Blade

[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

Binnatics

"Responsibility is not a matter of giving or taking, responsibility is something you share" -Binnatics

mandru

I genuinely had great hopes for NMS when the basic concepts were first introduced.  But I'm entirely glad that I decided to be a late adopter placing my decision as to whether to play it or not on the long term collective OWG reaction.

For me personally (what I was able to learn about the game from you guys) was that it was too fiddly with unclear directions on how to maximize advancement and ship upgrading as you played through the game.

When you combine those shortcomings with from what I could gather was a plot line that rivals the depth of a first surface mirror, it makes me wonder if (despite the intriguing concept of random world generation) does NMS even measure up to the baseline standard of being called a linear game?


I saw a video shot by someone who had gone into game store that was allowing returns on the NMS ( I suspect for less than .10¢ on the U.S. dollar of original purchase price) and there were dozens and dozens of used Play Station copies in the discount bin.  :(


- mandru
Gramma said "Never turn your back 'till you've cut their heads off"

OWGKID

The theme of this game was exploration and survive against the elements. Unfortunately, I assume neither Hello Games or Sean Murray anticipated or could meet the expectations of the Survival/Space exploration genre.

I can see that, mandru, I guess a lot of customers returned it and placed their 59.90$ on something else.
LEGACY

PZ

I'm the same as mandru on this one - glad that I did not make the purchase, although I almost did.  Fortunately I was too busy with other things to go to Gamestop  :-()

OWGKID

LEGACY

fragger

mandru, I don't know if the term "linear" actually applies to this game anyway. Linear implies that there is an ultimate purpose to what you're doing, with some sort of eventual resolution, constrained though you may be in your actions. A corridor usually takes you somewhere :-() NMS is sort of the opposite of linear - immense freedom, but with little to do and no sense of working towards anything, except upgrading your hardware. And once you've done that, that's pretty much it for the goal-achieving. There is still the goal of working your way toward the centre of the galaxy, but it's a tedious, time consuming chore (most of which is spent watching an animated hyperspace effect) and your sole reward for achieving that goal is to be sent to another galaxy to do it all over again.

Regarding the bargain bin, I'm wondering if NMS set any kind of record for being the most returned game ever. If it didn't, it has to be up there with the best of them ????

Since hanging up my space helmet, I've thought of NMS as a terrific concept in search of a game. You have this vast space which, as far as the individual gamer is concerned, may as well be infinite as there is no way one could visit every planet in a single lifetime. Not even in hundreds of thousands of lifetimes. But having such a mind-bogglingly vast space to play in doesn't mean much if there's nothing actually happening in it. Once you've upgraded all your hardware and maybe followed the Atlas path (to a shattering anticlimax), there's nothing left really except a lot of exploring and the seeing of stuff. Some of the stuff is cool to see - for a while, anyway. But the lack of anything novel or noteworthy to do starts to tell before too long, and much of the game universe is monotonously alike in it's diversity, if that makes sense.

There's this constant sense that the game is trying to be something special but doesn't know how to be. An example is this: You'll be travelling between the planets in a system when a whole fleet of huge space freighters will zap in out of hyperspace. As cool as that looks, once they're there, they're just there. There's no story or rationale behind them, and no reason for them to be there other than to require you to defend them from pirate attack sometimes, or be raided by you, which isn't worth doing because they nearly always have bugger-all on board worth getting and you'll have the galactic police - the Sentinels - all over you in no time. Anything you can get by raiding a Freighter you can get a lot more of by mining dirtside without getting hassled by the local fuzz.

As far as the lifeforms are concerned, after you've seen a number of them you start to see the joins, as it were. There isn't anything like virtual-evolution at w@&k. It's more a case of a number of preset parameters being stuck together in a variety of ways - hoofs, claws, paws, tentacles, numbers of limbs and arrangement of same, combined with a choice of insectoid, reptilian or mammalian forms, dressed in random colours, patterns, skins, fur, etc. To be sure, there are lot of parameters and a great deal of variation within each parameter, but many of the creatures begin to look quite similar after a while - just variations on themes. Sometimes you'll see something really unique, but they are the exception. And sometimes you'll see something that is so frankly ridiculous that common sense alone tells you that nothing like it could ever possibly evolve in reality.

If just exploring and seeing stuff is your thing, you'd find it fantastic, I guess. That is actually my thing to an extent and for a while I did find it fantastic, but I like to be able to combine that thing with some of my other things, like actual meaningful trading (not just gathering stuff and flogging it, but discerning a demand for something specific, for someone specific, and working out a plan to supply it), having combat (but only when I'm initiating it as opposed to being jumped by Rocket Robin Hood And His Band Of Merry Astro Brothers every flipping time I go out into space) and having interesting and varied interactions with other races (with members who actually move around a bit and do different things, not just be raspy-voiced talking heads with their bodies rooted to the spot).

Man, I haven't played this game for a while yet I still get on a rant when I talk about it :-() Yet for all that, I actually don't hate it. Hate is too strong a word for how I feel towards it. Disappointment over what it could have been, exasperation with its dreadful frame rate, resentment that I paid what I did for it. Disillusionment is the best word, I think.

Art Blade

After a while, at least for me, it was like a showcase for space ships. Their variety was very interesting and you could fly around in them. With a couple of mods, that is. Otherwise you'd have had to spend weeks of real time getting the cash and resources to be able to afford the cooler ones. And I got bored of it.
[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

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