I’ve sunk a lot of time into this game. $20 is a good price. It’s a little unbalanced imo. A little bit grindy for my taste. The gameplay loop is fun, but it takes a fairly long time, about 30-45 minutes for one run. It can take longer depending on difficulty. Each run nets you between 6-10 of what can be considered XP points which you use for upgrades, and a typical upgrade costs 30-100 XP. So you’ll be playing hours of gameplay to unlock a perk which isn’t rewarding enough for the time. They unlock a basic upgrade like 2% movement speed for your workers, and then something a little more unique like allowing you to select a different item to bring with you on a run. I have done probably 40-50 runs and it just doesn’t feel rewarding enough for the time it takes for each run. Also, the runs always end right when you’re getting your “flow”. It’s fun but they should take a deeper look into the core gameplay loop and make some fundamental changes.
They have NMS running very well with billions of planets. They should be able to make one good planet. Gameplay is where this game will succeed or fail.
They have NMS running very well with billions of planets.
Eh, more like 10, each with a couple of variations: grass world, toxic world, radioactive world, ice world, desert world, scorching desert world, volcanic world, dead rock world, anomaly world, swampy world.
I also distinctly recall the game’s framerate taking a nosedive with nvidia drivers 421 or newer, some years ago. Standing still and moving the camera around would freeze several times. Using older drivers made the problem go away.
I enjoy how it sounds like the guy didn’t even start out by playing the game, but rather started modding right away. I do get that. The coding itself is fun.
But yeah, the guy could also be making an own game, if it was just about the coding. At some point, you do want your mod to be part of a game worth playing.
Modding an existing game is rarely comparable to the complexity of creating the game from scratch.
Adding assets and changing dialigue in and existing dialoge framework are accessible to a lot of people who are not up to designing physics and hitboxes. AAA titles require vast teams of people to get the skeleton and muscles of the game right, and mods are generally the hair coloring and nail polish.
That isn't to say creating mods is inherently easy or anything, but it is tweaking an existing thing and not comparable to building it from scratch.
Sure, but some game engines out there do give you quite a bit to work with, too.
And well, I was talking specifically about the guy enjoying the coding without necessarily caring about the end result (like he’d do, if he patched up Starfield without enjoying the game).
If that were the case, even designing the physics can be a fun riddle.
That is a teensy-tiny problem compared to what has to be done to make a game like Starfield. Go look at the credits. Now understand that each of those teams had weeks or even months where they worked 60-80 hours to solve problems or design things or write or rewrite the story to fit a problem that the programmers can't solve. Now, imagine putting all that work on one dev or even a tiny dev team. And now you know why the market isn't flooded by indie dev games of this size and complexity. There is a reason why so many people involved in games burn out quickly - they are often ground down by the grueling work.
You are also conflating ability to do one thing really well with being able to do all things really well.
I get that it's really easy to be negative and jaded about it but cmon, I just want more (good) MMOs to play. Hello Games has both the budget and the experience to make it a good game, and the fact that they are trying to do it in a pretty struggling and stale genre is commending IMHO.
Of course I'm not preordering or believing anything they say until I see it for myself, that goes without saying - but we shouldn't actively root for them to fail like many of the comments here are seemingly doing. Let's not be "those" always-negative online people just looking for a reason to hate, I'm sure this game will finds its audience the same way NMS did eventually and I personally hope I'm one of them.
Yeah, I’m not personally interested in an MMO, but nobody wins if they fail. I want more great games, even if they’re in genres that I’m uninterested in, because they can spark ideas for other devs to make great games in genres I do care about.
At this point under-delivering is a marketing strategy. Just promise the world to lure in pre-orders, then release it too early in a broken state and spent the rest of the time that you had planned to develop it anyway to fix up the title and reap the press articles about your comeback and how much work you do for the fans. Gullible idiots will praise and defend you with their lives on social media. Worked for NMS, CP2077 and many other titles.
At this point everyone should know they just lie to see what they cam get away with and then see what actually needs to be delivered in the next years only to still have a boring game
That's the problem I have with their flavor of procedural generation: While there was some thematic difference between some planets, exploring them always felt like being on the same place.
Oddly enough I never felt this way with Minecraft and I can't say why...
I expect the great leap forward in LLMs and AI art to dramatically change this at some point. They can already write pretty interesting plot with OK prompting, surely only a matter of time before someone is able to wrap that in a game.
I agree with you 100%. The difference could be in the "uncanny valley" of proc gen... Minecraft is blocky, so you suspend judgement and just find the attention to detail a wonder, while perhaps realistic-looking proc gen games are not quite realistic enough.
Funnily enough I was talking to my teenagers on this exact subject last night. At a basic level, nms appears to have what Minecraft does, plus spaceships. Why doesn’t it work the same?
For us, we decided that nothing in Minecraft is difficult to get at the level you need it. Wood is easy, always there. When you learn that you need coal for torches, it’s just in that rocky outcrop. Start digging, here’s some iron for you.
In Minecraft you don’t need to understand anything complex, until you’re ready to understand something complex. And if you want to spend a week running around on the surface and collecting chickens, you can do that too.
I restarted a nms game the other day and remembered that constant “warning, warning” as the planet inevitably tries to kill me. It was disheartening.
Just as a heads up: No Man’s Sky has the creative mode where the whole survival stuff and the mindless basic material collecting is pretty much turned off. My daughter and I went on relaxing treasure hunts just the other day, jumping between solar systems and walking around on dangerous surfaces without grinding stuff first. It is a do-what-you-want game at this point.
I mean, everything they showed in the trailer is in NMS right now, and it's pretty clearly in the same engine.
With No Man's Sky, it was a [relatively] unknown studio making some pretty massive claims and then showing what turned out to be pretty exaggerated footage to sell it. There's no getting around the fact that they over promised and under delivered, to say the least.
But this is different. They have done everything they're saying and showing is in this new game now, it's in NMS right now, you can go play it and do all the same things but with a scifi flavour instead of fantasy. I'm not sure where people's doubts are coming from.
Whether or not it will be good is subjective, there are still people who don't like NMS' gameplay loop and that's fine it's not for everyone. But the features are there.
I think that the reviewer is missing the point that this is still just no man’s sky with a few tweaks and a different set of inputs. I look at this and the bones of no man’s sky are plain to me, the flesh there to see, just… tweaked.
It’s fair to expect that all the lessons learned from no man’s sky will probably be applied here.
Well they get the experience from building No Man Sky from the disastrous state to what it is right now. From the trailer, they didn’t seems to promise as much as No Man Sky, which is billions of world, instead they now focus on a single proc-gen world. Not like it never done before(Valheim, Minecraft, No Man Sky, etc etc).
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