this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Unless they've fired the absolute moron(s) who designed the crafting and alien language system in NMS, I say stay far away.
I mean, combining dihydrogen and oxygen yields... NaCl? And you learn alien words literally one at a time? Oh but they have procedural generation! Except every single space station looks identical.
IMO This is a developer who does not respect their players. And somehow they've convinced a lot of people that periodically adding more shallow grindy fetch quests means the core gameplay isn't garbage.
It doesn't mean it's bad just because it doesn't cater to your tastes.
I really wanted to like NMS. The core concept is 100% up my alley, it looks pretty good, and it's a neat sandbox. I suppose it's not bad if you're the kind of player who is happy mindlessly gathering resources so you can craft an ornate base. Hell, I played quite a bit because I was determined to collect one of every type of spaceship.
But I really do think the gameplay is objectively bad by almost any possible measure. The on-foot traversal is terrible, waiting around for refiners sucks (though at least they had the sense to give a backpack refiner), trying to get the actual spaceship you want is awful, flying towards the galactic center is a chore, and I could go on. I guess the gunplay is serviceable, but the enemies aren't the least bit interesting aside from maybe the largest walker bots.
I mean I don't totally disagree with your statements, but how much playtime do you have in NMS? I have 85 hours and I am totally satisfied aka not thinking of returning regarding new patches with new "content". Does that make it a bad game? I don't think so. Is it the best spacesim ever, I don't think so either. But it gets some features really nicely done:
But I agree the core gameplay loop is quite shallow, I see it more as a "light" sandbox game.
Yeah I like the "go anywhere" feel and was happy when I found a dinosaur planet too. But it still all feels 2 inches deep in so many ways.
I've come back to it a bunch of times because people keep insisting it's good or "no you just need to try X" or "but the latest update added so much". Steam says over 300 hours now but a decent portion of that was standing around trade hubs waiting for ships I wanted in S or A class, or literally just walking away from my PC while refiners ran.
I'm not usually the type of player to use cheats/exploits but I actually had more fun when I started using a duplication glitch. No more limited inventory, money, or resources, I could just pick one ship and one multitool and max them out with all the storage and weapons and whatnot. I don't enjoy grinding so this was a relief. But it still didn't make up for all the bad underlying mechanics.
This is the worst take I've seen in a LOOONG time. The language learning is one of the best systems in NMS. The developers literally spent YEARS adding to the game, completely for free, but they don't "respect their players"?
Not every game has to be for you, bud.
They ever apologized for lying for years to the players, who they respect so much?
Which lies were those, exactly? Please be precise so you can't move your goalposts later.
Are you pretending they didn't lie? Sean Murray didn't say the game had multiplayer even after it was released?
I know very well what was shown and what was stated, versus what was there at launch, but I'm interested in what you were going to cite. And I specifically asked about what was being referred to, because there's a huge gap between the validity or veracity of many of the claims of lies.
Because if it's just about the multiplayer working like anyone would obviously expect multiplayer to work, rather than just being able to see message boxes left by other people, yes, he lied to players about that, and he's apologized many times for that, and talked about and shown the development pitfalls they ran into while they were trying to build the multiplayer, and has since implemented what was originally promised.
But I see people make other claims, almost always based on the original cinematic E3 trailer, which usually boil down to, "x feature that was present didn't look like it did in a pre-rendered eye-candy trailer", or things like "the flight system wasn't 6DoF" which never even got mentioned, but was just assumed because spaceship, etc, and years later players still lie about what was or wasnt promised for a game that has since grown into having more content than was ever promised.
And I'd like to see one of those apologies. With my surface level searches, I've found nothing.
Although I'm pretty sure there never was and never will be a direct apology, since that probably opens them up to litigation, but that's just baseless speculation on my part.
I don't know if you were around for the launch, but it was a pretty infamously bad because practically none of the promised features were present. Landing on asteroids, fighting space stations, significant factions, big space battles, sand/water planets, complex crafting, creatures affecting the environment, etc.
I think Hello Games has done a great job turning things around, and shown that they do respect their players, but the launch was definitely a disaster.
What are you talking about? The player literally learns nothing about the alien languages. All you do is walk up to a NPC, button mash through absolutely inconsequential filler text, and pick the option that says "teach me a word". Then a popup says "You now know the Korvax word for 'THE'", except it doesn't even tell you which alien word was translated or explain any grammar or context or conjugation or anything. Your character just does a magical substitution from that point forward.
Or you can do the same thing by walking up to the black pillars if you'd rather trudge around a planet surface for macguffins.
How in any way is that a good system? There's zero skill or challenge or reward or even real gameplay here. A word search puzzle would have 100x more depth.
Wow…. I hope you’re not serious with this nonsense. I mean, it’s your opinion and all, but it reads like satire.
Playing the game felt like satire. Basic questions I would expect other devs of sci-fi games to ask themselves seemingly either went unanswered or got super lazy answers.
e.g. "Should we let players customize their spaceships?" to which HG apparently thinks their system of solely generating ships from a random permutation of parts is plenty. Or "Do you think different planets and galaxies would have different hostile flora?", to which they decided "nah, the same 3 are fine everywhere". "Should planets have biomes of any kind, at least ice caps maybe?"... "nah, players don't care if planets are basically uniform."
lol… okay.
They would have just abandoned the game if they didn't respect the player base. I'm really interested why you have such a hate boner for hello games, I say this as someone who does not enjoy nms but respect that they kept trying to improve it over rhe years.
So many big game studios in the last 10 years (i.e. Activision, ea) have just shit all over the fans then wait a year and do it all over again. It's really hard to hate a small dev team that at least is trying.
EA, Activision, Ubisoft... their BS is on another level entirely and I generally don't play their games because if it.
For NMS / Hello Games it's more that I really want to like the game but find it immensely frustrating that after years and years of updates, they still haven't fixed some of the most basic elements.
Like when your character sprints, the tiniest bump in terrain cancels the sprinting. This even happens in the Nexus where it looks like flat ground. Why?
Again for the alien languages... there's no dictionary in this universe? I'm supposed to believe interstellar travel is commonplace, but they don't have an app to translate the 3 ubiquitous languages? I have a device in my hand right now that can do that.
Space combat still isn't balanced. If you alternate between the phase beam with the shield absorb upgrade and any other weapon, you can basically wear down any threat and win.
What has actually been improved about the core game of NMS? People keep telling me that in vague terms without saying what specifically was improved. I know the inventory system is better (but still kind of a mess IMO), but what else? Don't say multiplayer because they promised that at the beginning.
Fair enough on all of your points, it sounds like you've played more nms than I have. I do agree with you about the core game being somewhat flawed, I get bored very quickly trying to play it. I get the feeling this game just isn't for people like us, but without a doubt they're doing something right for their player base