and they did, and that’s what the money’s for but it comes with a demand: they must reconfigure their beliefs to this unsought audience. They’re bound not to even judge the Thing as it exists because they must love it as the players do
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I was fine with it as a weird chill “lonely game” but it having a huge following led to it getting a really cool VR mode that I will probably play again someday so on balance it kind of all evened out.
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i fundamentally love every weird attempt to build the “AllGame” and this is such a weird sideways way to do it. it’s not an ubisofted focused grouped grey sludge and it’s not like an early access patreon where people keep voting on new things to add. it’s just like a weird restaurant where they just keep adding weird new things to the menu.
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i played the game at launch for about 15 hours or so and thought it was kind of a shitty, boring game. the generated flora and fauna and planet terrain were by far the most interesting bits, encased in a massively tedious framework. resource gathering was utterly hateful. flying around was janky and felt awful. lots of weird performance stutters (including relatively frequent crashes, iirc). miserly economy and progression, requiring you to perform vast amounts of incredibly tedious tasks.
unfortunately, the best bits were themselves way undercooked when weighed against what they’d need to be to actually sustain a game like this. every planet was just showing minor variations on things i’d seen over and over again, and the promise of something beautiful or interesting on the next planet became completely untenable to believe.
i did have some fun with it, because i do like exploring and messing around, and i liked that feeling of being somewhere no one else had been, but ultimately i thought it was mostly bad and a good portion of the time i played it, i was really not enjoying myself - just hoping for something interesting around the next corner that never came
idk i guess i really can’t picture having nostalgia for release NMS. i find it hard to imagine that the current NMS could possibly be worse than the OG shit, even if it has lost some of that weird empty vibe. the actual play was just miserable!
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i mean i never paid full price for it but it was decent enough as an HD Noctis
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Your experience was very similar to mine. Starbound is the good version of No Man’s Sky.
Since they never seem to stop working on the game, maybe they will eventually add the things that they should have in the beginning (some of which you can see in the ancient pre-release trailer).
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i love it when you’re catty
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I was caught up enough in the wonder of exploration in release NMS that I was able to look past its jankiness.
It’s a moment I’d never even want to try to recapture because there’s no way it would live up to the memory.
Also I would need a girl to pretend to be my GF of that time telling me the game looks super pointless and boring so I could agree while continuing to play.
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honestly just seamlessly transitioning from space → atmosphere → landing → walking was worth the price of entry for me. I also took so many screenshots of that game - they nailed the color palette first go, which was about the only thing they got right on the first try.
i guess there’s now a way to turn off all the tedious stuff and just have mostly infinite resources? i might try that and just zoom straight to the center of the galaxy since i never did that before.
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I also never reached the center, though I remember that I got all of the Playstation trophies at the time. (I guess they were pretty easy to get because I don’t remember making much of an effort, other than just spending a lot of time in the game.)
If they allow you to play without constantly having to gather the basic resources, I might have to revisit the game to see what’s different. Though I remember the last time I loaded it up all of my ship’s equipment had become obsolete and turned into scrap or something like that and I didn’t want to start from scratch.
I also took a lot of screenshots way back then. I liked some of the creatures I came across, but it always bothered me that there was no photo mode. There probably is now, I’d guess.
Edit: Yes, looks like it. Photo Mode - No Man's Sky Wiki
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i took a lot of photos and did a lot of exploring, definitely had some enjoyable moments with the game, to be fair
what tips my overall feeling toward the game in its launch state from “pretty, peaceful” towards something much less desirable is the intense feeling of existential dread and utter emptiness it gave me by the end of my time with it
seeing beyond the veil, the fundamental illusion of depth in the procedurally generated content in a game like this is an absolute death knell for enjoying it. the magic of discovery is replaced by the inevitability of disappointment and the preclusion of meaning.
i actually get the same feeling talking to ChatGPT, sometimes…
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i love that the storylines they’ve added since launch explicitly grapple with that and are just wall to wall bummers
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