No Man's Sky

Wright

Zillah wrote: »

I don't see how it is arrogant. Part of the justification for high prices - for any good - is how expensive they were to make. The reason I think a AAA game charging $60 isn't too bad is because of how much they had to spend making it. Like a Hollywood movie scale budget, with literally hundreds of people employed.

If you've got a four-man team working on a game and you charge $60, it's not because you need to recoup that big of an investment, it's because you've seen a chance in the market and you're going for the jugular. Which is how capitalism works: you don't get to tell someone how much to charge for their product, they just pick their price and the market tells them if it's willing to pay for it. Which is all fine until you remember that sociopaths use the same logic when engaging in, say, war profiteering with scarce supplies (or that douchecanoe recently increasing the price on a particular medicine 5000%).

There is a difference between saying "The market wants what I have so I'm going to charge the highest price I can possibly squeeze out of people" and saying "My product cost a huge amount to create so a high price is warranted to allow me to recoup what I've invested."

Both are allowed, but don't expect people to sing your praises when you're choosing the barefaced price-gouger option.

Nah; if you think games are 60 to make back a budget you're wrong; budgets for games with this level of backing are made back in 2 weeks or so.

If this game ends up being the same quality of a AAA, it deserves the same success, and that includes monetarily. Doesnt matter how many made it.

Potential-Monke

Christ that video ramped up my excitement for this. Like, when a dev says that 99.9% of the planets probably won't be discovered, it gives a savage indication that it is a lot bigger than people think. Granted, it may get repeaty, but hopefully there'll be enough diversity to keep it interesting. I'd imagine most people will be scouring all the planets they can to get enough fuel to head to the centre, but i think that video showed the possibilities of just playing the game and exploring. Yeah, there's an end goal, but i'd imagine once you get there, you'll still be plenty motivated to keep going.

And who knows, maybe with updates, or even No Man's Sky 2 (depending on the success of the game), it might bring in community areas, where players can build up areas for trading, chatting, etc. Realistically, the possibilites are endless, but it will be up to the dev's to keep people interested. Either way, it's a release day purchase, and once the release date is guaranteed, i'll be booking a week or two off work!

Finally, add in VR and i will probably lose my job, house and friends. But it'll be ok, because i'll own planets, and they'll all be named after the male appendage. Probably.

Benzino

Wright wrote: »

Nah; if you think games are 60 to make back a budget you're wrong; budgets for games with this level of backing are made back in 2 weeks or so.

Maybe for big hitters like GTA and CoD, but not for every game. In fact, games should really cost more.

Despite the fact that they now have longer development times, bigger teams and more expenses (mocap, voice actors etc), games are cheaper to buy than they were, say 20 years ago, when you take inflation into account. It's why we have all these DLC's, season passes and micro transactions, to help get the total cost closer or above where it really should be.

Xenji

Benzino wrote: »

Maybe for big hitters like GTA and CoD, but not for every game. In fact, games should really cost more.

Despite the fact that they now have longer development times, bigger teams and more expenses (mocap, voice actors etc), games are cheaper to buy than they were, say 20 years ago, when you take inflation into account. It's why we have all these DLC's, season passes and micro transactions, to help get the total cost closer or above where it really should be.

Still remember paying nearly 50 punts for most SNES/Mega Drive games in the 90's, that is nearly 100 quid in today's money if you add in inflation.

Captain Chaos

Xenji wrote: »

Still remember paying nearly 50 punts for most SNES/Mega Drive games in the 90's, that is nearly 100 quid in today's money if you add in inflation.

Yeah, the going rate for PS1 games was £45 punts, then we had to wait for the Platinum range when they dropped down to £20 punts but only if the game sold enough copies to make Platinum status.

FAILSAFE 00

I'd would love to visit planets that were discovered by other players so I am not happy that this will be almost impossible. That's a shame.

CiDeRmAn

Xenji wrote: »

Still remember paying nearly 50 punts for most SNES/Mega Drive games in the 90's, that is nearly 100 quid in today's money if you add in inflation.

I paid £60 for Virtua Racing back at release, and some ridiculous prices for consoles and games back then, all in punts.

I remember the revelation of the platinum range when they came out on the PS, £20 for a great game, amazing.
Of course, now, €20 seems OK for a budget title but the earlier £20 must be the equivalent of €30 these days.

Maximus Alexander

New PlayStation games were way out of my budget, but platinum? Ooohh baby you better believe I could save up enough pocket money for platinum.

Kiith

I payed £90 for Shenmue 2 on the Dreamcast, which remains the most i've ever spent on a single game (bar WoW of course).

As for No Man's Sky...i dunno. Not sure i'd ever play it long enough to warrant paying that much, as not having a real story is a bit of a no-no for me. Sandbox games have never really been my thing.

Varik

€55 from Game for Arkham asylum and €50 something for Star wars old republic (over €50 for a PC game was a kick in the teeth

Andrew76

Maximus Alexander wrote: »

The more I see of it, the more super boring it looks.

When you see the scale of the galaxy in that video and the fact there will effectively be zero interaction with other human players - then yes, the first thing that comes to mind is that the gathering/exploring could get boring fast. It's almost like they designed a cool programming trick with the procedural generation thing and decided to build an experience around it.

FAILSAFE 00 wrote: »

I'd would love to visit planets that were discovered by other players so I am not happy that this will be almost impossible. That's a shame.

You'd almost wonder why they bothered implementing a shared galaxy if we're never going to see the effect's of other players. Maybe when someone finally reaches the centre it will have an effect we will notice.

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

I paid £60 for Virtua Racing back at release, and some ridiculous prices for consoles and games back then, all in punts.

I remember the revelation of the platinum range when they came out on the PS, £20 for a great game, amazing.
Of course, now, €20 seems OK for a budget title but the earlier £20 must be the equivalent of €30 these days.

I think the most I paid for a standalone game was £70 for the steel tin version of SF2 Turbo on the SNES, turned out to be good value considering the time I put into it. Same went for SMB 3 on the NES, had to combine savings with the brothers to raise the £40 or so it cost! Thankfully a twin cassette deck was all you needed to get new games for the C64. :P

Anyway, a €60 price tag (or cheaper on PC I presume) wouldn't bother me if I think I'll get my monies worth. Will hold off buying this one though.

nix

From reading the description on this game it grabbed my attention.

From watching a view vids on it, its looks like its gonna be random generated terrain/mobs/nodes and ill never bump into anybody else on world or visit a planet anybody else has....So super boring repetitive farming..

Am i missing anything?

Mickeroo

I think it's going to end up with some of the same issues as Elite:Dangerous where it feels like there's not really much to do once the initial addiction wears off. On the plus side it's launching in a state that's probably about 3 or 4 years ahead of Elite in terms of content. though in Elite you can run into other players relatively often if you want to.

brevity

Eh, I can meet people down the shop or at work. People are annoying.

Isolation here I come.

Wright

Benzino wrote: »

Maybe for big hitters like GTA and CoD, but not for every game. In fact, games should really cost more.

Nope and nope. Like I said, big AAA games make their budget back far quicker than you realize.

Maximus Alexander

Andrew76 wrote: »

When you see the scale of the galaxy in that video and the fact there will effectively be zero interaction with other human players - then yes, the first thing that comes to mind is that the gathering/exploring could get boring fast. It's almost like they designed a cool programming trick with the procedural generation thing and decided to build an experience around it.

It's pretty much always the problem with procedural generation. You can have 100 billion planets, but once you've seen one Tundra planet, you've seen them all; once you've seen one jungle planet, you've seen them all, etc. They're all just variations on the same template, modified by a simplex noise function. The same goes for creatures, their animations and behaviours, etc. It just can't act as a substitute for the imagination of a group of talented artists.

I had hoped there would be some gameplay mechanic that would act as a hook, but so far it just seems like pretty standard 4x fare. If you look at probably the most successful procedurally based game, Minecraft, its success was not based on the joy of exploring its broadly repetitive world. Instead, its success came out of that world being a canvas for your own imagination; in effect being a simply executed virtual lego box where, instead of just giving you all the lego blocks it made you fight for them. Remove the lego without replacing it with something else and it becomes pointless and dull.

No Man's Sky doesn't have the lego, and it doesn't appear to have replaced it with anything else unfortunately.

gizmo

Wright wrote: »

Nope and nope. Like I said, big AAA games make their budget back far quicker than you realize.

Benzino is actually quite correct in what he said. A cursory glance at the annual financials of the larger publishers, publisher statements from the beginning of the generation with regard to the increased budgets required for AAA development and even leaked documents from the likes of Kingdom of Amalur show the conditions required to make a reasonable return on an investment from just the publisher level. That doesn't even include the possible benefits to the studio, if they're third party, and how long it takes for them to potentially see any returns.

It can be worse for smaller indies who aren't self-publishing as they have to deal with repaying publisher investment via low recoup fees and higher profit percentages being taken after the platforms take their cut etc...

Check out these numbers which came out of Rezzed this year. It's an example of a relatively bad, albeit uncommon, deal but still, it's an eye opener for what non-self published indies can have to deal with.

Zillah

Maximus Alexander wrote: »

No Man's Sky doesn't have the lego, and it doesn't appear to have replaced it with anything else unfortunately.

Well, there's the quest to reach the centre of the galaxy. And there is crafting of your suit, spaceship, weapon, and other equipment. And there is dog fighting and other spaceship combat. There are weird alien obelisk things, and Stargate-type portals, and language to learn, and faction to fight or cozy up to. I can't say yet how much fun any of that is actually going to be in practice, but it sounds a little glib to say they've replaced it with nothing.

I also don't think we're in a position to say that once you've seen a tundra planet you've seen them all. That might be the case, but we don't know how smart their procedural generation is - there might be tons of surprises out there.

Having a team of artists hand-tailor everything of course makes things more distinctive and polished, but there's no sense of discovery. When I land on a planet in No Man's Sky no one else will have ever been there, not even the dev.

I read that they sent out virtual probes in a beta build of the game to take snapshots and survey how the algorithm was working. The reality of that scope is something no other game has offered.

Maybe it'll be lame, I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt for now, and I don't think we've seen enough to judge, and I don't understand why people are being so cynical about a game that's trying to do something original. Loads of people are going to be horribly disappointed because they're not listening to the dev and are making up their own expectations: they think they can build a deathstar, or form a fleet with their friends; all manner of silliness. Don't listen to those people, they're the ones driving the hype, the devs themselves aren't behind it, and seem to be trying very hard to adjust people's expectations.

Maximus Alexander

Zillah wrote: »

Well, there's the quest to reach the centre of the galaxy. And there is crafting of your suit, spaceship, weapon, and other equipment. And there is dog fighting and other spaceship combat. There are weird alien obelisk things, and Stargate-type portals, and language to learn, and faction to fight or cozy up to. I can't say yet how much fun any of that is actually going to be in practice, but it sounds a little glib to say they've replaced it with nothing.

But sure every game these days has resource collection and crafting; every space sim has space combat; repetitive quests to gain reputation with factions are everywhere, etc. The USP of this game is exploring the procedurally generated universe, which just isn't enough for me because...

Zillah wrote: »

I also don't think we're in a position to say that once you've seen a tundra planet you've seen them all. That might be the case, but we don't know how smart their procedural generation is - there might be tons of surprises out there.

Having a team of artists hand-tailor everything of course makes things more distinctive and polished, but there's no sense of discovery. When I land on a planet in No Man's Sky no one else will have ever been there, not even the dev.

...because I don't agree with this at all. Especially the bolded part. There will be nothing in No Man's Sky that would surprise the devs. The devs write the classes that create things and then a noise function randomises the values. The algorithms don't create new and interesting things, they create infinite variations of classes of things that the devs have specified. Unless they've innovated here by orders of magnitude beyond what anyone else has done to date (and none of the footage hints that this is the case), I expect that exploring will provide more of a sense of deja vu than a sense of discovery.

I'm not saying it's going to be the worst game ever, I'm just saying I don't think that, for me personally, it would hold my attention for very long. I think I expected more; for them to inject something new into their vast procedural world and I just haven't seen it yet. I'm just a bit disappointed is all, I already feel like I've seen it all before.

DeSelby83

I wonder if we get closer to the centre will we meet or see more players or planets that players have found.

Noxin

DeSelby83 wrote: »

I wonder if we get closer to the centre will we meet or see more players or planets that players have found.

I imagine you would. And depending on what way their starting works, if you try to make a straight line for the center you'd probably encounter a few systems every now and then that are already discovered.

For me, the game sounds interesting. I like the kind of survival feel/idea to it.
End goal is to make it to the center but you really need to craft / upgrade / discover / collect to make it happen. If you just bolt straight for it, it'll probably take you forever and a day. Whereas if you stop to look around, collect resources etc. you'll end up getting there faster.

I'm in two minds for now if I'll buy it day one or not. The whole concept sounds good to me but yes, I do worry about the repetitiveness of it. Also what happens when you get to the center?

All in all, I like the idea of the game. I'll hold out a little longer and keep an eye on it for the next few weeks to see what new info comes out.

Zillah

Noxin wrote: »

Also what happens when you get to the center?

It has been suggested there is some big reveal. The dev has commented a few times to point out that we have no idea who or what we are playing - we could be aliens or robots for all we know. He also looked awkward and said "maybe" when someone asked if Earth was in the game, so my personal guess is that we'll find a ruined Earth or something like that, and we're human scion-bots or something like that on a quest to find the maker.

As for survival: I really don't think you can call it a survival game. You just respawn when you die, and you keep your ship. A survival game has to be pretty brutal in my book, and obviously needs the threat of you, well, not surviving.

Homlescow

I know the Dev's have ruled out micro transactions but I think they could be used for one realy cool feature, Have a secondary in-game currency that you can purchase and/or acquire like xp(albeit very slowly). You would then use that currency to teleport to planets where where other users have already placed a marker. Just a thought :-)

Sieghardt

gizmo wrote: »

leaked documents from the likes of Kingdom of Amalur show the conditions required to make a reasonable return on an investment from just the publisher level.

Amalur was a complete and utter mess of a disaster of development on every level, they didnt even know what they were trying to make for 80% of the development. They tried making an MMO and failed and then just made a single player RPG out of it.

Anyone holding it up as a benchmark example of a standard game development is utterly clueless

gizmo

Sieghardt wrote: »

Amalur was a complete and utter mess of a disaster of development on every level, they didnt even know what they were trying to make for 80% of the development. They tried making an MMO and failed and then just made a single player RPG out of it.

Anyone holding it up as a benchmark example of a standard game development is utterly clueless

The documents I'm referring to were the initial (co-)publishing agreements between EA and Big Huge Games, the subsidiary of 38 Studios at the time. They included details on lump sum payments made by EA, recoupment rates, royalty rate calculations based on net revenue, when said royalties would be delivered and how marketing costs factored into the equation.

The fact that the project, amongst other things, turned out to be an unmitigated disaster is totally irrelevant to the point I was making. The figures within the documents and how they relate to other information gleaned from publisher financials and statements is what makes them interesting in this context.

Noxin

Zillah wrote: »

As for survival: I really don't think you can call it a survival game. You just respawn when you die, and you keep your ship. A survival game has to be pretty brutal in my book, and obviously needs the threat of you, well, not surviving.

Survival was a bad choice of words yea. Without being forced to stop to fuel your ship, feed yourself and a potential heavy loss when dying, it is not survival. :pac:

None the less, like I said, the idea of flying off, stopping to look around, upgrading your ship / self, all the while having an overall end goal. Whatever you want to call that (too early for me right now) does intrigue me.

Zillah

Noxin wrote: »

Whatever you want to call that (too early for me right now) does intrigue me.

Yup, me too. I think if they hint the right mood it could be great.

You do have to fuel your ship apparently, and the cost of that is going to be a limiting factor in how quickly you can proceed.

It would be interesting if they did a more hardcore mode where there is perma-death and the danger of being stranded on an airless moon, etc.

MilesMorales1

I hope Gamestop gets that limited edition in. I want.

EoinMcLovin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqmJ8k9uBB0

Noxin

Liking the look of it more and more.

There's something about the art style of it that has me raise an eyebrow though. Just can't quite figure out what it is.
Maybe it's the cartoonish look to it. Or the red hue space. Dunno.
I don't mind cartoony looks in games, just not sure how I feel about it in a space sim type game.

Still, the overall gameplay and idea still looks great.

I like that there is languages to be learned as well. Great little addition imo. It always amazes me that in space sims, everyone speaks the same language. I guess they all come with a universal translator. This one actually makes you go out learn the languages (via game mechanics, not IRL :P ) It's probably a very small part to it, but still nice.

Also like that you set up your ship and suit the way you want. Not everyone will be running around with the same setup. It is pushing me more towards a day one purchase.