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No Man's Sky
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Funny you mention elite. It's another game that ended up being a disappointment for me but when I got fed up of nms I went back and have been playing elite and really enjoying it. Different games really but elite is a lot lot better
I keep meaning to get back into ED and finish up A rating my python but every time I plan on doing so, some crap like super combat AI bugs and having to grind out engineer upgrades for all my ship components, puts me right off
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Moderators, Category Moderators, Arts Moderators, Computer Games Moderators, Entertainment Moderators Posts: 29,390 CMod ✭✭✭✭
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Apologies for the length here, it is fittingly not a game that really befits brevity.
Trigger warning: this post contains some nice words about No Man's Sky.
TL;DR - w00t space exploration!
Anyway.
You know that moment with the giraffe in The Last of Us? That's a great shared spine-tingling moment, very clearly designed and choreographed for maximum emotional/aesthetic impact for pretty much every player who has been engaged up until that point. My favourite games of this year (and it has been a remarkable year for games) - The Witness, Inside, Quadrilateral Cowboy, Stephen's Sausage Roll etc - are similarly 'authored', where every scene, puzzle, beat, vista... seems thoroughly considered. Inside, for example, is as polished and linear as you could get, where you can't break from the designer's line - and it's wonderful. No Man's Sky is different. The 'holy ****' moments in No Man's Sky are impressive because they feel unique - while they're governed by rules and design for sure, there's a randomness and individuality to them that are remarkably potent and effective.
These moments are surprisingly frequent for me - when the artists' hands, the procedural rules and my own perspective gel together beautifully. It's encountering a picturesque lake occupied by shoals of fish and a solitary, majestic shark. It's that crimson sunset where the silhouette of a two-storey high preying mantis dinosaur marches on the horizon. It's stumbling across a mysterious ruin against a skyline dominated by a massive moon, or a magnificently deep cave chamber. It's just stopping in the middle of a vast, overwhelming plain as the dynamic soundtrack hits a perfect tone. It's a uniquely gorgeous, lonely and overwhelming game. A wholly authored game could never achieve what No Man's Sky achieves, and that's a good thing and the game's greatest achievement (well, apart from nailing that feeling of being able to just hop in your ship and fly off planet so seamlessly, which was always THE single most essential hook of No Man's Sky). Absolutely the limitations and restrictions of the algorithm become clear as you play, but really this is a game created by a few humans so they can't perform full-on miracles. But certainly they've amazingly managed to achieve something that's as aesthetically fetching as it is mathematically remarkable. Someone will do something better at some point - sign me up for that ****.
No Man's Sky is also a game of rules and limitations, some reassuring and some frustrating. I've grown to appreciate how low maintenance the core survival aspects are, and how little work is required to just get by once you're past the first few hours (and shame so many 'quality of life' blueprints are dished out randomly). There's just enough there to encourage you to explore a bit and make the more toxic and damaged environments stand out. Only when I discover a blueprint I want do I go scavenging for a bit, and that can be tedious - especially when the inventory limitations kick in. But the more I play, the less bothered I am about all that, and the happier I am to wander without harvesting everything I find (the crystals, though, they're always asking for a mining), or stopping at every outpost I spot.
No Man's Sky is a game that subverts or ignores many AAA game rules if you want it to, and that's equal parts liberating and disorientating (I also think that's where it has come into conflict with the wider playerbase, but there's a link below that better articulates that). The game - and this is a real shame - doesn't explicitly tell the player to not play the game like they would another open world video game. And indeed the developers actively litter the landscape with 'stuff' to find and ways to find it, with a waypoint always pointing towards the galaxy core if you so wish. It's easy to get drawn into a cycle of constantly travelling towards the next 'thing', and the endless repetition will soon become apparent. This is mostly a failure of Hello, but also partially IMO a result of years of conditioning in other games that's hard to shake off.
No Man's Sky, though, excels when you just stop playing it like other open world video games. When you think of it as some sort of hybrid between Pokemon Snap and Proteus, with some light survival and trading elements thrown in. Plus every sci fi book and film ever, of course. It's a game where if you get bored, you go somewhere else. It's a game where doing nothing in particular is not only a valid choice, it's probably the most rewarding one, creating a strangely meditative mood as you leisurely explore these alien landscapes. The lack of direction is actually one of my favourite things about the game - no metagame, no levelling etc... In fact I'd love if they had more willingly disposed of those few elements that do feel more like a traditional game. Thankfully, most of them are relatively ignorable. There's an aimlessness to No Man's Sky that, far from being a weakness, is for me anyway key to its appeal.
Here's a picture to break up the text a bit (this is the aforementioned mantis dinosaur):
There's elements in the game I really like that are underexplored for sure. I love finding more words, and how that feeds into your understanding of what's happening in the world - but there's definitely more that can be done with that and your relationships with the alien races. The prose is surprisingly vivid, but would be cool if there were a few more variants in where you encountered if. Variance is what the game needs most - more truly unique sights to find, more surprises, more variety wherever reasonable or practical. As somebody who enjoys playing the game as a pacifist (except when some mutant dog beast is attacking me or whatever), I wish there were a few more options in that respect - to avoid mid-space dogfights, or (this really irks me) not having to shoot down birds to scan them (by default, anyway).
But I'm quite excited at the prospect of this game evolving, beyond the obvious UI fixes and quirks being ironed out. Rarely has a game felt like it could legitimately be worth revisiting at regular intervals if the game is meaningfully updated reasonably regularly. Since it is a game you can't "finish", there's no reason for the release code to be "finished" in the way most games need to be (see also: Minecraft). I am of the seemingly rare opinion that there's more than enough in the game is as, but no question whatsoever I'd welcome a whole lot more too. There is a risk, unfortunately, that it could become more 'gamey' in the process - new systems, new rules, new stuff. But hopefully the core I have appreciated most remains intact: just being able to wander to your hearts content, at the pace you want, and with the capacity to simply point your ship towards the sky and go some place else whenever the hell you want.
I've played around 20 hours of No Man's Sky. I'll probably stop at some point in the near to medium term future, popping back in when it's updated. But I stop playing pretty every game after a few dozen hours, if I even get to that point in the first. No Man's Sky is absolutely a game with very apparent flaws, both objective and subjective. I have determinedly avoided superlatives, because as I said 2016 has been ****ing remarkable - this is another interesting game in a year full of them, and needs more quote reservations unquote than quite a few of the others. But amid the wave of negativity that surrounds the game now, I'm still rather bewitched by it, often in spite of its very apparent problems.
I like what Brendan Keogh has to say about the game, reflects much of my experience with it. Read it if you'd like (or not, whatever), but here's a key quote:Those who enter No Man’s Sky looking for a sense of progress or empowerment or excitement or even ‘meaning’ are doomed to be disappointed. That is not the niche experience the game is going for (but which it has so much trouble positioning against). But for those who want to feel very small and insignificant and overwhelmed but who also just want to just stand still as they crest that mountain and see the neighbouring planet looming over a crystal clear lake in a red sky and just look at it for a minute, marvelling at the beauty of an algorithmic and godless Nature, for those players No Man’s Sky is everything it was always going to be.
*hands up* I'm one of those players.0 -
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I keep meaning to get back into ED and finish up A rating my python but every time I plan on doing so, some crap like super combat AI bugs and having to grind out engineer upgrades for all my ship components, puts me right off
That stuff is all fixed now for the most part, some really promising stuff announced at gamescon too such as being able to launch small fighter ships from your main ship.0 -
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johnny_ultimate wrote: »Too long to quote
That's all fair enough but my main concern about the game is it just isn't fun. The main resource gathering loop actively makes the game less fun. IT's likes the player wants to go exploring but is constantly fighting against their inventory system which just fills up way too fast and you need to return and carry out some mundane selling. Then you upgrade your inventory and you think it would make life easier but then those inventory spots are taken over by upgrades and you are back to square one.
Sure there's tonnes of potential in the game but the way the game stands the whole game play loop is broken and effectively works against what is actually fun for the player to do. There's no way I can just give the game a free pass on that.
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Moderators, Category Moderators, Arts Moderators, Computer Games Moderators, Entertainment Moderators Posts: 29,390 CMod ✭✭✭✭ Join Date:Posts: 28102
Forgot to mention:
the jetpack / melee combo movement. They need a prompt to flag that stuff.Retr0gamer wrote: »That's all fair enough but my main concern about the game is it just isn't fun. The main resource gathering loop actively makes the game less fun. IT's likes the player wants to go exploring but is constantly fighting against their inventory system which just fills up way too fast and you need to return and carry out some mundane selling. Then you upgrade your inventory and you think it would make life easier but then those inventory spots are taken over by upgrades and you are back to square one.
Sure there's tonnes of potential in the game but the way the game stands the whole game play loop is broken and effectively works against what is actually fun for the player to do. There's no way I can just give the game a free pass on that.
The 'resource loop' hasn't been the main gameplay loop for me for at least half the time I've been playing - and a good bit of that earlier time was my own fault, really. Once you get off the first planet, you can engage with resources as much or as little as you want. Other than the few IMO essential upgrades (life support upgrades and warp drive ones, which definitely should be much easier to come by by-the-way as it's a shame the most bountiful planets are hidden behind the latter) you don't need to collect anything other than the isotopes and metals which are pretty much everywhere in crystalised form so requires little to no effort to collect. Once you realise there's no need whatsoever to collect anything other than what you want/need, you're liberated from the resource grind / inventory issues by-and-large and you can just get on with things
You can resource grind if you want, and there's ways to make it a whole lot smoother than with your initial wimpy laser, but yeah it's a system that can be engaged with as much or as little as suits your particular needs.
Am I having fun? Yes, but there's also plenty of other equally worthwhile adjectives I could use. I find it relaxing, fascinating, memorable, lonely, overwhelming, artful, etc... Games can be more than just 'fun', and hell I find No Man's Sky plenty enjoyable anyway *shrugs* (also plenty of problems too, several of which I called out - I'm not giving it a free pass by any stretch, simply commenting on my own experiences with it)0 -
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Moderators, Category Moderators, Arts Moderators, Computer Games Moderators, Entertainment Moderators Posts: 29,390 CMod ✭✭✭✭ Join Date:Posts: 28102
Embrace the aimlessness, Ciderdude, it's what I have found myself particularly enjoying about the game It's not a game of overarching goals or destinations (if you ignore the core anyway), and instead one of moments and freedom. It's a welcome relief to be liberated from a 'goal' TBH, and while I wouldn't want such a thing for anything but the smallest handful of games, it's still proving a welcome palette cleanser for me. 0 -
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johnny_ultimate wrote: »Embrace the aimlessness, Ciderdude, it's what I have found myself particularly enjoying about the game It's not a game of overarching goals or destinations (if you ignore the core anyway), and instead one of moments and freedom. It's a welcome relief to be liberated from a 'goal' TBH, and while I wouldn't want such a thing for anything but the smallest handful of games, it's still proving a welcome palette cleanser for me.
I'm not buying it at all.
It's like saying,
"Sure, don't mind they didn't publish the clues along with the crossword, embrace the freedom and liberty offered by filling your own answers in, and the surprise and adventure in completing it with random words!"
A little direction would be great.
The Path of Atlas is a step in the right direction (pun intended) but it just comes off as poorly written scifi with no grounding in what turns out to be less interesting than the merchants in Resident Evil 4, and not even on the same page as the merchants in the Dark Souls games.0 -
johnny_ultimate wrote: »Embrace the aimlessness, Ciderdude, it's what I have found myself particularly enjoying about the game It's not a game of overarching goals or destinations (if you ignore the core anyway), and instead one of moments and freedom. It's a welcome relief to be liberated from a 'goal' TBH, and while I wouldn't want such a thing for anything but the smallest handful of games, it's still proving a welcome palette cleanser for me.
The freedom to explore is pretty relaxing but the procgen engine needs to be tweaked to have much more varied looking planets which for a randomly generated system, sure does pop out very samey looking landscapes far to often in my experience. Personally I'm done with landing on a different colored rock type world to the one I just left as it gets old very quick.0 -
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