Revisiting No Man's Sky (Zero Punctuation) 

Watch this week's episode of Zero Punctuation on Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan - www.escapistmagazine.com/rainbow-billy-the-curse-of-the-leviathan-zero-punctuation/ - Watch it early on RU-vid and support our content via RU-vid Memberships for $2/month. ru-vid.com/show-UCqg5FCR7NrpvlBWMXdt-5Vgjoin

Streaming on RU-vid, having kids, wanting to go back to E3, revisiting games he's already reviewed. Man, would love to see Yahtzee from 10 years ago reaction to present day Yahtzee

I still remember the classic joke: "No Man's Sky? More like No Game!" "That wasn't your strongest attempt at wordplay, Yahtzee." "No worries! I'll just patch something better in later!"

Be careful Yahtzee, you might be conditioning us to love the game drought season because of the stuff you have to do to keep the content stream flowing.

How surreal that 2016 Yahtzee was presented as ancient as a 1930s black and white film

1:30 Thanks Nick/Yahtz, I now have an impossible need to re-experience all the much older ZP episodes as grainy, static-ridden Bioshock diaries

Fun fact: the game doesn't spawn in anything for missions. It just forces interactions/dialogue onto existing locations/npc's. Otherwise they just produce their fixed, procedurally generated interaction.

I was just rewatching the 2018 review of Observer, where he resists revisiting No Man's Sky because "it's against my principles to encourage this 'let's just fix it in post' culture." Four years later, he finally gives in.

This episode drops on RU-vid the same day as yet another free update. God I love the treatment this game got.

This actually touches on one of my main issues with No Man's Sky. The whole selling point was exploration. The idea that you had this insanely large universe to explore and discover. And obviously that fell flat. But now they've updated and update the game making it massively better..... by basically completely changing the direction to being about basebuilding and crafting. Yes it's a better game. Yes Hello Games deserve some major recognition for turning things around. But as someone who was originally excited on the idea of exploration it is kind of a bitter pill that so much of the improvement is at the further expense of having much reason to explore. I booted up the game yesterday to check out the last few updates that I hadn't gotten around to trying and basically felt like all it was was more progression mechanics and things to craft while the original central point of exploration and discovery feels like it's kind of just sitting there gathering dust as the dev team turns it into a completely different game from what it was originally supposed to be. This isn't me necessarily bad mouthing Hello Games too much. We didn't get that grand exploration game at launch and I can't really fault them for giving many players what they wanted. I just also can't help being a bit sad that it doesn't look like it will ever be the kind of game that had me so excited to begin with.

He said he'd never do it. Looks like he did it. Summer drought must be bad.

That "Hello, Games" made me laugh more than it had any right to

It's worth adding that their "expeditions" allow players to have a much more condensed and objective driven experience with the game if the more free form "wander wherever" is a little too amporphous for interest. The best part being that they are also free, give you a bunch of stuff and make an excellent jumping off point for new players who then get a boosted start to the game. I've started over several times and my current save file is one that I started for an expansion because I lucked out and got an excellent ship and some really solid mods. NMS is one of the only games I keep installed on my console to revisit once a year or so.

I went to the space station once and a player randomly for no reason at all gave me 1,000,000 credits and I think some resources, as you can guess that catapulted me forward in progress quite a bit.

So how many infinitly theoretical universes do we have in the yahtzee household now that he revisits No Mans Sky, and what does he have to remove to fit it in the house.

Drought season must be apocalyptic this year if we're going back to No Man's Sky

It is as Miyamoto said. A delayed game is eventually good or canceled or maybe repurposed into another game, but a bad game is bad forever or at least until it's been patched so many times it's barely recognizable and revisted by Yahtzee.

And this review is not even mentioning what got me back on the NMS train- VR support. It makes it great just for sightseeing, cruising around in my ship looking for the coolest scenery to get out and look at up close. It gives an amazing sense of freedom, and the knoweldge that you can go in any direction for as long as you want without hitting any artificial barriers gives an incredible sense of it being a real place.

Thanks for checking this one out again yahtz, I would never pretend it's a game that's for everyone. But in an industry where so often the go to course of action for any adversity tied to your studios name is to jump ship, abandon the game, abandon the entire company in some cases, and then open again under a different name. I feel like the fact that they're still going like... What 6 years or something at this point? I don't even remember. Of free content updates, overhauls, reworks, and so on, all for free. (Which they didn't even have to do after a while, I know I, as well as a large part of the community would have been happy to pay for expansions or upgrades after feeling like they'd earned the right. But no, they still keep trucking.) You can tell that they were thrown under the bus to sell consoles, but that they truly love their game, and the community that grew behind it. I can honestly, and without a hint of irony say that I wish more studios were like hello games. I just hope any studios that follow in their footsteps do their best to stay away from big name publishers lol

i like how you bring back old footage of previous reviews. classic.

NMS has the same problem Starbound did: Space is too damn big. If you don’t make the player visit a myriad of locations for story or progression reasons, what was the point? If you do, then they’ll never be attached to anywhere. And at least in Starbound there were acidic oceans and platforming asteroid belts.

This was really really good. First one of these videos I've came across. It gave me 2009/10 vibes where the Xbox 360 dashboard would show you niche gaming shows produced by Microsoft, except this one is an adult rated version. It's excellent!

Its really funny how a lot of gaming is affected by this for both good and bad. There’s alot of games I’m hesitant to revisit to because there has been years of updates/patches/DLCs, so the generally experience/meta has greatly changed.

NMS is one of the few games that actually "fixed it later". It has had the negative affect of making people support games that have no sign of improving because of the slim chance a giant AAA studio will care enough about making an unprofitable game good like an indie studio would.

Honestly, if it wasn't still in the 30ish dollar range even when on sale, I would have tried it by now. But as great as it is for them to have come so far, it really just DOES feel like 'another one'. Don't have high hopes for Bethseda's upcoming space game due to suspecting its gonna be akin to this, for similar reasons, but very open to being wrong on that.

1:30 Now all I can hear is Yahtzee doing a radio drama. Which, honestly, is something I’d be down for if Will Save the Galaxy for Food or Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash are anything to go by.

When you remember Yahtzee explicitly said hd'd never do this since he doesn't condone the "fixing it after post" mentality. Guess all things change, and not for worse! Also making those old timey bits in bloody windows movie maker is most impressive!

Honestly been really enjoying NMS since it updated so much. I like that you can teleport betwern systems easily so you don't have to move your base around. And I did end up needing other systems for specific resources for things I was building XD while the story isn't super strong, it's enough to get you going and for that I am enjoying it.

Never thought I would see Yahtzee giving a second chance to a game

"Oh, its a pun on No Man's Land. I just got that." Me: If it were a snake, it would've bit me, swallowed me whole and shat me out a month ago since I too just got that.

Honestly I'd be down to watch Yahtzee re-review most of the games he's covered, even the ones that haven't been patched or changed at all. Would be interesting to see how his perspective may have shifted over the years, the way it did with the Souls series.

Wow that's weird! After not touching No Man's Sky myself since first reaching the center of the universe about a week after the game launched I decided only about 5 days ago to fire it back up and take a look at all the changes in the game and have been puttering in it for the past few days. Then Yahtzee posts this today. I don't know what hive mind vibe Sean Murray is broadcasting this past week but that was kind of a funny coinkiedink for me. Neat.

Between this and the review on escapist right now, I'm absolutely certain people are gonna plaster him with game recommendations the same way sharks bite when they smell blood

My issue with No Man's Sky now is that they've added all this extra stuff without bothering to integrate it properly into early game progression. There are very discernable gaps between each section of content and a number of references to stuff that's been superceded by choices made in new content. And there's still bugs from the launch, like the quest breaking glitches that force you to restart a quest because it wants you to go to a thing that is no longer interactable. Personally I think they'd have been better off having bases only buildable in (or on the outside of) Freighters and doubling down on the space nomad aspect of the original release where you had no ties to any planet and could just wander wherever you wanted.

I think the biggest promise that I DON’T THINK has ever been fulfilled was the idea that you could randomly happen upon any other players and their structures. I understand that’s probably a nightmare with servers and whatnot. But that idea seemed fascinating to me. Esp if the stuff aged or was degraded depending on the planet type I know it’s asking a lot, but the fact that there was the remotest chance that someone could come across what I’ve deemed Planet Butts with the flying beasts I’ve named Sphincter Eagles. And then they could relax in the dilapidated ruins of Anal Explorer Base Alpha. Just would’ve been so cool to leave my little mark on the universe

Am loving seeing him tackle things he said he wouldn't, still don't think he'll ever like Pathologic though, but REALLY want to see his full reaction to it :P

To be honest, seeing this video on my recommended feed made my heart sink for a moment, but I'm pleased with the way this review review was handled.

Ah yes, the summer drought season is back

Oh and the way he uses an old-timey filter and a few other things when showing his old review was a very nice touch!

My biggest issue with NMS is that they don't respect my time. Everything has a loading animation with its "awe" moments. Docking a ship, loading the game, going through a portal etc. I think a lot of these are holdovers from when it was first launched and they wanted to pad your time with the game but now its just showing its age.

Thank you for the very entertaining review! I imagining it's kind of a moment much like the food critic (Ego) in Ratatouille had when he heard a restaurant he gave a poor review for was popular again. lol My mind goes to weird areas sometimes. xD

Thanks for doing this. When it rereleased all I saw people saying when they played it was "Oh this feels so much better" however as someone who never actually played the original, it all looks the same. It needed a comparison.

I think the NMS phenomenon is going to be a massive event in the history of gaming, for good and bad. you've got companies that will refuse to move on and incessantly try to throw bandaids at a broken or slowly failing product until it works because they don't want to leave behind the work they've put into it behind and "no man's sky did it, so can we" (most notable right now is destiny 2) alternately there's gamers who stopped reading into anything about the games progress past the release month that will forever only see it as an example of a bad release of broken promises and 'greedy devs' (totally misunderstanding either difference between crunch pressure and false advertising, or the difference between shareholders and game developers) In my opinion it can be used to show that shareholders should respect their developers more, gamers should educate themselves on how game design actually works, advertisment laws should cover more bases, and that good game developers will not only accept mistakes, but fix them *with* their community.

I’ve been looking forward to this ever since you mentioned it on the podcast, such an awesome idea of yours!

thank you for re-reviewing this! really appreciate the effort! 😀

One thing about the freighters or whatever they're called again they changed, was the new base building system they can now have. They basically act as a space station you can call on-demand, and you can even put one of those fancy teleporters in it. All of the machines placed in a freighter/whatever, also get infinite power, and don't need a generator. However, the aforementioned teleporter doesn't accept teleports to it, unlike space stations, which do. This is likely because the "freighters" can be moved to other star systems. The bases you can make in the cargo haulers, I mean freighters, is surprisingly huge, and can have multiple floors.

It's kinda funny seeing this video now since Cyberpunk2077 also did get major updates since Yahtzee's review

I like NMS and Starbound (not saying I like Chucklefish, though). I like the sense of community NMS has, and how serene the game can be. It's incredibly peaceful if you want it to be. And Starbound is fun because the base building is great, and it essentially fills the role of space-Terraria.

Did Yahtzee get a new recording setup recently? The audio quality lately sounds great!

I can’t believe Yahtzee missed an opportunity to reference Kurt Vonnegut in his „building St. Peter’s Basilica” bit. All you had to do was switch it to Taj Mahal!

The blended mewlette soup congealed enough for them to carve a nice little trophy out of its head and all they needed was another six years...

I’ve tried to replay it a few times. That was it.

I’ve been wanting a re-review of this

literally right as this video dropped, another pretty big update dropped xD

The fact that it's not simply a "new look" but a look comparing old ZP complaints and concerns makes the review revisit far more enjoyable.

if you want a really good space fleet rpg, you should play starsector. its like top down elite dangerous but much better.

I would totally have supported Yahtzee's previous position that games that aren't ready by ship date deserve to be kicked around the playground for showing up with their pants down. Having said that, in this day and age, it's nice that game makers have the option to fix things in post, though of course they should never make that the standard by which they operate. It's also cool to see Yahtzee broaden his horizons, especially in aforementioned modern world in which a game can last ten or more years if the makers keep making content for it (Minecraft comes to mind and I don't even play that!).

yes yahtz do cyberpunk. they upended the quest system so now sidequests are delivered in batches so your map screen doesnt end up looking like a police investigation board trying to link up all the related suspects

2:11 I spy with my little eye an Archer reference

Don't forget to add a healthy dose of battle pass-esque FOMO with the Expeditions. At least they can be pretty fun to complete and give you a huge boost in progression

And you put this out right when they announced a ginormous overhaul to the freighter building and functionality!

It is very cool and commendable that hello games has fixed this game, but as a day one buyer when it came out it was so empty and basically a 60 usd scam, remember the interviews saying “oh yea you can play with your friends in multiplayer” and all the other promises that were totally false or misleading? Yes, the game is cool now, yes the game has tons of free updates, but when they released it for 60 usd that was a real jerk move. I didn’t pay that a couple years ago so I could play a cool game now, I wanted what was promised THEN

the great thing is they JUST updated the game the day this was uploaded. Reworked the freighters and theyre super nice now. I also jump systems like a mad man for some reason

Yahtzee isn’t a multiplayer guy so I’m not surprised he didn’t try it, but the Community Expeditions are a lot of fun. For a certain amount of time, you can create a new save on the current Expedition and it dumps everyone is dumped in roughly the same area of space and directs them towards various meetup points with other supporting objectives that vary each expedition. It’s a stark contrast from the normal solo experience where you never see a single thing visited by another player - the meetup points have tons of players actively in-system and lots of bases and other signs of player activity. I think it’s a really neat way to use the same universe and engine to create almost an entirely different game.

Literally the same day as a new update for the Freighters lol perfect timing

"Hello, Games!" got me so badly in the dumbest way possible

Yahtzee I can relate to this video. I too lately have been staring into the abyss that is 2022 and beyond, and finding myself do a 180 turn immediately back to the past to look for entertainment. I've even been playing old console games, like from the SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, PS1, PS2, eras etc. Not childhood classics I'm returning to for nostalgia either, games I've never played before and I'm playing for the first time in 2022. And some of them have been damn fun experiences even by today's standards, which may be at least partly due to the sheer number of retro indie games coming out lately that are trying to evoke the style of games from that era. Even been chasing down top 10/20/30/100 lists for the best games from those generations to find new ones to play.. Maybe it isn't such a bad thing to sometimes go back to the past. Just because something is old, doesn't mean it's no longer relevant or fun.

I'd like to see Yahtzee revisit Cyberpunk 2077. I've been playing it off and on for a few months now and it's definitely still not perfect - it suffers from the same world rendering and NPC/enemy spawning issues as Fallen Order's Xbox One version - but there's gold buried in this pile of turds! The voice acting and dialogue are some of the best I've ever heard in a video game. FemV's lines when she's waking up after the first heist in particular are delivered with immaculate emotional tone, plus a lot of the conversations sound quite natural even when the words are fantastical. CDPR did Cyberpunk and themselves dirty by pushing it out in the state they did. They had the work done where it counted narratively, they primarily dropped the ball on the system delivering that narrative.

The thing about the procedural generation isn't that you get to explore a billion slightly different planets, but that one day some player might find something generated that is really cool. There's an entire subreddit that is nothing but people posting cool ships, weapons, or animals they have found, or bases they have built or farms that other players might make use of. You get a billion people to throw a billion Lego on the ground and eventually one pile might resemble the Taj Mahal or the Sydney Opera House, and that's what No Man's Sky is. A billion robots dumping a billion Lego in a warehouse with people running around to say, 'Hey, look at this shit'.

Always enjoy the little animations that is put into the vid.

Just went back to it, and my experience was similar to Yhatzee's. In fairness I may have screwed things up myself in the log and was too busy following the Atlas quest which just got tedious, but I got to the part where you make the big decision and I think I've had my full. Yes I could keep going, but I feel I got what I wanted out of the gameplay loop and it really doesn't have much else to offer. That, and I am getting sick of the inventory and upgrade management!

Sick Yahtzee sounds like 2012 Yahtzee

The problem I still see with NMS is that the game is a sample platter. It's a bunch of barely connected, compartmentalized experiences wedged into a single game. If I wanted that I'd play Mario Party.

5:19 Oh... Now the title finally makes sense. I never made that connection either.

I have the same kind of bench from the picture he uses for crafting mechanics

And the Yahtzee lexicon expands with the glorious entry: "un-fuckup-ening"

Don't forget the city building and management systems, or the horror freighter dungeons and stuff

I had a lot of trouble enjoying the game when it first came out, but I've since really enjoyed my time with No Scope 360.

Any jab joke about Trump is always a great laugh.

that line right at the end of the credits - oh yeah. i didnt think of that either.

These videos are amazing thanks!

As long as we're revisiting things, can anyone tell me if RainWorld got its difficulty adjusted? I remember hearing upon release it was incredibly tough, but nowadays it seems to be somewhat popular. I can't tell if there was an adjustment or if it just found its community.

Good timing with the Endurance update dropping

Wish I could get one of his books autographed my favorite game review show and one of my favorite authors

"After it managed to hook me in for most of a week" D-did the sky just implode?!

Drought Suggestion (again) : Textorcist. Yahtz likes Typing of the Dead. He will probably like Textorcist. Yahtz likes Bullet Hell like Undertale. He will probably like Textorcist. Yahtz likes Retro Pixel Art aesthetic like...lots of games. It's pretty ubiquitous now. Yahtz likes Grind House stories, like House of the Dead Overkill. Textorcist has a better story, campy, but it also has heart to it. Yahtz and I don't agree Politically, but we share a fondness for many of the same games. Give Textorcist a shot Yahtz. You're bored. It's summer. Try something different.

He said he wasn't going to do it, and then he did. Not the first time that happened.

About those cyber-trousers...come september that might not be such a crazy idea

Thanks!

The most impressive thing about the updates to No Man's Sky is that they're still all FREE. 7 years and Hello Games has never asked us to spend money on more content.

In my opinion as someone who felt the game at launch delivered largely what it promised and what I wanted, the 20 subsequent small and large free expansions have been amazing to the point of ridiculousness - haven't even managed to get to the moon buggy stage, or the orbital base stage, or the leading a space fleet stage, or really further than seeing ten different planets or so, while just trying to explore as far as possible. (Maybe my problem is a severe attachment to permadeath mode.) It's probably true its biggest weakness is the potential to take up way too much of your time in too many varied and interesting ways. Anyway it's cool of you to give it another shot.

So the basic problem remains. A captivating gameplay loop. It got a whole lot of busywork. Well, kudos to everybody who enjoys it. And kudos to hello games for continually adding and improving -for free- their game.

Can't wait to hear his re-review of Fantasy World Dizzy

Thing is No Mans Sky wasn't originally released as if it were the finished article, or even released as the unfinished article with a view to never improving it. It wasn't because of the reviews that they continued working on the game, it was because in essence they knew they hadn't finished it yet but were forced to release the game somewhat early. In reality they should have pushed the release date back and spent more time on it, but they couldn't as they aren't a huge developer with mounds of funding. Their basement studio suffered in the UK floods at the time and they lost a lot of their work. It was almost completely submerged. I believe they did push the release slightly at this point but not enough to get back to where they were and they were ultimately forced to release an unfinished game with a view to continue to work on it after the fact. The reviews this game received however asks the question as to why they were so harshly treated compared to the devs who release a beta at full price for 5-10 years with barely any progress being made yet never make it into the news cycle.

Freaky, I only just started playing Noam Chompsky, and somehow, even though you have already reviewed it, you managed to put a review out. Fine, it was technically before I played it, but I hadn't seen this video until the day after, which still freaked me out. Anyways. Good day.

This opens the floodgates for commenters asking for re-reviews doesn't it

Kinda surprised that this was a proper Zero Punctuation instead of an Extra Punctuation, but hey, neat!

Thanks for the review, sounds like I’m not gonna go back to Ngo Mansky I may have been one of the few people actually wanted to explore a bunch of planets and see different flora and fauna, and maybe some ancient civilizations that did some cool stuff. Instead, as you know, there’s a lot of saminess. Is it really that hard to procedurally generate randomness? I mean isn’t that what life is? Isn’t a platypus just a procedurally generated duck combine with the beaver? In any case, here’s hoping that sometime in the next 10 years they’re able to figure out how to make it so that each planet has actually different looking animals and plants, and then maybe sometime in the future, they’ll be somethings kind of like archaeology where each system has a different architectural style, and you can actually find interesting things. They wanted to shoot of people in space, I just play elite dangerous.

Zero Punctuation prog rock album of the week: *Procedurally Generated Infinity* by *Cosmic Cul De Sac* (tracks include *I Revel In Chaos* )

I had a dream last night where you debated the ethics of robot prostitution