FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
73% Positive
Analyzed from 8114 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#game#same#nms#feel#different#more#games#don#space#still
Discussion (159 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game
https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowl...
Compare it to even our own solar system where even so much as a new high-res photo of the hexagon storm on Saturn comes with stunning new and specific detail, or the "heart" on Pluto, we're practically ambushed with novel configurations of atmospheric dynamics and geology. It's frustratingly rare for games to truly activate that feeling of wonder.
I think NMS is still an unbeatable deal for what it is as a game but it's a frustrating near miss flyby of what I think people want a true space exploration game to feel like.
It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.
As an example in No Man's Sky the player immediately starts with a jetpack. It makes it so the terrain is approached the same way every time: you just jetpack over it. Very rarely something is tall enough to require you to walk around.
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a positive counter example. You have stamina so you're constantly thinking about the height of cliff faces, you can glide so you're thinking about height points and straight lines through the world, cliff faces cannot be climbed in rain so you think about the weather, slopes can be slid down on a shield, etc. There are a bunch of systems that may you think about the topology of the terrain, so even just varying the height map becomes interesting.
Similarly in No Man's Sky there are different resources but they work the same way on each planet and the player interacts with them pretty much the same way everywhere.
When I say elements should be "understandable" what I mean is that a trap, which Dwarf Fortress falls into, is to add a vast simulation which the player feels they can never really grasp. Simulations should not be a black box because then they begin to feel like a random number generator.
The aim shouldn't be to make an "infinite" game but to make a very interesting system for the player to slowly understand and master. The developer shouldn't just add stuff, but they should think about the long journey (and eventual mastery) a player might take as they spend significant time with the systems.
Spelunky uses handcrafted chunks that are connected together like a puzzle. Each generation feels interesting because each chunk is interesting and they are just strung together into a unique maze.
Terraria does a similar thing, where all the things that matter are hand-crafted. Bosses, items, layer details, progression. The map and cave system is generated but the caves tend to string together hand-crafted experiences and hand-crafted monsters. Many areas are generated, but in a unique style for variety. And there was still a fixed progression in the background (ore and boss progression). I think its in a big contrast to a similar game like Starbound, where all the weapons and creatures and maps were procgen at first, and it felt very '10000 bowls of oatmeal'. Terraria vs Starbound is the most like-for-like comparison I've seen for "procgen done right vs wrong"
1) is the really hard part, I think: it's a challenge to come up with enough meaningful variations that also work from a gameplay point of view.
The fanboy started saying how they could have endless different levels in Destiny 2... which is absurdly off-base since the entire game is just running through the same 9 sandboxes and 12 raids over and over and over again
He then went on to talk about AI creating an album as perfect as OK Computer on-demand, which was gently putdown by Kirk (who is an exceptional musician but also chill enough to suffer fools)
> Morty: it's boring. crank up the realism slider to max
> Rick: why does it get even more empty? Wait, I got it... because the universe is empty.
At the end, I think there is little point in simulating the vastness of the universe in a video game (even just a fraction of it).
It's a sandbox game yet when it comes to its "space" premise everything is thrown out the window. Dogfights carry no difficulty or skill. Flying around a system is pretty much pointless other than to stumble upon quests (100% RNG). Most of the fun you'll get at planet surface.
Wildlife for example you can train as pets, mounts or milk/harvest.
Once you get access to the Space anomaly the game opens up more and if you are social you will find outposts, pet arenas, race tracks and dog fighting/pvp zones. Ship building and freighters.
The latest update appears to allow groups to control areas of space.
All games eventually get boring but there is plenty in now.
The game is also too unrealistic for me: the planets are too close, you shoot asteroids just like you could 47 years ago, you can't dig very deep at all, your ship follow you wherever you jump to.
The trailer was beautiful, the actual game is really nice for a short while, but it's too simplistic and repetitive.
And maybe it has, but the first 60 minutes of the game still feel like enough of a slog that I have yet to get to any of the good stuff.
Space operas are closer to fantasy than hard science fiction: they are about extraordinary people and their extraordinary interactions, you aren't supposed to think hard about the physics.
Procedural generation, on the other hand, is all about emergent behavior, which is closer to hard science fiction: tweak the rules and see what happens. You have to build some deep core physics that are robust, make all the other systems interact in sensible ways over a wide range of conditions, and not worry when balance goes completely off the rails in some cases (in fact, that's the fun part).
No man's sky is a space opera. You could imagine it being hard science fiction: digging into the ground could be deadly (as opposed to a reliable shelter), water / atmosphere mechanics could change (as opposed to just... water and air), gravity could have a much greater range, resource concentrations could vary more, etc. You'd need some mechanics updates to avoid making this frustrating, but maybe not so many as you need to keep the space-opera plot moving.
All procedural games feel like this to me at least. I've been playing Diablo / POE recently. Same deal, once you're at the endgame - the goal just becomes bigger numbers. The maps have different themes, the monsters are different, but you sorta just look past that part as you're gathering generated gear with bigger numbers. It's why I typically get about 10% into the endgame and eventually stop playing.
Minecraft is also a decent example, at some point you stop exploring, build a base and focus on the progression rather than seeing what the system generates in the next biome.
There's a fixed set of biomes and notable geographical features designed by the devs, so there's no incentive to keep finding unseen ones, but each world gets its own layout and landmarks, so you get to explore the details of that specific generation for days without carrying over your knowledge of the previous one.
In the long term it might get repetitive too, but it does at the same rate as one gets tired of any other game I think.
A good start is not to try and build an entire galaxy. Procgen that focuses on the fine detail of a relatively small world have a big leg up over these "everything generators" (i.e. think of something more on the scale of Tiny Glade or Bad North)
There are enough hand built things that you don't quickly start running into repeats, and they are just melded into the generated terrain.
Iirc it used a voxel engine so would have been late 90's.
NMS is a technically impressive game. You can build a custom-spaceship, either with the in-game editor or by importing one from outside the game, dogfight in it, land on alien worlds, etc. and that's just one of the loops. However, the spaceships you build aren't simulated physical objects. They don't even feel as substantial as styrofoam fins tacked onto a model train. There's no real challenge to flying them. They all just float through space like nothing.
The game has dozens of ways to progress, finding resources and earning cash. They're all so easy to break that you have to consciously resist doing so. Craft a few donuts and you're rich. You don't have to worry about finding buyers for your obscenely high-end pastries. The market board will buy anything at the listed price. Game breaking bugs that trivialize finding resources have been left in the game forever because the developers were afraid that some people might be upset if they actually had to grind for resources. Why what is, ostensibly, a single player game with multiplayer support tacked on even has grind mechanics is another valid question.
I log into NMS occasionally, but my big problem with it is that it's gameplay devolves into a sequence of grinds that are all optional. The things that should offer a challenge (e.g. ship combat) don't. Every play session becomes a case of, "Where do I find this stupid mineral I need to build an upgrade that will make what's already too easy even easier?".
The technology on display in NMS is absolutely impressive, but the gameplay isn't. I'd love to see a fork of this game where they focus on more challenging gameplay with less focus on grinding and sandbox elements. I see the expeditions as an attempt at this, but they don't go far enough.
I wish somehow the complexity of eve could meet a game like this. I would sell a kidney for that
It's a weird mix of amazingly well done and absolute garbage. And pay to win. Don't forget about the pay to win bullshit.
To say everything in this game is half baked is giving it too much credit. It's 10% baked at best. This isn't a game; it's an underwhelming tech demo. The only cool feature of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great.
Everything else is baaaad: the quests have less logic than entry MMO quests, and are mainly fetch missions. The planets are randomly generated slop. The economy of building up your ship/fleet isn't fun (you just sell your ships over and over again). Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)
It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that are clearly just trying to trick folks into buying an elaborate space game tech demo. Can we move on from this "game"?
FWIW, most of the systems in the game that have been there since the beginning have changed significantly since v1.
IIRC, back in the v1 days you'd give an NPC a species-specific valuable trinket and they'd teach you a randomly-selected word of their race's language. Learning words was useful for when you'd encounter a historical relic that presented an important scene from history, and when you encountered an NPC that was requesting assistance. In both cases, they'd make their speech or request in their native language, you'd be given a few context clues in the form of dialog describing gestures, NPC attitude, etc, and then you'd have to guess what action you needed to perform or resource of yours they needed. If you get it right, you get something nice.
Like many other systems in the game, this got reworked several times into what it is now: "Find an NPC, ask for language assistance, select a category of word to learn, and Bob's your uncle.". I won't claim that either the v1 or current methods of learning language are fun, but the v1 method did consume a resource that was often difficult to come by... so it made learning the language much more difficult. They could have cooked up three whole-ass conlangs and built in gradual language tutorials for each... but that'd be a surprising choice for a game whose most difficult puzzles are "Can you do basic arithmetic?" and "Can you understand which direction this list of numbers is rotating?".
There's never been much _game_ in NMS... and most any player who's made it to the center of the galaxy and both got what they were being told by the story and weren't enraged by the implications gets why. The game's first story (such as it is) is why I'm always amused by people who don't dislike it, but also take it very seriously and want there to be a ton of stuff to do in it.
Having said that, Hello Games has apparently been more than happy to add in a bunch of stuff [0] over the years. I'm amazed that they're making enough money on the game to still be working on it a decade later, but here we are.
> It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that...
Eh. As someone who pops back in for a few hours when there's a major change, I don't mind at all the detailed patch notes.
> Can we move on from this "game"?
Go for it! I'll still be popping in every now and again to screw around with it.
[0] ...some of which is clearly playtesting for things planned for Light No Fire...
I think video games are art, so take my opinion in context of if this is right up your alley and you really love it, then keep on keepin on!
I found a barren planet in a black hole system where the vibe was all dark and shadowy with the light being tinted purple, and just some crystals or something on the surface, alongside a damaged robot that you could interact with.
There was also a world that had high Sentinel activity where I founded a settlement (well, more like took over managing it), however as it turns out it’d have those gravity storms often during which you could soar through the air.
There was also a world where the surface was toxic and you couldn’t stay on it for long, so I excavated a base underground, like something out of Red Faction.
For what it’s worth, a lot of it can feel samey (most of the scanning) and kinda boring, but while there aren’t that many insanely huge and cinematic moments, sometimes RNG hits just right and you get something nice.
The RNG space is part of the problem - planets and biomes kinda start to repeat after while and it is not really important any more on which weird planet or station you are.
It is actually interesting how many games with much smaller RNG generated world maps work just fine because you don't travel so much like in NMS & kinda learn to know the landscape and also shape it yourself or with your friends. Like you know there is a lake next to you base and that deserted town, then there is that forested mountain where you got ambushed by zombies once & built a secondary mining base later, etc.
In NMS you land on a random planet, build a base on it and - like, what is it good for, if there are millions of similar planets & coop multiplayer is almost non-existent.
If anyone has any recs on PvE/looting/base building games in space with the polish of NMS, please share.
It's a completely different game, it just doesn't look like it if you picked back up where you left off. Without the right context, you have a tendency to just repeat what you were doing before, and it feels like nothing changed.
But believe me, everything changed. You should revisit it, because I don't think you've seen the actual changes to the game.
This game just doesn't scale well from mid game on - it's way too easy, even on permadeath + hardest difficulty. Like, making money is way too easy, combat is way too easy, everything is too forgiving. And the entire loop is centered on like, 3 things to do that are all variants of the same exact thing. Really hope they do a much better job in Light No Fire.
To the guy who replied to me: Our genius overlord moderators rate limited my responses so I'll post here.
> I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding
You and I have very different ideas of what forgiving means. A reasonably intelligent 7 year old that enjoys and has experience playing video games could play this game on max difficulty settings and not have any issues. And while I never had an issue finding anything (shit is literally everywhere), resource scarcity doesn't equally an unforgiving game mechanic unless it's gated by some sort of difficult fight or something, which this game doesn't have. Combat is laughably easy and repetitive. I've got a couple hundred hours in the game, and at one point I was running the same bounty missions over and over again for some outrageous amount of money - the mission took 7 minutes round trip, the combat encounter was literally the exact same every time, same number of enemies just with different names. And that was the most efficient way I could make money in late game on the permadeath server on max settings. If that's the best economy loop a game can come up with, a 100% brainless combat encounter, then the developer has done something very wrong.
you spend most of your time finding/farming resources and unlocking builds
most of your time is traveling between planets/systems/galaxies for different resources
I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding, which is the core gameplay, you can easily miss it if you don't play for 40+ hours but there are entire varieties of star systems you can't access initially, an entire race you literally can't see without completing some strings of missions, etc
i have an idea for it,
Let users populate the universe with custom quests. Scriptable quests with dialog and multipart structure. You need a custom script language and some limitations on it. Example quests:
- "Bandits have occupied our town", but actually bandits are tax collectors. You instead may help them document the goods.
- "Our star is dying", instead a huge starhip is recharging and refusing to move without some condition.
also add a rumor system to lead players to quests.
you can use my idea Hello Games, you have my permission.
I feel like the same thing happens to other sandbox games too. Minecraft is one of my favorite games of all time and I could easily spend a thousand hours in a vanilla world and still find things to do, however the game gets constantly shit on by the community no matter what it does. They speedrun through the progression and then lack any creativity to do anything else in the game.
I personally love building bases and customizing and collecting things, which is a large part of the gameplay in NMS. I could spend hundreds of hours doing that but I guess some people just need a constant sense of progression and the game telling you what to do because they aren't capable of setting their own goals. Anyone who says NMS lacks content or things to do has barely touched the game.
I enjoy being creative to an extent, but I like to solve problems, so I naturally gravitate to something with a long-term goal to achieve like Factorio (I rapidly lose interest after launching a rocket though).
The story and those quests will be rooted in building something. The space exploration will be rooted in finding a cool place loosely intended for your next base. The space battles and encounters will be part of the same core procgen survival craft cycle.
I won't deny there's probably only 20-40 hours of "real content" in the game. Most of what is there is shallower, or easilly missable, without the expedition(limited-time event) that launched it. A lot of things do seem like "grind X yourself, order team to do Y every few hours, fly to Z and talk to someone" which will get repetitive if/when you keep getting the same ones.
I hopped back in a couple years later after a few updates, and agree that the quantity of content was pretty big. But the quality was not -- it still felt "empty", and never held my interest long.
Last year, the same thing happened. I hopped back on after a few big updates, probably spent another 10 or so hours on it (I think I started over), and felt like I had explored all there was.
I feel like all the criticisms it gets are valid. I agree that the effort of maintaining a game after 10 years is incredibly admirable, especially since ever update has been free. That's amazing. And the devs should be acknowledged for that.
But the game itself still feels largely empty. The progression feels mostly repetitive without feeling like you're really moving forward in a meaningful way. And, as others have said, the proc gen still feels "vanilla".
I probably won't hop back in after this update. I've learned, by now, that while many praise the new content, it'll probably just feel like more of the same to me.
Different strokes, I guess.
In SaaS and YC, it's ship early and ship often, right? Is that absolutely not the case in games? Also, how true is it in SaaS? Genuinely curious here.
NMS really is an exception, that they sold well enough at launch that they can keep providing free major updates for 10 years.
Stuff like this, it's why I often avoid big releases for the first year or two then go play it when it's on sale.
For another perfect game example - Star Wars Outlaws. Terrible, buggy release with obnoxious gameplay loops. They fixed it, now it's one of the better games I've played recently. You can go look up gameplay reviews from the last year to see people shocked at its reputation, it's a very good game now and arguably would have been a candidate for GOTY if it had released in its current form.
> Mile wide and inch deep is exactly the way to describe it.
Aren't you doing the same thing you're saying? Plenty of comments in this thread disagree with your assessment. If the game isn't for you, that's one thing, but it's a factually untrue thing to say "there's nothing to do, game is sparse after a few hours and novelty wears off" like many comments say. This suggests the person did not actually see a lot of the game, which is fine, but it's still not a trustworthy evaluation to me.
Some are, sure. But -I say as someone who enjoys the game for what it is and still pops in every now and again to mess around with it- there's not much game in the game. Like BoBaitlyn said, it's a sandbox game. It has always been a sandbox game, and there are some folks who spend a few minutes fucking around with the sand in the box, go "WTF, this is boring as shit. I'm out!" and are boggled at the folks who enjoy playing with all the sand.
There's nothing wrong with being boggled or talking about how much you hated the sandbox. Specific sandboxes tend to appeal to specific sorts of people... each one often has its own gimmick that will pull in different sorts of folks. Suggesting that most complainers are complaining from a position of ignorance when they're complaining about a lack of things to do in a game that doesn't have much game in it kinda sucks. I've been playing off and on since v1, and have played for about half of the major patches. Hello Games has added a lot of stuff, but they haven't really added in much game to the game, if you see what I'm saying?
So the system is fairly shallow, since what you end up doing is just jump from system to system and buy and sell everything.
But if you want to get rich just find a few player farms and harvest. You will make millions in no time.
i also happen to enjoy the game itself.
The gameplay is completely engaging and this update looks like it fills in even more spaces than were hoped for.
Early access, early release, beta, whatever is just an euphemism of becoming a backer. You thought you buy something final, and in the end you become a financier. You lend your money upfront. All this because a group of pampered kids can't keep a deadline. And think that the world is a playground and they can keep their game 5 years in early access. Get a grip.
Sorry. You release your shit, it gets evaluated, end of story. Nobody cares the rest. Gaming space is already half dead because people think that sitting at a game company means you get to have knitting lessons during workhours, and you can daydream and chitchat all day long. Ridiculous.
this is very obviously untrue, as evidenced by no man's sky.
They launched an empty, hollow game. And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. Most of their new systems are half baked—confusing and only adding to the game design mess the game came out with.
I'm convinced the reputation that they executed a "turnaround" is based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
The benefit to the NMS team for this is they'll have people half willing to try their next game because they "didn't give up". Not the worse idea, but I think we're over stating the heroicness of this.
why scare quotes around for free? they were free.
>haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it.
i went from hating it to really enjoying it. i am not the only one.
>based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
my comment comes from my opinion and my experience, not social media. i think its a good game, and i would say it's absolutely worth the money.
That said, I don't agree with their take at all. Hello Games offered a mountain of content that's right in the bullseye center of game's core vibe and identity; and continuing to hold the original critique against them based on the "not procedural enough" argument is increasingly equivocating between two different things. You've been given a game that's more than worth the cost of admission, and you'll see dozens, hundreds, of slop space games come and go with less than one tenth the value proposition of NMS. That should be more than enough to quell 99% of the criticism.
The fact that it's not procedural enough amounts to, say, feeling that The Odyssey was good, not great. For however true that is, it's not a scandal.
Not that they're bad, but wording them like they're some huge act of generosity from the studio instead of a reasonable expectation pushes the baseline away from where it should be.
> based on them staggering a few nonsense releases
This has to be a troll. Or you haven’t touched the game in years.
What other game has had 10 years of free updates that has dramatically changed the game?
You can build bases, manage settlements, maintain a fleet, build ships and exocraft, build multi-tools, have pets battle each other, cook food, manage the economy... but there's only a thin relationship/lore system and not much of a difficulty ramp at any point.
You're space farming, if you expect anything else you won't like it.
1. Total Revenue - ~$500m-$700m
2. Copies Sold - ~15-20m
3. Steam Review Score: 84.36%
4. 40 Free Major Updates
I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.
NMS is a great example of a developer who was devoted to their customer base, kept updating the game for free, and saw great market success in return.
This is a story to be celebrated.
The problem is the game itself, gameplay wise. It's just boring for many (including me)
Funny how this is exactly the same sentiment I feel about NMS. Go figure, different strokes, ya know?
While several people are complaining about a one-time-cost game with an absurd amount of updates that had a rough launch, thousands of people are continuously happy, the subreddit expresses joy. It’s okay to “not get it”; but at some level, this much hate and dogpiling over a game that’s not harmful and not fostering a toxic community is … embarrassing for those participating in the hate.
[0] https://steamcharts.com/app/275850#6m
I really wish they would just focus 100% on Light No Fire.
In hindsight I think the great thing about NMS was that it shipped in such a raw state and they continually improved it based on community feedback.
I have faith though —- they know a lot more from building NMS and managing the community. They absolutely know what a good game feels like.
They’ve done an incredible job fleshing out the universe, giving us new things we can build, simple city management for people that want that, and the same exploration system for those that wanted that.
It was sold as, is, and will always be a sandbox game with some simple, procedurally generated “missions” to get you going to the next point of interest or having the next, relatively low-stakes fight.
And that’s okay. People play Animal Crossing and Minecraft. People can play this. Some of us are happy to. Some of us see a $50 game and say “yeah, 50-100 hours of time in this is my money’s worth”. And some of us spend 3000 hours in the game because we love the creating and sandbox feel of it.
Some people like Farming Simulator 2020 - I’ll never understand it and it’s not for me, but plenty of people do. Some people like Powerwash Simulator.
It’s okay if No Man’s Sky wasn’t the *specific* game you were hoping for and if it hasn’t become it; but that doesn’t make it a bad game, it just makes it “not for you”.
I wish these threads weren’t always filled with people complaining about a game that wasn’t made for them. It’s been a decade. It’s time to move on.
I spend a lot of time building / designing my base. In that aspect, the enjoyment of the game is limited only by my creativity. I've definitely got $25 worth of entertainment from it. I will say, though, it is more fun if you have others to join your squad.
It's vastly better, imo, than Starfield. That was a game which really let me down -- I wanted Skyrim in Space, but I got 1,000 planets with the same cookie cutter quests on each. Or a team member saying something like "I can't believe we're the first ones to set foot on this temple" when there is a randomly generated outpost plopped down right next door.
Maybe this is the nudge to move it higher in my queue.
It's not
It's a chill sandbox and that's fine.
Props & respect to the devs for so many years of free updates!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ
Not even worth pirating if I have to set up a container with wine, I'd rather spend that time drinking wine.
https://www.protondb.com/app/275850