Has anybody played on the PS4 yet? Should I be buying at release on my PC?
Trying to decide between this and Rimworld this week.
Update 1.03 increases the likelihood of encountering others’ planets.
I got the PS4 version as a gift, despite having preordered the Steam version. The game is fun, but you have to ignore all the stupid icons on the screen. There’s a huge temptation to just walk back to your ship and fly from waypoint to waypoint, but it sucks pretty much all the fun out of the game. I generally walk if something is under 5 minutes away, and fly otherwise, and I think it improves my enjoyment a lot.
Random thoughts:
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[li] The survival aspect is trivial. You can get the materials to refuel your life support and ship easily. I got to the point where I was literally selling all of my fuel so I had room for more important stuff because I knew I could find more just by walking for seconds on a random planet.[/li][li] The planets aren’t too varied w.r.t. biome. That is, you’re not going to get big volcanos on molten planets or anything. It’s all pretty much rolling hills and caves. That said, it produces some pretty decent terrain, it just looks like it’s the same landscape parameters for every planet type.[/li][li] Combat is awful. I haven’t tried ship combat yet, but enemies lack and animation or noises when they get hit, making you wonder if you’re actually doing anything.[/li][li] At the beginning before any upgrades, this game is Sim Inventory Manager Deluxe 2016. Just sell off those rare resources, there’s too many to hold onto.[/li][li] It becomes clear pretty quickly that the animals are, as Jim Sterling put it, “lego animals”. A bunch of prefab pieces smoothed out and perturbed by an algorithm and stuck together. They’re still pretty interesting to look at, as long as you accept that.[/li][li] Texture quality is abysmal on PS4, hopefully PC supports some high-def textures (or higher resolution texture generation since I assume that’s procedural).[/li][li] Speaking of “lego animals”, there’s a lot of prefab in this game. Once you’ve seen a couple bases and a space station, you’ve seen them all. The landscapes, caves, and animals are procedural. The “setpieces” like ruins and outposts your map waypoints lead you to much less so.[/li][/ul]
This game is best if you just want something to chill out to and walk around looking for resources. It’s not very deep, even compared to Minecraft or the current crop of popular (mostly early access) survival games on Steam. The crafting is almost all “+1 to <X>” stuff. However, it is very stylish and it does art and exploration better than all those games (except arguably Minecraft which has a ton of charm despite its low fidelity). I think PC will be the definitive version assuming they don’t totally botch that version, just so long as you can up the texture quality and crank up the draw distance.
Rimworld. They’re completely different games with a completely different feels to them. But I’m a huge proponent of Rimworld. It’s still in early access but immensely playable and the developer is very active with the community.
Yeah this jibes with what I’ve been seeing on streams… well, I guess I’ll be canceling my pre-order. Will definitely pick up once it’s a little cheaper and maybe when there’s some more content/variety/mods available 
If that’s the case, then there’s absolutely no reason for there to be so many planets. What’s the point of infinite planets if there’s no permanence? You could have gotten the same effect (lots and lots of planets with nothing on them and little likelihood of running into anybody else) with only a few million.
Permanence with that many planets would make coming across somebody else’s work very special, and could even create space tourism, provided there was a way to protect work. “Hey, on this particular planet at the ass end of the galaxy, somebody spent a long time building an awesome such and such.”
Either way, the first impressions have cooled my interest enough that I won’t be considering a purchase until more reviews roll in over the next few weeks.
Apparently two streamers tried to meet up on the same planet. They got to the same place but couldn’t see each other. The planets weren’t even synced up. One guy saw night and the other saw day. So it would appear that the promises even of the very limited multiplayer are not happening.
I saw that, and a lot of people are very upset about it too, if we were reading the same subreddit.
Funnily enough it doesn’t really worry me too much - I suspect it will get added in at some point anyway.
The way they described it is a sort of random local lobby system, where even if other people are around you only see each other if you happen to be in the same “lobby”. Of course, god knows if they even tested the functionality, it could be completely broken.
There’s no building in the game, the best you can do is make crude tunnels with grenades and mine minerals. The best you could do is make some Nazca Lines, and even that would be hard. They said they want to add bases in the next update they’re working on, but I don’t know why. This game is all about going somewhere else. Having a home base is pointless.
Makes me kind of happy actually. If I want to be griefed by some random idiot I happen to bump into I’ll keep playing* The Division*
No - I think Minecraft and Terraria have demonstrated that for some people, building a home base is the game. It would be good to have the option.
Well, yes. And in Minecraft, Terreria, Starbound, and Space Engineers I build elaborate home bases with elaborate showy decorations, unnecessary greenhouses, animal pastures, and lava waterfalls. No Man’s Sky is very different from those games, the entire way the game and its reward system is structured is antithetical to having a singular place to return to.
I disagree; at least in my case. I like the idea of setting up a home base on some interesting world I’d discovered - Ubaltopia, on the Planet Galena.
So this article from a couple weeks ago says that large enough changes will be saved to the game’s servers. That gives me a certain amount of hope, though the info is vague.
Being very unlikely to meet another player because of the vastness of the galaxy is a far, far different thing than not being able to meet another player at all regardless how hard one tries. Limited multiplayer my ass. Uploading information about a discovery or named item into a database is not multiplayer, especially if no one can other than you can ever experience it.
With each new piece of information that comes out about the game, it seems less and less likely I will bother, which is disappointing as i have been looking forward to NMS for quite some time now.
I’m right on the fence of buying this. For $30 I would have already bought it. But I suspect as awesome as the planets and exploration will be at first, the gameplay will get old quick.
I’m trying not to see/read too many spoilers, but I would like to know how multiplayer will be.
There’s essentially no multiplayer. It ranges somewhere between they lied and there’s no multiplayer at all, or you might have a 1% chance of encounter another human being but likely not recognizing them form every hundred hours of gameplay.
Well, we’ve still got Civ VI guys, am I right?!
This was the only game that could possibly distract me from my laserlike focus on Civ VI.
I was going to hold off anyway; a game of this ambition will be buggier than an anthill, so may as well wait six to eight months and play the version that works, at which point hopefully it’ll also have more features.