Norman Skye

it was fine-ish but I’m running on a very good GPU

Mine runs fine, until after some time playing, the framerate decides to die, and chugs along until I restart the game. It’s not frequent, but annoying enough. There’s already been a patch.

Hyped to know what you think of it! Have fun playing/exploring

Well, so it took me longer than Felix to realize, but yeah, ultimately I don’t think I want to pay full price for a game I can’t/won’t sink the time it demands.

Maybe I was unlucky with my starting roll. I discovered a lot of new technologies, but couldn’t install any of them because I was always maxed out on space, and didn’t find any extra slot upgrades, and that made the progression feel pretty slow.

Game is pretty and it can be addictive in a mindless kind of way, but as of now, it’s too repetitive/progression is slow.
We’ve seen all this before. Fractal planets, voxel terrain, procedural structures… but it’s all brought together with a pretty great sense of design.
I dig the spaceships! you can see some wacky and cool designs if you hang around a space station for a bit.

Decision: I requested a refund, and I got it.
I thought I may not, since I was 5 min shy of a 3hr playtime.

But yeah, my decision: wait and see which updates get added (the capship building and market trading sounds nice) and pick it up later on sale.

It’s weird that the survival game aspects are focused on so much because they’re such a minor part of the game. Every planet I’ve been to has been resource rich to the point that I don’t even bother picking stuff up unless I am specifically collecting stuff for a tech.

Besides, look at these goofballs

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there isn’t nearly as much variation as I expected in the terrain and creatures, to be honest, unless the progression is much more linear than I’ve been led to believe

they also really need to throw in some more shader effects for the sake of doing so. the art direction is kind of middling but it could look a lot better.

My spawn planet had toxic rain, very tall mountains and deep valleys, and was very scarce on zinc, which you need to mantain your hazard suit protection. Thankfully, there were a lot of caves, where you could recharge your toxic protection without spending the very limited resources (it took me almost an hour to find my first “zinc flower”)

That could have been interesting but it just made the starting steps of the game too much of a unnecesary slog.

After you can leave your first planet, resources become more plentiful, sure, but you are still preocuppied with constantly refuelling your systems, which drain extremely fast. I’m guessing there will be an auto-refuel tech later on, that does it automatically, but until then, manually refueling your ship, suit, protection, mining bean and blaster just exacerbates the “ok, I get it already” aspect of survival games.

it honestly seems like a huge shame that they shipped the game like this and I didn’t have any performance issues beyond what you’d expect from a big release on day 1

it certainly has one of the more solid foundations of any space sim I’ve tried in the past decade but oh my goodness is that not enough

I’ve heard PC users can get better FPS by setting their FPS to a higher max than what they currently have. So if you’re getting 40 FPS with it set at 60 max then you should set it to 90 and it will actually increase the performance? I don’t know if that actually works?

Anyway I guess me and @legalstep are the only ones in the thread who actually enjoy this game? I jumped a couple more star systems closer to the center and put myself firmly on the Atlas path as well. I also found an ingredient for a key component in making warp cells so now I don’t have to dork around with any of the traders to refuel my warp drive, I can just find all the materials and make the fuel cells myself.

I got a trophy for learning 30 alien words. I also got one for walking a whole bunch lol. My current goal is to spend some time in the current system I’m in crafting enough fuel cells to fully charge up my warp drive and make a much further jump.

Also look for drop pods. They always have suit upgrades that give you an extra inventory slot. Distress signals lead you to crashed star ships that may or may not be better than the one you start with, though you’ll have to put some work in repairing its systems.

I find myself wanting to play, because the game is cool and the gamefeel is neat. Then I realize: “Ok, jumped to a new system. Let’s grind a bit on the surface to keep our gadgets charged so I can grind for materials to make a warp cell to jump to the next system. Then, repeat”

I know there’s more with the alien ruins, space pirates, traders, and learning the alien language, but 90% of the game still feels like busywork I don’t really have patience for, at the moment.

I’d probably be playing this nonstop if I was 10 and had tons of free time, though

I’m really enjoying this game actually! I wish it had more variety in the creatures and terrains, and I wish I could find a fricking way to upgrade my inventory space already. But I’m really having a good time just tooling around.

My enjoyment of the game has increased once I started looking for monoliths on planets. The Gek seem surprisingly volatile for their “trader species” role. I’ll investigate more once I get to another Gek system. I’m in a Vy’keen system now, I think.

So yeah, it’s a good game in my book, but I understand why people don’t like it. I was very confused for my first hour, and frustrated as well, but powering through that made all the difference. I can make fuel for my hyper drive now which will also save a lot of money/time.

I got attacked by a weird crab-like creature with tentacles for legs and that made me happy.

I just hit 18 slots in my personal inventory and still enjoying the crap out of this.

RE: Inventory space, on planets you’ll find these little stations with orange beams of light shooting up. You need to hack them with a bypass chip (which you maee combining plutonium and iron, two of the most common elements everywhere) and then it’ll let you select a location to discover for you somewhere nearby. Your choices are colonial outpost, transmission, shelter and monolith. Monoliths improve your standing with aliens, outposts are just buildings that sometimes have traders, transmission will give you a distress signal from a crashed starship and shelter will point towards a place you can take refuge from the elements.

Shelter is the one you want to select because it will often point you towards drop pods, which always have an upgrade for your suit giving you one extra inventory slot. The first one costs 10,000 units and each one after costs 10k more than the last one.

I must be lucky, as I come across constant suit upgrades. They don’t appear in a scan; you just have to look out for the drop pods on the ground. They might be more difficult to spot in some color schemes than in others.

Edit: Oh, I didn’t realize that Shelter led you to those, as Mr_Mechanical mentioned. That’s even easier.

Apparently the really large creatures are rare. I’m hoping to come across one of those. I sure wish there were a screenshot mode with the HUD off. The only place that it seems to disappear entirely (for whatever reason) is underwater. Sea life seems to be rare so far for me, but I like what I’ve seen of it.

I don’t know how the sentinels decide that they don’t like what you’re doing. When I kill an animal or two in self-defense, they scan me intently. But they only turn on attack mode when I mine too many smaller mineral patches in one place or attempt to break into a locked building.

I’ve found that if you want to learn the game’s story, the plaques are the thing to look out for. They don’t teach you the languages as fast as some of the other monuments, but they always give you some of the history.

this is another game that’s only on my radar because people on the internet seem massively invested in complaining about it

I’m just glad that this is on a platform that does refunds unlike when I decided to buy uncharted 4 two days before release

What were your gripes with Uncharted 4? Did you talk about it in a thread somewhere?

I found a huge dinosaur creature in a planet, and I thought its walk cycle was a bit funny. maybe some animation glitch. Until I got closer and realized it wasn’t walking, but flying, thanks to small butterfly-like wings.

A big-ass dinosaur hanging from some tiny fluttering wings…

First actually strange/disturbing creature encountered.

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yeah. It’s extremely long and middling. The stretch where you’re traveling with sully and your brother that they showed a bunch of before release is neat, but otherwise it’s pretty brutally straightforward and doesn’t have anything on uncharted 2, let alone TLOU. I uninstalled in like the second to last chapter after playing like half an hour at a time from the 2/3 mark onward.

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friendly reminder that if you’re liking this but wish it was more intentionally empty and abstract you should check out MirrorMoon:

The guys who made it are some Italian dudes more stylish than you could hope to be but you can always play their cool games

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