darkSpyro

Bumping this because it's once again relevant. I just bought the game on Steam today, and I have a horrible feeling that it's going to be a piece of ****.

I mean, right from the start it was a certainty that it wouldn't be able to live up to the huge expectations set on it by the gaming community. What I'm afraid of is a Fallout 4 / Mass Effect 3 -tier failure.

I'm 100% prepared to get a full refund, but I want to see the game for myself first.

About an hour to go until I get my first taste of it. Let's see how it goes.

I sent Steam a refund request in less than 40 minutes after starting the game. Holy ****, what a mess!

Quote: Big Green

There's so many negative Steam reviews with 2.1 hours of playtime. Bums me out since I think you can't get a refund unless you played for under 2 hours

They made their choice.

Quote: Bifrost

Care to elaborate, Samius? I saw a lot of reviews(ok actually just Dunkey and a LOT of written ones), but it's good to see it from someone in DS.

I didn't get to play it a lot, but I'll gladly share my thoughts. I'm playing Civ 5 right now though, so I'll post them a bit later.

Edit: Right, here goes:

First off, I never really expected No Man's Sky to live up to all the hype, so I was ready for a bit of a disappointment. I read a bit of what people said about the PS4 version, so I had something of an idea as to what I could realistically get out of my purchase. The main complaints that stood out in my mind had to do with the quality of the graphics and the lack of interaction with the game world. Personally I wasn't expecting an MMO, nor a space fighter simulator, I just wanted to see a well-made space exploration game that would be able to keep me going "Wow!" for a week or so.

Secondly, my experience with the game itself was very limited, since you can't refund a game on Steam if you've played it for longer than two hours. I had a brief go at it (about 30 min) and in that time I didn't even manage to repair the ship to get off the starting planet, so I can't say much about the space travel, the battles, and the little "story" thing going on with the Atlas. As far as I know your starting location is also completely randomized, so other players maybe haven't had the same problems with it than I had (my starting planet was extremely cold, and I started on top of a very steep mountain, making initial exploration a bit difficult).

My first impressions (as I was downloading the game) were that many people were having trouble getting it to work. They were experiencing multiple crashes, lag, severe FPS drops, etc. Many people were seemingly stuck in the opening screen without being able to start the actual game. Apart from some lagging I didn't experience any problems myself, and I figured that they would get fixed later anyway. Still, a crappy launch is a crappy launch.

Graphics-wise, it was exactly like the PS4 version. It looks nothing like in the promotional videos/pictures (surprise), even on the highest settings. Very disappointing, but it was to be expected.

Gameplay-wise.. Well.. The introduction was very awkward. The character just kind of "woke up" in the world and was immediately told to do things. About 5 seconds after gaining control of the character I was already directed to go harvest resources to fix some part of the ship. There was no real tutorial as to how all this was supposed to work.
As I was trying to navigate the strange UI and mining iron with my multitool, it quickly occurred to me that this was what the game was really all about. For a moment the horrible reality of it laid out before me, as clear as crystal: Hours upon hours of tedious harvesting to fuel your equipment to get to the other planet to harvest resources to get to the other planet to harvest resources to get to the other planet...

An infinite variety of procedurally generated environments couldn't trump the fact that most of my time playing this game would be spent slogging through endless landmasses, on foot, mining iron and plutonium.

Couple that with the likely fact that the environments, not having infinite variety, will likely all start looking very familiar as you approach your tenth or thirteenth planet, and the fact that there isn't much to do within the said environments except harvesting resources, AND the fact that the game looks like crap compared to what the marketing boys originally showed us, and BAM! You have yourself a boring ******* game, period.

I'm not pissed off about the multiplayer (or the lack of thereof), or the simplistic space battle AI (of which I've read several complaints), but the crafting kills me. If you have to make it such a huge selling point, at least make it about something other than digging. I really don't want to dig for hours.
I remember an old-ass indie survival sci fi game called "Notrium", that included crafting by having the player experiment by combining salvaged parts, creating all kinds of useful and exiting things. If I had to choose between that and digging, you would rather see me cut my balls off than dig up even one single unit of iron.

So yeah. For me, that was enough. For 20e I would've gladly bought the game and tried it out for a longer amount of time, but it's not worth 60e. And it didn't even work for half the people who bought it, for ****'s sake.

TL: DR - What I wanted was an epic, atmospheric, large scale space exploration game. What I got was a somewhat laggy space Minecraft with a strange crafting system and a strange visual design.

Quote: HIR

So is it fair to say that this game was advertised as a space exploration game but was actually a Minecraft-style survival type game with a space setting? That's the impression I'm getting (didn't get the game, wasn't interested from the get-go).

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Even the actual space exploration is Spore-tier. You can't really interact with your environment in any meaningful manner, and all the planets are more or less alike.

Hello Games is the new Bethesda.



I've only seen several youtube vids, but the creature animation cycles and clipping is horrendous.