Norman's Guy

[Dog Pants]

This game has so much potential for me that I've caved and pre-ordered. Despite being skint at the moment (bloody kids and their school holidays). It's been a worrisome decision, mostly based on my experience with other games which have promised similar things - Spore, Black & White, Minecraft, Elite Dangerous to name a few.

Sifting the wheat of opinion from the chaff of internet outrage, I think I'll be okay. It sounds, to my ears, to be a fairly low stress survival game. A piece I read on Kotaku of their first two hours (which I skipped to the end of because of spoilers) said "Don’t expect this to be the space game of all space games – it’s clear from the beginning that there are a very set number of things you can do — but if you’re into chill exploration games, this will probably be up your alley." Which is fine by me, I only need an excuse to go out and explore the universe with just enough risk to focus my attention rather than stress me out. I expect more stuff to do will come along, and if the devs aren't inclined to do it then hopefully they've made it easy enough to mod that other people will.

Will it earn £40 worth of my money if it keeps me going back for a long time.

[FatherJack]

I like the idea of it - especially the exploring of new uncharted space and naming planets after my scrotum, but I really want to see what it is like first.

Elite promised to be like that but ended up as space trucker in small area (if you wanted to stay near friends) or mostly samey if you went exploring - you have to go pretty far to find undiscovered stuff and it's not that amazing when you do.

There's also the time I get to play - it won't be as much as some so I worry that all the planets will be named after someone else's bollocks by the time I get there, and that's just nasty. The pre-release Daymeeuhn debacle, and pre-day-1-patch shenans proved that no matter how much of a chilled discovery vibe you give your game, there's always some arsehole who will blast and hack their way directly through it, which in the context of this game could ruin it for everyone else.

[Roman Totale]

I'm probably going to get this game as I like the idea of it, but I can't get excited by it as it reminds me too much of Spore. I could tell from the early days of it being hyped that people were going to get over excited about it and declare it best game ever despite never having played one second.

Launch trailer has just been released:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aozqa_7PLhE[/youtube]

[Dog Pants]

I was reading an RPS post on hype and expectations, and I saw a picture of what I assume to be some of the proc gen fauna. I thought to myself "oh cool, I didn't know it could generate things like that." And that's pretty much summed it up nicely. I've not really been interested in the hype. I know very little about the details, only the odd screenshot, the early premises, and the non-specific words of a few journalists who have described the style of game it seems to be. I just want something I can fly around in and find interesting things. I don't care if other people have seen them before - if they can direct me to unusual and interesting things then all the better. I don't want to find other players, at least not unless they're people I know, because other people on the internet are generally dicks. So I'm not excited, juts intensely curious.

[Mr. Johnson]

You might be in luck regarding the other players, there's currently a big fuss going on about the game apparently not having a multiplayer whatsoever despite there being one promised. I didn't really read into it and it's probably just internet people shouting against each other on tumblr. It's all a bit vague really.

[Roman Totale]

I've seen a few reviewers saying "if you go into it with the expectation of it being an Indy game, you won't be disappointed".

Yeah, that's not an indy game price tag though.

[Dog Pants]

No, agreed. That's the thing I'm most uncomfortable about, and I wonder if they've hiked it because of the hype.

[TezzRexx]

This all seems very Spore-ish. Will give it some time before buying it!

[Roman Totale]

I think the more I see of it the less inclined I am to buy it. I wonder how long it would take to get bored of "oh look, another random procedurely generated thing". Knowing me, not long at all. I mean I like the idea of exploring the galaxy and all, but I get the impression the galaxy might get a bit samey after a while.

[Dog Pants]

This gives me some faith. It's a fairly spoiler-free article about people looking for a giant snake glimpsed in one of the trailers. Speculation ranges from accusations that it has never, and could never, exist in the game, to assumptions that it simply hasn't been seen yet in the vastness of the game. Either way, the things that do get mentioned - unexplained, weird, or just cool - reinforce my hope that I'll be able to wander the galaxy taking screenshots of interesting things for you guys who are as yet undecided.

[Dog Pants]

So far so good! Although only an hour or so in, admittedly. The interesting thing at the moment is I don't know how typical my experience is. My starting planet is an ambient 41c, and I am apparently a snowman because I can't survive much over a day in it without shelter. I've got iron rocks literally all over the floor. At one point I found a floor made of gold ore. There are flowers bearing platinum and little sentry bots which I thought were on my side until I started hitting the door of a ruined building. Then I had to hide in a cave until they went away. Spaceships occasionally fly overhead. The fauna is fairly unremarkable, I've seen some deer-like things, some dog-like things, all a little bit alien, and a few birds which I've not seen closely enough to work out how alien they are.

EDIT: And it does not like ALT-TAB

[spoodie]

EDIT: And it does not like ALT-TAB

Seconded

I had to buy it to see what all the saltiness was about. It runs fine for me and looks good, but I do have a high spec system. Only about an hour in myself and slogging across the landscape to find the material I needed to repair my ship was a little tedious. Although as my ship can now fly I guess that will be a thing of the past for me now, plus there's upgrades for mobility, I believe.

[Dog Pants]

I had some performance issues on day one, but they seemed to go away overnight. They weren't game-breaking.

11 hours in now and I'm looking ahead. I've worked out which parts of my starting point were unusual (pretty much none) and fully explored my home system. I've now moved onto my next system, and advanced the plot a little.

Good points so far: It's noticeably persistent - I'm slowly learning alien dictionaries so I interact better with them, slowly upgrading my equipment, slowly exploring, and it all feels quite cumulative. There's a vaguely directed plot which puts you under no pressure to follow but is as good a direction as any. It's all very relaxed and unhurried.

Bad points so far: The variety isn't great. Planets look slightly different, creatures look somewhat different, the rocks and plants vary a little, but it all feels rather samey. I've heard that there are rarer, more remarkable types of everything out there so maybe this isn't such a bad thing, but at the moment I'm feeling that one location on a given planet is pretty much the same as another. There's also a lot of wandering about looking aimlessly for interesting stuff, which pretty much just consists of wandering in a straight line keeping an eye out for places to land.

Recommendation at the moment? Probably not worth the £40 for the experience so far (although I think £40 is too high for any game) unless you really love studying the effects of procedural generation or are desperate to have a chillout game and feel like the screenshots grape your squildo in a big way. That said, I fully expect to see a triple-figure 'time played' stat on my Steam listing, so I'm content I'll be getting my money's worth.

And speaking of screenshots.

[Dog Pants]

RPS's review is pretty spot on.

18 hours in now and I've noticed (like John in the review above) that it's not very good explaining some things. I don't mind this as much as he does as it means I've not discovered all the game's systems in the first few hours, although this isn't something it should be praised for. Maybe it's the same thing that makes me not like Fallout 3 & 4, TES games, etc., but I'm quite happy wandering about slowly meandering towards some vaguely insinuated ultimate goal. No pressure, no rush, no worrying about missing something because once you've spent ten minutes on a planet you've probably seen most of what it has to offer. I feel like I'm seeing every bit of its content, despite knowing I'll never see more than the tiniest fraction.

Even so, I wish the starships were more fun.

[spoodie]

[Dog Pants]

[Chickenz]

lol. Spotted that on FB earlier and had a good giggle :D

[Dog Pants]

I was explaining NMS to an interested friend at work yesterday and came up with something that seems to fit quite well. You'll see 90% of the game in the first few hours, and spend the next 30 looking for the ever diminishing (but increasingly interesting) percentage of content you've not encountered yet. If searching for that elusive bit of randomly generated genius over many moderately interesting but ultimately fairly similar environments sounds entertaining, then you'll probably enjoy yourself. It sounds dull, but I'm enjoying that - if we encountered giant snakes on every planet then it really would be a very shallow and repetitive game. The mystery is what keeps me going, and there is occasionally something which surprises me.

So that covers whether you might think the game is for you. As to whether it's worth £40... That depends on whether you're happy to pay for quantity rather than quality. This is at the MMO end of value-per-hour - lots of low-impact gaming time rather than a six-hour tightly scripted adventure. It seems obvious, but in that perspective the price isn't so shocking. It still feels like it should be half that, but if you know what to expect and enjoy it then you shouldn't feel hard done to. I certainly don't.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

The internet seems to hate this more than a bastard hybrid of trump, pokemon go and spore, I can only assume the hypetrain rolled through and upset people?

[Joose]

The internet seems to hate this more than a bastard hybrid of trump, pokemon go and spore, I can only assume the hypetrain rolled through and upset people?

Yeah, basically. In brief, it went a bit like this:

Team announces game, shows off some pictures and video of what they are aiming at. Fails to properly explain at any point what you will actually be doing in game, moment to moment. Internet sees pictures and video, goes hog wild with speculation. Decides that the game will do All The Things. Team making the game continue to fail at setting reasonable expectations. Hype train choo choo. Team would now be stupid to reign in expectations, as the ludicrous hype has turned their game from "we expect decent indie game level of sales" to "we expect full AAA major launch level of sales". Game is released, does not do All The Things. Sadness.

If it were not for the crazy hype that built up I suspect it would have been greeted as a deeply impressive indie exploration game showcasing some interesting procedural generation tech. It probably would have been launched at a lower price point, and everyone would have been happy.

I do think that some of the criticism is being made by people who dont understand procedural generation. Yes, loads of the planets are basically the same with slight tweaks, but to me that makes finding something genuinely unusual all the more interesting. As someone on a podcast I was listening to earlier in the week pointed out: just because you keep finding Planet of the Upright Horses doesn't mean the more impressive, realistic looking creatures used in promotional images dont exist.

That being said, there are some bits of it I find disappointing. Every planet has plants on that can be harvested for resources, and they all use the exact same model. A "silicon" plant on one planet looks *exactly* the same as all other silicon plants on all other planets, which is a little lame. The critters on planets not being part of any kind of ecosystem is also a bit disappointing; you could replace all the interesting models with two differently coloured blobs, one green for safe and one red for angry, and it would be mechanically identical. I would like for there to be some plant->herbivore->carnivore thing going on at least.

Overall I'm enjoying it fine, but I was sceptical about the hype in the first place.