OK, so.. Rant, anyone? :)
When everyone here was going crazy about getting the game, I wasn't interested in the game.. not sure why but I didn't feel excited. But I did obviously notice everyone's enthusiasm. That was what made me want to be part of the OWG crew yet again, together from the start, as it was the first time in a long time that more than two or three of us would be playing the same game, on top of that, from the start. I did probe the vids posted and I took notice of a few things Sean said and of some promo footage. But not enough to actually know what was going to be in the game (the way they said it was) which meant, I wasn't full of expectations. I had none. :-D
When the discussions came up as to what wasn't in the game that should have been, again I took notice. But it didn't bother me as I liked the game the way it was. Well, except for the bugs.
The first bugs nearly ruined it for me. I was frustrated because I couldn't save my progress anymore and stuff like that. Starting over for various reasons isn't fun, either. Still, the game was fun because thanks to the bugs and starting over, I was able to avoid pirates and instead of running around with a stick, we started to max out our stuff and were talking about discoveries, sharing that type of experience was a great experience. It was exactly why I bought the game, to share that experience with you lot. So, it was good -- while it lasted.
It was then that we discovered how poor the "story" was or the diversions were. You couldn't become a real trader, you couldn't become a pirate, the three races were just some muppets who served as blueprint dispensers or one-word-per-class teachers. Perhaps, occasionally, as multi-tool dealers. We almost never needed their repair or healing power. And it was silly how easy it was to get the maximum standing with every race. Say hi, give them some carbon snacks and ding, level up with your standings. Well, cheap bastards, aren't they :)
Now, the red orb. Hehe, I remember rather fondly how I enjoyed rubbing it in to those of you who missed that red orb sitting in a bowl next to your ship at the start. :-() As if it mattered.. I thought it would. And it should have. But it didn't. Actually, you were almost better off without it as you wouldn't have had to endure all those silly messages popping up every two seconds. But even if you purposely kissed it good-bye while sitting in its bucket, it would pop up eventually, in form of "anomaly detected" messages where you could still choose to follow the Atlas path. I bet I wasn't the only one wishing for those clowns in that anomalous space metal ball to f@#k off, already, and to leave us alone. At least once you came to the last Atlas interface and got a multi-million doll.. er, pound sterling, production value text message describing the miracle to you that you'd never see, a new star was born. Gee. Thanks.
Or you made it (or didn't, because you were already too pissed off) to the centre of the galaxy. Hey, new galaxy, you won a free new start with an old ship. A broken one. Actually, with everything you put so much time in, broken. Ding, kiss all your discoveries good-bye which, at least at the very beginning, you still named with fervour. No one will ever know, anyway.
So.. what's left? Planets inhabited by bouncing punch-balls with a head the shape of celery and malice aforethought as a "funny" attribute. Meaning, it's either you or.. nah, scratch "either." You shoot it. With a mining laser. How original. But still, somewhat effective. And that's when you get to know The Sentinel. Maximum opponent count: three, or was it four? Maybe five, that's it. Whoa, a BATTLE! Why, can anyone tell me why, on those 18 quintillion planets, why every single one of those planets happens to have drones buzzing around you like flies around s#!t? I mean, really? And EVERY. SINGLE. PLANET. is inhabited by a few clowns of one out of three alien races that look as if borrowed from the Muppet Show. Can't even shoot them. Can shoot pirates, though. Who, once you start to fly around a bit further than your crib, will be waiting for you. Probably laughing. Evil bastards. NO LOITERING! I don't want them to pop up before I get out of hyperspace! I don't want them to be in my face almost EVERY time I move. OK.. pirates. I'll kill you with my mega adjacency bonus the devs forgot to tell us existed. Oops?
Well, there are space ships and multi-tools. So expensive that, without our expert OWG knowledge, it would take years of real life time to gather the money necessary. You've got to be kidding, HG.
Oh, updates. Can't say much about them because we don't know much about them. Except that the first few made the game w@&k and the next few.. well, now we know what PS4 feels like.
Well, there are mods. They make it way too easy. But finally fun.
/rant off :-D
I tried not to have too many expectations. I watched some of the vids on Youtube, then stopped when I decided I didn't want to see too much before the release and spoil the novelty. I tried to keep the expectations low, but it wasn't easy when faced with the prospect of playing a game which I had long hoped that somebody, someday, would make. My own personal starship and a whole galaxy to explore, chock full of planets with all kinds of interesting stuff happening on them - wonderful! As release day approached, I got like a kid on Christmas Eve and stayed up until 3:00am on release day waiting for the game to come down the chimney.
The time came, Art was online (must have been about 6:00pm his time) and I think a few others. I saw Art go into the game and post his first screenie while I was downloading the game. I went off to take a leak and make coffee, came back and the game had downloaded. I fired it up, saw the logos, then a black screen, then the desktop. Ah, okay, I thought, it's doing something in the background. Waited. Waited some more. No HDD activity, no twirly pointer thing. Waited a bit more. Thought, you are doing something, aren't you? Five minutes went by, still nothing.
So I clicked the game icon again. Got the logos and the black screen, then the desktop again.
I tried four times. On the fourth attempt, when the screen went black, I caught the briefest glimpse of something move - a couple of those star labels or whtatever they are that appear during the "travelling through space" animation, but no stars - then the desktop again.
OK, something's not right here - Art got straight in. I hadn't updated my video driver for some time, so I went for that. After a bit of mucking around and being sidetracked by NVidia telling me that I needed the latest version of Java for auto-detecting my GPU type - which it then stubbornly refused to recognize - I chose my GPU manually from the list and updated.
Fired up the game and bang, success! I saw the starfield and the title. I was in, and I was excited. After a moment of confusion before realising that I had to hold down the "E" key to initialize instead of just tapping it, the game began. I saw a static screen fading in of a funny-coloured sky with the top of a mountain showing along the bottom. No, wait - it moved. A second or so later, it moved again. I then realised that this was my frame rate, about 1-2 fps.
So, into the painfully slow Options menu. Made some changes, which were followed by a message telling me the game had to be restarted for the changes to take effect. I did that, the game loaded, I got a different starting planet, but still the game ran like a slug in molasses. I repeated this process until I could get an acceptable frame rate - well, it had to be acceptable because EVERYTHING was now at "Low" or "Off", and my res was down as far as it could go without getting aspect ratio distortion. That's as low as it can go, folks. It was reasonable (until I encountered my first ocean planet, where it ran like a slideshow of still-lifes) but this constituted bummer #1, although I didn't make too big a deal of it at the time.
The next two weeks were a bit of a blur as I couldn't tear myself away from this (initially) very addictive game. I haven't been so severely hooked in by a game since I first got into Civ V, and I was having a ball with it - until the pirates showed up for the first time (in the very first system I jumped to). Well actually, the first time was okay as there was just one pirate ship and I had a fun little dogfight taking it down, and I even thought it was rather cool. Little did I know that that initial pirate ship was but the first drop in a coming storm of space-faring freebootery that would soon have me cussing and pulling out what little of the hair I have remaining to me. Bummer #2 had arrived.
Then I read Binn's account of his Atlas experience, and not long after I experienced this singularly underwhelming event for myself. This was bummer #3, and it gave my enthusiasm a vicious kick in the shin.
Then I looked at D_B's spoiler about what transpires upon arriving at the galactic core, and I watched a Youtube clip of same. Bummer #4 kicked me in the other shin so hard that I pretty much conceded then and there that the game had bested me in the disappointment stakes and that it was probably in my best interest to retire from all the shin-kickery while I could still hobble away from it. There's only so much bruising that my enthusiasm can endure.
There were various other less serious gripes, such as bummer #2a, the preponderance of Sentinels on every damned planet, as Art has mentioned. That was just ridiculous. I mean, really - do they have to be on every flipping planet, buzzing in your face like blowflies at a picnic? And bummer #3b, spending so much time revealing the entire story of all three races with absolutely nothing to show for all that hunting around for Monoliths and sitting through all those "just a tad too long" story fragment reveals.
We four OWG members who played the game lasted longer than most NMS players before becoming disillusioned, and this was probably down to us having the patience and willingness to fully explore the game and experiment with what we found. But it didn't take us long to experiment the dickens out of it because it turned out that there wasn't a heck of a lot to uncover.
Maybe the devs will go on to do good, or even great, things with the game. I hope so. But until they do something about the crummy frame rate, I can't see myself picking it up again soon unless they do something really, really special with it. I'll soon be into Civ VI anyway - unless that game starts bruising my metaphorical shins all over again, a possibility which I'm certainly not ignoring.
lovely, fragger, I enjoyed reading yours. :)
This is going to be a topic I'm inclined to read every once in a while, from the start. At least this is something else we can get out of this game, epic rants and reads. :-D
Cheers mate :) And yes, maybe the most fun we will have with the game from this point on is running it down >:D Time for us to do some of the kicking :-()
Do I really have a rant about this game? Maybe a little. I wasn't expecting all the things that most of the internet peoples were expecting, because I didn't frame skip the preview videos and memorize every word what's his name said. So, I saw a game that looked pretty cool, and one I could have fun in for a while.
After the initial problems, like Fragger, I couldn't run the game, and I had updated drivers. But unlike Fragger, I'd not only get a quick trip to the desktop, I'd also get spontaneous reboots and BSOD. The first few updates fixed this and it's been pretty stable since. The main gripe I have with it now is the extremely short load distance. Reminds me of the original playstation or a Nintendo 64 console. They both had serious pop-in but covered it up with blurriness or fog so you couldn't see very far to begin with, so when stuff popped in, it was invisible. A modern game shouldn't do this. If they would have a setting or slider for load-in distance I can fiddle with myself to find a good balance between performance and display, I would be happy. As it is now, load-in happens while walking around, and I'm sorry, once I'm out of my ship, everything in sight should be 100% loaded in.
But, I'm still playing, spent some time last night getting the gold and emeril I needed to get that last hyperdrive upgrade. Also got all the suit upgrades except three that I need some trivial stuff to complete. Then I'll move them around with the mod to maximize the bonus. But, I now can warp to the first Atlas station, I've seen videos, and heard you guys talk about it, but I'm still going to do it for myself. For me, wandering around and looking at stuff, even if it is a lot more similar than what they advertised, is still pretty cool.
Am I 100% satisfied with the game? No. Will I play it for over 500 hours like I have Fallout 4? Not likely, unless they come up with some serious new features.
To be honest, I don't have much to rant about the game. I've had my fun while it lasted. I think I got hyped by your collective enthusiasm when the game came out.
And when I started playing I had a lot of fun with it. Only it lasted not long enough. Atlas was a proper disappointment, and so was the core. And that was the main 'storyline'.
I did find the way the worlds are created disappointing too. There's no connection between the different randomized items that are being processed for the worlds. Of course there's snow on cold planets, and there's water animals when there's water. But that's basically it. The few images I saw in the quintillion previews and teasers gave me the impression there were different types of ecosystems, with a logical connection between flora, fauna, atmosphere and available resourced. I had hoped for that. Probably it was too much to hope for, since that would probably be way to complicated for a program to combine, every time a world was to be discovered.
But still...
I agree with you on the other disappointments, but my main one is that the game was unable to keep me going. No story, mystery or goal, and no real systems to take account for.
In fact, I had more fun here @ OWG than in the game itself :-D
:-X :-D
Another thing is, the devs haven't communicated with the community since launch. Their twitter has been inactive. Currently, less than 1000 players are playing NMS on PC. Even Sony's CEO admitted that the PR from Hello Games was bad.
Oh, so Sony's CEO bigshot CUNT talks to the public about his new small tiny little contracter Hello Games fucked up on the PR thingy? Well, f@#k SONY then!!! >:((
:-[... Well, this is a rant topic after all :-()
The guy from Sony essentially said that what's-his-name should have had a PR person with him on all those interview shows to let him know what to say and that it's not a good idea to just say "Yes, you can do that in the game" to every question someone asks.
Quote from: OWGKID7891 on September 23, 2016, 07:27:29 AM
Another thing is, the devs haven't communicated with the community since launch. Their twitter has been inactive. Currently, less than 1000 players are playing NMS on PC. Even Sony's CEO admitted that the PR from Hello Games was bad.
The devs did communicate with the community while fixing bugs and they publicly posted on their site after the launch. However, the last "news" entry is from September 2, 2016.
Today they released patch notes for 1.08 and 1.09 on their site (I posted a new topic (http://www.openworldgames.org/owg/forums/index.php?topic=3910.msg82205#msg82205)).
Those 1,000 players aren't what's left of PC players. The number was taken from steam data and those 1,000 are referred to as "concurrent" players, however there was a high of 212,000 concurrent players. Which means, there will be a lot more than 1,000 PC players but they're not playing at the same time.
Yeah, that would be more correct to say ;)
Btw, the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) have launched an investigation regarding NMS (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-09-28-advertising-standards-launches-investigation-into-no-mans-sky)' advertising being false/misleading on Steam...
If Hello are serious about wanting to stay in business, they really need to open up some communication with their customers, and very, very soon. And that communication needs to include a lot more than patch notes. The ongoing silence from their end is not only giving their critics more ammo and cementing their reputation as being stand-offish ripoff merchants - it's getting up the noses of the people who are still willing to give NMS a chance and are genuinely hoping that Hello will keep working on it and expanding it until it's something more like what it was touted to be. But all Hello seems to be interested in doing is fixing the trifling bugs and smoothing over the rough bits, with the occasional patch note thrown out to show that they're doing something.
People don't want to hear about bug-fixes from Hello. What they want to hear from Hello is whether the devs are going to stick with the game into the future. They want to hear if there will be new content and features coming for the game. They want to hear whether the devs are still enthusiastic about the game, or if they're planning to fix as much as they can before abandoning it.
With no words coming from the devs as to whether this game has any kind of future or not, the people who are holding out hope will soon get sick of being kept in the dark, decide they're wasting their time and will give up on the game, just like everybody else has. Possibly that's what the devs are actually hoping for at this point - for everyone to just forget about the game and pretend it never happened. One could certainly get that impression from Hello's highly conspicuous lack of communication.
Murray was all over the net before the launch, now he's become like the Julian Assange of the gaming world and dropped off the grid. Maybe he's afraid of getting shot or beaten up if he goes outside, I dunno, but the guy has done a good job of making himself scarce. Maybe he's holed up in an embassy somewhere.
All the actions Hello have taken since the release of the game have been classic examples of how NOT to do damage control. Every day that goes by with no words issued is another nail in that company's coffin. Personally, I'm getting the impression that the people at Hello are praying for receivership to come along soon and put them out of their misery.
It's all got to be pretty demoralizing for them. You spend several years of your life working on something you're passionate about, determined to make an impression with it, struggling through all kinds of financial hardships to bring it about, even surviving a flood with your w@&k largely intact, only to see it all unravel at the last minute and not only get bad press for all that time and effort but manage to attract a level of public condemnation that is almost unprecedented in the industry, a veritable tsunami of vitriol. Would you be inclined to stick with it and try to improve upon it in the face of such buyer backlash? I don't think I would. Confronted with a level of consumer anger that verges on vigilante justice, I think I'd want to just crawl into a cupboard and not come out until the furore was over.
I am completely agree, fragger. Sean Murray should never have given out those vague statements in the first place. The so called "game journalists" should also be more critical to the game, they didn't bothered to go in depth of things... Also, I believe Murray never commented on the concept art, which even ignited the hype train more.
QuoteProbably it was too much to hope for, since that would probably be way to complicated for a program to combine, every time a world was to be discovered.
Not really, Binnatics, it all comes down to the people behind it and the desired features. I believe having a team of 4 programmers was either too low for this type of project or, they realised the features would be too much to make in time. GTA V was developed by multiple studios worldwide due to all the in-game systems had to w@&k together. I wonder what Hello Games actually did in the years up to launch.
It's turned into a casual game for me, when I have 15 or 20 minutes and don't want to load up something else, I explore a bit in NMS and then stop when I need to leave to do something else. Too bad, I was expecting it to be my "winter game" and last me until at least spring.
fragger's and D_B's posts are essentially my own thoughts. :)
:)
I think Hello Games' most infinite ( ::)) desire is to disappear into nothing right now. I would. Definitely. Especially when my name was Sean Murray.
Hello Games is a goner. And they didn't even say goodbye. I'd give you all a good advice; be on the lookout for Bye Games, and avoid it as the plague >:D
What is the definition of infinity? Doing the same thing, over and over again, hoping it will be different :angel:
Yep, or they will procedurally rebuild themselves :laugh:
:-D
:laugh:
If they decide to procedurally rebuild themselves, they'd better take care when they set the exaggeration parameters 8-X
Yes :-X :laugh:
:-D
So No Man's Sky is going to get a huge update. (http://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/gaming/729958/No-Man-s-Sky-news-update-PS4-Hello-Games-Sean-Murray) Wait what ??? ???? ?!
???
They're going to have to w@&k very hard to win back customers, and their prolonged silence hasn't helped their case. But the fact that Sean Murray was receiving death threats merely because the initial release date was pushed back a month shows that there are some pretty unreasonable, or downright unstable, personalities out there. Reactions like that have to be demoralizing after you've devoted several years of your life to a project. There was no doubt that Murray was sincere in his enthusiasm before the rot began, and if you're going to plot some way to rip off a lot of people, there are far quicker and less expensive ways of doing so. Murray may have shot his mouth off and gotten carried away with the hype, but I certainly don't see him as a "criminal" as some have charged. That's just stupid and insulting.
I still believe the vultures at Sony should receive the lion's share of the blame. They not only helped to derail the game but also took over the promotion of it, and most of the inflated hype came from them. Then they had the audacity to claim that they weren't responsible for the exaggerated promotion, which was an outright lie. Unfortunately Murray allowed himself to become the face of No Man's Sky and thus became the prime target of peoples' ire. Yes, his mouth got him in trouble and he should have been more careful with his statements, and while some of the blame rests with him it is certainly not his alone. I have no animosity towards the man - well, maybe a tiny bit - and in fact I feel a little sorry for him.
I think what irked a lot of players was the fact that they were charged the price of a AAA game and thus expected a AAA experience, which is reasonable enough. Had it been released as a $20 indie title, or promoted as being in ongoing development, it might not have ticked so many people off and it might even have garnered a devoted and supportive fan base, a la Star Citizen. Now there's an interesting contradiction - in the case of Star Citizen, people are spending real money (in a couple of cases thousands of dollars) to buy ships and gear to use in a space game which doesn't even exist yet, with no guarantee that it ever will. Nobody seems to be complaining about that. At least Hello delivered a game that you can play now.
I'll be interested to see what Hello can do. Hopefully they'll give at least some consideration to improving optimization. Adding new features and introducing new player abilities isn't going to mean a lot if the game still runs like a slug on PC. If it was me, that would be the first thing I would tackle before I started adding more bells and whistles. I know that's easy for me to say, but I'm not the one charging a triple-A price for an under-developed game.
NMS does have potential, and if that potential can be realized (and if they can do something about the atrocious frame rate and draw distance) they might just lure me back. I'm wiling to give Hello a second chance, but it's gonna take some solid persuasion - and much incontrovertible proof.
True, but the problem with the "Survival" genre is it is not fleshed out/developed like the other genres on the games market (FPS, RTS and racing). I watched TB's 40 minute rant about the hype around No Man's Sky where he said that, there's so many unfinished survival games due to the difficulty in mastering this genre. No games haven't done that yet completely. Minecraft kicked this train and the survival component there became extremly popular. I believe the games in the survival genre builds upon MC's mechanics and put their own flavour into it. Not every game use certain aspects of survival, like combat/crafting etc.
Currently playing ARK: Survival Evovled and the game is still inearly access. The devs even released a 20$ DLC, which upset many fans. I bought it, because I enjoyed the game and my friends have a Scorched Earth server. If it wasn't for the friends that played the game, I wouldn't bothered with DLC ;) The devs are more busy with adding stuff like procedural maps/dinos rather than fixing basic issues with the systems around. Also, the game still doesn't look graphically impressive. Heck, there are mods out there that improves stacking and building by a mile... Nice that you need modders to build your game 8-X On the other side, mod support is a huge yes in PC gaming :-D It wouldn't surprise me if this game will not get finished, but I have found enjoyment in this title at least ^-^
I think it's Sean Murray's fault alone for being vague. I'm not sure what Sony actually did and I find it hard to blame them completely for the marketing/statements from Murray before they took over. Wouldn't surprise me if they used NMS' marketing assets in their own. Still doesn't change the fact Sony did the marketing for NMS on PS4. Star Citizen is developed by a huge team internationally and Chris Robert have developed lots of games. Compare that to the team at Hello Games. I also believe Cloud Imperium have a framework on how they envision their game and therefore can develop it without problems.
In TB's words, this project was done by developers who enthusiastically wanted to create a space game, but they either lost their way on that task (designing the game/elements) or took on more than they could chew. I would definitely say it sucks when things turn up like this for the devs and the players. Irrational thinking is commonplace, there are people who enjoy hating/liking this game and they seem to personally identify themselves with the hate/love relationship with NMS. Which means they will do whatever it takes to defend instead of accepting honest critism. Yes, every game have their own flaws and I accept that, but you cannot go full retard and pull moves like death threats and callouts when someone points out flaws.
Honestly, I think Murray did a poor job on the PR part, but hey, that something everyone can do. We all do mistakes now and then right? I never showed any interest in NMS, but I hope Hello Games can restore their reputation as a developer and get NMS in the direction they wanted it. I also hope everybody learned that we need to be critical when it comes to games being hyped by the media.
At least they didn't pulled out and abandoned their game :)
A big fat thumps up for that statement GKID! +1 :-X :)
I agree with you, Murray didn't do a good job on the PR part. The guy lacks integrity. You can blame it on the big money pointing to Sony, and sure they have a share in the process, but Murray wasn't true to people. He was a weak lying soab.
I think the great part of NMS was just a concept. And I agree, most early access survival game developers are just focussing at silly little things you can add to the game. At least that's what I found in DayZ. They keep introducing new ways of crafting, new items you can find, but the real deal stays imaginary. No true changes to a weak engine and server technology are being made and the game stays in Alpha forever. I recently took a glance at what they're up to now; still the issue of servers without stable items, just a bunch of new crap you can go and search for. This type of game is nice for a team of nerds going bonkers with a çrowd-funding-like bunch of money. It's no fun for the audience :-D
Anything they add would be a bonus. Even with it's faults, it was still a fun game. I got my money's worth out of it, less than a $1 an hour for something that was pretty enjoyable for the most part. Can't say that about a lot of things lately, like movies for instance. So, if it becomes a game that I can play again, then I will, but right now, it's at the point of there's nothing left to do really.
Thanks, Binnatics. Yeah, he could have done that 8-X I agree, early access games are a risk. Again, the majority of them are survival games still unfinished. Nice to see you found some entertainment in NMS, DB :)
the moment I see a download starting on steam, I'll be excited. I'd start up the game right after the update.
But as it is now, and until then, I'm done with it.