No Man's Sky

[Art Blade]

weird. I can't find when steam updated what, once it's updated, that info is gone. I could have sworn I had an update just the other day but maybe it was Space Engineers, both related in a way so I may simply have been wrong about an update.

[Dweller_Benthos]

yeah Space Engineers has had a couple minor updates in the last week or so, probably that's what you saw.

[fragger]

I had a go at NMS again just out of curiosity. It's been a long time, thought it might be cool for a change...

I started from scratch, and I found that you now begin automatically in 3rd person view. Since there was nothing anywhere in the controls to tell me how to get back to 1st person, and after pushing every key on the board, I had to look it up online (it's actually in the "Quick" menu, up one level, and scroll to the right, and select "Camera". Don't know how I didn't go right to it... Wtf is wrong with a simple keypress for that? Hello Hello my old friend... )

It seems you no longer start right next to your crippled ship either, since it put me quite some distance away from it, over a bunch of hills, on a frigid planet with my environmental system rapidly deteriorating. There was no directional icon to tell me where the ship was until I fixed my Multitool. I got to the ship without a lot of time to spare (couldn't find any caves along the way to hole up in to let the Environment system recharge).

The resources are all quite different now, almost nothing that I remember exists anymore. When it came to repairing my ship, right away I ran into a snag. One of the resources I needed to fix it was "Pure Ferrite". Well, there were a few big chunks of that nearby, like rocks wrapped around the trunks of trees. However, I couldn't mine it - I first needed to upgrade my Mining Laser to "Advanced Mining Laser". How to do that? I had to go online - again - to find out. Apparently I either needed to find an "Armorer" to get it from (uh, there's nobody around here, I don't have a base yet because I just started and I have no way to get staff for a base even if I had one because I'm in the middle of nowhere on a frozen flipping planet with no way to get off it and thus fly to the Space Station to start futzing around after workers and Multitool upgrades) or I can build it, but I need a bunch of components which aren't exactly just lying around the place and I don't have the faintest idea of where to look or go to find the resources to make the components to upgrade the Mining Laser to mine the Pure Ferrite to fix the ship, and I don't want to have to look every bloody thing up online and I don't want to have to traipse all over the bloody planet on foot looking for stuff.

So I gave up. Only took an hour or so for me to get discouraged... Back to FO4 then, I guess.

[Art Blade]

yep.. that kind of resembles my first impression, too, when I started it after a long hiatus. And to cut it short, I still don't like the game. I mean, I liked it when it was new, it was so simple that it was fun but I instantly disliked it when I first ran into pirates. And I started to hate it when there were pirates AND game-breaking bugs and after that, game-breaking updates. Damn it.

However, from my last time I remembered that the 1st/3rd person "camera" was somewhere in the menus so I didn't have to look it up but, as some say, "F me sideways," was the general feeling when getting back into that game. Indeed, why not have a single toggle key for that, for crying out loud? HELLO??

And regarding those overly complicated resources and the management thereof, I almost instantly asked Dweller for help. Not how to play the game but to help me get an updated save game editor which miraculously solved ALL my problems Well, except menu design.

After some time with unlimited resources and fully kitted-out ships and the sudden appearance of star destroyer-sized freighter which I had created out of a shabby cheap fighter, things started to be fun. For some time. Having tested out all the new stuff, I quickly lost interest again. I simply wanted to see the new stuff. The game itself hasn't changed in a way that I'd want to go back any time soon.

[BinnZ]

D_B, are you sure it was 'your' crashed ship you found?

But damn, what a bummer! I don't like it in the first place when everything is different just for the sake of it, but this... horrible 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Binn, I think you mean Fragger, not me   

But yeah that's how it works now, but they've been promising a "big update" to be out "this summer" that will - again - change much of the game.

As far as how the game starts out for the new player, if you are going in blind then there's not a lot explained, at least that I recall. The other thing about not having a single keybind for a view switch, well, it's meant for a controller on a console, so the "quick menu" was they best they could come up with I guess. Let's not even talk about, I don't know, maybe even thinking for one second about PC players and letting them attach key binds to anything? No? Ah well. That's why I had to go the external route to edit the keybinds file manually to get them to do what I want. There's still no way to bind a separate key to something that doesn't have a separate control, like the 1st to 3rd person view, but at least I can make it w0#k mostly the way I like.

I haven't played the game in quite a few months, and will probably pick it up again once the new update drops to see what's going on. But I don't think it will change the base bedrock of the game in any significant way, it will still be the same resource gathering and buying ships routine.

[Art Blade]

from the very beginning up until now, the one thing I've liked the most is checking out (flying) new ships. Thanks to procedurally generated ships, there should be an infinite amount of different types (within a finite amount of classes) but somehow they managed to procedurally generate just a handful of types within a class. Not so much procedural but randomising from a pool of parts I guess.

[fragger]

D_B, are you sure it was 'your' crashed ship you found?

Yep, definitely. A message came up once I'd fixed my Multitool that said something like "Your ship has been detected", put my ship's location icon on the HUD and gave me an objective of travelling to it, and when I got to it, it said something like "You have found your ship" and it was the usual Star Wars fighter-style vessel with the wreckage, crates and bits and pieces around it, as per normal. I also wouldn't have been able to climb straight into it if it hadn't been mine.

So yeah, no question that it was my ship

[Art Blade]

any, more substantial, proof of that?

[fragger]

  No, that's all I've got - apart from the dialog box that appeared at the bottom of the screen once I'd climbed aboard that told me it how it must be my ship because the controls are responding to my touch even though I have no memory of having a ship

[Art Blade]

alright, then

[BinnZ]

Sorry fragger, double time 

It's been long since I played it and didn't remember all this... the idea just sprung to mind since you mentioned the extreme long walk to reach it.

[Dweller_Benthos]

From what I understand, this is how the game starts now, and did for me last time I did a new game test. Usually you are about 500m or so form the crash site, and I think you can fix your multitool fairly easily, not sure if you can get it to the point to dig a cave for yourself to hide in, but that's what I usually do on hostile planets, if there's no shelter around, dig a hole and hide in it, lol.

[Art Blade]

dig a hole, hide in it, and quit the game.

[Dweller_Benthos]