Full cooperative multiplayer coming in two months!
Sean Murray has been giving some interviews as the NEXT update gets ready to release. It’s got some interesting stuff about the time period directly after the launch and sheds a little light on why Murray went dark.
Having read Jon Ronson’s excellent (all his books are excellent) So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which is about public shaming in the age of the internet, his radio silence feels understandable even if his exaggerations to press were not reasonable.
Looks like it’s 30 Bucks right now on Steam. I might finally go for it. Or maybe I won’t.
$25 on Green Man Gaming.
After reading about this update, I’ve been putting serious thought into picking it up.
Doo eeet!!!
There are deadly aliens on certain planets in the game now that travel in packs, attack on site, and look like a cross between a human-sized scorpion and the monsters from the movie Pitch Black with razor sharp teeth and five eyes. Scary as bloody Hell.
I am still trying to get my bearings as so much of the game has changed. You can customize your character to look like any race in the game now, in addition to the ability to customize the look and colors in your exosuit. You can now own a fleet of frigates that you can send on missions. If you had a base before the update it will probably be borked when you log in again, that is if you can find it at all; there’s a way to restore your base in such cases.
As with the Atlas Rises update, all the star systems and their planets have been regenerated, so your base may not be where you left it. After I logged today, I found my freighter half buried underground on a planet with its bow sticking up out of the ground, even though I left it orbiting a different planet before the update…
I like the new third-person view option, and it is easy to switch back and forth between it and first person. For the first time, you can see the ship you’re flying without going into photo mode, great for watching your exotic ship (if you have one) in motion.
The rings of ringed planets contain mineable materials, which is more than I was expecting.
I am happy to say that this game is now better than what was expected at launch 2 years ago. There is so much now, and the universe is much more dynamic than before.
The one downside I see so far is because of the new multiplayer functionality, other players can grief you, but there are ways to limit it.
Uh, how do you do that? I tried the mouse wheel, “V” (just because it’s common), various modifier keys, and looked through the controls. I was unable to figure out how to get into first person view on the PC. (There are a bunch of sites/videos showing how to do it on PS4/XBox, but those instructions don’t seem to map to anything PC-ish.)
X key, then scroll to Utilities (the white gear icon), then the F key, then scroll to Toggle Camera View, then F key to switch.
If you want to switch the view of your character, follow the instructions while outside of your ship. If you want to switch the view of your ship, follow the instructions while sitting in your ship.
On Steam, the overall score for the game has ticked up to “mixed” from “mostly negative” because of the recent reviews. Unbelievable turnaround.
I’m picking up a copy.
Good deal and, although I thought I’d never say this about No Man’s Sky, watch your six.
Well I picked it up. And I have played it a lot so far, and I suck, it seems. Because I am crap at navigating around the planet. I really need a rover :).
I’m playing in survival mode and it’s pretty tough. I’ve just built my hyperdrive and now need to get antimatter.
The constant recharging of life support is kind of grating, but I imagine I’ll get more efficient systems as time goes on. The game is definitely pretty.
The challenge of survival gets easier as you make progress in the game, to the point when you have so upgraded your systems that you don’t really have to think about it anymore.
There are 3 land exocraft, with the smallest being the most fun by far, not to mention the fastest. A downside is its storage capacity is the smallest so it doesn’t hold much. Also, you cannot equip it with all the technology available for it because of its limited technology slots, so you have to choose wisely.
With all the updates and multiple save slots, I decided to start a new game.
Dunno if I can find my base again in the first save. Never got very far with it, anyway.
I’ve started a new save on my ps4
First impressions - it looks better, and the aliens look better than before. There’s planetary rings you can see from the planet’s surface, space itself looks better and there’s a notable difference of planet’s surface from space to indicate what type of biome you might find when you land.
Early inventory management is as annoying as I remember it being, although all the stuff has changed, and there’s a new Refiner machine (which you can pick up and set down as you need to) to compress stuff down, which it seems you need to do to fair amount of raw materials to use them in crafting recipes. It’s an extra step, and may get more annoying as time goes on, but it’s not too bad so far.
Drop Pods (which give exo-suit upgrade slots) now require “fixing” to work, by the addition of various crafting mats much like the old opening of damaged machinery did (and does), but they now don’t need money to use. I have only found one, and I don’t know if they all require the same things, but the one I have needs anitmatter to fix, so it may be while before I get that up and running.
Base building is very different. Instead of the rigid block system, there’s now walls and floors and ceilings that you can put together to make your own places, but the old circular rooms and corridors are still available. You have to search for buried treasure pods to get the blueprints for these, but I haven’t had much trouble finding those. The other notable change is that you can now build a base where you like, and have different bases on different planets, and connect them all with teleporters. I haven’t done that yet (I have built a shed), but it’s looking like a much better system than before.
The Visor is now more useful than scanning, and you can set a tag on an item of interest so you don’t lose it, which has been more useful than I would have thought.
Overall, the early game is pretty good, certainly better than at launch. It’s a bit annoying coming back, and I know people with current saves are a bit miffed that they’ve had all the crafting stuff changed underneath them (seriously, it’s all different - no more plutonium, for instance) but hopefully this will be the last time they have to do that.
I’ve found four; one needed cobalt. Which I actually had.
Don’t remember what the other three needed.
Have any of y’all played Subnautica? I’m a huge fan of that; would I likely enjoy No Man’s Sky?
I think that may be more valuable end-game, when you’ve got all the elaborate components (the one I found had four or five different parts that needed repairing, some of which required tech I’d never heard of yet). In the meantime, you can still buy upgrades for credits – there’s one at every space station, behind the guy who sells suit tech blueprints.
(You can also upgrade multitools the same way–next booth over–except that there’s a bug with the desk placement that usually prevents you from actually interacting with the tool/gun).
In general, the game is much deeper, and there’s just plain a lot more to do in the early game (a lot of stuff like freighter ownership that used to be really late-game has been front-loaded and made more complex: you can have a fleet and have it run expeditions for you “in the background”, for example).
But this comes at the cost of a LOT of bugs. I’ve had primary mission path missions that I can’t complete (the mission “markers” just terminate at a random point in space), and almost all of the “side quests” are broken in ways ranging from subtle to large – the “collect an element” ones will ask for a different, random element when you actually go to turn them in (although the quest does finish); the “repair the frigate” quest gives me damaged components that aren’t even actually on the ship (and there’s nothing at the marker when you get there); most of the random side quests don’t have a description, just something like NPC_SEARCH_MISSION_TAG; deleting bases doesn’t seem to delete them permenantly; the base computer doesn’t acknowledge some of the later “new archives are available” missions, blocking further progress, etc. etc.
I’m hoping there’s a patch imminent. It’s not quite unplayable, but I’ve been forced to restart the game because of blocking main quest bugs twice now, and that’s not tenable once you get into the dozens-of-hours levels.
They’re often compared, and they’re both exploration-based. The actual storyline is much less important in NMS, and NMS is of course scoped much larger and is considerably slower-paced, but yeah, if you liked Subnautica, you’d probably like it.