http://www.no-mans-sky.com/about/
Went gold a few days back and is due for release early/mid August.
Looks mighty good and if they can make it work will be a huge accomplishment for a small team.
Anyone else looking to get it?
It really feels like it should be a multiplayer online game.
It is though, isn’t it?
It is in that you *may *encounter another player but given the size of the ‘universe’ it’s highly unlikely. AFAIK it’s a shared 'verse (a bit like Elite: Dangerous), as you discover and name planets or species they are loaded to the server and if another player passes through the same area they will see the name you gave it.
I thought, and I can’t point to where I picked this up, that there was some sort of endgame where ultimately everyone heads to the center of the galaxy and there would be more interaction there.
That is, I believe, the idea behind the game but you only have to go there if you really want to.
Sprung for the Steam pre-order back in May or so.
As I understand it, once you have discovered a planet you can share the coordinates so other people can visit.
Straight-forward question:
What do you do in this game?
I hear the hype and going through space sounds neat, but I wonder what you do.
Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there! That was fucking awesome!
It’s basically a survival game. You mine, gather resources, trade with aliens. Most planets have no atmosphere, so you have to watch your oxygen levels as you mine in the desolate landscape. Other planets have other hazards: too cold, too hot, voracious wildlife, etc.
If you’ve ever played Starbound (or Terraria), it sounds very similar to that. You need fuel (which you need to mine for) to get to the next star system. Ostensibly, the goal is to get to the center of the galaxy, but it gets progressively more dangerous the farther in you go. So you also have to mine for better materials to make better weapons, armor, etc.
First star to the right? First? Thou art surely a madman, birthed from the bowels of hell!!
It kind of sounds like Spore or Space Engineers or other games where you basically just explore around a mostly barren planet filled with wildlife. And because it’s just you and the odds of actually meeting another player are so slim, it’s more Moon or The Martian than Star Wars or Star Trek.
Actually it seems as though there will be plenty of aliens abound. They were precisely going for a star wars feel. The four pillars of their game, they say, are: exploration, trade, fighting and survival. With the unlikeliness of encountering other players, there must be plenty of other trade opportunities with the AI.
I’ve got a copy pre-ordered on Steam, btw. Can’t wait!
Fun fact: If you only spent 1 second on each planet, and it only took 1 second to travel to another one, it would take you a trillion years to visit all the planets in the game!
… which kind of makes me think $60 might a bit too steep for this indie game ;p
I think I’m going to wait until reviews/you people comment before I grab this.
I was hyped when I first heard about it…in September 2014. By now though, meh.
This game has reached ridiculous levels of hype. It’s made by a studio that’s only made some shitty movie tie in games, promising some vague but revolutionary gameplay, and it’s reached Spore levels of hype. I think there’s a very high chance this results in huge disappointment.
People seem to think the quadrillions of planets is a selling point, but that scares me off. If you have so many things, you aren’t likely to have real meaningful differences. Okay, so one planet has orange trees and short turtle creatures. The next planet has blue trees and tall turtle creatures. And no one is ever going to discover anything you’ve named or modified (and in fact anything you do to a planet disappears as soon as you leave).
I can’t remember the math but I remember someone ran the numbers using some generous estimate and said if X millions of people get the game and they each spend Y hundreds of hours playing and discover Z dozens of species/planets, the odds of anyone ever running across anyone else’s planet is something like 2%, once, in their entire playing time. Seems like they cranked the number of planets a few orders of magnitude too high thinking that bigger was better. But I’d rather have a smaller universe where I might actually interact with someone else, even indirectly, than a big empty one full of trillions of minor permutations where I’ll only ever see a millionth of a percent of it.
I don’t know why anyone preorders anything without a significant discount, but this game seems like an especially bad idea to preorder.
I agree. No Man’s Sky risks being the worst of both worlds: all the limitations of an MMO (no mods, an inertialess setting, shallow gameplay), without the benefit of actually having people around. The only way I think it would be worth playing is if everyone in your cluster heads to the same planet to start and then migrates from there.
Ever wonder why all the marketing saying “18 quintillion” and when it’s spelled out it’s some absurdly specific number? The number of planets is actually 2^64. It’s just saying that their procedural generation algorithm can take any unsigned 64-bit integer and make a planet from it, as well as saying that all 2^64 unique planet IDs can in theory be accessed in the game. This is really the same as the number of games of modern Microsoft Free Cell, or probably the number of unique Don’t Starve or Binding of Isaac seeds.
Everyone starts at the galactic rim, the real question is how they made the progression between that rim and the center of the universe. But focusing on “algorithms” and “18 quintillion” has really distracted the media from asking important questions about how they plan to keep the gameplay interesting and how many players they anticipate will reach the center.
E: This is one of those games that I’m getting because even if it fails, which it very well might, I want to be there when it does because it will be one hell of a conversation. I’m praying that regardless of the outcome, they do a postmortem.
Also, the “goal” is to head to the galactic center, the density of people increases as you near the center, drastically increasingly the probability of finding others. Still, I think the drop-in multiplayer was a mistake and has caused a lot of confusion. This game is not meant to be multiplayer. In fact, they said there’s absolutely no way to even know if the person or ship you passed was a human or an NPC. It’s kind of like a mix of the ghosts (not invading phantoms, the ghosts you see walking by now and then) in Dark Souls, and the other players in Journey. Sure, you CAN see them, but the game is essentially the same without other people. Journey benefits maybe a little more from them. There’s an offline mode where you don’t even need to connect to a central server (though planet and creature names obviously won’t be synced until you log in), other people don’t matter.
I have no idea why they even added the feature. That’s what makes me concerned, there seems to be no real purpose to it and my concern is they spent the development time on feature creep rather than polishing their core mechanics.