[Khellendros]

D, on 19 August 2016 - 03:40 PM, said:

Khellendros, on 18 August 2016 - 10:29 PM, said:

I can totally understand why this game has been getting the largely mediocre to negative review reception. Reviewers especially have rushed through the game in order to meet their deadlines, completing the story objectives and finding them wanting.

It probably didn't help that the creator did a Peter Molyneux and talked about all sorts of features that would be in the game in interviews and stuff, and then never revealed that any of those features got scrapped, so the people following NMS' development apparently had some big expectations right up to the release date that didn't get met.

Mmm, I've read that elsewhere, but, having followed pretty much every interview and gameplay video in the years' long lead-up to the release of the game, I didn't get that sense that he'd overpromised once I eventually got it. If anything, in every interview he downplayed exactly what could be expected from the game, i.e. it's free exploration, you go around to see what you can find, and it's isolating and lonely even though you share the universe with everyone else, it is totally supposed to be single-player, there is a loose narrative and a loose goal but there's no real need to follow it, etc etc.

But the hype machine took off nevertheless. People heard 'infinite universe' and understood 'infinite possibilities'. And somehow lots of people seem to have understood 'meet up with your friends and play together' which I just find a weird interpretation. People's expectations didn't get met because they were expecting something different to the game that was always being made. I've been playing it for about 40 hours now and it's pretty much spot on to what I thought it would be. It just so happens to be what I wanted from the game, but I understand that lots of people did not.

I am sure that Murray talked about some features in 2013 or 2014 that eventually didn't make it into the 2016 game, for whatever reason. That happens in game development. To every single game. NMS just got a lot more attention than most games so it was noticed. But it's hardly the same as lying about what your game is, which I personally find a shocking and over-the-top accusation to throw at a team who've clearly put their heart and soul into this game.


It also shows you how privileged and entitled many gamers (and indeed, game reviewers, especially ones on YouTube) feel. "Oh, this should not be a full-priced game, this should be half the price and Early Access." "This is an indie game made by an indie team and so should be cheap, they don't have the right to price their games like EA or Activision." What? Why? (According to these people) Because it doesn't have a clear mission structure. Because the plot and being led from A to B and having direction is not central to the game. It's not a missing feature - the game was never intended to be that! Try, you know, just doing your own thing, at your own pace, with no real end goal. Just experience it.

Perhaps it's a division between people who think of games as entertainment, and those who think of games as experiences. I don't know.

This post has been edited by Khellendros: 19 August 2016 - 04:54 PM

[Khellendros]

To expand, the notion seems to be that it's alright for indie games to be about 'themes' and 'ideas' and 'moods' (for example, recently, Abzu). But so-called 'full-priced' games must have some solid end objective and what are felt to be traditional game and gameplay elements. NMS dared to cross the line between these two things, and many gamers, being a by and large conservative lot, were outraged by it.

[D'rek]

I didn't follow any of the development of NMS, but I have read some of the summary articles posted elsewhere, and it seems like a huge mixed bag.

There's definitely a lot of cases of fans who projected their own desires without any basis and built it up in their heads when the game was never planned to match certain things they'd imagined, and obviously NMS can't be faulted for that. Those people are idiots. And overall, I think the generalized idea of what the game would be, as presented by Murray, has been accurate.

But on the other hand, there's a lot of very specific things Murray said very directly in interviews (often multiple times) that would be in the game and are not.

There was a good article/thread I saw that ignored all ideas brought long ago and focused only on the things Murray had said when they demo'd the game with IGN this past April, and it listed a lot of things (some big, some tiny) that were said to have been in the game only a few months before release, and then weren't. And their final point wasn't "this makes NMS a bad game", but rather "if these ideas were scrapped between April and August, and NMS still turned out to be a good game (maybe not as good, but still good), then why not be public about removing them to the fans and why keep using the promotional footage from April to sell the game?"

And I can totally agree with that. The people saying NMS should or shouldn't be priced a certain way are idiots. Any game developer can offer any game for whatever price they want. But having promotional footage on their Steam page and interviews from the last few months before release that say the game has X, Y and Z, but it actually has only X and W, is deceitful.

I don't even get why Hello Games would want to do that, either. They seem to be getting a ton of backlash for it. Why not just be up-front in June like "look, this feature we wanted to put in can't be finished in time, but rather than delay we're going to release in August and add it in later". NMS is still a good game that lots of people are loving, so it seems to me like that that approach would've gotten a lot less people upset with them and therefore when they go to make a second game they'd have more people ready to trust them some more, no?

Of course, it's hard to weigh any legitimate criticisms on this issue when there seems to be a horde of degenerates on both sides of the fence who are ranting at everything and rabidly issuing death threats to anyone who disagrees with them.

[Khellendros]

Not getting why they would possibly want to do that is already suggestive that perhaps they didn't do quite what they're being accused of. It is of course entirely possible that things got cut between April and August (they did delay the release by a month) because they thought they could polish up whatever it was but then eventually realised it just wasn't going to happen. But I will rewatch the IGN videos and see what they might mean. Do you have a link to that article/thread, please? I'd be interested to read it.

[D'rek]

Yeah, it's entirely possible that even in April they still thought they could deliver everything they were talking about, and whatever footage existed was some kind of early alpha version that showed things in a limited context that didn't actually work in the full game... and never ended up working fully.

Another possibility is that there wasn't a good synchronization between Sean Murray and the dev team - e.g. just like with Peter Molyneux the dev team knew they weren't going to be able to do some features but Murray didn't know that and kept talking about them (bad for such a small team to have such a disconnect, but it wouldn't be nefarious).

Here's a page with a bunch of listings of discrepancies, cobbled together mostly from a couple reddit posts I think. This goes to before April, but they've bolded any links to the IGN demos in April so you can easily see which of these claims are coming from only April. --> http://www.onemansli...al-reddit-post/

AFAIK, the big 3 things that were still being talked about (or even sort of shown) in April and never came about are

A: the planets and space objects having "real" physics - e.g. entering the light/dark side of a planet affects the daytime, moons actually orbit a planet, there's a real sun in each system that you can fly into (instead of a sky-box image), you can't fly through freighter ships, etc.

B: a more complex resource system where most valuable resources appear only on a small number of planets and the environment of a planet + the distance of it from a sun affect resource distributions semi-consistently. Trading becomes possible as you bring things from one system to another that doesn't have it. Supposedly you could play the whole game mostly as a trader. Crafting is complex. But instead, supposedly plutonium spawns almost everywhere en mass, there's very little difference in resource distributions and buying/selling resources is the same everywhere.

C: In the unlikely event that a player finds another player, the game was supposed to have some mechanism to move them to an online instance and they would be able to see each other, see how each other have affected the environment, etc.

[Aptorian]

I think NMS just fucked me hard.

I think I have a big warning for people playing the Atlas path.

I've been going down the Atlas path fast and finally reached the last Atlas station. Turns out at the last part for a reason I wont spoiler, you need to turn in 10 of those Atlas stones they have been giving you.

I sold 2 or 3 of mine when I had less inventory space. So when I didn't have the 10 stones I just couldn't complete it. That's fine I thought, I'll go to the space station and buy some. I could only find one but I went back to see how many I was missing. And I couldn't interact with the console any longer.

So basically the quest chain just dies like that. If I'd know before hand I'd made sure I had ten stones.

This is fucking dumb.

Anyway, I guess I am going to the core of the galaxy instead. With the Theta level warp drive I can jump 8 systems in one go, so it's easy travel.

[Gothos]

So how absolutely bad it is compared to:
a) hyped features
Elite?

[Aptorian]

I've put in around 35-40 hours over the past 10 days. I really like the game but it's also a very thin game.

I haven't played Elite but from what I've seen of Elite, the only real comparison between NMS and Elite is that they take place in space and there are space stations. Elite is a much more expensive, well made and focused game than NMS is.

NMS is basically just a galaxy simulator that you are meant to race through, on your way towards the centre of the galaxy or some mystical path. Much like a racing game, once you slow down and actually look around you realise that the people in the crowd are just cardboard cutouts that are copy pasted.

NMS is a really cool, really atmospheric indie game that has been marketed like it was a AAA game and that is what really hurts it. If it was a 20 euro title I'd call it an amazing game.

If

[Gothos]

Apt, on 22 August 2016 - 05:52 PM, said:

I've put in around 35-40 hours over the past 10 days. I really like the game but it's also a very thin game.

I haven't played Elite but from what I've seen of Elite, the only real comparison between NMS and Elite is that they take place in space and there are space stations. Elite is a much more expensive, well made and focused game than NMS is.

NMS is basically just a galaxy simulator that you are meant to race through, on your way towards the centre of the galaxy or some mystical path. Much like a racing game, once you slow down and actually look around you realise that the people in the crowd are just cardboard cutouts that are copy pasted.

NMS is a really cool, really atmospheric indie game that has been marketed like it was a AAA game and that is what really hurts it. If it was a 20 euro title I'd call it an amazing game.

If

From what I've seen, the list of gutted features makes Warlords of Draenor look like it delivered on its promises. The pre-release stuff reminded me of Paul fucking Burnett and how he hyped the train wreck that was Warhammer Online. There seems to be nothing in this game besides endless mining with a laser to upgrade your inventory space. I had more diverse stuff to do last time I raced past Mulgore on an alt.

[polishgenius]

Basically, the guy doing all the talking seems to have proper Molyneux'd it.

[Aptorian]

The problem with that discussion, like Khel and D'rek discuss above, is that there is no official in depth list of features. So what you call a list of gutted features is actually just things we imagined might be in the game that aren't there. Clearly the company intended to build a bigger game then they ended up with, but it is what it is.

You travel between planets or star systems, you collect resources and scan stuff, then you upgrade, sell or repair and do it all over again. You're meant to play the game like a space honey bee flying from planet to planet gathering plutonium. And that is reall all. You can't play as a pirate or a smuggler, you can't really do diplomacy or trade missions, all there is, is the journey.

Personally I love that, but if you want more than space Minecraft minus the building element, there's not really anything to come for.

This post has been edited by Apt: 22 August 2016 - 07:25 PM

[Traveller]

I haven't put in that many hours at all, but I can't see how the gameplay is going to change vastly from what I'm doing now... does it?

I'm quite happy moving from planet to planet, but yes, 'thin' is a very apt description Apt.

This post has been edited by Traveller: 22 August 2016 - 07:30 PM

[Raymond Luxury Yacht]

Yeah I'm hoping to get a completed version of the game to buy down the road, on sale.

[Morgoth]

To be honest, the only thing that has disappointed me is the upgrade system (it's all so boring, though the multi tool provides some choices at least). So, it feels a little pointless to gather rare resources for a slightly better shield, or the ability to breathe a bit longer under water.

[Tiste Simeon]

Realised something today. This game is quite therapeutic for me. I spent ages just lazily floating around a planet, enjoying the scenery. Because there isn't really a purpose to it (from the spoilers I've seen about the "Centre" of the universe, I'm in no rush to get there) I can just spend 20 minutes wondering around the place, appreciating the view.

Still cursed the game to high heaven when I collected about 500k worth of emeril and promptly had it stolen by space pirates because nowhere on the planet apparently had a trade terminal...

[Khellendros]

Was away on holiday last couple of weeks so didn't play NMS again until yesterday. Yep, still love it! I've noticed the new patch has done a couple of subtle things - for example, it is definitely much easier to scan flying creatures now, no more having to shoot them out of the sky first.


I've just warped to my third system, and the first one with a planet that has moons. But the most interesting thing about this system is: Someone's already been here!

And this person clearly does not play the game like I do, lol. It says that some - not all - the planets were discovered by them, but they haven't scanned/discovered any creatures/plants/locations on them, or renamed anything.

Last night, I landed on one of the planets which had not been discovered and promptly renamed and uploaded this. This morning, I found that they had been to one location somewhere on the planet (the list of discovered locations had been empty last night). So they seem to still be around!

[Khellendros]

In other news, I was attacked by pirates for the first time and almost killed. Only just managed to fend them off in my Dinkleship with no upgrades. The fight happened just above the atmosphere of a planet, making it all very...atmospheric!

After that, I finally went and bought a new ship, basically a longer, sleeker looking version of the starting ship, looks a lot like the Vipers from Battlestar Galactica actually. And...I hate it and regret my buying choice. In the first ship, you could look out of the side windows while flying and see more of the terrain, spotting locations which aren't directly in front of you. In this one, the windows are almost completely in front of you, meaning you can see far less. Definitely not worth two extra inventory slots and minus 500,000 units.

Finally, I've only just realised the floating rocks are copper d'oh! Still haven't found nickel anywhere, and only one of 11 planets thus far had chrysonite (which I've instead been slowly attaining from feeding animals and them leading me to some scraps of it).

[Aptorian]

Certain ressources become more prevalent around the green and blue stars.you can find a lot of Nicle in the potato asteroids in space.

Personally I am stuck in a rut. I just want to reach the center but around 140,000 light-years from the core the black holes aren't taking me any closer. Which leaves warp drive jumps. But the theta drive will only take me around 800 light-years per jump. I am not going to do 140 warp jumps just to get to the core.

This post has been edited by Apt: 03 September 2016 - 01:19 PM

[Khellendros]

Apt, on 03 September 2016 - 01:18 PM, said:

Certain ressources become more prevalent around the green and blue stars.

Personally I am stuck in a rut. I just want to reach the center but around 140,000 light-years from the core the black holes aren't taking me any closer. Which leaves warp drive jumps. But the theta drive will only take me around 800 light-years per jump. I am not going to do 140 warp jumps just to get to the core.

If you go through a black hole can you go back the other way?

[Aptorian]

No. They're one way.