No Man's Sky

[Jimmy Higgins]

So, I remember hearing about this game on NPR (of all places), and was very intrigued. And then the game came out... and it was boring. The creators worked on it, trying to make it right. They did. Years passed.

Game comes out on the Switch... more time passes.

I finally breakdown and get it. OMFG! This is like super awesome. It is Stardew Valley in space on steroids... and that on steroids. I'm in resource hoarding heaven! I love just going out into an environment and exploring and getting resources. I remember playing GTA V and swimming around, under water, finding a sunken ship with weapons in it. I did it for so long I was able to hold my breath long enough to get the weapons. Didn't know there was a sub later on to do that.

Playing No Man's Sky is just, OMFG! It is a time stealer. An hour will pass quickly... midnight already?! Man... this would so be the time to get Covid! I was wandering about and found gold metal deposits, metal bulbs or something like that. Sweet... then I found out you can blow up asteroids and space rocks and what not which is great being near a planet with rings and lots of rocks to blow up. HOARD HOARD HOARD!!!

The Switch version is knocked down a bit. The live rendering takes a bit, as in flying near mountains, you need to get pretty close in to see the details as to whether that is a metal deposit or cave entry or just terrain that hasn't rendered yet. Otherwise, it plays real nicely.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I've transitioned to the falling asleep and playing the game in my head stage of the game. Ran into issues with Sentinels. Apparently they don't stop coming at you. I blew all of my Sodium reserves, so I've been working on restoring that. Finally found cadmium too, which was nice to fix up the ship. You know how it is.

 

[Jarhyn]

Yeah, NMS is a really fun time sink. When I play, I will often derp around looking for ships I can fix up well enough to get them into the scrapper.

The game has been developed into something that you can explore a lot in, and build really neat things, like Minecraft with space ships.

Eventually it does become "samey" again, though.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Game is definitely glitchy. Running into troubles with the game forgetting what I need to do. It is quite possible I achieved too much too early? I need to get all the plants planted, and I only had to find seeds for two of them, so I kept coming back and fulfilling the mission. The game was okay with that sometimes, not okay others.

I get advice, you should expand the Multi-tool device. Duh... I did that in the first week when I apparently wasn't following the main plot enough.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Over 80 hours in, completely addicted. Catching up on the plot. Definitely an interesting story they are telling. Learning through experience how the sentinels act and aren't all on the same mission. I wish the puzzles were a little more difficult. I only needed to spend a minute on one of them. Some required a little thinking, but they are getting repetitive.

Need to beef up my fleet. And scrapped two abandoned ships and rebuilt another one to keep. Definitely do not like the glitching on the ships with them disappearing. Or when I transported to a glitched freighter where it was only showing the landing pad!

Luckily I'm coding for work, so my brain goes to that when I'm going to sleep at the moment.

 

[Gospel]

On my phone right now so suffering from low quality text rendering. I have that game and had fun playing with friends. If you're still playing by time Digital Storm sends my custom PC I'll join. I'll revisit this thread when that time comes. So far it's looking like end of May.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Starting to fatigue a little. Nearing 200 hours. I have never played a game so obsessively before.

I've only come across one place where someone else had found. It looks like they had a couple other people with them, as three or four users had found plants, rocks, animals on the planets in the system. I should have put a base there. I think the game kind of goofed on a few angles.

• Firstly, the galaxy is a bit too symmetric plant and resource wise. It'd make more sense to have different plants in different regions to provide needed resources.
• It is possible that I haven't found it, but the other issue is there don't appear to be any actual civilizations. The entire galaxy is somehow sparsely inhabited, but heavily mined for what purpose, I'm uncertain. It is like everyone lives on ships and mines and trades so everyone else can live on ships.
• It'd been nice if intolerable planets had a few colonies, better planets many more. Trading and selling would have been a bit more arduous, but it could have made a lot more sense too. Things getting impacted by supply and demand. No selling 20 million credits worth of gold to the same place. Systems without a resource paying better for said resources.
• Ships... why can't we sell them?! Defeats the whole purpose of putting them back in good shape to scrap them. Oi! And if you sell too many, authorities start targeting you due to suspicions of piracy as an economic control.
• Multi-tool sales would be nice as well.
• And again, the puzzles, nice, but repetitive and lack too much needed effort. There should be a couple tough ones to receive a notable reward.
• Repetition of ruins and freighter crashes, this could have been changed up a little. Maybe three different freighter designs for crash sites.
• Pirates are idiots until they have virtually no hull integrity and then they become dangerous.

The game is open, and allows one to play as they'd choose. I find the base thing odd because as a traveler, isn't the whole point to travel? I've set up resource bases which are just portals, storage, miners, electro-power generators, but otherwise, I've got one old base on a mountain top, another on a floating island on a paradise planet, but really... there is little to do at a base.

But as I said, about 200 hrs at this point. I clearly love the game. But am starting to tire... but then I'll just shift to missions for Nada. I have barely scratched the guilds at this point.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Well, spent several days making a massive "floating" base that I needed to cut back on because I kept passing the 3000 item maximum (the game is somewhat of an obsession it seems). Neat to see larger frigates pass under the base. I suppose the next thing would be to create a floating base with a sub-marine portion as well (why did I need to think of that?!).

On weekend events, see the stuff people have at their bases... and then I learn that you craft most of that from quicksilver. OOOOOOOHHHHHHHHH. Well, need to do a bit more on that side of things then. to make that better. I typically hoard resources and currency, so I had a small amount to work with.