No Man's Sky (2016)

Wow, just wow. This is like living my science fiction dreams! I love everything about this game.

I like how vulnerable your character is. I found myself running back to my ship (that I repaired) for safety several times.

You can even tunnel and mine for metal.

This all completely blew me away. Thank you @bmo and @tylerisrandom for the recommendation. This game is helping my mental health very much! :-)

Just played a couple hours in my Oculus Rift with the new update and am really digging it. This is my first NMS experience beyond a half-hour stint a year back.

Anyways, I'm happy with everything so far except for the flight controls. In VR, they're set to hold a "virtual flight stick" and "virtual throttle" in the air where you're just holding your hands out in front of you. Meanwhile, you've got two real analog sticks right at your thumbs, doing nothing... it's super lame. I dunno if the devs don't play games themselves or what, but every other VR flight game uses the real sticks. So there's an established standard and they've ignored it; not a good look.

On the Playstation VR version, you can switch back and forth from the Move motion controls (for walking around) to the Dualshock (for flight) which would be much better. AFAIK, that's not an option on the PC versions.

Also, versions sold from GOG can't play multiplayer with Steam people, and vice versa. Which is also disappointing. In this time of cross-everything support (Fortnite, Dauntless, upcoming Call of Duty) I expected (hoped?) a dev house with-it enough to do VR support would also at least manage cross-vendor multiplayer. There was a big fiasco with CoD on the Windows Store not having cross-vendor play on the PC and having maybe two players online at a time, before Activision was shamed into refunding and giving up on that. Yet here it is again.

So I'll try to figure out what I can with flight controls, eagerly watch for patches, and enjoy this thing!

I 'finished' the game. (If you want to call that an ending.) I did most stuff there is to do in the game as well. For the most part this game is OK. But its not the best design, lots of short sighted stuff. The overall aesthetic is nice though and its fun to just fly a ship around. (Compared to most space trading or space flight sims, its pretty approachable.)

The game asks you to do a lot, and work a lot to give you very little sometimes, and as you learn the rewards for doing things, you start to really care less. For a game that allows you do seemingly do so much, and go in different directions, its surprisingly repetitive. Of all things, I wish the trading was less tedious, but due to the way menus and inventory works, its a nightmare. Of all things this should not have been such an oversight since it seems to lend itself so much to elite and other space trader type games. doh.

It's also still full of bugs here and tehre. I've gatewayed to places in the middle of deep space and fallen to my daeth, had portable smelters dissapear, NPCs to return quests that you spent time on nowehre to be found. By far the worst aspect though is the UI windows. Between shuffling items around (even once you get the hang of it) and losing them when you forget to transfer your stuff to a new ship.. or worse freighter.

By far, the worst thing you can do in this game is lose your freighter and your cargo, as well as all the support vessels you own. Few games have a little UI misclick error of such a magnitude.

I see a lot of guides and stuff on how to do things in the game that imo, just dont matter. Most of the hype around getting a good ship is somewhat silly as well. The best way to get a ship is to use that telecom data to find a crashed one and keep hopping around until you find an 'A class fighter' with ~34 slots. Only fix up the main stuff, like guns, engine and the warp. and leave the upgrade slots you dont need broken as well as all the inventory space. This will let you warp through blackholes and you'll never break your warp drive. IT managed to work for me anyway.

Is there a term/subgenre for a game that is a massive single player world? I'm not talking about open world games or long games (like Witcher 3 or Fallout 4). But games like maybe Elite, Dwarf Fortress, Hollow Knight, No Man's Sky, maybe Monster Hunter (I haven't played)

a lot of RPG games have a similar feel and experience as they explore this territory to do their thing (like Witcher, Fallout, ELEX) but that's usually not the underlying focus. RPGs tend to also do this in the same kind of identifiable genre formats

So, anyone have a thought? Is there a distinction between a really big open world RPG and something like No Man's Sky? It's confusing. I think so, but a lot of games feel very close (Like Bethesda's First person open world dungeon crawler games and even old school first person open world dungeon crawler's Krondor) you know you hit this when after you play it you dig deeper and realize you have just scratched the surface.

I really wanted to zone out into another world last night so finally tried it. Played it for about 3 hours. It's a bit immersive but it doesnt have that magic hold minecraft does. IMO, Minecraft's main drawback is the slow paced grind and (with mods) tons of sorting and re-learning ui with each modpack. no man's sky feels a bit like that, with some gameplay niceties, it's a more vibrant minute to minute survival aspect with some simplification of crafting, but to me it feels obtuse. Overall, playing it is a toss up between "i'm kinda curious about that" but also "i kinda just want to get this done and ghost this planet. these

The updates sound interesting and seem to have added a lot of content and many claim the game has improved. I'm sure there are planets that just like the biomes in minecraft really can stand out from the three i visited. But, this doesn't quite feel like a 'make your own story' or 'carve out your own little world' like minecraft. It feels a lot more forced and less free form and definitely shallow. In doesn't stand out from other games that are world building games kinda in same vein that i've played. Digging for treasure or mining or learning about anything in the game doesn't really appeal to curiosity.

I played the 'normal' survival mode. the harder survival mode sounds like it would just be frustrating, a creative mode might be the way to play it since the main meat of the game is continuing on that main quest, but I think i'd rather go back to test new builds in PC Building Simulator, lol.

So, yea that's how exciting the game is! :P