No Man's Sky Orbital Update brings full ship customisation and a complete space station overhaul

https://lemmy.world/post/13604961

No Man's Sky Orbital Update brings full ship customisation and a complete space station overhaul - Lemmy.World

Common Hello Games W
Honestly I’m really thrilled to play the update tonight.
One of those games I’m glad I bought at launch, although I’ve fired it up 3-4 times and struggled with the mechanics… it’s nice to know it’s still evolving and I can always start fresh again with the new content. If I wasn’t so deep into Helldivers I’d give it another go right now… but Democracy can’t wait!
Same. I keep picking it up every now and again but it really needs me to put a bit of time into it to understand all the new mechanics since launch. I’ll get to it one day!
I felt this same way until I jumped into the Omega expedition. It was an excellent crash course for all the game offers and I now feel way more comfortable jumping into the base game and doing whatever I feel up to.
Can you still play it? Been a while since I’ve played but last I knew the expeditions were limited-time thingies.

FOMO-leveraging shit needs to stop. All it does is make me not want to touch the thing at all because I know I don’t have the time to do all the things in a season.

NMS isn’t so bad at it, but seriously FUCK the games that leverage it. Almost as bad as microtransactions.

FOMO-leveraging shit needs to stop.

but seriously FUCK the games that leverage it.

No one likes to be manipulated/tricked for someone else’s profit.

I tried the game two or three times sitting down with the “I want to play a space sim” mindset and could never get past the tutorial. Then the next time, it had clicked that it’s a survival crafter that just happens to have a space theme. When I sat down with that mindset and perspective on what I was in for, I suddenly throughly enjoyed the game.

The game just does a really bad job of showing you what it is trailers and other media. Sure, all the things it shows off are there, but they’re not the core of the game.

I waited to get involved until after the Echoes update last summer, and I truly enjoyed 100+ hours of the game.

It still does suffer from inevitably feeling really empty, with billions of copies of the same 4 different coloured/temperatured planets and 8 creature types, but it was still a heck of an experience.

and struggled with the mechanics…

Are you speaking towards the UI/UX, or the gameplay?

Similar to Glide said above, wanted a space sim and realize it’s more of a survival game. On the opposite end I played a little Elite Dangerous which was WAY TOO INVOLVED space sim!
Playing this on the playstation vr2 is mind blowing.
I might try this again when I get home

this game came out in 2016 btw

kudos HG! grah!

My last foray into NMS ended when I found a little town and was promptly attacked by sentinels that could heal each other through walls.

Meh…I’m sure it’s still NMS. Feels so empty and boring anytime I’ve trying to replay after getting screwed over with buying this game after I was lied too.

Won’t be trying this new sticker or whatever new thing they are working on. No thanks.

A mile wide, but inches deep.
Inch, singular I would argue. I don’t think there’s any gameplay mechanic here that can’t be mastered in 2 minutes (artificial grind notwithstanding).
I kind of feel you on this. I can build amazing things, find cool ships, kit out my freighter, and all that lovely stuff but theres no point to it. Theres no evil empire to fight, no galaxy to save, no dungeons to raid. Its a great sandbox, but not a lot of reason to be in it after a while.
Yeah, I’m glad they put the work in and I’ve gotten a lot of hours, but…certain things about the game seem broken by design. I just don’t feel like buying a more expensive ship is letting me do things that I couldn’t do without it. So personally I’m looking forward to their next game, and seeing what they do with all the lessons they’ve learned here. But I’m probably done with NMS.
What would be really cool would be if they made a companion game that took the work you do in NMS and ported that character into a combat game.
It’s basically space Minecraft. Not all people like that kind of game.
Significantly less fulfilling than Minecraft, as you have limitations on build area and terraforming simply resets after a number of days.
Yes I also cling to the past and never update my views or thinking on things.
Try reading while you do that…

Sort of goes against the whole point!

Like if you’d read the news and updates about NMS you’d see they fixed most of the complaints and made a great game, and all for free.

The fuck are you smoking…

I don’t give rats ass what the ‘news’ says about this game, or any game. That’s the damn reason this game was sold on lies in the first place. Bullshit news. I make my own opinion based on actually doing the thing. I replayed (the words you still didn’t read) and made the opinion that it’s still a boring crappy game that makes me want my money back still.

The point is, the game is boring and has nothing to do. Why bother getting bigger ships. There’s literally no point. Gameplay is not fun in any way and I will not force myself to get enjoyment out because that clearly defeats the point of enjoyment.

The only good thing this game and Sean ‘give me my money back’ Murray did, was make me not trust any developer until I get their full game for free and test it on my own time and finding out where the company is full of shit and lying to its userbase.

Ah, so it has nothing to do with NMS then, it’s just you don’t like the sandbox genre. That’s fair.

The developer has pretty much delivered on what they promised at this stage.

You’re basically saying you bought an RPG and you don’t like that it has a levelling system. Bit different.

It’s pretty amusing that this game went from over hyped to an absolute dumpster fire to probably one of the best space games ever made. One hell of a comeback story.
Honestly to me it’s more promising to see a game studio stick behind their game like this rather than having the initial game be good. A good studio will still have bad games, but knowing that a studio will stand behind their bad game and work on it until it’s good means a lot.
It’s definitely cool, they could have pulled the rug and run away with the money.
we just have to do some work on the overhyping a game and preorder part, but its looking like i might pick up this game

I got it off GamePass back in November 2020 for my One S and played it a lot. Work has kept me busy so I’ve had less time but I have bought it twice since then - once for PS5 and then when I bought my Series X.

It’s been worth it. I don’t play multiplayer much and I’ve missed most of the Expeditions but I enjoy it a lot every time I play.

You can follow the quests or not. I honestly enjoy exploring the different planets. The graphics are good. On my PS5 save, my home base is on a planet where the grass glows when the wind sweeps across it at night.

I’ll sit and just watch it throughout the game night.

I don’t see why it’s suddenly the best space game… The core mechanic seems to be the same as the original. Mine materials that are the same on every planet, so you can build space ships and better miners that take more materials and do it over and over again.

When I was playing on launch day, I had a really good first impression but it turned into disappointment, since all the planets had the same minerals. May as well stay on the first planet forever.

I think a lot of people are just very, very pleased with how well it’s being supported compared to its initial launch and how this game company has become an outlier in the industry. And they take their love for the company’s business practices and don’t recognize them as conflating them with the game’s mechanics. So while the game may be great, I think a lot of people subconsciously give it a boost because of its legacy.

Every planet doesn’t have every material you need for crafting everything. But a single solar system likely has most of it. There are key elements on every planet that are meant to make sure a player never gets stranded. I guess one could argue for that to be a game mode though if it isn’t already where you very well could end up on a planet and have no way to survive.

A lot of people like the gameplay loop from day one but the initial lies about how multiplayer worked was a driving force behind the unhappiness. Once that was fixed it was a shallow experience but a lot of people would have been content with it. Instead Hello Games keeps supporting it and putting out new content updates. There are still a lot of features and improvements people would like for the game and those very well may see the light of day with the passion Hello Games has shown for improving it. That’s why so many people think favorably of them. There are a ton of other bigger studios that would never show this level of dedication and community support.

I agree, they did the right thing and much more. But the game still doesn’t feel very fun. It’s missing a reason to do things beyond just exploration and seeing new randomly generated animals and colors.

I was hoping for it to have some Elite qualities where you would travel with rare cargo to make money, but it doesn’t even have any rare cargo or any demand for unique minerals on planets…

It’s not fun, which is the main problem. The devs have built a universe to explore but hasn’t accounted for that humans don’t think different shapes and colors are very interesting when it’s the same otherwise.

The popularity speaks to the contrary; a lot of people want to exist in a universe they get to see neat things. There are quest lines to help push players forward if they want, they just aren’t required and are easy to ignore. I don’t think resource scarcity isn’t meant to be a major aspect of the game but I can see why someone might want it to be.
Yeah maybe you are right. It’s just not the game I want it to be, but they do have players and it’s going well for them, so… :)
It was genuinely fun when i started and had to hunt for materials and actually had the threat of death, i hid in a cave to recover heat protection and had to do that a few times before i entered space and then the game all but ended

That is pretty reductive. Like, it’s a sim. You could describe just about any sim the same way. “You just do this thing to do that thing”. How is this any different from any other game?

I’m not saying it’s the best space game, but I had fun when I played it and it definitely didn’t just feel like I was mining materials just to mine more materials.

If this isn’t even remotely a sim.
Ok? I don’t think that changes my argument very much.
Not even remotely? That’s a bit hyperbolic. I don’t think it’s a sim either, but it has some qualities of one.

There’s absolutely nothing in no man’s sky that’s meant to be a space sim in any way at all or even has any resemblance. It’s not hyperbolic. The dev has always called it an imagination of the science fiction idea of the 80s which is supposed to capture the feel of something that would be in an arcade.

Not saying it’s a bad game, but it’s not a sim. At all.

It was marketed as a sim, so there’s that.
I wouldn’t call it reductive as much as I would… accurate.

The problem is that NMS is very repetitive and bland. Learning alien words takes for-fucking-ever, finding freighter upgrades is one of the worst time sinks in the game, combat feels more tedious and padded out than that of Everquest, looking for “that one cool ship” or “cool looking weapon” is pure RNG and lucking out on it not coming as a C class, upgrading inventory space is either a system jumping time sink or “planetary exploration” time sink.

Nearly nothing you do in the game gives you a sense of accomplishment and, after 4-8 hours or so after first starting playing, you’re unlikely to look forward to any specific activity because “it’s fun”. There’s a lot “to do” but very little motivation to, like why even bother being the mayor of a settlement?

Even on permadeath the game offers no real challenge once you’re off the starting planet.

Isn’t there a “journey to the centre” and interaction with other players?

From what I’ve found online, the “center” of your galaxy is just a portal that sends you to the edge of a different galaxy where it’s different but more of the same.

Kinda like Starfield actually.

The irony is how much Starfield copies from NMS, often the bad things and as a worse copy, like scanning stuff on the planet surface, jump range limitation, space “exploration”, shitty performance

Isn’t there a “journey to the centre”

Yes, though it’s a cheap “new game plus”, without even feeling like a “new game”. Once you manage to get to the center, you’re thrown in a new galaxy in a random planet and have to get back to your ship, only some upgrades you’ve installed on yourself and your ship might break. Yet you can immediately call your freighter and any exocraft.

There’s also Artemis’ questline, with an interesting concept but overall underwhelming delivery.

Story spoilers

Artemis is stuck in a simulation, just like you, player, are stuck in one. The whole universe is a failing simulation created by Atlas.

.

interaction with other players?

From my experience, which pretty much ended around 1 year ago with the game, player interaction could be summed up to:

  • finding someone else’s buildings during a community expedition
  • finding someone else’s buildings in a quicksilver quest
  • someone giving you free stuff while you’re idling in the anomaly

Apparently there are guilds now? In any case, I never saw anyone looking for group, because the game has nothing that only a pair or trio can do, or do faster/better than a solo player, other than base building

wait till you play the game of life bruh.

no respawns though.

Theres no suddenly about it. They took the well deserved heat after launch very much to heart and spend the next 8 odd years crafting it into the best space game out there imo. Best VR game too.

Its version 4.61 and, essentially, at least its own sequal. Its nothing like the launch day game.

What, like Minecraft, still possibly the most popular game on Earth? I mean, all you do in Minecraft is mine the a couple of minerals that are the same on every seed, and use them to make better tools to mine minerals faster, and grow the same crops so you don’t starve, and do it over and over again.

but in minecraft it’s enjoyable!

not trying to be cheeky—i wrote up a long part about modding capacity and level of sandbox freedom etc., but i am sure you’re already very aware of that lol

so taking it as just vanilla: at the end of the day mining in minecraft feels relaxing and satisfying to me while in NMS it feels like a chore. i absolutely hate mining out ore deposits with a mining laser.

(breaking plants and minerals is kinda fun though)

like minecraft really nailed game feel

obviously this all depends on personal preference anyway, but if players have to do the same thing over and over again, then it needs to be very enjoyable in and off itself to do so.