Well today the UK's Advertising Standards Agency decided that Hello Games did not in fact deceive customers and that the screenshots and trailers of NMS are accurate to the extent that they can be given the procedurally generated nature of the game.
It's a shame that Hello Games seem to have sidestepped this issue because they were able to convince the ASA that the contents of screenshots were possible to experience, just difficult to find given the nature of the game's mechanics.
Even with the sale and new update... the game is still dead. There's too much negative stigma around it.
Make no mistake - the game is still a steaming pile. To my knowledge, they haven't even fixed any of the bugs or broken mechanics of the game. They just added stuff on top of it to make people scream less loudly about how shit it is.
The game needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, imo - Empyrion did what NMS was trying to do except they did it about 1000x better, with mechanics that make sense, in less time, for a fraction of the money, and it's getting regular updates. All this while being in early Alpha development whereas No Man's Sky is in Reluctant Post-Release Damage Control Development after 5 years of what appears to have been slapping a keyboard.
I don't know what studio had how much money and to be honest I don't care. Developement of Empyrion seems to have started around the same time as NMS. (source)
Despite what Sony pushed Hello Games to say, it is not a finished product, I agree. Empyrion isn't either. Empyrion might be more playable right now but NMS has other parts covered that are not present in Empyrion. (procedural generated content vs. multiplayer)
What brought you to expect an epic story in NMS?
I should have been clearer - I didn't mean studio funding, I meant the price of the game. Sorry (;^ ^)
Empyrion's dev team says they hope to implement procedural generation of planets somewhere much further down the road, but I don't think that's the priority at the moment. Which is a good thing - they appear to be pacing themselves, which makes me think they might have a good shot at actually doing it and doing it well.
I didn't expect an epic story - being an open exploration game like Minecraft, Terraria and others, I guess I expected the point to be that you make your own story/adventure, in a way. But at the moment, it seems to have been a sort of Catch 22 situation where you use your tools to find resources to upgrade your tools in order to find resources more quickly.
Grinding in a game is only tolerable if you have a certain goal in mind like building a base, building a better, cooler ship, accessing more, more interesting parts of the map, etc. NMS on the other hand has you do the exact same thing over and over again, and if you happen to reach the end of the game, you just restart exactly the way you began at the start of the game, and the cycle begins again.
That is exactly what the new patch is about.
Maybe these videos help a bit:
Well, this second one is just for console plebs like me.
This is true, but it's very much a patch in that it doesn't actually solve the plethora of other problems with the game.
I think it could be an amazing title eventually, but Hello Games is really going to have to up their Hello Game for a very long time.
Do you have some examples?
Maybe this video helps a bit.
But it's like, half an hour, so strap in.
OK, I've watched the first five minutes now and this video is not true anymore. You have base building, you have more aliens around, you can hire them to work in your base, you have more random planets and so on. (I don't have my game yet so take it with a grain of salt but that is what I have seen in multiple videos now.)
keep watching it, because it describes game mechanics that until now (and probably even now, given the TeamPGP stream this past week) are still broken.
Sorry but TeamPGP did a poor job of trying out new stuff in that stream.
Anyway, I will play it and then I will tell you what I think.
okies :D I'll play when it lets me deliberately crash my ship into a mountain.
Well, it isn't a space sim. So it might never do that. Question is: is that the games fault?
I don't know, I would have thought that something with spaceship flying mechanics would let you fly the ship wherever you please. I mean, you can crash into asteroids with impunity, so why not planets?
GTA V isn't a space sim, either, but you can still plow your car/truck/plane/helicopter into the ground at breakneck speeds if you want.
It's the main thing that put me off playing it - the unbelievably broad and vague ways in which the game controls and dicates what you can and can't do.
The way I'd describe it is... if Apple were to make a game. It looks really nice and has the potential to do some really neat stuff, but if you do something the game's programmers arbitrarily don't want you to do, it won't let you do it.
Took them two years⌠but here it is.
@kreestuh, you mentioned youâre looking for games again for the stream?
I actually included an article on this for the news this week. Looks interesting.
Some more info.
Yes, necro. But so relevant these days.
That was interesting. It has been an amazing turn around which I did not think would happen. It seems to have worked.
Though what irked me watching it was that he blamed everyone else for the launch problems which were almost entirely his making by running his mouth.