No Man's Sky

Of course, there's still the problem of FINDING that 1%

Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great

I like the idea of the Garden Worlds being incredibly difficult to find. It gives more reason to for you to be protective and prideful of your findings, especially if you hit one that's both a visual beauty and full of valuable resources.

I remember playing a game Noctis years ago, which is basically a DOS version of No Man's Sky but way before No Man's Sky existed. (to the point where I suspect the developers took more than a little inspiration from that old game) Worlds with any kind of life were very rare, worlds with animal life even rarer, so it was a major "oh yes!" moment when you finally discovered a garden world/class M planet.

Considering how much exploring you'll be doing in this game, making the best planets too common would be a mistake. Spore was kind of like this, were advanced life was so common that you were tripping over advanced civilizations while exploring the galaxy, and it became mundane.

What makes a good man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?

Oh god I almost forgot about Spore. I would make friends with the requisite 3(4?) empires to fill out my fleet then exterminate everyone else nearby before they spread onto all the free star systems. Anyone with a purple T3 would feel my wrath.

I'm cool with the low % if you can still find useful stuff on the uninhabitable planets.

Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?

You will; in fact, more valuable resources may be more commonly found on uninhabitable or unfriendly (or possibly barely earth-like) planets than the "garden" worlds.

I remember Noctis; in fact, it may be a Spiritual Predecessor to NMS at least gameplay-wise.

edited 16th Sep '14 1:56:22 PM by PilotSolaris

Too easy.

Double post, but some more news for NMS has surfaced, though it's mostly rehashing of what's already been said.

This article is mostly gushing about the game, while this one is somewhat more professional. Take a gander if you want.

Too easy.

I don't think it was actually DOS-based, it just looked grainy like that. I played it a little, years ago, on my XP machine, which actually ran it quite smoothly. Finding planets with life isn't that hard in Noctis if you're specifically looking for them, and life can show up under a fairly wide range of conditions.

Still waiting for Noctis V...

Join my forum game!

I think the later versions were Windows, but I'm pretty sure the early ones ran in DOS. Of course, even the DOS version could still run in Windows.

Noctis V will never happen. How long has it been in development for? 12 years or more? No Man's Sky is shaping up to be a superior replacement for Noctis, anyway.

What makes a good man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?

Yeah; if it delivers on its promises it'll be an excellent Spiritual Successor to Noctis.

Too easy.

So if anyone's near Vegas, tickets are on sale now.

Or you could just check out the official Twitch channel. It'll probably be on there.

Hm. This + the new version of Grand Theft Auto V might just convince me to get a PS 4.

Anyone who assigns themselves loads of character tropes is someone to be worried about.

I'M SO EXCITED...

'Course, I'll probably just have to settle for the Twitch stream of it but if I were able to go to Vegas and see No Man's Sky live, that would be all I would want to do there. Not look at upcoming content for Destiny. Not watch trailers for the next LittleBigPlanet. Just this.

Too easy.

NEW TRAILER IS HERE!

Too easy.

The game looks neat, but I still don't know what there is to do besides browsing space and walking on planets.

No regret shall pass over the threshold!

Yeah, seriously. There's really nothing more to it aside from those and to be honest that could get boring VERY quickly.

That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.

You can look on the trope article for the game and find a page listing the features the developers have said will be in the game: collecting resources, space battles, etc.

There's been a couple interviews with the lead dev, and another new trailer:

In terms of the game's basic set-up, the kickstarted Elite Dangerous looks very similar, though much more closer to reality. But it still only promises future features that No Man's Sky has not only claimed are in the game, but has actually shown, like being able to even get out of your spaceship. And Elite still has a dedicated fanbase, so I'm sure somebody could get a lot of mileage out of No Man's Sky even if it is as barebones as it seems from the trailers.

Amusingly, the dev mentioned in a interview that he was surprised that people gravitated more towards the Trader type of gameplay, over combat or exploration, when the desire to make mad space bucks is the reason that games like EVE Online continue to exist.

Hopefully they'll show off more content at the Playstation Event tonight (9:00 PM Pacific Time).

Basically, the developers have said a lot but shown little. This is understandable when they don't want to give too much away, since they have said things will more and more alien as you get closer to the center of galaxy. But as a result they aren't really giving much else to hook people on, besides the exploration.

Which, personally, is almost enough for me. I don't know if I'd pay $50+ for it, but a 10/10 exploration game would certainly be worth something, even if it is a one-trick pony. Maybe it's not a game you sink 100 hours in a single week, but maybe over months or a year.

The key, however, is having the right amount of uniqueness and variation. Everyone's understandably worried that the "infinite content" will just boil down to seeing horses/fish/ships/planets copy-pasted in a million different shades of blue, or red, etc. I certainly hope the devs aren't dumb enough to think they can get away with that, but are passionate and ambitious enough to actually pull something incredible off.

edited 6th Dec '14 5:15:35 PM by Eschaton

Regardless, the sheer scale of it is rather off-putting. I mean, it might probably be the actual size of a galaxy if what the trope page says about the sun burning out 117 times before the last planet is discovered, but I'm wondering if it might be like EVE or something where you can make fleets or start companies and whatnot and eventually the galaxy may become "civilized" but still it seems like it might be too big. I mean, how big is the EVE galaxy?

That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.

A quick Google search tells me that the playable EVE Online "galaxy" is 106 light years in length, 90 light years in diameter, and 25 light years thick, with ~7500 star systems (which have at least one planet).

In comparison, the Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter. And considering how Minecraft could generate a surface 8 times the size of the surface of the Earth, or something like that, NMS may be able to generate something similarly enormous, though it may not need to. Whether that ends up being a whole lot of nothing does remain to be seen.

Compared to EVE, NMS seems to be focused much more on the individual, to capture the sensation of being a very small person in a very big universe. So it's likely far too big for any amount of people to truly grasp. But with a large enough amount of people, with a large enough amount of time, I'm very curious to see how much can actually be seen.

You're missing the point. A lot of people do with NMS.

The entire ethos is NMS is that it's too big. That's it's massive. That's it's on a scale literally incomprehensible to us. Why? Because the real universe is that big. It's that mind-bogglingly massive.

Gamers have come to expect being able to cover every inch of a game no matter how big in their games, and NMS is intentionally breaking from that. Some people just refuse to realize that, though. Everytime I see someone go "what's the point if all you do is explore" about this game I weep for our society, for that's a true showing of how utterly devoid of imagination and wanderlust we truly are.

Those of who aspire to be more than mindless drones however will enjoy this game.

edited 6th Dec '14 7:36:00 PM by Frostav

Varśnāmi, nūdhrēmnāyīm eyī —"With the pen, I reach satisfaction"

I'm not complaining about the exploring thing, all of the open-world stuff like Skyrim and Far Cry and whatnot is all about exploring.

That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.

I'm excited. Actually give me the same vibes I got when I first set sail in Wind Waker.

http://www.twitch.tv/playstation

A night under No Man's Sky has begun. They've got a band playing music focused on the game.

So I've been moderately excited for this for a while now. Then I went and watched some trailers.

Now I'm hyped for it. I'm annoyed that there's no release date yet but I'm willing to wait.

Anyone who assigns themselves loads of character tropes is someone to be worried about.

I want to get hyped but i'm getting some serious Molyneux flashbacks over this.

You can go anywhere.

Then you're a complete idiot who has no idea what he's talking about.

You do realize that we've had procedurally generated games for decades, right?

Varśnāmi, nūdhrēmnāyīm eyī —"With the pen, I reach satisfaction"