No Man's Sky

[Dweller_Benthos]

I haven't seen pirates yet, as I'm still in my home system, but I did try to attack just a random trader to see what would happen. He of course called the cops, and I took him out and a few of the sentinels, maybe 3 or 4 all told, before I couldn't repair my shield fast enough, then died. I spawned back at the station and got the message to go pick up my stuff but I loaded the save game instead as that was just an experiment. Do any of you have an idea if there's a limit to the lives you have? I see on the upper left there's a health indicator and some symbols for things that look like lives, but that would be weird in a limitless exploration game. I guess I should look up what the HUD parts mean I suppose. But the tip I posted earlier about attacking a freighter and grabbing the goods until you die will w@&k, so just have at it I suppose.

But the latest patch that the experimental branch supplied yesterday seems to w@&k very well, no crashes last night after 3 or so hours of playing. I also used the "optimal" settings that nvidia had set up, which were all higher than I had them set at just to get it running before, and it all seemed to w@&k well. I spent a lot of time on a barren moon with no animals and only a few plants, gathering resources. Went back and forth to a trading post to sell stuff and got my reputation up enough that a guy there upgraded my mining tool for free. Now I can just give them 20 carbon and request a new word to learn, so soon I hope I'll be able to understand them better. This is the Viking language (I know it's Vy'keen in the game) I guess there are two others? Anyway, I forget my standing with them, most trusted or something like that.

Oh, and installed the "no waiting to click something" mod from that link above, works great. No more pausing every time I want to do something in a menu. I guess that's put in so that console users can be sure what they are clicking on with their clumsy clunky controllers. Going back to that site to see if there's anything else I want to install to "fix" the game.

[Art Blade]

those symbols aren't lives, I suppose they represent how much shielding you've got.

[mmosu]

The bar above is shield, and the symbols themselves are "life" for lack of a better term, cause it seems once the shield is down you start losing those, and once they're gone you die.
And on that note, space combat on this game is bullcrap  >:((
There's literally NOTHING you can do to prevent getting jumped (short of never going anywhere) and ALMOST NOTHING you can do to survive once it happens  :D
This aspect of the game needs a BIG overhaul 

[Art Blade]

yep

the only thing you can do is fill up your entire ship with upgrades.

[mmosu]

yep

the only thing you can do is fill up your entire ship with upgrades.

Yes, and it's garbage - not to mention it undermines the spirit of the game. The most annoying thing is that you get pulled out of pulse drive when you get attacked. So let me get this straight - an object traveling at near light speed gets ground to a relative crawl by a scan from a pirate ship, because reasons  :D

[Art Blade]

totally agree :-D We had this discussion elsewhere here already, apparently no one of us likes nonsense and to be forced to fight, on top every fricking time you leave or enter whatever it is, station or planet or system.

[fragger]

I too hate this pirate business that gets in the way of everything I try to do above a planet's surface, but I'm dealing better with them now. Once you start getting your weapons and ship shield upgraded (and arranging your upgrades efficiently) you can survive longer against them. Since rearranging my ship's weapon upgrades to take the best advantage of the adjacency bonus (I prefer the Photon Cannon for combat) I can clobber them fairly quickly. My Photon Cannon now spits out shots like a minigun. I can usually trash a pirate ship with one or two good bursts, and my Shield lasts longer before needing to be restored.

Doesn't make the pirates any less of a pain in the backside though, I would still be a much happier camper if they weren't around. Occasional pirate attacks would be OK, might even help to jazz things up once in a while :-() But something like one attack every couple of dozen trips on average would be tolerable. Getting jumped every flipping time you venture out into space is ridiculous.

[Binnatics]

Can you actually, in any way, benefit from those pirate attacks? Like getting (scrap) metal or blueprints or maybe even respect from the locals?

[fragger]

If you destroy the pirate ships you do get increased standing with whichever alien race governs that system, and sometimes a destroyed pirate ship will leave a canister floating in space that you can fly into and pick up. So far though, every canister I've picked up has been empty, but presumably you can get something out of them once n a while. I don't think every destroyed pirate ship leaves a canister behind.

[Binnatics]

Ah I see. So they should rather downgrade the amount of pirate attacks or upgrade the importance of good standing with the 'natives' and the amount of good loot you get from those cannisters. Judging from your experiences a downgrade of pirate activity would be best... Or giving you an escape opportunity so that you can choose whether or not you'd run the risk of confronting them. The latter would implicate imo that those cannisters contain something valuable.

Man, it's been long since I've lived so intensely with other's gaming experiences!

[fragger]

Why don't you join us? :) The game is great fun, despite some of the shortcomings we've mentioned - the worst of which were fixed with the patch (the save problem, Alt-Tab functionality. and the frame rate). The pros definitely outweigh the cons. I'm even learning to live with the lift-off glitch, which I seem to suffer from far more than anyone else here - as far as I know, Art has only encountered it once, and D_B not at all. I get it a lot. It would still be nice if they would fix that, and I think maybe they will since quite a number of players suffer from it. It's included in most gaming sites' "known bugs" sections.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Actually, I got the launch to orbit thing for the first time yesterday, but I think there was an overhang of some of the landscape fairly close to where I took off from, so maybe that messed up the ground avoidance thing and shot me to orbit? Then again, I've also taken off close to some overhang or cliff and just bashed right into it, so who knows?

And, for anyone who wants to read the main gripes a lot of people have about the game that was shown in the preview videos, and the game that was released, there's been a web page created for it, as the original reddit post is gone since the author deleted his account on that fact he was getting too much grief for it.

http://www.onemanslie.info/the-original-reddit-post/

There are a lot of good points made there, things were specifically talked about that were in the game a few months before release that vanished in the time before actual release. I didn't watch all those videos closely back then, just skimmed some and thought it looked like a cool game. I didn't go, "Hey, at 1:56 in that video, they showed a river and talked about XYZ feature, and it's not in the game now, and I'm mad!" but apparently a lot of people did. I can understand where they are coming from, it's almost like seeing a commercial for a new car that has doors, only to find when you go to buy one, that it does in fact, have no doors.

I think when Sony got involved, they soon realized that the game they were making was in no way going to be playable on a Playstation, and Sony told them to tone it down until it does, and what we have now is what was left after they cut a bunch of stuff. One of the main things is the number of creatures you see on screen at a time, animals attacking each other, etc. These types of high level AI and number of objects on screen is just something a console can't deal with. Heck, even a decent PC would have trouble. But they kept showing stuff like that in the videos up until a few weeks before release, and that has ticked a lot of people off.

[fragger]

Terrain doesn't seem to be a factor with the lift-off bug in my case, I can get it anywhere.

It certainly is looking like the reason for the delay in releasing the game was not because the devs wanted to fix last-minute problems, but because they needed the time to cut stuff out at the insistence of Sony to make the game console-friendly. I still enjoy the game, but I can't help wondering what else the game might have had to offer if Hello hadn't gotten into bed with Sony.

Incidentally, I have seen an animal kill another animal, but only on one occasion.

[Binnatics]

Well, I can't join right now. First of all because I'm 2000 km away from my rig (still on holiday in Spain ;))  and second because I've spent so much on holiday that I should be careful with farther expenses atm, heheh

But I am definitely considering the purchase of the game. I know I will enjoy it greatly, and it would be super cool to share the fun with you guys :)

[Art Blade]

I certainly hope that you'll join this epic galactic party  :)

[fragger]

Likewise :)

And the nice thing Binn is it's only a 6GB download, so you won't have to wait an age for it to come down.

[Art Blade]

to me it was only 2.5, I think it gets extracted to 6 on installing it.

[fragger]

Yeah? I didn't watch it, I went and did something else while it was downloading.

[Art Blade]

I watched it, which is how I also know it took like +/- 8 minutes with a 50Mbit line and you said it took you like 10, with a less capable internet connection you'd have downloaded about 3x the volume in a comparatively equal amount of time. Just trying to make sense of this information and I can only conclude that you checked the disk space used, not the download size of the installation packet.

[Binnatics]

With my current data rates I don't have to worrie about any download sizes, but anyway I Will definitely get the game, although it Will probably be somewhere late september I guess. This game is just too fun to miss :)

[fragger]

I just went by what was reported by numerous sites on the net immediately pre-release, and since the download only took a few minutes I didn't bother fact-checking. Fact-checking now, it is actually about 2.6GB.

[Art Blade]

 ^-^

[mmosu]

Man, you guys are probably so far ahead of me now, and I'm the one that had the head start!

[fragger]

That's cool, it's not a race :-D

[Art Blade]

Indeed. It's not a race, as fragger said, no need to rush anything, so let's relax :)

Well, at least as long as mmosu doesn't start to overtake us, that is.