The impression they’re giving through their twitter account is that they’re basically completely overwhelmed by the response and can’t quite handle it in their current state.
They just yesterday more than doubled their staff size by adding a (comparatively) massive QA team. (Or, Sony made them do that, I don’t know. 
)
Why not have a ship as a base? Collect materials, bits of transporters you’ve destroyed, and gradually build a ship capable of interstellar travel, complete with crafting rooms, defense systems, a hangar for your planet exploration shuttle, etc etc.
From above:
I mean, how do they figure it’s “the majority of players”? It’s more players than it ought to be but I have no idea what proportion of players it is. What inside information do they have?
The monoliths I’ve only seen as Heridium, in every video I’ve seen and on every planet I’ve visited.
There are these giant lumps that appear, and those can be several different metals. But I am pretty sure there are no gold monoliths.
Edit: You know, I"m starting to think I maybe remember an Aluminum monolith, so maybe I’m all wrong about this.
Yeah the hold-the-mouse-button thing is supremely annoying, and even more so when I quit the game and keep on “holding down the button” on Windows and in browsers etc! :smack:
They better fix this up in a patch. Please I hope. Also, recentering the cursor when going to a new tab/screen/whatever–oh god why?!
There are Aluminium and Nickel monuments, but I think Gold and Emeril are only in the giant lumps.
Stupid question from a person who hasn’t had a console since the Atari 2600… 
I’ve got the PC version, and I can tell it’s still optimised for gamepads. Can I get and use any gamepad that’s compatible with Windows, like the XBone’s wireless? I’d assume so, but the game documentation is nonexistent, and I suppose this is a “you dummy” question anyway.
I’m enjoying it so far - it’s exactly what I thought it was going to be, I quite like walking simulator games, and there’s enormous potential for you to create your own story.
I’ll be interested to see what the expansions are like.
The hold the button thing is annoying in consoles as well. I’ve only become aware of it recently, The Witcher 3 maybe. What is the point of it? Is it to protect against accidental button presses? I think it should be gone from all games, not just PC games.
Call me cynical, but I can see a simple explanation for the host of rabid fanboys in online discussions.
The game is clearly unfinished on both the PS4 and the PC, although the PC seems to have got the rougher deal for now. Beyond crashing issues (which I haven’t experienced on the PS4 but there are a lot of people saying they’ve had to deal with) there’s things like the non-existent multiplayer and dodgy texture work on things like water that makes you feel that they decided on a date, probably pushed by Sony, slipped a bit but then decided to release no matter what. That’s the only explanation I can come up with to explain the huge game-changing day one patch.
I’m enjoying the PS4 version for now. I may pick the PC version up in a sale if they firstly sort it out and secondly if any interesting additions get added, but either the developers or the community.
But for now … I’m enjoying it but don’t really know why. And I have no idea how long that will last. It really is going to need some of the new features they have discussed, including adding in stuff that was discussed beforehand but never made it into the final product.
That’s the only reason I can think of. The Division does the same thing.
Yep. most games now a days, unless designed solely with mouse and keyboard in mind (for which there exists the Steam controller) support any gamepad that will connect to your PC.
Don’t leave us hanging!
Have you ever been angry when a really stupid movie comes out that’s been overhyped, and the reviews come out and say it’s bad and not what it promised to be and has all sorts of problems, but people ignore that and go see it anyway due to the hype?
What if it was up against other movies that had merit and were small projects with similar appeal but higher quality and those movies withered because all the money was going to the super hyped one?
I normally wouldn’t care very much, but it’s always sad to me to see when advertising/hype completely takes something over. We’d all like for things to be a meritocracy and not simply a battle of marketing budgets. If this game was a $20 game with 30,000 concurrent users on day one - like a lot of other niche indie games with fun ideas like, say, Starbound, Rimworld, Rust, 7 days to die, Don’t Starve, etc. it would’ve been fine.
But instead, Sony’s marketing department got ahold of it and suddenly this game that should be a $20 indie title is a full blown $60 title. And despite this it explodes anyway, having one of the biggest launches ever on steam by concurrent numbers, higher than a lot of legit AAA games with broad mass appeal and not that far behind behemoths like Grand Theft Auto 5.
And it’s not like it turned out to be great and exactly what everyone wanted. The user ratings are very poor. Features were flat out lied about. Hints that the final stages of the game at the center of the galaxy were going to be this amazing thing that no one should spoil were misleading. It’s a technical mess (not just on PC, the damn thing runs on like 50 FOV on PS4 to keep the frame rate acceptable) because despite having an AAA marketing budget and an AAA price and an AAA timeframe to develop the game, no one bothered to hire QA testers and put out AAA quality.
The defenders treat it like it’s a $20 niche indie game. Dismissing all the flaws by saying “what did you expect, it’s a 15 man development team!” leaving out the part about how a 15 man development team doesn’t get to charge $60 for games. They want Terraria/Don’t Starve/etc-level acceptance of limitations but GTA-5 level price and launch success.
And… I just don’t understand why people allowed themselves to be hoodwinked. The developer was suspiciously vague about pre-launch promises. The developer had no track record and yet everyone expected this mind-blowing game - at least with Spore we had a developer with a track record. We had Sony using heavy-handed tactics to suppress early footage and early reviews and even early discussion and not allow any reviews. When does that ever speak well to the quality of the product? And then we even had 3 days after the console launch to see that it wasn’t what it was cracked up to be and it was at least disappointing. And yet after that, we still had a whole lot of people who preordered and kept their preorders. Why?
What advantage did you get by preordering this game? You couldn’t even preload the thing. I truly don’t understand the preorder mentality. I understand kickstarter backing - if you don’t do it, the game may not be made at all. But whether or not you preordered this game had no impact on its development cycle at all. You received no advantages for doing so. No discount or anything. So why do it? Why not see if it’s actually any good before committing $60 to it?
It’s hard to believe anyone could be in a “gaming slump” that they needed to preorder a new game to cure. Aside from the fact that preordering a game doesn’t actually allow you to play it, there are thousands of amazing games out right now for PC. You could find something better, something cheaper, something that was a known quantity with reviews and gameplay footage and something you could actually play now.
It won’t be a disaster because they’ve already made tens of millions of dollars off of it. Who cares anymore? The marketing team delivered masterfully - which means it doesn’t matter that the development team didn’t.
We’ve got some procedurally generated reviews for the game which is not surprising. My friend dug around on metacritic and identified a pattern - there would be blocks of 20 or 30 user reviews in a row in which the account was created just a minute prior to posting that review, has no reviews except their positive 10/10 no man’s sky review. Incidentally, you get a lot of “Everyone who doesn’t like this just expected a stupid call of duty game!” meme a whole lot in the cult-like defense of the game.
So these awful user reviews (4.9 on metacritic, 56% on steam) are already with all of the fake astroturfed reviews mixed in. Steam reviews work like rottentomatoes (positive or negative), except since gaming journalism has set stupid expectations, we only use the 40-100 range and not the 0-100 range like movies do, so 56% is sort of like a rottentomatoes score of 12-20%.
The PC version has also been packet sniffed showing that no location data is sent back to servers to allow for multiplayer.
It is pretty clear now that if it was ever there it has been disabled.
Apparently, the PS4 retail copy in Europe had a sticker with a PEGI 7 or something like that rating… but if you peeled it off, out came a PEGI 13 rating with a disclaimer: “Online experience might vary”.
I thought it was pretty obvious, but to be clear, I suspect that a significant fraction of the rabid fanboys are paid for it. I mean, if your marketing consists mostly of buzz, then you pay for buzz.
Paying people in India and other low wage places to astroturf online hype/reviews/anything is remarkably cheap. A few thousand dollars can buy a ton of astroturfing.
But I think there’s lots of legit fanboyism going on too. People have hyped themselves up for years over this and invested a decent chunk of change - there’s a strong incentive to justify your behavior if you’re not introspective about it.
I just had a thought. Since they were delaying the game so long anyway, they should’ve delayed the game longer and made it a launch title with PSVR. It would’ve made a good VR title, the fact that it isn’t really what it’s cracked up to be would be masked by people experiencing it in a new way and having that make it feel revolutionary. VR would’ve made it seem closer to the revolutionary and unique experience it wanted to be.
I guess they’d have to make it run a whole lot better - VR demands higher frame rates and higher FOV than they use by quite a large margin.
I was mildly interested in NMS, despite having paid no attention to the hype. I saw a trailer recently and it seemed interesting, and it happened to be coming out soon. But it also seemed to be a 6 hour game. After 6 hours, you’re just doing the same thing over and over, with no purpose or goal. A friend who bought it on PS4 loves it, but basically confirmed that suspicion.
Still, I watched a stream, and I wanted to try it. I wanted to see how varied the planets actually were. So I bought it for PC. It crashes on startup 100% of the time (which, I now see from checking online, is very, very common). So I got a refund. I’ll wait six months, however long it takes to get discounted. This game isn’t worth $60. I’m glad the crashes broke the spell so I could get out of the purchase.
