No Man's Sky

mrmessy · September 2014

Sorry if this has been discussed before, but a search revealed nothing, as usual.

I have just been watching a few You Tube clips of and about this upcoming game and I have to say this looks and sounds like it could be the game that makes me go out and buy a current gen machine! - when it finally comes out.

I do not make statements like that lightly. I usually wait YEARS to get on the current gen wagon, so this, in my mind, is one hell of a game.

The main chap who was being interviewed did not seem to want to estimate when it would be released. Anyone heard anything? Also, what systems will it be out on? The official website does not seem to say. I believe it will at least be on the PS4, which is what I would choose as my next machine anyway. Which is good.

What do you lot think?

mile · September 2014

I think it's a timed exclusive to ps4 with a pc release later.

A procedurally generated space exploration game with current gen performance is gonna be awesome, and one I certainly want to play.

Think it might be time to upgrade my pc. :-P

Vampyre · September 2014

It's a PS4/PC only release and it is indeed looking awesome. Rough estimates are for a 2015 release which puts its release date similar to the also procedurally-generated Elite Dangerous - although I believe they'll be different enough to warrant purchasing both.

I'll bet it was Sean Murray being interviewed. He used to work on the Burnout games and founded Hello Games a few years ago. Here's an interview he did with Edge a few months back.

Dunno if it's mentioned in that interview but Hello Games were hit badly by the floods last year, on Xmas Eve IIRC. Gamers were panicking that they'd lost all the code but they were sensible enough to have cloud backups :-)

Their Joe Danger games are really good. It's free on PSN this month.

Arjun · September 2014

I patiently await the PC version. :)

mrmessy · September 2014

PC or PS4, I can't wait. Which is strange. I do not really get that excited over future games releases these days. In fact, I think the last time I was looking forward to a game this much was Frontier (Elite 2) on the Amiga in 1993 - (which I ended up never getting because I had switched to a SNES by the time it finally came out).

Strangely, I am not really bothered about the new Elite: Dangerous. Not yet anyway.

Morkin · September 2014

Looks good. I'm never sure if my PC can cope with stuff, so maybe I can treat myself to a PS4 at some point...

beanz · September 2014

Umm just watched the gameplay trailer on youtube...looks crap to me as far as visuals go...certainly not current gen quality..

Morkin · September 2014

beanz wrote: »

Umm just watched the gameplay trailer on youtube...looks crap to me as far as visuals go...certainly not current gen quality..

Yeah, I was thinking that the graphics weren't quite as detailed as some of the new AAA blockbusters. Still looks pretty immersive though, I'd defo be up for playing it. Hopefully the gameplay will be as good as the trailer makes it look. I guess time will tell.

AndyC · September 2014

It's an interesting concept, I just wish games would stop forcing that pseudo first person viewpoint onto things. It just looks utterly stupid, breaks the immersive factor and makes it difficult to judge your interactions with the world around you. It's fine for games where you're just mindlessly shooting things in relatively flat terrain, but terrible for games where there is endless variety of terrain to negotiate and many things to interact with.

Dunny · August 2016

Downloading for PC now... *squeeee*

Luny · August 2016

Oooh, lucky man. I think I worked out for a decent PC I needed 1500 quid. PS4 sounds a lot cheaper. One day my friends I will upgrade... One day.

Rebelstar without a cause · August 2016

Any game that doesn't fit into 48k of memory isn't worth the effort.

kgmcneil · August 2016

Rebelstar without a cause wrote: »

Any game that doesn't fit into 48k of memory isn't worth the effort.

So your happy playing Renegade then without the throw?... ???

Rebelstar without a cause · August 2016

kgmcneil wrote: »

Rebelstar without a cause wrote: »

Any game that doesn't fit into 48k of memory isn't worth the effort.

So your happy playing Renegade then without the throw?... ???

Totally!

Grunaki · August 2016

NO MAN'S SKODA

kgmcneil · August 2016

NO MAN's SKODA...

well... its the right colour... just needs some evolutionary fauna growing round it...

And as for Renegade without the throw...?... Pffftt.... gets claustrophobic real quick... just not the same... But then, many of us who started out on the +2 still struggle to understand how anyone could type on the Dead Rubber version...

So whats the verdit then?... No Mans Sky just a hyped up version of an Elite universe with better graphics, or truly something new and revolutionary?... Are there even a lot of other procedural games out there?...

Vampyre · August 2016

A word of warning to those thinking of buying the PC version. I got it today and all it does is crash on the Hello Games splash screen after about 5 seconds. The reason is that it's using something that's missing from older AMD CPU's. If you've an Intel processor after about 2007 you'll be okay but it won't work on AMD Phenom I and II CPUs because AMD didn't include the SSE4.1 support on these older CPUs. Anything released after the Phenom's should be okay. Annoying as although it's a processor about 6 years old it plays everything I throw at it, even behemoths like Arkham Knight and Witcher 3 @ 1080p albeit on Medium settings.

Hello Games are working on a fix but it's a bit crap. Only the third time it's ever happened to me on PC that my current rig is incapable. In the mid-90's it was due to a forgotten game that required MMX and a few years later Deus Ex Invisible War required a GFX card capable of Pixel Shader 2.0

grey key · August 2016

Yes I had the pixel shader problem with Deus Ex, had to re-buy the game on X-box, I took it back to the shop on release day and they offered me £5 buy back on it, I think it cost me about £30 the same day and again about the same on the second copy for the x-box. Needless to say, on principle I kept it myself !

Dunny · August 2016

Well, I'm loving it.

The worlds are incredibly detailed, with lots to do (shock!) what with ferreting out bits of lore on the history of the dominant advanced life forms, finding recipes for repairing bits of your ship and then getting the ship space-worthy. Once that's done (took me about two hours) you can really go exploring. One moon alone was worth about 5 hours of play time while I pootled around looking at stuff and finding suit upgrades and stuff.

My starting planet was hella radioactive, which made it a challenge but protection regenerates rather than needing to be recharged so you just duck into a cave or a settlement for a few mins. Puzzles are not hard, but do require a little thought so pitched just right for me - and solving them gives you a new quest to find a life form, crashed ship (which you can repair and appropriate should you decide), ruined buildings with lore in them...

One real surprise was a bright purple planet with some quite vicious life forms on it, so I jumped in the sea. Swam around (GIANT SHARKS!) a bit then needed to get to the surface for air and thought I saw some misaligned textures... Didn't check the temperature - it was ice :) The surface was frozen.

Thought I'd found a bug - a life form requested I visit. At a point in the bottom of the ocean... Got there to find nothing. Went back to my ship and received new coordinates - went through this four times before I finally found him tucked away in a little camp miles from anywhere. Worth it - he gave me some suit upgrades for free.

Into space - this is incredible. Mining asteroids, watching ships warp in and out, landing and taking off from stations. Seamless, really seamless planetary takeoff and landing (though with good headphones coming in at speed into atmosphere is exhilarating with the roar of the engines and the heat buildup) though being able to crash would have been nice - it automatically levels out when you get to the ground. It really has to be experienced.

The scale is incredible. The worlds are spheres as you'd expect and you can circumnavigate them (though probably not much fun on foot!). They're huge, as large as any of the planets in our solar system. The variety in colour, flora and fauna is immense. Out on the edge of the galaxy where you start it can be a bit sparse, but no less varied from world to world.

It's worth reading Jeff Minter's experience with a pirate battle: http://www.yakyak.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=86603&view=unread#p1655125 (tl;dr - he started a fight in space and it continued down on the nearby planet. Try that in Elite!).

And his beautiful screen grab:

http://minotaurproject.co.uk/YakImages/yes.jpg

So far I've also been a bit naughty and stolen plans for tech by breaking and entering - get some attention from the Sentinels and that can really escalate quickly...

Also, FLYING MONSTER HUGE SNAKES! And FLYING WHALES! Just on one world. Found a walking-upright on two legs tortoise with a shell covered in spikes, so I called it Bowser.

Also Dinosaurs. BIG ones, small ones.

And OMG, I've only jumped twice so far. There's so much to do that I doubt I'll ever get near the centre of the galaxy.

A major win in my book.

Dunny · August 2016

Oh, and addendum:

I'm playing this on a mid-2015 Macbook pro if that gives any indication of the kind of specs you'll need. I've got all settings at max, except for anisotropy and antialiasing, which are both off. Also running at the native 2880x1800 is obviously not gonna happen, so I'm running at 1680x1050. Framerates are more than acceptable, but not getting to 60fps, more like 20 to 30.

polomint · August 2016

I am not buying this until the PC version is working correctly, and probably not even then, not for a long while.. I won't get anything done otherwise lol

Oooo, I can murder everything!!! Take over the planets, solar system, GALAXIES !!!!! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dunny · August 2016

Yes, there is more than one galaxy :)

There's some flaws. Controls are wonky at best in flight and take some getting used to. Walking is pretty slow, so running is best, interspersed with some jetpacking. You can murder everything, but you'll pay a heavy price for that. Multiplayer isn't working (not that it's a problem, this game is best savoured without interruptions).

Space combat is great fun.

stupidget · August 2016

I've been playing it on my PS4 since Wednesday and it's fantastic.

I'm just loving going to different planets. You can find abandoned ships that you can fix up if you like, there are abandoned manufacturing plants that you can break in to (by blowing the bloody doors off!) to get blue prints. You can gradually learn an alien language and search for monoliths which give you snippets of history. Then there is the discovery side of things where you just spend ages on a planet find the different flora and fauna. Even when you reach a space station you can trade with anybody/thing which lands there as well and buy ships.

I've just been to a couple of 'threatening' planets where the sentinels will attack you for the slightest thing. I've had a couple of in space dog-fights but I just dived back down to the planet as I'm cr4p at dog-fighting.

The thing I love about it is that there is not limit to where you can go. Once you get your ship 'space worthy' you can go anywhere. Look up in to the sky and think "i'll go there' and you can. Getting the hyperdrive is a bit of a faf, but, once you've got that sorted then the universe is your oyster!!

I don't see why people are getting so hung-up of the lack of multi-player!! To be honest I'd hate to play this game and some inbred moron obsessed with shooting things turns up and reminds me why I despise most people :-)

The best quote I've seen in a review is:

"There's a famous quote from mountaineer George Mallory, when he was asked why he would want to climb Mount Everest: "Because it's there." If that answer strikes you as profound and beautiful, go buy No Man's Sky. If it seems dumb and unsatisfying, go play something else."

Morkin · August 2016

Still planning to play this, but I just assumed there would be a few bugs on release. Thought I'd wait a few months for the first few patches to go out.

Figured that for a blockbuster game it would still be niche enough for me to avoid any spoilers on social media etc.

dm_boozefreek · August 2016

Stop saying how great it is! I had no interest in it, now I kind of want to jump on the bandwagon you sods :p

I could get it in future to replace Fallout 4 when I finally get really bored of it. Which I think may be on the horizon soon...

Vampyre · August 2016

I've put in a Steam refund request as I just can't be arsed fannying around with the PC version. Plus the latest AMD GFX update has ballsed up and is now stretching a 1080P resolution as bigger than the screen. Very odd that one and their useless Catalyst software shrinking method doesn't work :-(

Probably grab the PS4 version tomorrow.

polomint · August 2016

dm_boozefreek wrote: »

Stop saying how great it is! I had no interest in it, now I kind of want to jump on the bandwagon you sods :p

I could get it in future to replace Fallout 4 when I finally get really bored of it. Which I think may be on the horizon soon...

Are we gonna take over the Universe, like we have the Commonwealth? heheh

Well, you can take over, I'm just gonna kill everything!!!!! :D :D :D

Arjun · August 2016

A patch was released yesterday for the game on the PC, and it fixes all the issues I had with the game! The FPS on my desktop is a rock solid 60FPS (Vsync). On my Dell XPS 15 laptop, the frame-rate is a very playable 30 (graphic settings on medium). As for the game itself, it's nothing like I've played before! Utterly beautiful worlds filled with exactly the kind of exotic flora and fauna that sci-fi books have been plugging all this while. The experience of travel from space to terrafirma and back is exhilirating. I've heard some quibbles of the game itself being boring with little to do. I believe that comes down to what kind of games you like to play. If it's GTA or Doom kind of pace that you like, this game isn't for you.

polomint · August 2016

Damn, I'm trying to find reasons *not* to buy this at the end of the month.... and you lot ain't helping, :p hehe

Vampyre · August 2016

I managed to get a Steam refund and got it on PS4 instead. What was intended as a quick half-hour on it last night turned into a 4 hour marathon well past midnight :-)

It's superb, but I don't think it's for everyone. Like Arjun says, if you're after fast-paced, plenty of action then it won't appeal. If you like a nice leisurely pace and lots of exploring then it probably is. If they patch it up to use Playstation VR, and rumours are they will, then I'm definitely getting a VR headset. Landing on a plant/moon is awesome - imagine it through VR!

I particularly liked the tutorial which just gave you enough info to get going and properly learn the systems rather than ramming an information-overload down your throat.

MatGubbins · August 2016

Currently £50 for the PS4... there's a case sitting in the window of my local CEX.

It looks nice.

No Man's Sky

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