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No Man's Sky


Gonzo

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2 hours ago, piranesi said:

Everyone's different. 

I guess it's true that men really are from HarambeRIP69 and women really are from SnapeDid9/11LulZ.

I thought men were from Omicron Persei 7 and women were from Omicron Persei 9. 

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Refundageddon started this weekened. PSN is breaking from their usual policy and is refunding owners, as is Amazon. Amazon is even refunding folks who bought a physical copy of the game.

Steam was refunding folks and then stopped saying that NMS is no different than any other game. Except that it is different because it's broken as fuck. People who have been denied refunds later had them accepted by resubmitting their request so it's definitely a YMMV thing. I was denied my refund and then I resubmitted the request.

My experience with NMS has been shit. Nevermind all of the shit about how this game isn't what was advertised, but it flat out doesn't work like a final version of a game should. If this were an early release game on Steam, I'd have far fewer complaints, but it's not. What came out was obviously rushed for release. I've had to play a fucking experimental version of the game put out by Hello Games because the "main" version receives updates much slower by comparison. 30 minutes in, the game slows to a crawl every time I try to play. Every time. That isn't fixed until I restart. The new thing that happens is that I now get to go through the game crashing multiple times and when that happens, I lose my progress.

There's also many other technical issues that I continue to experience and Hello Games has been totally unresponsive. Due to all of that, I asked for a refund and was denied. The second time I pointed out how twice my save file was corrupted, along with all of my other technical issues. I communicated that I understand that 2 hours playtime is their cut off for refunds, but my 25 hours of playtime consists of 3 restarts and in each play session, I'm wasting 30 to 45 minutes troubleshooting the fucking thing. Why I even tried to troubleshoot something so broken is beyond me, but I think it's because I really wanted this game to work. Even with how boring it is, there's an addictive quality to it and there's a hope that it would get better and it only got worse.

I also feel bad for Hello Games. I think this likely crushes them as a company. There's more to say about that at another time, but I think they brought this on themselves.

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Honestly I think the mistake they made was putting it out on PC right now. PC games notoriously have some issues out of the gate, especially ports, and combining that with them being a small company they really should have just stuck to one console at a time then did thorough testing. I haven't had a single technical issue on PS4 so clearly they tested that well but I do feel bad for those that got it on PC and its busted.

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The PS4 version sounded nearly as fucked as the PC port. I can say that at the very least my game didn't crash nearly as much as it did for PS4 owners. If I went through all of that, I would have asked for a refund long ago. As it was, the game constantly slowing me to a crawl at least allowed me to slowly get to a save point. Constantly losing your progress due to crashes would anger me more than this experience has disappointed me.

And there are people out there having neat experiences with NMS on PC. I can honestly say that the low flight mod is cool, if a little broken, but that should have been in the game from the start. I also applied the deep space mod (I think that's the name, it's the one that removes a lot of the color effects from outer space) and the other mod that removes the need to click and hold to make selections.

My hope is that at some point, refund or not, Hello Games keeps improving on the game to make it into what was shown at conventions and on TV shows. I'd settle for it looking like either of the two videos that are still up for it on the Steam store.

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Not saying those people are exaggerating or anything like that, but 20 hours in my PS4 game and I haven't had a single freeze so I figured the first or second patch must have fixed most of the problems. So I can just speak from my own experience, maybe some just got unlucky. Or some people aren't patching for whatever reason.

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Or they're way farther in the game, which is when the real crashes start.  I haven't played since this last patch though, but I had about a 20% crash rate when I'd warp to another star system.


One of my buddies got the refund when one of the updates made it so he would freeze EVERY TIME he jumped star systems, without fail.  Good times.

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LOL 30 to 40?!? Jesus. I have 3 system jumps. I made it to an anomaly by doing that. That's as far as I've been. I can get very far because they game is always in slow motion. This, despite an i5 well over the required CPU, a GTX 960, and more than enough RAM. People with 1080 cards or whatever the fuck new GTX cards are have similar or worse problems. Then you see from people with a 600 or 700 level card and it runs just fine. I don't think a team that small, who has only handled Joe Danger before, is equipped to optimize, let alone create, something like No Man's Sky. That they got as far as they did is incredible, I'll give them that much.

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4 hours ago, Tromatagon said:

Yeah, I know I had enough to trigger the silver trophy for space exploration, which was 30, and it started fucking up a lot around 10-15.  I haven't played the game for like two weeks.

In the game's defense at the moment, the last few patches were supposed to make the game smoother so the issues my be better since you last played. I think 1.07 came out today. While I don't advocate broken games being released, I can just say from my end that I download patches like a demon and I haven't had problems, and at least they have been putting out patches pretty quick and not ignoring the issues like sometimes happens. According to them, Patch 1.06 fixed 90% of PS4 crash issues so it may be safe to give it another whirl ;)

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I have not played it, and probably won't for a while, but I have a feeling that execs loved the first trailer in 2014 and pushed the studio to do much more than it was capable of doing. If it had stayed a smaller indie game, I don't think we'd be seeing the issues or the anger.

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I think part of the issue is that what they promised/mentioned back in when it was first announced wasn't really possible which put a ton of pressure on them, which is asking a lot from a smaller team. Some of what they mentioned initially still hasn't and will never be done, I don't necessary blame them for that as plans do change over time but with how high expectations were it was bound to disappoint some. Still no excuse for having such a buggy game at launch, if they had delayed it two or three more weeks they could have had a mega patch to fix a lot of these issues (that annoys people too I realize but its a better solution than what happened).

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Delays happen all the time. That NMS had as small of a delay as it had and people got so pissed is baffling. Half-Life 2 was ready to go until the source code was stolen and then it got delayed by, what, a year? Same shit with Halo 2, right? There's plenty of examples where games get huge delays, slipping into the next year. NMS gets a tiny delay and people flip their shit.

No one likes delays, but I'm at the point where I accept them because there's nothing you can do and it's better to get a game that works than one that's busted. 

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Even though I am kinda enjoying it in its own special way, I don't see myself finishing it. I am about 20 hours in and I feel like I did all the stuff that was keeping me amused (upgrading my ship and my suit, learning words, etc.). Now I am probably still a gazillion systems from beating the game and aside from just warping a ton I don't know what the point is, I'm kinda over exploring planets that look suspiciously the same. I may set it aside for six months, let them patch in some new content and go from there.

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38 minutes ago, EVA said:

Anybody got any tips on upgrading my ship?  Specifically inventory space.  That's what's killing me right now.

Not sure if its spoiler necessary but what I did was:

Spoiler

Only way to upgrade is to buy a new ship or find a crashed one, I never found a good crashed one so I just made an offer at the space station for a ship I liked. First I upgraded my suit since that was easier, some of the larger planets have five or more pods to upgrade. Then I found a few planets that had a lot of valuable resources and with my suit slots I was able to stash quite a bit. Then I sold it all and waited in a space station about five minutes until a ship flew in that had the slots I wanted. I think I spent about 3.2 million which sounds like a lot early in the game but if I find a planet with Emeril I can get money pretty quick, one trip alone I got about 600K worth before my suit was full and I had to sell it.

Mind you this all took awhile as I was exploring while upgrading my suit, but that's how I did it anyway.

 

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1 hour ago, EVA said:

Anybody got any tips on upgrading my ship?  Specifically inventory space.  That's what's killing me right now.

You upgrade inventory one slot at a time by buying new ships and finding crashed ships. Crashed ships you can find at the varies red laser beam beacons. Just select Transmission at those. Sometimes you'll have to go to another location first, but more often than not, you'll find your way to a crashed ship.

Here's a tip if you want a ship that's parked at a space station. So, the ships you see at space stations wind up being the ships you find crashed. Yeah, I know. Anyway. There was a sweet Tie Fighter looking ship at a space station, so I went to my next planet, and while it took two tries, I found the identical ship with one extra inventory slot than what I currently had.

So anyway, whether you follow that method of finding the look of the ship you want or not, you're going to be doing the ship upgrade thing of finding a crashed ship about 20+ times, or somewhere around that many times.

I'm not sure about buying ships because those are always in the 10s of millions of credits to buy.

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I don't really follow gaming news that much, I don't watch the E3 coverage or anything, so the first I had heard about this game was at the end of July when I walked into a Fred Meyer and on the TV displays in the electronics section showed a five minute trailer and I watched as you were on a planet, scanned some flora, then hopped into the ship, used the map to go to another star system, warped in, landed, and scanned some aliens...

 

...and the whole thing looked boring as fuck.  Not only that, but I was turned off by the cartoonish artwork.  It looked like the makers of Firewatch had designed a sci-fi game.  If I wanted to play a space exploration game, I could just download Wing Commander: Privateer off of Gog.com

 

If anything, No Man's Sky should serve as a valuable lesson to both developers, in terms of controlling the PR message and not over-promising on features or over-hyping, and to fans who basically in forums over-hyped the game themselves with all the assumptions they were making.

 

When the awful X-Men: Destiny game was announced, a couple of gamers started a thread for it on the official Marvel Comics message board, and they e-mailed invites to the developers to come on the forum and hype the game.  Quickly, users started posting questions and started making wild assumptions for the game ("Can we explore the Xavier Mansion?" "Can we kill Cyclops and make Emma team leader?") and then after about 20 pages of questions and self-hype, the users finally noticed that none of the developers were coming on to answer questions, or had in fact even responded to the e-mail invites.  And, of course, we remember how awful the game was.

 

Sean Murray and his staff have learned a valuable lesson here (assuming that No Man's Sky doesn't result in Hello Games going out of business, it very could).  Keep things close to the vest, don't start the hype train until the game is pretty stable and less than a year away from Gold Status, and most importantly, make sure the game is bug-free and has most of the features you promised at launch.

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3 hours ago, Jerome Miller said:

If anything, No Man's Sky should serve as a valuable lesson to both developers, in terms of controlling the PR message and not over-promising on features or over-hyping, and to fans who basically in forums over-hyped the game themselves with all the assumptions they were making.

Sean Murray and his staff have learned a valuable lesson here (assuming that No Man's Sky doesn't result in Hello Games going out of business, it very could).  Keep things close to the vest, don't start the hype train until the game is pretty stable and less than a year away from Gold Status, and most importantly, make sure the game is bug-free and has most of the features you promised at launch.

While I don't disagree with most of what you say, do you really think that it could put them out of business? I know that folks on the net have been very vocal about how disappointed they are in the game, especially on the PC side with all of the troubles it had.  

It has to have sold an incredible amount of copies, and I don't buy for one second that the majority of those copies have been refunded. There have been 3 or 4 patches for the PS4 version, and I don't know how many for PC, so it's not as if they are not trying to fix the error they made in releasing a buggy product. I feel like an action like that should take some of the heat off them, especially if they can end up implementing a lot of what was stated about the features initially.

I know nothing about the financial side of the gaming industry, so if you do, I will defer to your knowledge, but I just think that calling this the death knell might be a little much. I have no doubt that it will effect the way folks look at any of their future releases, but beyond that I don't know what the future holds for them.

I can tell you that I am enjoying the everloving fuck out of this game, as are my wife and son, and we have not been beset by any of the bugginess other folks are experiencing, save for the game-breaker my wife ran into that I talked about earlier in thread. And it looks like from looking at the patch notes that they may have fixed whatever issue that fucked her game in the first place.

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