They also released a PS4 patch to enable 4K output on the PS4Pro. Surely VR has to be in the next patch? This game is such an obvious candidate for it.
And yes I also applaud them for the continuous patches and development.
So, I’ve had a bunch of hours with Pathfinder. Some observations (possibly spoilers if you haven’t read the release notes):
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They’ve continued the trend of making the game harder, mostly by slowing down progression. Blueprints are a LOT harder to come by now; all the stuff that dropped them give you a new currency (nanites) instead. You use these to buy blueprints from vendors, all of which have a limited supply. There are some fomerly-basic blueprints I’ve still never found. Multitools appear to be much rarer, too.
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Inventory management is even more tedious. They’ve added another bunch of elements to store, but with no corresponding increase in storage. The new planetary buggies (exocraft) have an inventory of their own, but so far as I can tell, there’s no way to put something from your inventory into it. The early game is still basically entirely “get enough inventory space to actually function in the world.”
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The perma-death option is a neat idea, but “Survival” setting is too hard to support it; most people would never get very far. I’d like to see a perma-death option for normal difficulty.
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Warp, base teleporter, and loading are all still incredibly long. First load (“Loading Shaders”) took almost six minutes for me, on a reasonably modern machine.
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You don’t need to start over unless you want to; they’ve done a much better job this time integrating the “new stuff” along separate trees from the “old stuff.”
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If you DO start over, they’ve dramatically improved the messages you get about the Atlas/Polo choices and paths early in the game, making it clearer what you’re supposed to be doing.
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The fixed a bunch of UI irritations (particularly “hold” rather than “press” in a bunch of places), and introduced a bunch of new ones (you can hold tab to skip the widescreen effect on notable events – sometimes – and by holding for basically as long as the event would have taken, anyway; hitting ESC now always takes you to “options” instead of “discoveries”, so you have to hit left arrow several times every time you enter the screen to get the the one you usually want.).
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There’s now a log telling you what the next thing you need for each “quest line” is.
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The buggies (exocraft) are fun, and make a lot of the problems of ground exploration less tedious. But the quest line to outfit them needs work; too many “some of this is out there – somewhere. Find it and bring it back to me.” They say you can scan for it, but so far as I can tell, they just mean “you can scan your local area as always, and maybe you’ll be lucky.”
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BUGS. Wow, is this release buggy. I’ve had more crash-to-desktops in a few hours than in all previous releases combined, usually when in or near the exocraft. The base-building is full of bugs, especially for multi-story bases: I’ve got a room I can only intermittently access at all; the “ceiling” that’s supposed to go away when you build a latter is sometimes there, sometimes not. I’ve had teleports just “fail” and leave me at my source location.
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You still can’t rotate, move, or remove a base segment or component after you’ve placed it, which means you’d better not make any mistakes.
I see the game is 40% off on Steam for the next 23 hours or so.
One problem I’ve run into, and I’ve seen several others voice this as well- Normal is too easy, Survival is too hard.
I’ve been kind of enjoying the game again, but (playing in Survival mode) I simply can’t stand the constant pirate attacks. Every time I leave a planet for more than thirty seconds, I get jumped by pirates… even when I don’t have anything in my ship worth stealing. I’m also extremely irritated by the fact that nice planets seem to always have sentinels that want to kill me on sight. As a result, if I land on a nice planet I end up running from sentinels all the time.
The end result of these two factors is that I don’t want to explore. I’m trying to find a mod that fixes this, 'cause as it is now I simply don’t enjoy the game.
It’s not enough to change that basic calculus, I don’t think, but the latest patch made Normal harder – not in the “you’ll die a lot” sense, but in the “you can’t become ultra-powerful in a day or so” sense. The much narrower funnel on blueprints dramatically changes the power curve of the game.
Development is still not dead. Of note:
A friend just showed this to me. I haven’t made a point of following NMS, but this took me completely by surprise. Credit where it’s due - the developers are continuing to work on deliverables long after their credibility train derailed.
Neither have I. Noticed Steam had an update scheduled so I clicked News to see what’s going on.
So, I played a bit of it on my ps4 this morning, after the update.
It’s messed a few things up - previously discovered planets appear to have vanished, and the base building parts of the game have become confused. Some people’s bases have been reset back to the initial single room, some people’s bases are hovering in the air or sunk underground (a common problem with a lot of pre-discovered and placed things - the terrain generation has changed but the position of the buildings hasn’t), and it seems to be universal that the base building questlines have all been reset and all the people recruited for your base have vanished (although, in my case at least, their stations are still there). The advice seems to be either hold off for a patch or, if you’re coming back to the game after a while away, start the game again.
Things do look different. The planets and animals look nicer, there’s some easing of inventory problems with ‘technology slots’ in your ship and suit purely for putting tech upgrades in. There are apparently missions and a storyline, but I haven’t seen any of this yet.
EDIT: Oh, and you can summon your ship to you now.
NMS is a much better game now. I already thought things were pretty good after the Pathfinder patch in March, but with Atlas Rising dropping last week, it is simply amazing now.
Yes, there are glitches with bases for players who decided to continue from games saved before the patch, as I did, but nothing too terrible. I resolved many issues by simply trashing my previous base and starting a new one on a different planet. Of course you can eliminate every issue by simply starting a new game.
The new storyline, in my opinion, was very well crafted and integrates well into the game, as opposed to feeling tacked on as it did when I played last year.
Portals are nothing less than phenomenal in their appearance and execution, albeit with more than a passing resemblance to the stargates in Stargate. I don’t even want to know how HG got away with that one.
Ship on ship combat (dogfighting) is more challenging now and a welcome improvement.
Something that caught me by surprise, which is really quite minor yet welcome, is there is now a compass in your ship’s HUD that indicates North and South and is very useful especially when flying around a planet.
I am not in love with the new ability to summon my ship now; seems to make things a little too convenient and less of a challenge.
Crashed shipwrecks now contain a random number of slots, as opposed to just +1 as before Atlas Rising. So if your current ship has 15 slots and you find a crashed ship, instead of 16 slots, it can have 24 slots, or 33, or 48, or any amount in-between.
Some craftable items are now obsolete and are labeled ‘Obsolete Item’ if they remain in your inventory from before the patch, and some resources and farmable plants have been renamed.
I believe there are fewer lush and paradise planets than before, and that’s probably a good thing.
The Galaxy Map has been completely overhauled and, among other things, now allows you to track where in the universe you’ve previously gone.
Coop play has a long way to go to be actually useful but I am still surprised with even the small amount of it there is as I didn’t expect multiplayer to be added at all… ever, and I was fine with that. Now that HG has stated that the current implementation is just the first step, I am actually looking forward to seeing it evolve.
Graphical depth of field has been added and is quite pretty, and overall graphics are better throughout.
To learn about the many, many other improvements to No Man’s Sky I haven’t mentioned, read the patch notes at http://www.no-mans-sky.com/
“Simply” he says.
I like my base, and the complete mess the update has made of it has pretty much ruined what is otherwise a pretty good update for me. This isn’t an Early Access title where updates can be expected to break save games occasionally.
How close is NMS now to the game that was promised? Is it worth the buy now?
I would say it is definitely worth buying now.
Although I was aware of the hype before the launch of the game in 2016, I didn’t follow it that closely. I judged the game on playability and in that regard it was just okay. I was very dismayed when someone reached the center of the galaxy within a day after the game’s release.
I didn’t own the game at this time but used someone else’s account who’d stopped playing. Things markedly improved with Foundation, and then again with the Pathfinder update, which is what brought me back to the game.
Elaborate base construction in Foundation and land based vehicles in Pathfinder were welcome additions, even if they didn’t make much sense in a space exploration game in my opinion. I used my imagination to incorporate them into a storyline that didn’t exist at the time.
Along with all the improvements, Atlas Rises weaves disparate components of gameplay into the storyline.
Is No Man’s Sky the greatest game ever created? No, not by a long shot. It’s not even the best space exploration game ever created, although I’d say it’s pretty darned close. Is it fun? Yes, yes it is.
I loved my base as well, and put a lot of time and effort into it. When Atlas Rises dropped and my base was floating more than ten feet above the ground, and instead of being on a lush planet, now it was in a radioactive Hell with constant storms, I was miffed as well but I had three choices: cry about it and shut the game down for good, trash my save and start again from scratch, or bulldoze my base and rebuild.
Initially, after creating a copy of my saved game, I started from scratch; I wanted to experience everything fresh. After a couple of hours, however, I missed all the resources I’d collected and stored, all the money I’d earned, my 48 slot ship and exosuit, and my 24 slot multitool, so I reloaded my save from before the update and, after progressing down the new storyline, rebuilt my base (at a certain point in the new storyline you need to have a base).
My advice? Get over it and rebuild. I understand your frustration, believe me, but hey, the game is not called No Man’s Bases. 
On the other hand, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was the headliner for a Humble Monthly within the next year.
I would be. The game is really good now, with more improvements and storyline additions on the horizon.
How’s the core gameplay, as opposed to storyline and content? The early reviews made it seem like it had more grinding than a bathhouse on Pride Day. The phrase: “a mile wide and an inch deep” kept coming back in that you could do the same shallow resource farming with limited inventory space in lots of different places with the novelty wearing off after 15-30 minutes. Is that still the case?
Is the game still grindy? Oh yeah, it can be. That stated, it is much less so now because of all the new content.
You grind, for the most part, only if you really want to but it is not absolutely necessary anymore, although if you want to make 10 million moneys (heh) an hour, you can do it but yeah, you’ll have to grind for that.
Every player has different expectations and reasons for playing a game. For me, the storyline and content is what appeals to me in No Man’s Sky, so I haven’t had to grind at all since the new update, whereas it was pretty much a necessity when the game launched last year.
Patch 1.32 is out with a bunch of fixes.
Yeah, it fixed my base completely, so I’m playing it again!