Gotta check if maybe that’s a feature of my ship or a setting, but you basically aim to the the lead-shot circle you get when targeting a ship and fire. the shots basically just go there. I’ve noticed it works better with shot type weapons, as beam-type ones have a narrower lock-on circle to auto-target
Yeah, the more I read about it, the more people are saying that their ships don’t have auto-lock, but hey maybe that’s non-fighter ships, but oh no this guy has a fighter ship and he doesn’t seem to have auto-lock, but this guy had auto-lock and it stopped working, etc etc etc. Even descriptions on when to tell it’s working are nebulous.
Plus, I found a stupid hot planet in the last system I was in, and I just bought an S-Class upgrade for 500 nanites to give heat protection so that I can even exist on the planet, and I went to install it and it changed into a cold protection module. This is the second time an exo-suit upgrade has fucked me over (I couldn’t install one of the two modules I bought in my first-ever purchase, and it outright disappeared the next time I booted the game). So that’s another 500 nanites down the drain and I still can’t visit the planet.
I am extremely rapidly approaching the end of my enjoyment with this game.
2 Likes
A slightly more positive anecdote: I got an explorers’(?) guild mission to go take out 9 monstrosities. I of course said yes to this quest; in addition to the 85ish nanites it offered, I knew I’d be raking in however many Larval Cores I could stomach before getting bored. It sends me to a planet.
All the land creatures I found were mushroom-esque or jellyfish-esque. As you can see to the upper left, there were little mushroom guys that were hopping around. Now, I also had another quest, to kill 14 creatures in general, and it just so happened that I killed 13 monstrosities. So I decided I’d donk the big mushroom/jellyfish guy for my 14th, in order to get maximum resources out of it.
In truly Dark Souls fashion, he one-shotted the absolute christ out of me. The creature bio labels him as ‘docile’. Take that, me.
It took four plasma grenades to eventually down him.
4 Likes
I had that appear in a story quest. I was asked what kind of protection I need and I said cold protection. Then I receive the thing and it says heat protection. I roll my eyes and am about to chuck it out when I decide, you know what, next base might be on a hot planet so why not install it. I do so and suddenly it’s cold protection. After I put it in, I mean. As it sits there. I’m like… huh.
1 Like
I find that the space battles are two different things. One kind of fight is if ships are attacking a freighter. Now those fights the game clearly wants you to win, so you can spend 138.000.000 on a new freighter. In those battles I can eliminate 6 ships without breaking a sweat.
The other kind of fight is where pirates attack you because you’ve got valuable loot on you. Those fights are usually against one or two ships and can’t be won. You do minimal damage to these bastards while they melt your shield like it’s butter. So you have to run, basically. It’s more of endgame content I guess you could call it. 
(I haven’t upgraded my shields btw)
And I have auto-lock! It’s really generous and I don’t know how you’d lead your shots without it. I never had to turn it on, it was just always there. I can change targets with left and right on the d-pad on the dualshock 4. It’s really convenient and I’m kinda reliving my old Wing Commander 3 days…
I haven’t died once in this game in maybe 22 hours of play time. I’m a very careful person who doesn’t know how to have fun
1 Like
Have I told you about the time I had to fly in a straight line without pulse drive for 18 minutes straight? I made the big mistake of fleeing onto space from an “aggressive” sentinel. What I didn’t know was that that means that a sentinel starship chases you around in space. At first I tried to engage it but it was immediately clear that that fight is even more impossible than the pirates fight.
Then I just picked a direction and ran to the next planet over. Big mistake, should have just turned back to where I came from, even with the sentinels looking for me.
So it turned out the next Planet was 18 minutes away. No big deal, I’ll just shake the joker and then activate pulse drive. Again, big mistake. I just couldn’t shake off that sentinel. It always stayed close enough for my pulse to not work. Sometimes he even got shots in on me! Every couple minutes for no apparent reason.
Next big mistake was that I didn’t just reload my last save instead of space truckin’. But I sort of wanted to see the conclusion of this, after investing so much energy and time in it already. Might as well just hold that boost button for another 5 minutes.
I reached the planet’s atmosphere and the starship still followed me. I decide to get out now while I still could because the shots on my ship were now unbroken. I was melting fast. So I got out and the first thing I see is sentinels. One of those robot dogs with the strong laser beam.
I’m running, trying to find shelter so I could end this. I’m getting shot, again. I realize I’m not going to find a place in time.
I take out the terraforming tool and just dig down. A flying sentinel follows me in but I’m faster, I change to create mode and shut the hole I’m in.
Finally they can’t see me anymore and I wait the 30 seconds it takes for them to act like nothing ever happened. How they don’t have a most wanted list with me on there I don’t know.
I still don’t know if that was cool or sucked
9 Likes
Tbh the game lives in this sector and I respect that
7 Likes
I hadn’t really played the game since it released (aside from dipping my toe in again during one of the previous big updates) and I’ve been playing it each evening for the past week or so. I’ve developed a sort of love/hate relationship to it for the reasons everyone’s already mentioned.
This is a cool looking game where you do cool-looking stuff like fly around in star ships and explore planets in a literal galaxy. It wants to be Minecraft-in-Space but with “actual video game” Stuff To Do and it still doesn’t quite hit the mark despite moving the needle considerably in that direction over the past two years. Though to be fair even Minecraft wasn’t really Minecraft until after it had been around for a few years.
So basically I’m hoping Hello Games can hang in there for the long haul and keep working on it. I know I’m going to keep playing, probably even regularly now, until I either get bored of it or can’t stand to put up with some of the game’s more, uh, idiosyncratic bits like it’s awful inventory management. Right now it still feels like everything’s kind of held together with duct tape and positive vibes. Like, literally my PS4 fan screams when I run this and I’ve had the game freeze up completely at least once so far.
And yet I am right now debating myself on whether to get the Xbox version right now so I can experience similar performance and stability but with that sweet native 4K and further draw distances (and a near-silent console seriously I don’t know if the newer Xboxes even have fans or what) or wait until it’s on sale and until then just keep trucking with the PS4 save I started last week. That is the allure for me of this cool looking space game.
Why couldn’t Elite: Dangerous have looked like No Man’s Sky?
I’m going to try and snap some cool pics tonight. That is my mission for the evening.
1 Like
I can grow my own shit now. Quite literally, because the first plant you get produces Coprite, which is what animals shit out after you feed them. I’m not gonna spoil anything but it feels so good to say good bye to certain resources and never having to find them again because you can just grow them. So good.
What’s not so good is when you progress in a certain storyline you get to meet certain people. Again, no spoilers. If you then progress another storyline far enough you meet the same people but they don’t recognize you. And you don’t recognize them. There’s really no way to explain this with the ingame lore. I mean, if you’d bend over backwards so far that you’d do several flips, you might be able to. I really tried and I found a possible solution but no way can this be intended. If it is then it’s Stupid.
So it looks like the game wants you to focus on one storyline per playthrough. But fuck that, if you offer me three at the same time I’m going to do all three, it’s obvious
2 Likes
also what the fuck is up with these certain people. They constantly give me upgrades but it’s always the same now. The same god damned upgrade probably 3 or 5 times in a row, I lost count. It’s always the B-rank life support module upgrade. Like, why is that? Did I break the game? I know certain things that they’re supposed to give you and some of them are really important. Now I’m worried I’m not going to get them
every ship has autolock i think?
i usually just boost away from pirates then hit the brakes & do a 180. you can usually nail them with rockets head on then finish off with the regular shot. you can also hold the brakes down to move backwards and give yourself more of a window to hit them
1 Like
E:D is beautiful as is, don’t mess with that.
2 Likes
Alright, so.
I snagged another S-class extreme heat resistance mod. It turned into a cold resistance mod again when I went to install it. So I figured maybe they screwed up (spoiler: they did) and got the temperature mods backwards. So I cycle through the shops in the last three space stations I’ve been to, which are of course on the other side of the station from the damn teleporters, and I chase down an S-class extreme cold resistance mod. It turns into a heat resistance mod. Score! I’m still down roughly 950 nanites from where I should be, but whatever.
I take it out to Planet Firebrand to test it out. So here’s the thing. It doesn’t just make your environmental protection bar shrink more slowly. It has its own durability bar, so basically on top of your environmental protection bar and your life support bar, you have to keep track of your extreme weather mod bar. Except it doesn’t pop up in your gui, you have to open your inventory to see where it’s at durability-wise. And me being the heel I am, I popped it in the Exosuit Technology submenu, so I have to go two menus deep to even see the thing.
All it does is prevent your environmental bar from shrinking until the mod itself runs out. You have to refill the mod’s power with either dioxite, which is a pain in the ass to get a hold of, or ion batteries, which are a mild pain in the ass to make (~20 ferrite dust and ~25? cobalt). It takes 3 ion batteries to fill this mod from zero to full.
I timed it. The mod’s bar lasts two and a half minutes.
That’s more than an ion battery a minute, in order for me to wander around an ugly-ass planet with, as far as I can tell, jack fuck-all on it worth exploring. The only good thing about the mod, the only good thing, is that the every-three-minutes firestorms that jack the planet’s temperature up past 130C don’t affect the shrink rate of the already embarrassingly short-lived mod bar.
So, I’m done with the game. Nobody in their right mind tested half this shit for the four seconds it would take to go “this is tedious and frustrating, this needs tuning.” I could just not explore the planet, but it shouldn’t have taken me over an hour of prep and wading through multiple glitches, lost currency, and multiple unwinnable pirate encounters to come to the realization that the environment mod balance is fucked right to hell.
4 Likes
A searing indictment!
3 Likes
Yeah. I mean I don’t want to shit on people’s enjoyment of the game, there’s a ton of stuff to like in there. I just, uh. I feel like I’m wading through too much cruft to experience the morsels of enjoyment myself.
I’m sure I’ll revisit it down the line when they’ve (hopefully) ironed out some of the kinks.
1 Like
it’s incredible to me that after being released for 2 years they still can’t figure out how to make the survival elements fun. just scrap that whole system and start over!!! steal it from another game!!!
i honestly hope they stop working on this and just spend 3 years making a sequel so they’re not beholden to all of the existing systems. or something like that.
i do really like this game though
3 Likes
it’s all about the framing, that was a desert planet with mostly garbage on it, but i found a nice angle for the downed freighter and changed the sun position and filter until i got that “instagram vacation on mars” look
i was really pleased that i could get the rings and another planet in the photo of the big brainy boy though
1 Like
I feel like everybody’s errant boy in this game. It’s gotten to a point where it’s not funny anymore.
I don’t know how long I’ll keep playing but me reaching any of the game’s conclusions is highly unlikely. I’m still strangely addicted to it though, somehow. I think I’m not as bothered with the game’s inventory and systems as most here. It seems I’ve got a high tolerance for this shit.
Storage units, man. They are these huuuuge bank vaults. You wanna know how much storage space they have? 5 slots. It’s ridiculous. I can carry, I don’t know, a maximum of 48 slots on my person, probably, and a huge vault only has five? I mean, you’re allowed to build 10 of them per base but what does that look like? And can you imagine looking for something? Checking you inventory, your cargo slots, the starship, the freighter, 10 vaults… Who designed this?? I have to mention that each slot in a vault has 4 times the depth of your personal inventory, so it can store like 1000 carbon in one slot but still, it’s terrible.
3 Likes
Yeah… I really do like the idea of no man’s sky, but when a game revolving around resources can’t provide a sensible way to manage those resources then it just gets tiresome. and I’m forced to remind myself why I’m not wired properly for these kinds of freeform procgen games in the first place. You figure that a software designed to generate endless novelty would be less hollow-feeling, but this is a gaaaaame and the part of the game you engage with the most is easily the weakest part. Idk.
Maybe procedurally generated Pokemon snap or a qud-like approach to universe-building would make this game feel less empty
I think I just really want a nice new space sim/dogfighter, it’s been years. Anyone up for fs2 netplay