I played it for the very first time a few months ago and honestly became obsessed with it for a few weeks. If the game looks like something you would be into then it's absolutely worth $25.
That was my experience too. A few weeks of "This is cool" then it became boring and repetitive; all the planets and star systems are basically the same
Buy it because it's a fun game. It really is. I've got 300 hours in and will probably start a new play-through with this update.
I was a skeptic too, and say what you will, but Hello Games has pushed a huge amount of content out for the game without ever having yet charged for an update or DLC. No other company I know would have done that.
Right?? I got 15 games from the SSS and have only been playing the shit out of space station 14 which is totally free. I bought chivalry 2 yesterday because I saw a YouTube short and went on to find that their model and monetization is really principled. I played the tutorial and went back to SS14. It's good even. I'm just obsessed elsewhere and am happy to give the devs that money.
I tried to play it on VR about 3 years ago and got stuck in the tutorial looking for an engine part on another part of the starting planet, I think the map was glitched. Did they fix that?
They've added so much since launch. Entirely new systems from base and ship building to full questlines. The new update improved the world generation and hoo boy is it pretty. I will say the amount of pollen on some the planets is melting my GPU.
I'm having a blast just traveling around looking at stuff in VR in this game. After about 25 hours I still have no idea what the actual gameplay is supposed to be.
It's focused on exploration with combat, base building, and trading being important secondary factors. It's not everyone's cup of tea for sure, but it is the best game available at what it does. The immense expanse of the universe(s) is front and center in the experience.
Checking it out in VR is on my gaming bucket list, as it's already amazing on just a regular screen.
I'd personally put quotes in combat. Haven't checked this latest update yet, but combat has always been a complete letdown, especially on foot. Your character starts putting down your weapon if you spend 1 second without firing. Once the animation starts, it will add considerable lag between your click/button press and it actually firing, which can make you miss shots very often during fights. Beating those orange drones never feel like any sort of challenge, just an annoying chore, especially when the repair ones start healing your target from very far away
Space combat is fine, but nothing to write home about. It's all about dogfights among small craft, which is much better than doing anything on foot. Freighters and corvettes exist solely as stationary space rocks with maybe some cargo you can blow up to steal.
I wouldn't say trading is even a secondary factor, much less important in any manner. It's just a crutch for players that don't accidentally stumble on an easy way to get boatloads of credits. Getting nanites can be a much bigger chore (I've set up a macro to turn in food in the Anomaly for nanites, since I was playing on permadeath, so mold->nanites wasn't feasible), quicksilver is even worse. A good chunk of my playtime was setting up active indium mining farms and uploading them in the hopes someone else could use the money, back before the price was nerfed down hard.
it is the best game available at what it does
Only at the "infinite* planets, infinite* universe" thing and seamless space to planet transition. It's not the best at ground combat, space combat, base building, ship building/customization, trading, crafting, storytelling, being a space pirate, space exploration, ground exploration... Of course, no other game offers all of these things in a single package, at least not that I'm aware of, but I can name some games that do some of those things better than NMS
Every time I've opened No Man's Sky, I always get excited to explore in the game. Sadly, always after playing a couple hours, I get bored because the gameplay loop isn't as fun as the wonder you get when you first open the game.
Everyone says that it's got quests now, it's got bases now, planets are more diverse but the depth of these are extremely shallow. So, for me, the game still has not been redeemed from when I bought the game on release.
It's $30 on Xbox right now. I've never seen it lower. Also, at least on Xbox, GOTY edition is meaningless. The content is all free updates to the base game.
Five or six years ago I used to be able to get 30 fps on low graphics with one or two mods to reduce the load on the GPU. Now I can't even break 15 FPS without lowering the resolution to unusable levels. What gives? Same setup and everything.
Doesn't it only go up to 4 players or something? What a weird limit for such a large game. I guess the devs just weren't skilled enough to raise it any higher.
"Doesn't it only go up to 4 players or something?"
That was the max number of players who could play together for something like 3 update cycles, and that was years ago. Everyone was still technically in the same shared universe, you just couldn't actually co-op with more than that... but, again, that's outdated. Not sure what the limit is now, if there even is one - it's a more seamless and behind-the-scenes load-balancing deal now.
Games were over hyped, released buggy, and lacking a ton of features long before no mans sky, nms was just one of the most over hyped - it's also by far the biggest redemption since it now has significantly more content than was ever promised at launch, and all of it has come free instead of in a ton of dlc's or with monetization
Is it really redeeming to spend so many years and resources on a game that still isn't very good at all. They've basically spent two full development cycles on one mediocre game.
Oh boy, there's missing the bus and then there's this ☝️
If you were to rank everyone to blame for the state of games at release these days, there are so many people that come before Sean Murray. First and foremost, is YOU. Not necessarily you or even only you, but the consumer. I haven't preordered a game since standing in line at GameStop for Halo fucking 2. It was immediately obvious how stupid that was back then, and it makes nearly no sense these days. Some people want to support a dev and that's great, but others just slap their money down on a preorder for a digital release from some soon to be defunct EA studio. You created a precedent for games to be sold before they are even made.
Which brings me to number two, the studio conglomerates like EA, predatory confidence games like console exclusivity, and general anti-consumer practices. Hell, capitalism itself incentivises every studio to make their own store, lock every asset behind a paywall, and make the game progression as needlessly grindy and time-consuming as possible.
You think Sean Murray masterminded the debacle himself? Watch his videos from during that time. He is incredibly awkward because he is a dev. He's not a salesman or a marketing director. What dev do you know that doesn't dream about what their game could be? And sure, the debacle is ultimately Sean's responsibility, but he has gone above and beyond to make up for it. To blame him for "games these days" that fail to do that in any meaningful way is just so transparently ignorant.