No Man's Sky

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yes, the new update is supposed to finally allow you to make a custom character for yourself, and greatly improves multiplayer. I'll probably get back into when that gets released. Glad you're finally able to enjoy the game Fragger, it's definitely not the game that was released anymore.

[BinnZ]

I'm also glad you're enjoying the game, Fragger, but man this video you posted GKID, deja-vu!
How on earth does this arsehole have the guts to start talking about something like NMS again in a show like this! It can only mean we have some donkeys @ Xbox today. Or it's just a massive satire

[LowPolyOWG]

What video? Unless, you mean a video within the article

[Art Blade]

I think he does—I noticed it, recognised that cun... that cunning guy, and decided not to watch it.

[fragger]

I think Hello deserves a pat on he back for sticking with NMS. After copping such a blasting from players and the media at the game's initial release, they could have just walked away from it, and I don't think I would have blamed them - having that much public scorn heaped on a project that they'd dedicated several years of their lives to would have to be pretty disheartening. But they got their heads down and kept working on it, and they have actually begun to fashion a decent product out of the wreckage. It's still not the most exciting game in the world and is still a pretty grindy affair, especially in the early stages of a new game, but there's no doubt that it has been improved tremendously.

So I'd give Hello an "A" for dogged perseverance and for not taking the easy way out

As for this NEXT, I'm ambivalent as I have no interest in a multiplayer NMS. But boy, Hello better have this one working right when they release it or they'll be shackled back into the same public pillories of Debacle Town that they've spent the last few years extricating themselves from.

Re the game itself, I enjoy the flying a lot more now. Control of the ship has been refined and it's now possible to land it on a dime if you want, instead of hitting the "land" key and hoping it doesn't set you down half a mile from where you want to be. That stupid automatic terrain-clearance thing they had going in the original game has thankfully been discarded. I like skimming the ground at speed and flying down canyons, and I'd like to retain the right to fly into a cliff-face if I so choose I notice too that they have improved the appearance of asteroids. Now they really do look like asteroids and not improbable brick-like blocks of rock.

I've ground my way up to 7 million units so far, with a view towards getting to about 15 mill with which to buy a decent intermediary ship. I'm doing it the hard way - mining up and stuffing the suit and ship with a ton of valuable stuff like Gold or Emeril, then flogging it all at the nearest Trading Post, or at the Station (though I vary payloads - it seems that the more of a particular commodity you sell in large amounts, the more the buying price for that commodity will decrease over time, so you steadily get less and less money for it. So I alternate cargoes every third or fourth run). I embellish that source of income with money earned by exploring and uploading discoveries, and along the way I'm keeping my eye out for any promising wrecked ship that I might salvage.

I went aboard a "small" freighter and priced it. The captain was asking about 100 million units for it. Pricing ships at the Station and at Trading Posts, 48-slot ships are actually more expensive than small freighters, at about 110-120 mill. I remember how in the original game, whenever you bought a new ship, the prices for the still bigger ships would jump up considerably. I don't know if that still happens, but I plan on acquiring just one intermediary ship on my way to a 48-slotter, like say a 32-slot job. The 16 slots on the default starting ship just don't cut it.

Looking through the blueprints on offer at the local Station (almost all of which are for various ship weapons), there are lots of upgrade blueprints for things that I've never heard of and have no idea what they do. Where are all the upgrade blueprints for things like the Mining Laser and the Exosuit? I've found one or two, but that's it so far. My ML is what I most want to upgrade but I've only found two blueprints for it so far - a Sigma Beam Intensifier and a grenade one.

I'm a ways away from base building yet. I've seen a couple of promising base hubs, with one just a stone's-throw away from a Trading Post. The base-building part of the game is a complete unknown to me, except for what Dweller has reported about it. I may need to re-read his posts when I get to that point. IF I get to that point - I don't know how long this font of newfound enthusiasm for NMS will keep bubbling

[Art Blade]

enjoy it while it lasts.

[fragger]

Actually, I think it ran its course with me already. I made my first hyperspace jump into a new system, and on my very first interplanetary flight in that new system, I got jumped by a flight of three pirate ships and killed. Since I couldn't get any blueprints for upgrading my ship's weapons and shield in my home system, the ship's fighting capabilities are lowest-level, and if I'm going to have pirates in my face every time I fly between planets trying to get myself sufficiently geared up, I'll quite likely be spending a lot of time flying back to wherever in space the pirates last killed me to retrieve all my gear - and hope I don't get attacked again while I'm doing that, which happened to me a couple of times in my original game.

If that's how it's gonna go, then bugger it, I don't want to know. The ridiculous level of pirate attacks in the game really irked me the first time around. I don't want to get re-irked.

This game is just screaming for joystick support. Or I'm screaming for it, whatever Trying to survive a rapid-paced, twisting-turning astro-dogfight using M&K is an exercise in exasperation for this greenhorn space jockey. The game was created primarily for consoles and their controllers after all, and I might possibly have more of a chance with a controller - because for me, mice make really sucky flight controllers. I'm pretty good with a joystick, but if I'm trying to throw a space fighter around in a furball using M&K it's just dumb luck if I hit anything - or if I even see anything to hit - while I'm getting hammered from all sides. Cruising around a planetary landscape is easy and fun, but throwing down with pirates isn't so much.

Nothing much has changed there evidently, and it just put me right off. I think I'll warp back to Planet Fallout and fool around with Magnolia for a while

[Art Blade]

When I picked up NMS for the second time, I experienced a very bad game. The game looked better, the new stuff was totally new to me, and I started in a system that hated me. I remember generally speaking a very hostile environment and pirates as well as sentinels all over me. D_B recommended to start from scratch because the legacy in my old savegame might have caused the weird stuff. So I did start anew, it was better, but still no fun. Then I couldn't for the life of me get the NMS mod site to w0#k (I never got any mails to retrieve my password and was unable to register a new account) so D_B helped me by down- and uploading a savegame editor for me. That allowed me to stuff myself with whatever new stuff and resources I wanted, I modded my ship and all the tech stuff, and started to fly around on a one-seated weapon of mass destruction. Thanks to my xbox controller, I was able to have some fun with pirates, they were no match but with keyboard and mouse, they would have been. I did some base building, went to something like build mode rather than survival mode to play in, but despite that, all of a sudden I had to play missions because the game in build mode forced me to. No escaping that. Sod that.

[PZ]

Man, after what you gents describe, I'm glad I did not purchase the game.

[Art Blade]

the wise man learns from the mistakes of others.

[LowPolyOWG]

 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah your starting system can make or break a game. It may be a "poor" system that doesn't want to spend any money on the stuff you want to sell. Or as in what sounds like Fragger's case, they only sell ship upgrades and no mining tool upgrades, which are only sold by certain vendors, in certain systems.

Pirate attacks also increase the more valuable your cargo, so if you're hauling 10 tons of gold and emeril, they are more likely to target you than if you're empty.

[Art Blade]

ah yeah, I remember getting scanned every now and then and when I did have some stuff on board, I got a message along the lines of, "valuable cargo detected, now you're screwed."

[fragger]

I didn't have anything much on board when I got attacked except for a slot of Plutonium, one of Carbon, one of Thamium9 and a few other half-filled slots of stuff like Iron and Zinc, nothing tremendously valuable. I'd just jumped into the new system, dropped onto the planet nearest to the local station to get a handle on its climate, went back into space without gathering anything and got attacked on my way back to the station.

The game's galaxies must be absolutely swarming with pirates - the buggers are everywhere you go Way too many. It's not much fun at all getting shot up just about every time you try to fly between planets, and every system seems to have pirates in it.

I know there's "Creative Mode" in which player and ship are indestructible, there are no pirates and you get unlimited resources, so it's essentially like a God mode, but I don't want to play God mode. I like to w0#k my way up ungodly and vulnerable, because then I feel like I'm achieving something. I like a challenge, but Creative Mode would take all the challenge away and I think it would get boring quickly.

I just wish I could play on Normal Mode without having to fight bloody pirates just about every time I get into space. Whether or not I get killed, I just get sick of dealing with them. The game really needs something like a "Pirate Attack Level" option in the settings where you can set the frequency of pirate attacks to something like "None", "Occasional", "Normal" or "Frequent". Something along those lines might make everyone happy. By everyone, I mean me

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah you must have won the reverse lottery on that one. I rarely get pirate attacks, and usually only when I was carrying a couple million worth of circuits boards. Sometimes I just ignored them and flew to the planet I was going to, other times I shot them out of the sky. But not having a decent ship with good armor and weapons makes that a bit tricky.

Wasn't there a mod for eliminating pirate attacks? I'd have to look.