No Man's Sky In Close Critique [Deep Spoilers] 

It's more like fool's gold

Man, 4 years ago you were talking a lot of shit. I wonder if you’re still doing that today

@@idrinkmilk282 No, he wasn't. People can disagree, you know.

@@lillyclarity9699 I’m not talking about his opinion. I’m taking about the fact he’s talking actual shit.like he’s just using a lot of words while saying a lot of nothing.

@@idrinkmilk282 You should let go of the past if you are still butthurt about him talking shit years ago on a fucking RU-vid Comment Section. Talk about moving on....

Yeah it's weird to see how much everything has changed, even with the UI and graphics. Same with how people look at the game now

They're saving that for the DLC.

Proof or it isn't happening. Yes, I know it's a joke. But at this point, anything said about NMS absolutely needs to be questioned to the point of obsession.

Maybe if you put the game aside for a while and go outside :D

Please keep your Kirk inside your pants

Even the people printing the boxed copies thought it had online play and had to print stickers to apply to cover up the logo for online connectivity on the back.

Robin Napoleon I don't see that as being "no different" The developer was also clearly guilty considering on many of the copies of the game they placed a sticker over the section containing multiplayer on the box. And, it has already occurred. Day one no less on a stream. And it was clearly showing how unfinished such a feature is since the player lacks a player model, and you just walk into each other.

Also, faction wars, different planets different materials, orbits, diverse animals who do things

Slight correction, there was NOTHING to signal to the players that met that they were together, exepct for being able to observe the same objects around them. If one shot a rock, the other did NOT see the result. They saw NOTHING. ANd they could not "walk into each other". They simply did not exist in each others games. The only way players have been able to do anything multiplayer-like, is for 1 player to name something, and then the other player CAN see that discovery.

Bastardo Borracha To me that makes it worse considering how the game advertised multiplayer until right at the last second

Yes, I agree completely. I have not played the game, well because what it seems to be lacking (everything it was sold on). I like most of his reviews, but some, like this or like Fallout4(althoug that one not that much), it feels like he is trying to give meaning to things that are not meaningful. This review sounds like he is trying to justify to himself, why he is liking the game.

also the whole math argument would be much stronger on a game like the original elite, or elite2, but not on this. not after there are so many procedural games there are already. and they all work the same, as u already pointed out.

genkispt I felt the same way while watching it. I almost stopped before finishing the video to write my comment because I knew how the rest of the video would go. I normally like this channel's reviews as well, I came from the Fallout 4 review, but this one seems very self serving. It's perfectly fine to like the game, but it's kind of shitty and pretentious to call people who feel burned spending $60 ignorant by reading them passages from Lewis and Clark's diaries.

Agreed, FTL's goals are so different as to be incomparable. Minecraft is a better comparison, since it has exploration and random generation, but the meat and potatoes players keep returning for is the building (and sharing it with others). Why name every fern or squirrel in a hundred star systems if no one will ever see them? Being a casual exploration game is fine as long as there is staggering variety, but I think it needs distractions. Elite: Dangerous has weathered similar complaints that the procedural bits aren't diverse enough; the real draws are combat, player interaction, and sweeping time lapses on RU-vid. Meanwhile, I'm not convinced that players want worlds they can crash on and be stranded. More variety in terrain would help, but the point is to bask in awe, not stew in frustration. Maybe an element of danger would be exciting, but it's not the only way to give players challenges that aren't rooted in collecting a million space rocks for the privilege of collecting more rocks.

Make of my thoughts and counterpoints whatever you will. I think you're a wonderful human being, and that your comment deserves the hours I put into tapping the following wall-o-text out on my phone: I disagree that Minecraft would have been a better comparison. Minecraft is at bare minimum the size of one planet in NMS, which severely limits its size in comparison to NMS. Because Minecraft is much smaller, the game uses its math in very different ways from how NMS uses it. Think about it: let's say you somehow make a mod that allows players to craft spaceships that will allow players to traverse a void between different Minecraft world seeds, with zero "loading screens" in the transition. Then, Minecraft would be a more important comparison to NMS, but that isn't reality. You could say terrain generation would be where the comparison is made, but every world in NMS generates a visually unique planet every time: trees might look like a massive root-bound tumor, hostile animals could be anything from massive horned beasts to tiny alien bugs, even rock formations and boulders are visually unique between planets. In Minecraft, a Creeper is always a Creeper, a Spider is always a Spider, Villagers are always Villagers, almost everything is cube-shaped, and trees will always be trees. Even if you could traverse Minecraft world seeds as smoothly as NMS lets you traverse its system seeds, every world seed would be painfully identical to the other, far more so than with NMS. Also, Minecraft's smaller size and far more detailed world encourage the player to completely take it over, to carve a home out of the wilderness, which is a very different gameplay experience from the nomadism NMS encourages its players to do. NMS nudges its players to move on to the next planet once you're tired of exploring a particular planet, which means the game doesn't let you carve out a home from the wilderness the same way Minecraft does. Since the scope and goals of the two games are very different (Minecraft is small and encourages each player to make their world seed their own, while NMS is huge and encourages each player to move on from each system seed and forever be traveling), value judgments by comparing them are not very useful, as why people buy and enjoy Minecraft would naturally be very different from why people buy and enjoy NMS, despite both of them using some form of math (random generation) to create the game world. FTL, on the other hand, also encourages and sometimes outright forces you to move from system to system, with the Rebel Fleet constantly on your tail and having to be one step ahead of them to win each run. You could argue that the comparison to NMS Noah makes in this video has the same problems as the comparison with Minecraft, but again I would disagree. FTL's constant urging of the player to keep moving forward creates a drive in the player to keep moving, keep fueled, keep upgrading, and stay alive, much like in NMS. The difference between the games is obvious, though: FTL is a brutal, uncompromising challenge that puts the player's skill, crew and equipment to the test at every random encounter, while NMS is a gentle, meditative exploration of a universe-in-a-bottle that strives for visual wonder and awe at the scope of the game's world. Both accomplish the same goals: keep the player moving and progressing through the game world and its systems; but they do so using different mechanics and different forms of math. That's very useful for consumers wondering why they should pick up FTL or NMS over the other, as they are both nomadic procedurally-generated space adventures, and understanding where they are different would help folks decide which they would rather buy. As for the "story" not actually being that impressive, Noah brought up that pulp science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s has the same problem: it over-emphasizes the science and the scale of the universe way over anything resembling a decent narrative or character development. It asks the questions of "how and why does the universe work the way it works? What would it look like? How would you live that way?" None of that has anything to do with humanity's desire to conquer, to leave their stamp on the world. In fact, many classic science fiction stories are about the hubris of humanity trying to bend nature to its will, and showing the consequences of those desires. The "story" doesn't matter in pulp sci-fi: the science matters, the "big picture" matters. I think the audience expected something like the Star Wars universe out of NMS, where the narrative is king and every player goes through some form of the Hero's Journey. Instead of that, they got the science fiction equivalent of Euro Truck Simulator, without the trucking-as-a-job part. Then again, isn't that filling a niche that the market is sorely lacking in? We already have a massive space opera trilogy where our choices matter: it's called Mass Effect. We already have a galaxy-wide economy simulation: it's called Eve Online. We already have hardcore space sims in development that put you right in the pilot's seat: they are called Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous. To have a game where you are a nomadic wanderer in an impossibly vast universe whose only goal is whatever sights and sounds the players decide to go see is something the market hasn't brought to consumers yet. At least, not until NMS came out. Also, if it were only a few thousands of things that are pieced together to create the flora and fauna, there would be much less variety in NMS's planets. The thing is, I've checked out screenshots people have made of the planets they have found, and I have seen things I haven't seen in game. That was after exploring eight planets and cataloging all the species on them. Having only a few thousand parts to create that variety would result in players seeing those same parts over and over again across the different planets, meaning screenshots would bleed together after a while: nobody would be seeing new body parts or plant life after a few planets. Clearly, that isn't the case. Not only that, but after looking at those screenshots, I found a planet that had flora and fauna with still new body types and shapes. Sure, repetition can happen, but the pool is wider than you may think. And of course, a wider pool means more stuff to "cram in", making the smaller file size that much more impressive. Plus, even with a "smaller" pool of "only a few thousand parts", where does the game store the 18 quintillion body part combinations? I can understand each planet 'feeling' the same, as animal types are similar across planets: carnivores are carnivores, grazers are grazers, so on and so forth. The visual variety is what makes each planet interesting though, much the same way that the clothes you wear are what help you stand out from literally every other human being around you. To poo-poo visual diversity is equivalent to poo-pooing the artistry of dresses, suits and costumes. We're all humans underneath our clothes, but without clothes and the art of making visually and aesthetically pleasing clothing, we would be more likely to lose ourselves in those masses of humanity, and find it that much harder to distinguish ourselves from our fellow human beings. It's the same difference with NMSs visual artistry: the window-dressing IS the point, NOT the underlying functions. Last but certainly not least, if I remember the anecdotes correctly, many games industry figures have come out over the years and said a series of fairly similar comments about creating a vast space universe that players fly through in real-time: "It's too big to create and be playable." "We don't have the technology to pull it off." "It would take too long to hand-craft, and procedural generation would create laughable results." "The game size would be massive." NMS, in six gigabytes, proves all of that industry-speak flat-out wrong. We CAN create a huge, procedurally-generated universe that is functional to the point of playability that doesn't produce results so outlandish that laughter is the only appropriate response, all within a reasonable file size. Now there is no excuse to not double down and really expand the space sim and space exploration genres. Devs, NMS showed you the possibilities; now you better damn well run with them. Make of my thoughts and counterpoints whatever you will.

I agree with you up until this part, "...multiplayer experience". He mostly meant the whole naming animals, planets, etc and having other people visit and see all the shit you discovered. As far as playing with other people it was 'supposed' to be barebones. You could see other players if they're near you but that's pretty much it.

GRStudios360 I mean his often repeated words (spoken numerous times, i.e. at Conan O'Brien's, or wherever he showed the game) how players could find each other, it would just be really hard. I remember how he said it would make you think twice about attacking other people, as such encounters would be priceless. How it was meant to show you how rare and wonderful is the existence of life. I also remember how 1 in 10 planets would have any life 1 in 1000 complex lifeforms, and 1 in 10000 a civilization (number could differ). Nope, nothing like it in the final game. Murray never addressed it after release.

"You said you don't get why people accuse Hello Games of lying. But seriously, what's not to get?" A lie is an intentional misstatement. The developers told us what they were working on, and some of those features had to be cut before launch. Any reasonable person who's not in kindergarten and who knows anything about video game development knows that sometimes features have to be cut before launch due to QA issues or deadlines. To say that it's a "lie" for a developer to say that certain features will be in the game when they only "intend" that such features will be in the game is like saying that I'm lying if I tell my wife I'm making steak for dinner and when I go to the fridge I find the steak is past its sell by date so I can't make steak. Did I "lie" when I told her I was making steak? Of course not! I'm not fricken prescient - I can't see into the future. Neither can Sean Murray. "If Sean Murray says there is possibility of meeting other players, and there isn't, then it's false advertising. It's as simple as that" Maybe in fricken Fairyland. Here in the real world, grownups understand that when a developer talks about features before launch, he's talking about things he intends to put in the game. Everyone who isn't a child knows that what a developer intends to put in the game is subject to change. That's why developer statements are NOT considered advertising.

You misspelled your nickname. It should be "No Man's Sky Apologist".

Not to mention the lack of space battles and giant creatures that were SHOWN IN TRAILERS.

And the thing is, Minecraft has some actual GOALS. Even without the blatant ones like beating the bosses, simply creating buildings, creating safe spaces for night and claiming turf from nature is alot more engaging. You can explore for the sake of exploring, but that's not the only reason you'd want to.

Minecraft is much more boring in terms of procedural generation, though. Or at least it was when it first started gaining momentum online. The extra biomes, the "silly" biomes, the special enemies and the terrain generation customization came after. It wasn't its strong suit at all. So why was Minecraft more satisfying that NMS, even playing as single player? In my opinion, it's because it had both customization, challenge, and progression. I don't think I need to repeat what the video says, but basically, Minecraft lets you customize your avatar and your world aesthetically and functionally. In early stages of the game, it is genuinely challenging. It lets you get lost, and lose your gear, forces you to start over for small mistakes. Yet instead of creating frustration, it makes players want to get better, to try again. Both games sound very close in terms of features, but they focus on entirely different aspects of play. In terms of comparison, contemplative walking sims like Dear Esther or even some of the Myst games have much more in common with NSM than Minecraft, Starbound or Terraria.

Selestrielle Depending on at what point you consider Minecraft was gaining considerable momentum it still had very interesting procedural generation. You could walk around a peaceful world during the day of rolling grasslands and hills. During the night you could explore extensive sets of interconnected caves. It wasn't as expansive or intricate as NMS, but as I said, I think Noah might have drawn an interesting connection with Minecraft because it's clearly a major influence on NMS and was successful in a lot of the ways NMS isn't even when NMS tries to.

+mechbgum you assume so it's your fault PERIOD

+mechbgum you're a fool for making assumptions. It's you. I hope you bought the game. Serves you right. And if you think you're right, just try to sue them. Go on little man. You'll discover how the REAL WORLD OF GROWNUPS works.

+mechbgum people in Nazi Germany assumed that indeed Jews were a problem to be gotten rid of. They assumed their leaders were good and responsible in their own bubble. Now ponder on that boy.

+mechbgum And again you assume on. I'm actually Jewish and you seem to have trouble comprehending the context of my reply. You shy away from the subject through your assumptions.

+mechbgum triggered much? Calling me a latent fascist doesn't work on a Jew. You ignore history little bumboy. You assume...and still don't get it. Nazi's assumed a lot too. That's you sheeple's problem. You're so gullable. You would buy medicine from a quack doctor in the 1880's.

He's pretty unique among game reviewers, I myself could listen to him talk about anything. He has a 1 hour and 40 minute video talking about a 4,000 mile road trip he embarked on in a 70's Mercury Marquis and it's surprisingly entertaining. The video is underrated as hell, check it out when you have the time.

will do!

You played a game for 68 hours and yet call it lacking?

reviews like this should be changed to just "I dont know what I want"

There's more to satisfaction then just play time.

Definitely agree. It's just rare that I encounter a game so full of potential yet lacking. the core game loop is not nearly as interesting as the concept behind it.

The Monarch tps?

I would not say that's fully true. I would say it got abandoned because randomly generated 3D spaces have a problem with collision, allowing players to accidentally fall through the floor

Still, games like Deus Ex, Thief 1 & 2, The Elder Scrolls (except Oblivion), the good Ultima games, the "Shock" series (except Infinite), the Fallout games and Bioware's old D&D based RPG's encourage exploration by dropping the player in a handcrafted environment full of interesting details and rewarding gameplay. Procedural generation is great at creating vest spaces for the player to inhabit, it's not good at actually making those environments interesting. So there's an inherent problem with creating a game based solely on exploration, and then setting it in an almost entirely Procedurally generated world, the sense of wonder and excitement the player initially feels at the scope of the game is going to quickly evaporate once he or she realizes that every planet is created based on a formula that can only spit out variations on a theme.

"And it got abandoned" Half of the games coming out nowadays have some kind of random generation in them :/

I deliberately excluded Civilization, Elite, roguelikes and diablo, because none of them focus on exploration. Civilization is a 4X, Elite was a space combat game with trading elements, roguelikes are about planning, resource management and (in the case of nethack at least) macgyvering innovative solutions. Diablo is a hack and slash game. As for your opinion of the Elder Scrolls, that's your personal opinion of a game, they're a widely respected series and yes, most people would consider them "good".

Daggerfall was alright, and Morrowind was good.

fake build and he got on public outlets and LIED STRAIGHT TO EVERYONE ABOUT WHAT WILL BE IN THE GAME. Fuck this guy..

I think that they could have hit a compromise where there was always at least on planet in every star system that was habitable but lacked resources, and a whole bunch of them that had various environmental hazards that you had to wear the right gear for which held increasingly rare resources. You would find that you always crash landed on a habitable planet so that the game would let you opt out of the survival aspect completely. You would then be guaranteed to find all that you needed in the way of materials, debris, wrecks and objects amongst the planets and moons of your current star system to journey to the next star system. I also think that Sentinels should only occur in star systems that have fauna, but that there should be no signs of alien civilisation on the planets as these robots would destroy any race attempting to colonise their nature preserves. I also think that Pirates should only occur near Space Stations and that Space Stations should be far more rare and harder to discover the location of. This could work by first finding a star system that had no alien fauna and therefore no Sentinels preventing colonisation. You could then find that a single alien race had taken territorial control of this. Although this would be rare and you wouldn't encounter any alien NPCs until you had travelled about halfway to the centre of the initial Galaxy. Some of these bases would be just outposts, others unoccupied mining complexes and factories, there would also be the odd abandoned research facility with a horror slant to whatever had broken out of quarantine whilst it was being studied, there would be multi-platform trading posts taking multiple ships, as well as the new addition of something the scale of a small space port (think Mos Eisley from Star Wars: Episode IV) which had a Cantina bar in which you would find a variety of aliens who didn't belong to any of the rival factions from whom you could get jobs as a trader using a loaned vessel, or a bounty hunter with your own, as well as discover the trade routes that interconnected local Space Stations and which ones had the most Police (both making them a good destination for legitimate trade, but simultaneously a bad one for illegal goods), and those which had none at which contraband and Piracy florished - basically, the same as Elite (1984). You would also be told of regions afflicted by the erupting Interstellar War so that you could choose to avoid these star systems as you charted your way to the centre, unless your ship was sufficiently upgraded for you to side with a faction as a paid mercenary. I would like to see some procedurally generated narrative come from an RTS game simulating on their server that online players could sway the results of. There would be no need for PvP multiplayer, just a recognition by the central server that your assistance of some bots in one faction help it keep territory, conquer some, or lose it. Ships should have different control schemes, if not different performance characteristics from ship to ship, giving more of a reason to change ship than a few extra slots. I also don't see why equipment can't be transferred across. The Fighter ship would Pitch & Roll on the Left Stick rather than Pitch & Roll as the Trader ship controls at the moment. You would start off with a Trader ship and then have the option to swap to a Fighter that would be unique in not having an autopilot enabled that prevented it from flying down canyons under rocky arches and slamming into the ground at high speed. People complain about missing features, but the game would be better with more missing features, as it doesn't help immersion to have a waypoint to the location of your ship (losing and finding it again would be an adventure that it is not allowing players to have), or to all the points of interest on the map (so there is no stumbling on an ancient ruin or cryptic monolith as its location is clearly marked from hundreds of miles away), or even to mark the location of mineral resources and what they each are (this should be a mystery until you dematerialise the rock into its constituent elements into your Exosuit whose menu would gain a complete Periodic Table for you to fill up this freeing up the limited Inventory slots for upgrades and crafted item storage tradeoffs). You also shouldn't have a Grave at which to collect your dropped Inventory, or Respawn unless you have made a copy of your Traveller in the pattern buffer of a Space Station's rented teleporter. You don't need to muck around with a Pulse Drive if you can fly faster and faster and faster through frictionless void and the whole pace of the game should have planet to moon transitions that are more akin to that seen in the E3 2014 "Dinosaur Planet" trailer. I guess all this grind was intended to stop players rushing through planets like a slideshow and getting jaded fast as they began to compare a lot of them in their recent memory and start to see recurrent patterns ruin the illusion of it being "something entirely new that they had never seen before" and merely "something that was entirely expected to be similar to something seen not long enough before for them to have forgotten about it". However, they used the wrong brake. Optional preparatory grind in order to mount an intrepid exploration of a hazardous planet for rare minerals, wrecks, ruins, etc. is a well understood and justified "risk versus reward" gameplay mechanic that it doesn't fully commit to. However, because this necessarily has to remain an optional survival aspect in order for it to succeed as an exploration game it has to have another pervasive brake slowing rapid progress to the centre. As the Nada and Polo subplot undermines all value in your achievements by the revelation that this Universe is fake and nothing you did really mattered, that has to be cut and Black Holes have to become dangerous singularities which destroy your ship once pulled past their event horizon rather than wormholes inside which you can chat to two NPCs. This immediately makes getting to the centre far harder especially as you only live once. To balance this it will now pause the game when in the menu (and allow you to arbitrarily overwrite a single save point on exiting from which it will later resume) so the inefficient menu system never causes an unfair death. However, piracy will inhibit trade and the interstellar factional war happening much closer to the centre of the Galaxy will inhibit safe movement towards the end of your journey. Unless you trade to get the funds to upgrade your ship to then align with a faction so you may gain safe passage through their territories you won't get to the centre to get your name memoralised on the leaderboard of all those who managed it in order of who got there first and in the quickest time, etc. More could await you there but that would require the reinstatement of their cut multiplayer.

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Great video.

Good talk!

Needlessly aggressive rebuttal.

well i would also assume elite dangerous is able enough... was almsot a bit sad he didnt mention it-but t makes sense because, nms is like.. trippy pulp like people pissed drunk talking about philosopical bullshit 3am at night.. interesting but inconsequential omfg I just realize I got a new pc and now I can run that game. brb installing it XD

Well, it takes shield damage and then hull damage once the shields are down.

There is also the skybox. One of the most increadible things about Elite is the way that each star twinkling in the skybox is a real star that you can go to. Each Nebula is one you can plot towards. One of the most haunting experiences one can have is to go up, or down, to the edge. The furthest reach of the galactic disk, where there is nothing above. There, with the galaxy below you shining as bright as the moon, or brighter, the faint distant galaxies are invisible, save a few. It is nothing but darkness there, and below, an ocean of light. This is repeated in your approach to the core. Or to any nebula, or any galactic feature spanning more than a couple lightyears, really. Your ability to percieve the galaxy moving past you in snapshot makes it all the more magnificent. You can note the depth of how far you've gotten into the core by how many stars are behind, above, and infront of you. Or you can note that you've truly begun to move towards the core when you finally breach the arm of opaque dust that separates earth from its blazing intensity. In short. No matter which direction you go, you are always making progress towards Something.

TheCrazyman5291 It does have situations where you cannot win. I have had situations where I run into 2 whole sectors with no shops and no ships I run into drop any fuel, so I'm stranded and my weapons haven't improved enough to take on the ensuing rebel fleet. You have clearly just had better luck than others. That is what FTL is, ultimately. A test to see if you get just favorable enough RNG to upgrade your ship enough and get the right weapons to win. If you don't get the right weapons, don't have enough scrap to upgrade your ship enough, don't come across enough extra crew members etc. then you are ultimately fucked. I've had perfect strategy in some playthroughs but not enough resources to work with in order to get through the shields of an enemy ship in the first place to beat it.

Did you try milking each sector? Or did you run through a straight path? Were the sectors nebulas, because they have almost nothing in them. At least certain situations had to arise where there was choice, right? There's also the distress beacon, and if you know you're going to run out of fuel, don't just pick any beacon. If at least one of these factors of choice were in your game, then it potentially means that you made one wrong move that ended your game.

The point of the analogy was not to say that "FTL explicitly creates worlds you cannot win in". The point of the analogy was to say that FTL acknowledges and understands its playerbase, and the generation tools it has at its disposal enough to give those players unwinnable situations. No Man's Sky doesn't ever stray from its hand-holdy, casual feel. FTL, Planet Earth, and even moreso the uninhabitable worlds of the universe, do.

Exploration is about the unknown. The unknown causes tension. Relaxation comes from comfort. Comfort comes from the familiar. Not universally but you need to work to get past those opposites. Sorry I’m 4 years late.