This is a sandbox game, I think that’s pretty clear. I don’t see people worried about the end game of minecraft or Space Engineers.
It’ll be mostly about the wonder of discovery. Eventually that will get old, but I expect that for me, that point is likely to be way past the time where I think my $60 were well spent.
It’s not the “endgame” I’m worried about, so much as the progression. In Minecraft there are a lot of little subgoals to accomplish, which all have reasonable clear steps. There’s some randomness in finding diamond, but if you want to upgrade to Diamond tools you know roughly how deep you need to go, what equipment you need, and so on.
Space Engineers is… I didn’t play that much of it, it’s similar but less polished (since it’s in earlier access).
The thing in NMS is that you can’t upgrade your ship, you have to trade for it. And I think you also have to trade for new suit upgrade crafting recipes. It’s not clear how well they’ve distributed all of these little milestones. One of the kisses of death for these types of games is how well distributed the milestones are. Because if you want to just make a nice pretty exploration game you can just make Gone Home, Proteus, Journey etc without mucking about with all of this procedural generation, NPC trading, and space combat, and even get some success for it on a far lower budget.
A bad content distribution in a game like this actively hurts the sense of exploration because it adds arbitrary, frustrating gates on the player’s ability to enjoy the experience. However, a good one can make the experience much more memorable and interesting. They haven’t really been given the opportunity to share how these things are distributed. We know things like “you may not have a resource you need on a planet so you may have to go to a completely different one that may not even be nearby to get it”, and that ships are randomly available for trade and can’t be upgraded. What we don’t know is how much effort they’ve put into making sure that you get ships and materials at appropriate intervals, and aren’t just mad because you haven’t found any silicon for 20 systems now. (This was a big problem in Starbound with its materials and pretty much killed a lot of interest in the game for a lot of people).
Seriously, I haven’t been this excited for a game since BioShock 2 back in 2010. Everything I’ve seen about NMS has me almost giddy with excitement to play it, though I will admit that I’m slightly nervous about how the developers will keep this infinite exploration dynamic interesting for, well, an infinite length of time.
That said, I don’t know about anybody else, but the idea of getting lost and enamored with a single planet for weeks at a time - never mind an infinite universe - has me monumentally excited.
I admit I am interested in NMS. It seems to fulfill what I’d hoped for from Eve Online but never really experienced. I signed up for Eve Online in January of 2004, when the game was in its infancy, with the idea of traveling to distant solar systems and exploring. I quickly found that there really isn’t much different or unique in one star system compared to any other, and you can’t land on planets in any case. Now that it is virtually impossible to travel outside empire space unless you are part of an alliance or large corporation, my interest has waned greatly, even with the absolutely beautiful graphics and immersive gameplay.
With NMS, I am hopeful to get what I really want in a game set in an expansive universe: real exploration. It is not that important to me that I may never encounter other players in my travels; I am a solo player at heart anyway, even in MMOs.
From what I have seen of NMS so far, Eve Online’s graphics are superior, but if NMS gives me even half of what I am expecting from an exploration perspective, I will forgive the visual shortcomings.
I haven’t known about NMS for long so I don’t have hype fatigue yet. I am concerned that a small development group have had their game hijacked by the Sony hype machine and Sony have been hyping far beyond what the developer can deliver. I’m worried that the delay in release date is because they’ve realized it has serious gameplay flaws and are desperately trying to save something. I hope I am wrong and it will be brilliant. I suspect the result will be something in the middle, which would be fine if it hadn’t been hyped.
What delay in the release date? Isn’t it still scheduled for August 9?
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No Man’s Sky? Her again?
It was originally scheduled for a June release but changed a few weeks prior.
I’m looking at this as more like Elite: Dangerous set in the Homeworld universe (an that’s how I’m going to be ‘roleplaying’ it. Separated from the Kushan Mothership, alone and pushing on, looking for clues to Hiigara.
I really like the 1970’s scifi book cover/Chris Foss/Homeworld vibe they are going for.
I’ll wait at least until next summer to pick it up unless the reviews are through the roof.
My computer can’t even play Fallout 4 for some reason.
I wonder how much (if any) of that had to do with the lawsuit from Britain.
Apparently the British TV network Sky sued them because they claimed to own the word ‘sky’ itself. Thankfully, the developer won and got to keep the right to use the game title.
That is some serious irony given the actual name of the game.
:smack:
It wasn’t mentioned in the press release but I’m sure it wouldn’t have helped.
Probably cost them a fortune in legal fees + the settlement. Kinda lame, Britain.
How interesting can that be? I mean once you view one patch of procedurally generated wilderness, desert or snow field, I imagine the rest all probably look pretty similar.
I dunno. I also find that to be super exciting. I’m the type of Civ player, who likes the building and exploration part and not a huge fan of the warfare part, so my exploration side is really psyched.
I don’t know, minecraft can look pretty awesome at times.
Sky TV is one of Rupert Murdoch’s satanic media outlets, which explains the abhorrent monopolistic behaviour a bit.
I still can’t decide whether to go PS4 or PC.
PS4:
Bigger screen
My home surround sound
Possible PS VR support in the future (I’m not going to buy a PC solution for a while)
Rumours of performance problems.
Sit on the sofa.
PC:
Probably much better performance
Have to sit at a desk
So just stream your PC to your TV via any of the 200 different ways you can do it. Steamlink is probably the easiest since the interface is designed to be used that way.