"No Man’s Sky" Gets Basic Multiplayer a Year after Debut

Megalith

Megalith

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Hey, remember No Man’s Sky? While many have already abandoned it, developer Hello Games is still making an honest effort at improving the reputation of its action-adventure survival title: the latest update, Atlas Rises, introduces a variety of new features that include an overhauled storyline, portals, a new procedural mission system, trade improvements, and system economies. Joint exploration also brings the beginnings of real-time multiplayer to the title, allowing 16 players to see visual representations of one another within the game.
 
I enjoy this type of game, but this one doesn't really bring anything new to the table, and it doesn't excel at any particular feature.

The soundtrack is about all it has. (I do like 65daysofstatic!)
 
Too bad not all developers support their game, even if it's poorly rated, like Hello Games. I'm sure most would've dumped it without DLC.

*cough* Mass Effect *cough*
 
Oh look, it almost resembles a game now instead of a glorified tech demo.

Although I'm still confused as to why they're adding things like bases and such in a game where the focus seems to be to continue traveling... doesn't make any sense. Or is it just going to be minecraft in space now? Also, that's not multiplayer, that's a glorified skype screen sharing call while playing minecraft.
 
Too late, crap game, I returned it two weeks after buying it and Steam actually allowed it - Mind you, I'd only played it around two hours.
 
Merc1138 said:
Although I'm still confused as to why they're adding things like bases and such in a game where the focus seems to be to continue traveling... doesn't make any sense.
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You can plunk your base down, go explore then head to a space station and teleport to and from your base. You can continue exploring while having a place to store all your crap (though it would be nice be able to store more in the storage boxes).
 
I really considered trying this game. Then heard it was buggy and needed some updates. This sounds promising now.
 
What I didn't get from the reviews was that you were supposedly the first person to find a planet but then you would find artefacts and bases on the planet. Wut?

It's the little details.

It was £15 on Steam this weekend but I didn't bite.
 
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I bought this on release for PC, and put about 200 hours into it after installing all my mods.

Then a patch last year broke all of my mods and it was a pain to even get a few of them working again.

I can't bring myself to play it now. :/
 
I actually really liked this game when it first came out. They certainly oversold it but it was a totally chill exploration game. I did find it a little odd how you were going to alien planets as an explorer and then naming all the shit that was there when there were alien outposts on the planet. It kind of seemed like I was discovering someone's backyard and arbitrarily changing the names on the things they had already given names to.

I stopped playing when my save game inexplicably stopped working and the "cloud save" got over-written with a new save file. Which kind of defeats the purpose of the cloud save I would say. Still, I'm glad the developers haven't given up on this.
 
Every planet was the same with samey environments and samey objectives and samey materials and samey gameplay and samey travel and a tiny inventory. The update supposedly makes better environments but its still all a lie.
 
All of this should have been in the original launch. That would have made it worth the $60 ....maybe
 
daglesj said:
What I didn't get from the reviews was that you were supposedly the first person to find a planet but then you would find artefacts and bases on the planet. Wut?

It's the little details.

It was £15 on Steam this weekend but I didn't bite.
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Maybe they meant the first human player to find the planet? I've never played but what i understand if you go to planets even if they inhabited you discovered them. So if someone else playing happened to come across this which was like 1 in a billion they would know who found the planet. That what i thought the naming of planets was about. Maybe i'm wrong?
 
SomeoneElse said:
Maybe they meant the first human player to find the planet? I've never played but what i understand if you go to planets even if they inhabited you discovered them. So if someone else playing happened to come across this which was like 1 in a billion they would know who found the planet. That what i thought the naming of planets was about. Maybe i'm wrong?
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Yeah maybe but would it have hurt to have some totally 'untouched' planets that no sentient life had ever visited? But yeah, who knows.
 
I think it is worth giving a try but I read in the comments on Steam that the AMD card support was terrible. Anyone know if this is still an issue?
 
lilbabycat said:
Every planet was the same with samey environments and samey objectives and samey materials and samey gameplay and samey travel and a tiny inventory. The update supposedly makes better environments but its still all a lie.
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While most of the planets did seem largely the same there were plenty of planets that had wildly different stuff from all the samey same ones. And as for inventory, that was part of the game: to manage and find the modules to expand it through exploring. I eventually maxed my inventory out on both myself and my ship. Without that there wasn't much reason to go anywhere beyond seeing what was over the next hill. Which was usually just another hill. Still, I found it to be a very chill almost meditative experience. What they're patching into it now makes it an actual game.
 
I just bought it the other day for $22. The game is deep.... not sure how much I like it yet, but I only have a couple hours in and just got off the first planet. But I know I've wasted more money on worse games.
 
Dr. Righteous said:
I think it is worth giving a try but I read in the comments on Steam that the AMD card support was terrible. Anyone know if this is still an issue?
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Im using a AMD Ryzen 5 1600 with a Radeon HD 7950 running just about everything on Ultra with no problems...

I did buy the game after it hit 23.99 on steam.
I will be buying my wife a copy as well when we get her steam account set up.
The game is worth it.
If you like Elite Dangerous then No Man's sky is a brighter version of that, less in the way of missions and more in the way of exploration.
I describe the game as minecraft in space...
Its pretty fun and with them adding bases, vehicles, and now fixing the flight mechanics a bit an adding a new storyline and improvements to many mechanics it feels more like what I expected when it was released...
 
Kinda thought that this would be the thread where everyone jumped in to hate the game (some more without actually playing it.) Meanwhile, over in the "official" thread, we've actually got old players enjoying new updates, new players trying it out and enjoying it so far, and some others that are about to. Looks like Steam reviews are also shifting to positive from negative. Other gaming sites are also giving it a more positive spin. As mentioned above not a lot of game companies support their games like this. Hey, if you want to hate it, go for it, but the amount of uninformed drivel in this thread... actually, it's about what I expected... :p
 
w4ffles said:
Too little, too late. Their reputation is forever tarnished.
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Right. Because... you know them personally, and they ran over your dog right? I mean, yeah, they screwed up but I think it was only 60% their fault in the first place, a dev shouldn't be allowed to perform PR duties, and imposing a release date on an indie studio is asinine anyway. So, you could jump on the bandwagon and spew hate, or try it out for 30% price in a 99% fixed state after they spent a full year fixing everything that was wrong with it, and maybe surprise yourself.

I don't care THAT much, but after enjoying it myself, it just seems a shame that people can't get over the bullshit, and let the game stand on its own. If you play it and still don't like it, then cool.

If you like space exploration games, then you should really like this. If you don't like them, then maybe it won't change your mind completely. It just has so much going for it.

Oh well. That's my thoughts on it. I don't expect to change anything, but as much as I enjoy it, (especially now) I'm just a bit enthusiastic to see someone else experience something like what I have.

Edit: Sorry for the harsh opening.. :D
 
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I have 15 hours in, and their is definitely some interesting stuff there. They do things like force you to work your butt off to learn alien languages, which is something a lot of other games might benefit from. Technically doing so is kind of just grindy, but it is a slow paced game so grindy is a lot of what it is about. You build up to being ultra powerful (at which point I don't think you actually still are that powerful), you don't just magically become so.

Even when you do make it pretty far you still have to work at things a bit. There isn't really a magical way to just have enough of everything like in many other games. For instance, you can have all the money in the world, but you still have to spend time gathering enough zinc (through exploration and purchasing what you find from other explorers) to explore heavily radiated planets effectively. Gathering the resources to travel considerable distances by warp will always be a challenge.

That said, it is early and we will see if it holds my interest all that much longer. You never know.
 
velusip said:
I enjoy this type of game, but this one doesn't really bring anything new to the table, and it doesn't excel at any particular feature.
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JENNIFER LAWRENCE THUMBS UP.gif


I'd love for you to tell me the other games with prog gen variations of this nature and this scale of exploration. Don't say that old ass 90s game lol.
Agreed on soundtrack though, often-proc gen audio FTW.
 
Dr. Righteous said:
I think it is worth giving a try but I read in the comments on Steam that the AMD card support was terrible. Anyone know if this is still an issue?
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Many people I played with in early days had the opposite issue, some AMD cards (79x0/2x0 etc) were actually better supported early on, remember it was a PC game that they had to adapt to the AMD consoles...
 
yashmack said:
Im using a AMD Ryzen 5 1600 with a Radeon HD 7950 running just about everything on Ultra with no problems...

I did buy the game after it hit 23.99 on steam.
I will be buying my wife a copy as well when we get her steam account set up.
The game is worth it.
If you like Elite Dangerous then No Man's sky is a brighter version of that, less in the way of missions and more in the way of exploration.
I describe the game as minecraft in space...
Its pretty fun and with them adding bases, vehicles, and now fixing the flight mechanics a bit an adding a new storyline and improvements to many mechanics it feels more like what I expected when it was released...
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Yeah I decided it was worth a look so I grabbed it on the Steam sale.
I installed the game and chose the basic mission. I watched the "wake up" scene with the sparking and smoke from the ship.
I then decided to check out what graphic tweaks were available. I turned motion blur off and increased textures from med to high. You have to restart the game so I did.
When I get back to the wakeup scene all the terrain textures are flat, low res. I restarted again, same issue. Now the game looks like crap..........


UPDATE:
After some reading on the issues with AMD card support I found it is poor at best.
There several .cfg file settings tweaks but none fix the issues 100% for everyone. The main tweak they suggest will cause the game to crash when you travel another planet. Great fix huh?? I reset the game to default graphics settings and restarted; textures did not return. I'm done with it, not wasting my time! So it is true what I read that AMD support is a joke in this game. :(
I put it to get my money back.
 
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N4CR said:
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I'd love for you to tell me the other games with prog gen variations of this nature and this scale of exploration. Don't say that old ass 90s game lol.
Agreed on soundtrack though, often-proc gen audio FTW.
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Snark on my internet? ;)

While some similar games don't generate entire galaxies, I would argue that level of scale is not an important feature for the genre. I mean, there are other games with just as many features as No Man's Sky, but generating a point cloud clamped to resemble a galaxy and some planet feature algorithms may project a kind of simulated scale, but is it important? (Also , what old-ass 90s game? Pioneer?)

For example:

* Both Rodina and Astroneer put emphasis on small survival challenges in a huge world. Rodina isn't pretty, but is really fun and has similar features to No Man's Sky. Astroneer isn't infinite, but excels at small challenges on the ground and terrain manipulation.
* Empyrion - Galactic Survival and Rebel Galaxy are similar to No Man's Sky in many ways with less proc-gen and more balance and polish. Story and NPCs, for example.
* Elite:Dangerous is more of an arena sim than anything else (which it does extremely well), but as a throw-in, it also has the entire Milky Way Galaxy and definitely the best looking proc gen game out there right now. Avorion and Everspace are similarly more combat oriented with less proc gen, but still related.
* Space Engineers and Starmade are a little more shipbuilding oriented than anything else, but they still fit the genre. Clearly inspired by games like Minecraft. It's worth mentioning that Space Engineers is currently a terrible game, lol.
* I have to include Pulsar: Lost Colony here. It's straying away from the genre a bit, but at least multiplayer was the focal point from the beginning. It's also one of the better games in the genre right now and it's not even officially released.
 
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