Gaming No Man's Sky

[Face]

Probably not, as all the people who would leave good reviews are too busy playing the game...

Yes, there are probably only bad reviews because of what you said. But why does that mean that the bad reviews are not painting a realistic picture?

What I mean is this: many argue that it is very repetitive, gets boring after some time, has many glitches, doesn't run fast enough, etc. Is this true?

 

[Fabri91]

The main issues seem to concern serious performance problems and interface issues on PC, in addition to many people not being used to playing a game with a linear and clear goal.

When setting off in games like KSP, Elite: Dangerous, No Man's Sky and such it is very important to be comfortable with playing sandbox-y games, otherwise disappointment is unavoidable, and with the incredible hype surrounding NMS some disappointment was impossible to avoid.

Regarding performance issues on PC:

Regarding the incredible hype:

 

[jedidia]

I'm doing a multi-part blog-post about it, but a few quick things to consider:

I'm playing the game underspecced on the GPU-side (GeForce 840M), and so was fully expecting to have to lower the resolution. Experienced no performance issues on 1280x720. Most of the issues seem to crop up at higher resolutions, but there are some issues with certain graphic cards. Also, there seems to be a number of people that have GPUs effortlessly surpassing the minimum specs in processing power, but being too old to fully support OGPL 4.5. My card is somewhat newer than the one cited, but considerably less powerful. I had two crashes, both after extended sessions of over 6 hours, so nothing shocking. There have been serious issues with AMD phenom CPUs though. A first stability and performance patch is out, brought a noticable frame rate increase for me especially in the GUI, but the main thing here is that really the controlls are completely unoptimised for PC. There's already mods out fixing part of that, though.

For Orbiter players it might be important to know that the game has no semblance of realism in any of its aspects. High ability to suspend disbelief is required, though I find that the real scale planets make up for a lot of that. It's basically the main thing that completely put me off spore (not to say that the two games are very similar - they really aren't).

For people that are unsure, I would definitely suggest to wait for a sale, though. This thing requires a certain kind of player to fully enjoy. I'll elaborate more on that in the blog.

 

[steph]

The frame rate drops in the first video are almost unnoticeable to me. I'm all fine and dandy playing games at low visual details and relatively low fps. It has star wars physics, right?

Edit: Spore was cool, but it seemed to me like it started good and then it quickly got repetitive and superficial as you progressed to the space and galactic eras.

 

[jedidia]

it seemed to me like it started good and then it quickly got repetitive and superficial as you progressed to the space and galactic eras.

Oh, no man's sky gets repetative alright... The question is, do you like the thing you are repeating (walking around on planets, essentially).

 

[Fabri91]

The frame rate drops in the first video are almost unnoticeable to me. I'm all fine and dandy playing games at low visual details and relatively low fps. It has star wars physics, right?

Edit: Spore was cool, but it seemed to me like it started good and then it quickly got repetitive and superficial as you progressed to the space and galactic eras.

The noticing of FPS drops may depend on your settings in the Youtube player (set to a quality option with 60 fps?) and to the fact that these drops are much more noticeable when playing something (i.e. performing actions with an expected immediate feedback) rather than "passively" watching a video of the same.

 

[hutchison66]

No Mans Sky

I play it on a PS4 and it is a serious game, if you only like first person shooters or football its not for you but for scope its magnificent
I found an Eden world and right next door a pure Venus style hell world
you never know what's over the horizon

 

[Artlav]

Looking at the videos, i find it rather funny that no one is bothered by the same sort of stuff-appearing-in-the-distance thing in NMS that i got quite a bit of noise for in Orulex/OGLA/Spaceway.

Speaking of hype, there was quite a bit of interest in Spaceway back when it wasn't released yet and all they had was screenshots and a few videos. It even got a few articles on gaming sites. All of that disappeared after the first few releases.

I guess that's one more mistake to add to the list - releasing the game instead of just writing about it...

 

[Face]

Speaking of hype, there was quite a bit of interest in Spaceway back when it wasn't released yet and all they had was screenshots and a few videos. It even got a few articles on gaming sites. All of that disappeared after the first few releases.

Hey, speaking of Spaceway... pack some animals and resources to be mined in it, and your work would be more playable than NMS, it seems. :lol:

When I first heard about NMS, I was immediately remembered of Spaceway. Universe, seemless flight, procedural generated, and all that...

 

[jedidia]

Looking at the videos, i find it rather funny that no one is bothered by the same sort of stuff-appearing-in-the-distance thing in NMS that i got quite a bit of noise for in Orulex/OGLA/Spaceway.

Oh, people are complaining about it alright. I'm not, and never have been, knowing it's pretty much unavoidable with the technology.

Speaking of hype, there was quite a bit of interest in Spaceway back when it wasn't released yet and all they had was screenshots and a few videos.

Yes, it's this thing where the imagination runs away with people. All they think is "OMG limitless universe this is going to be every game ever put into one", without realising that every piece of gameplay has to be put there somehow.
As for spaceway, it's great for the noctis crowd, which I'm not actually a part of. I'm not a sightseeing guy. I don't walk around searching for cool sights even in real life, much less in a virtual one (though I am still pleased when stumbling over one while doing other things). No Man's Sky is just the first engine of this type to come with a game attached, which gives it the necessary context to make it interesting for me. It's not the greatest game ever they attached to it, but it's a game...

Spaceway does still have huge potential in that area, because it's got accurate physics it can potentially hit a completely different crowd from NMS. But without context, it will only be interesting for sightseers, and they're all into space engine nowadays (which I took a short look at, but didn't spend half as much time with as with spaceway because there's not much flying to do, if it's any comfort).

 

[jroly]

Looking at the videos, i find it rather funny that no one is bothered by the same sort of stuff-appearing-in-the-distance thing in NMS that i got quite a bit of noise for in Orulex/OGLA/Spaceway.

Speaking of hype, there was quite a bit of interest in Spaceway back when it wasn't released yet and all they had was screenshots and a few videos. It even got a few articles on gaming sites. All of that disappeared after the first few releases.

I guess that's one more mistake to add to the list - releasing the game instead of just writing about it...

I think what you've made of Spaceway is incredible, probably thou when you released it, it was too difficult for people to play (like Orbiter) and they lost interest. If someone was really interested in space they wouldn't play NMS, they would play Orbiter (or Spaceway/KSP). I cringed when people were getting excited about the 'over 18 billion autogenerated world's to explore' or whatever it was in NMS

 

[Enjo]

I guess that's one more mistake to add to the list - releasing the game instead of just writing about it...

It's our human nature and there's no reason to fight it: A girl in a skirt appears sexier than a naked girl

 

[Messierhunter]

I'm doing a multi-part blog-post about it, but a few quick things to consider:

I'm playing the game underspecced on the GPU-side (GeForce 840M), and so was fully expecting to have to lower the resolution. Experienced no performance issues on 1280x720. Most of the issues seem to crop up at higher resolutions, but there are some issues with certain graphic cards. Also, there seems to be a number of people that have GPUs effortlessly surpassing the minimum specs in processing power, but being too old to fully support OGPL 4.5. My card is somewhat newer than the one cited, but considerably less powerful. I had two crashes, both after extended sessions of over 6 hours, so nothing shocking. There have been serious issues with AMD phenom CPUs though. A first stability and performance patch is out, brought a noticable frame rate increase for me especially in the GUI, but the main thing here is that really the controlls are completely unoptimised for PC. There's already mods out fixing part of that, though.

For Orbiter players it might be important to know that the game has no semblance of realism in any of its aspects. High ability to suspend disbelief is required, though I find that the real scale planets make up for a lot of that. It's basically the main thing that completely put me off spore (not to say that the two games are very similar - they really aren't).

For people that are unsure, I would definitely suggest to wait for a sale, though. This thing requires a certain kind of player to fully enjoy. I'll elaborate more on that in the blog.

Interesting. I tried it with a 940M (core i7 CPU) and the framerate was an absolute slide show. I lowered every setting to low and even tried the patch but no dice. Lowering the graphics settings barely seemed to impact the frame rate at all, and it wasn't even close to acceptable. I got fed up trying to make it work and requested a steam refund. To be fair I did not try lowering the resolution (I was at 1080), but given how choppy the frame rate was I would be surprised if that alone would have made up the difference to a playable level.

 

[jedidia]

1080p was absolutely unplayable for me, just moving the cursor around in the GUI was torture. But I was more or less expecting that.
Lowering resolution usually helps the GPU a lot, because there's a lot of post-processing on a per-pixel basis nowadays.
In the end I'm playing on 1280x720 with everything else turned up to max except shadows and anisotropic filtering, which I run on minimum. Getting significant drops during "cutscenes", but what the hell. I played Morrowind under far worse circumstances.

 

[Messierhunter]

1080p was absolutely unplayable for me, just moving the cursor around in the GUI was torture. But I was more or less expecting that.
Lowering resolution usually helps the GPU a lot, because there's a lot of post-processing on a per-pixel basis nowadays.
In the end I'm playing on 1280x720 with everything else turned up to max except shadows and anisotropic filtering, which I run on minimum. Getting significant drops during "cutscenes", but what the hell. I played Morrowind under far worse circumstances.

Ah well, guess I should have tried that. I'll just wait for it to hit a steam sale and then maybe try it again if I have the time.

 

[Artlav]

pack some animals and resources to be mined in it, and your work would be more playable than NMS, it seems. :lol:

Yep, also remove all the real physics from it that confuse people, and it would be more or less NMS.

have huge potential in that area, because it's got accurate physics it can potentially hit a completely different crowd

I just recently found out that Orbiter folks instinctively press the killrot key, while almost everyone else spin out of control and quit, not being aware even of a possibility of such a key.

The rotation seem to be easier to understand when you are in VR googles, but then people are having problems with the engine and with expecting the thing to go where it points.

Most of the time on that ride people acted like they spent their whole lives flying on a magical broomstick, and then were given a rocket-propelled one. They fly towards a wall, turn sideways when near it, then spend the last living second wondering why the hell are they still moving towards the wall at almost the same speed.

It's an almost universal lack of understanding. Perhaps thanks to the ST/SW/SO movies, perhaps just because it's unnatural to humans.

So, I'm yet to find such a crowd outside of the Orbiter community.

I'm really starting to think about the controls in terms of a drone - you don't killrot a drone yourself unless doing acrobatics, there is software to assist you. You don't bother tilting it to get the right speed unless racing, there is software to assist you.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to have the killrot always on unless disabled, to have an autopilot that doesn't take programming, but takes a click on a map, to have an auto-hover mode, and so on.

 

[C3PO]

The worst thing in NMS is IMHO wading through a sea of cut-scenes. There are just too many of them. I find it a bit weird that a space explorer hasn't thought of making a map. Even a basic compass would be nice.

 

[Deleted Orbinaut]

The worst thing in NMS is IMHO wading through a sea of cut-scenes. There are just too many of them. I find it a bit weird that a space explorer hasn't thought of making a map. Even a basic compass would be nice.

I can't tell if this is intended as sarcasm. There's a compass and map and no cutscenes.

 

[jedidia]

Perhaps it would be a good idea to have the killrot always on unless disabled, to have an autopilot that doesn't take programming, but takes a click on a map, to have an auto-hover mode, and so on.

Oh, most certainly. Accessability is always a good thing to improve. But it's still a problem if people have nowhere meaningful to fly to...

There's a compass and map and no cutscenes.

He means a compass that points "north" so you can keep your bearings to an absolute direction, a map in terms of a planetary map, and by cutscenes he probably means all the "journey miilestone accomplished" scenes as well as activating beacons, signal scanners and stuff.
I tend to agree with him, except for the map. I think I actually don't want a minimap in that game. But setting arbitrary waypoints and most of all retargetting already discovered waypoints wouldn't be luxury.

 

[C3PO]

Well, probably they aren't technically cut-scenes but they slow the flow of the game down. Even the menu every time you 'speak' to an AI or access anything, the game makes you wait 1-3 seconds before you can interact with it. After a few hundred times it becomes just irritating without adding anything to the experience. Menus that fade in is one of the very few things that you deserve capital punishment for. :compbash2:
He could have used a normal left-click for most of the stuff instead of that weird left-hold. It's fine if you use it for some special functions but not all of the time. It looks like he's trying to hide how 'shallow' the gameplay really is.