No multiplayer, nothing “essentially” about it
Maybe Civ VI can take my focus off Rimworld and Heroes of the Storm.
Oh yeah, and the new Pokemon game (not Go. That bored the crap out of me).
I have it on very good authority that Civ VI will be very good, particularly if you liked Civ V.
More immediately, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is out in fortnight or so too.
Remember though: Civ usually isn’t that great on release (at least that’s what I hear. I enjoyed vanilla Civ V).
That’s just silly folk wisdom. It might be good or it might not be good but I’m going to read reviews instead of relying on such “rules”. I enjoyed Civ V on release a lot more than I liked Civ4 with all expansions for example and given Civ VI isn’t going back to stacks of doom I have high hopes for it.
That’s usually (but not always) because the first iteration on a new numbered civ tends to focus on a main set of mechanics and leaves everything that was added in expansions in the previous version behind. This ends up feeling sparse compared to the meatier gameplay of the previous. It looks like this time, every mechanic in Civ V post DLC will be in here, and the new mechanics look pretty good - specifically the new politics system and the city districts system looks a lot deeper than in civ V.
Anyway, sorry for derailing! Back to NMS.
One of my fave reviewers on youtube: ACG says it’s a wait for a sale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ASL8WAd8kg
Surprisingly, yesterday I was hearing Giant Bomb personality Jeff Gerstman praising the game. Was not expecting that. Though he was only a few planets and a few hours in at the time. i want to see what he says next week.
There’s something that seems a little suspicious to me going on with metacritic. They have 28 or so reviews catalogued (with blurbs and links to them), but only two of them are actually scored. One has a 50, one a 70, and the rest are essentially pending to be awarded a score.
Usually metacritic adds the score as it adds the review, so having 20+ reviews that haven’t added their score to the metarating is something I haven’t seen before.
It makes me wonder if Sony paid them to deliberately wait on declaring/adding up the scores so that the game would be stuck in unscored (minimum 4 reviews) rather than posting a metacritic rating. Otherwise what’s the hold up?
Yeah, I’d have to agree. Once I started playing Civ V, I was done with Civ IV. It was and is a much, much better game. The expansions are mostly improvements, but it was fine out of the box.
The “Civ sucks when it comes out” thing is I think based on some actual facts:
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Civ III was advertised as being a multiplayer game, and then shortly before release that was removed and Firaxis was a bit sullen about admitting they’d promised it and then removed it. It had other bugs too, and, weirdly, lacked features the previously released “Alpha Centauri” had.
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Civ IV was extremely uncooperative with a stunningly high percentage of video cards on release, and was effectively unplayable for many consumers.
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In all three of the last releases, the game HAS been dramatically altered by subsequent upgrades. The perception of the consumer is therefore, naturally, that what they paid $60 for was not in fact a complete product. My recollection is that Civ V worked out of the box and was a fine game, so that’s great. But then I had to keep paying to get updates and civilizations. That lends to the perception it wasn’t finished at release, and people resent pay-to-play DLC.
This is relevant to No Man’s Sky because it seems like all games are like this now, and it can’t help their sales. Surely I’m not the only person who now doesn’t want to buy the game at its initial price because I’m convinced it’ll be unfinished.
I think the game has a fantastic base as it stands, which only promises to get better.
I think Sony getting involved might be good for their short term gains, but I don’t think it will be a good thing long term. I think Spore and No Man’s Sky is going to go hand in hand in a lot of people’s discussions about the game.
I think if it had come out on Early access, it would have still been a pretty big deal and the narrative around it would have been VERY different.
Sadly, no Steam pre-loading:
[QUOTE=official site]
Steam – The game will be available to download from Friday 6PM BST [UK]/1PM EST [US]/ 10AM PST [US] / 7PM CEST, please note: Pre-loads are unavailable.
[/quote]
From: http://www.no-mans-sky.com/support/ as of the time of posting.
I see this quite often. It’s because review copies were released late. Notice most of the unscored articles say they are not final reviews.
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When the game was released on PS4, the user scores were brigaded by 4channers who were morally offended that the game didn’t have PvP. I wonder if that has something to do with it?
A lot of the reviews I’m aware of are “Game In Progress”, so there’s no score attached because the reviewer hasn’t “finished” the game, or hasn’t seen enough of it to feel confident attaching a score to it yet.
Reviewers that did snag pre-release copies only got them a day or two before launch, and two days isn’t enough time to do a comprehensive review of something as ambitious as No Man’s Sky. Also bear in mind the PC version isn’t out yet and there were, to the best of my knowledge, no pre-release review copies of the PC version made available.
There’s also a trend in reviewing away from scores, given people’s tendencies to skip the review, go straight to the score, then onto the comments section to rage and call the reviewer names for giving the game the “wrong” score - especially given than 7.7 is now often taken to mean “a perfectly acceptable game” and only getting better from there, and anything less than that is seen as “bad” or “terrible” etc as the score lowers.
In theory, a 5 or 6 should be “OK but not great, unless you like this sort of thing in which case it might be worth it on sale” 7-8 should be “pretty good and definitely worth checking out” and 9-10 should be “Shut up and give the publisher your money”, with a anything below 5 being “Not worth it/avoid”.
As I think anyone with an interest in the gaming industry knows though, it doesn’t work like that, sadly.
As either an example or an addendum to this, when the Mac version came out, the system requirements were ludicrously high, comparable to the most system-intensive real-time games. I’m not even sure if they ever actually fixed that, or if they just waited for the state-of-the-art to catch up.
Videos of what’s at the center of the galaxy have been uploaded to YouTube.
Not that youtube comments are ever worthwhile, but the amount of rage vs blind fanboy defense on this one is pretty extreme. It’s either something you will defend to the death no matter the flaws, or the game raped your mother and killed your puppy.
I almost feel sorry for the guys trying to make a unique little indie game and then they got swept up by the Sony hype machine and expectations became crazy, but on the other hand, they can cry themselves into their scrooge mcduck vaults.
Played a bit on my lunch hour. The planet it put me on looks great but a bit weird. More on that later.
You start out by waking up from a crashed spaceship. Which, of course, is damaged and in need of repair so you have to go find the necessary elements (iron, zinc, and something that begins with “H”) to get off the planet. You have a scanner to help with finding elements but that is also damaged and in need of repair. Need carbon for that.
Here’s where the weirdness comes in: the elements do not look like what one would expect. Some, like small carbon deposits, resemble plants. Small iron deposits resemble oysters on the half shell; large ones look somewhat like dried out saguaro cacti. The one which starts with “H” bears a strong resemblance to 2001’s monoliths.
In addition to the scanner, you have a laser drill. This is not needed for the smallest deposits, those can be broken via melee attack. Some elements, such as iron, take more mining power than others. The drill will need to be refueled at some point; plutonium is best for this but others, like carbon, will do in a pinch.
I’m reading about lots of crashes and terrible frame rates no matter what the settings are at or hardware you are running.
Waiting 6 months may be the best bet for this game, but considering how long it has been in the media, it should have been better at launch.
Every planet’s element bearing items are different, so one person’s experiences will be different from other people’s.
Some other planet would have monoliths of gold?