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Comments
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One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important
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zGUI 4.0 - A Free GUI for Mudlet 4.10+
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One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important
zGUI 4.0 - A Free GUI for Mudlet 4.10+
zGUI 4.0 - A Free GUI for Mudlet 4.10+
I wanted Stellaris without the politics and the ability to actually visit the planets I was flying by. I got it and I only have to deal with other 'people' if I want to. There is also a language learning system so I am god damn sold. It's a game you can put down when you want and come back to it later without having to wrack your brain trying to remember exactly what you had been doing.
Only complaint is one time I saw a little T-Rex thing on the next hill over chasing these bald sheep with short front legs. I went to investigate and turns out the 'little' fella was about 3 times taller than me. Being able to tell the size of things in the distance is sometimes a little hard.
End comment:
I love it. It's beautiful and relaxed and there is a language learning system. Friendly to us filthy casual players. 9/10. Oh look, new flower. -bzzzzzzzzt-
NOTE NOTE NOTE: After typing all this out, this has turned out to mostly be a rant... So be warned! Wall of text imminent!
tl;dr Game could be so much better than what it is currently. Everything looks great etc but it's plagued with so many faults and (in my eyes) false advertising, etc. I'd give it a miss until it is much cheaper and the developers have had more time to implement things.
Appearance and Performance
Looks great. My PC was struggling at first, but it seemed to even out after a few graphics changes. I've not experienced any crashes yet. The planet I started out on looked pretty cool, but as I went to a few more planets and traveled a few systems, everything started to look exactly the same. Like, why is there a plant in this system physically the exact same plant as the one a few warp jumps away?
Ground Movement/Control
Movement seemed sluggish at first when I started out, and thought everything kinda looked cool. I really enjoyed just wandering around identifying/scanning all kinds of stuff. I liked the idea of the mining laser that can also be upgraded to be a boltcaster, that is kinda cool. The ground combat also seems very... lackluster. And what the hell is the deal with the Sentinels? Why do they randomly get mad at me? Why do they keep scanning me? Why are they on every single planet?
I followed a few of the starting 'quests' to get my ship up and running and took it out to space.
Ship Control/Space Flight
My goodness the flying mechanics are horrid. The ship movement is so sluggish and I often feel like I have zero bearing of where I am sometimes. I feel like the game would really benefit if you could look around your cockpit manually and be able to do stuff like look outside the window to the side, so you can get a bearing of what's nearby instead of just guessing.
I passed too far over a place I wanted to land at and missed landing, so I tried to turn around and land there. Turning took forever and I could barely even tell where the place even was - is my turning circle too big to turn around this fast? Am I directly over the place now? etc etc.
Controlling the ship for other stuff seems terrible as well, apart from just orientation. My speed would sometimes go up or down majorly with seemingly no explanation when flying around in the atmosphere. I like how the game prevents you from being able to crash into the ground and planets and space stations and stuff, but I like that kind of gritty realistic stuff. If I'm dumb enough to fly directly into a space station, I deserve to die.
The trailers seemed to show that there was like a seamless transition from space/orbit, to entering atmosphere, to seeing the ground. However the graphics when you're doing that... leave much to be desired. I could clearly see that the planet was rendered as a big sphere until I got really close, then bam it looked completely different as it decided to render things. It looked way more 'clunky' than it did in the trailer.
When I entered orbit in a system earlier, I randomly had a thing pop up on my HUD that I was getting scanned by hostiles. Then hostiles were coming after me and my 'valuable' cargo. Who are these hostiles? What valuable cargo are they after? At least in Freelancer you'd actually know what was up. You'd get a message from people going 'We want X, give it to us now or die', or you'd get scanned by Police and they'd be all, 'You have contraband, hand it over now'. These guys? Just rock up and start shooting me. I'm kind of okay with that, but would've liked a bit more depth added to it.
Oh, and then the combat started! Sluggish movement galore, difficult to aim and track enemies, etc. And then there's the Shields on your ship. I don't know if there's a hotkey for this, but trying to recover your shields is a huge pain. Forgive me if there's an actual hotkey for this, but man. I had two ships on me and I was blasting away at one and just before I had him down, my shields went out. I kinda went, 'Do they automatically come back? Is there a key I can press to get them back up (a la Freelancer)?' I ended up having to open up the character menu, tab over to the spaceship inventory, left-click on the Shield (once I found the damn thing), then click which mineral I wanted to use to recharge my shields. Then exit back out and get back to shooting. All the while, they're still shooting at me cause the game doesn't pause while you're in that menu. That combat was just so painful.
Overall stuff
Space exploration. Discover all these planets!
But, uh... There's already alien species on these planets. I've been trading with them. I'm not actually the first person to discover this planet. Who are these alien races? How long have they been here? How am I the one to officially discover all this stuff when there's lots of people already here? There's ships flying over my head every 5-10 minutes while I'm walking around on an undiscovered planet. What's the go? I was expecting contact with most other entities would be pretty rare and that most places wouldn't have anyone. That, to me, really helps ruin immersion (on top of so many other things...). And again, what the hell is with the sentinels?
I was also hoping for some voxel-building type stuff in the game too, but that was never really shared as something that would feature in this I think, and more just a personal hope of mine. I wanted to build a trading post, or a space station, or a pirate outpost, etc. Develop a planet, strip mine it to the core, etc.
The description of the game also seems very disingenuous to me.
I'll quote the descriptions from the store page on Steam. Note: I do only have 3 hours of playtime on this so far, so I may very well be quite wrong on a number of these.
At the centre of the galaxy lies a irresistible pulse which draws you on a journey towards it to learn the true nature of the cosmos. But, facing hostile creatures and fierce pirates, you'll know that death comes at a cost, and survival will be down to the choices you make over how you upgrade your ship, your weapon and suit.
Your voyage through No Man's Sky is up to you. Will you be a fighter, preying on the weak and taking their riches, or taking out pirates for their bounties? Power is yours if you upgrade your ship for speed and weaponry.
The galaxy is a living, breathing place. Trade convoys travel between stars, factions vie for territory, pirates hunt the unwary, and the police are ever watching. Every other player lives in the same galaxy, and you can choose to share your discoveries with them on a map that spans known space. Perhaps you will see the results of their actions as well as your own...
Factions vie for territory? What factions? What territory? Why?
Pirates hunt the unwary? What pirates? Where? Why? Can I hunt them? Can I join them?
Police are ever watching? You mean those Sentinels? That are on every single planet? If that's the case, the Police have already discovered absolutely every planet in the entire universe (at a guess). Therefore I'm not discovering anything new and wondrous, that 'no one has seen before'. If it doesn't mean the Sentinels...what police?
And sure, every player lives in the same galaxy... but would it be asking too much that we could, y'know, play with each other? I know the game is flagged as a Single Player game, but I feel like the game would be that much more enjoyable with friends that are actually there in the game with you, instead of just happening to maybe be in the same system, even though you can't see them.
If what you want to do is fly around casually and explore places with relaxing music, this is good. If you're after a realistic first-person space-exploration sci-fi game - this isn't it. I'd argue I get more fulfillment from playing Space Engineers (and with friends, too!). And especially get more from loading up a Windows XP virtual machine, running a dedicated Freelancer server on it, and playing that with a few friends.
I play it like Tahquil. VERY easy to pick up and put down which I like in a game. I've been focused on locating the artifact on each planet to learn the language then the major settlements to get new gear. Checked out a few other spaceships on the space station.
Reminds me of early minecraft with no real goals other than survive and get better equipped.
I do think the game has great mod potential if that were an option.
zGUI 4.0 - A Free GUI for Mudlet 4.10+
The center of the universe thing I was referring to wasn't a glitch, it was just one person stumbling onto a rare resource and mining the crap out of it to upgrade his ship a lot.
And sure you can judge a game based on it's beta versions. Look at ARK. And while it may be billed as a single player game, that strikes me as boring when it comes to an open world exploration game of this scale.
I know back in March the minimum requirements were well below fallout 4. So if you can run that you shouldn't have issues here.
(Fallout 4 being the last thing I got this excited and hyped up about).
Decided I should put some more time into it, just in case it improves. Determined that one planet I 'discovered' (lol) was a High Security Planet. Had sentinels everywhere, basically, and they did not like me grabbing some graviton orbs or whatever that were all over the place. Constantly attacking me if they'd scan one in my inventory (it'd be nice if it, y'know, said 'HEY YOU HAVE A GRAVITON THING. DIE'). Discovered elite sentinels, too. When I took to orbit to escape when my shield was gone (and I couldn't do a thing about it? why can't I recharge them like my ship shields?) I also discovered that there are SENTINEL FIGHTERS AND THEY GON COME KEEL ME. I warped to the next system, cause screw that.
I also discovered it's easier to blow up asteriods for commodities than find them on the ground.
What makes me most sad is that this game had so much potential to be awesome. The indy vibe made me trust the developers. But in the end its just a moneygrab. Fooled by the games industry again!!
zGUI 4.0 - A Free GUI for Mudlet 4.10+