No Man's Sky Cosmos

It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing.

It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game

I think facts would be helpful for this discussion:

1. Total Revenue - ~$500m-$700m

2. Copies Sold - ~15-20m

3. Steam Review Score: 84.36%

4. 40 Free Major Updates

I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.

NMS is a great example of a developer who was devoted to their customer base, kept updating the game for free, and saw great market success in return.

This is a story to be celebrated.

While I love the game I still think they are overhyping the game in the trailers.

The game always looks far more dramatic in the trailers than it actually is in practice.

One example that struck me is how they show players flying in formation while in practice that's almost impossible to do : your ship always flies faster or slower and it's really hard to follow someone else, even the NPC ships.

They also often show in trailers situations with 3-4 players doing all kind of cool stuff but the game never is that busy and multiplayer is still very janky you often dont see quite the same things as other players.

So I am excited about Light No Fire, but also not expecting something mindblowing. Unless they only port engine improvements, but no gameplay improvements from LNF and one hopes with LNF they really improved the combat mechanics which is the weakest element of NMS.

What are people on about, there is tons to do in NMS, tons of missions, expeditions, build bases, build a corvet, hunt rate parts, ships, rifles, creatures, manage a settlement, automate crafting chains, find a lucrative trading route, and this new update apps even more things. I'd never consider NMS anything close to empty, there is so much variety in the content

I discovered NMS only recently (100 hours in, 2nd save now), and it has become one of my favorite games. It reminds me of the old TES (Morrowind, Oblivion), but the world is truly limitless, and possibilities are huge. I enjoy finding rare things, and 100 hours in NMS keeps delivering me those. I get why people complain about challenges being no biggie, but to me it is an advantage: I pick NMS when I want to chill and feel lost in the endless world, and when I want challenge I play other games. My other favorite game is Dota, it is very hard, challenging and demanding game, but one cant chill in Dota at all like you do in NMS.

at the time of posting, i think every top-level comment except one is negative. so, i'd like to balance it by saying that i have never seen a better executed turnaround than what the no man's sky team did. they cratered their reputation on launch, worked hard and long to restore it, and then continued to offer free updates long after they needed to. lots of respect there. (i will reward the effort by purchasing their next game on day 1, sight unseen.)

i also happen to enjoy the game itself.

NMS is an amazing game with no soul. A metaverse. A monument to technology without the depth or people or narrative (prewritten or emergent) that makes it interesting.

I'm certain there are some people whose brain is wired exactly right to love it.

But I have more fun playing the n100th Call of Duty clone hearing real voices on the headset in a tight, fun game loop.

But the company behind it deserves to be applauded. Might be the best value for money / care / support of any game, especially one so poorly received initially...

I have hundreds of hours with my son in creative mode just building bases, fishing, battling our animals and hanging out. We’ve explored hundreds of systems just cataloguing all the animals and flora. We’ve learned all the languages. We basically have infinite money.

It’s all very shallow but it’s also “cozy”. This game is much more Animal Crossing than Minecraft. Other than the planets with extremely dangerous atmospheres and storms (and only in survival mode) it’s all pretty chill. If you like making your own fun and just like doing stuff like using photo mode and chatting with friends this is a great game.

My son was really excited to see the new customizable base station any space station updates. It’s like they made this update just for us.

Really looking forward to see what they’re cooking up for Light No Fire.

This game came out before my son was even born and it’s his favourite game and it’s a constant source of bonding for us. Thank you Hello Games.

I really like this game and have played it for years but I think it's popularity outgrew it's niche. It's a very niche game, the devs have made the ultimate space Lego kit, but I see lots of people complain about it being boring because there are no stakes, no challenge. I think they are trying to play the game they want it to be not the game it is. The overwhelming scale of the meme this game has become I think is the cause of that.

I'll echo a sister comment saying that NMS still feels like a tech demo. However, I'll also use the occasion to mention slash shill Noctis IV, a game that NMS more than likely owes a lot to.

Noctis IV is an old DOS game, or perhaps more of an art project about flying through a galaxy and exploring (sections of) planets on foot. Notably, you can name stars, planets, and place markers with notes on planetary coordinates, and then you can share those with other players via an "INBOX" system. While it technically has even less gameplay than NMS ever did, its primitive but custom 3D engine produces absolutely striking landscapes to explore [0]

While the author's webpage seems to have died at some point in the recent years, the project lives on through two community made mods, Noctis IV Plus [1] and Noctis IV Community Edition (NICE) [2].

[0] https://mooses.nl/nice/screenshots/city2.gif

[1] https://github.com/jorisvddonk/Noctis-IV-Plus

[2] https://mooses.nl/nice/releases/R11dot6a/

I like playing the game in abandoned mode in single player, just me, my ship, a lot of dead space stations and planets and some fauna here and there. I explore every planet (except aggressive sentinel ones) and make short hops to nearby systems. If I run across too many systems that have already been explored I made a large hop in a random direction and try there. There's something about playing this way that keeps bringing me back. I tend to nope out of the main game as soon as I get a freighter, I'm not that into a lot of game mechanics, but I love exploring planets, even if they are ultimately not that different from one another. I like going on hikes even though it's just the same trees with some variety in real life.

NMS is one of the best comeback stories in gaming, but I'll keep dying on this hill: the game is an ocean wide and a puddle deep. I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours. Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials. It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content. The UI isn't intuitive and badly needs modernizing. It feels so clunky after all these updates.

Spent a lot of time in this game… The team is excellent and they ship incredible ambitious work.

I really wish they would just focus 100% on Light No Fire.

I belive no Mans Sky is a great game but I could realy never get through to the newer stuff because the base resource gathering gathering does not grip me. The lasering of resources is just not satisfying to me. I love resource gathering but it needs to be satisfying like mining ores in minecraft (or Hytyale).

Additionaly I do not like flying Fighters I enjoy larger Ships. Put it as me enjoying space combat like Star Trek more than Star Wars.

If a Star Trek game similar to NMS came out, that would be my JAM imagine flying a smaller explorer vessel beaming down on procedural worlds and interacting with flora and fauna there. That would be up my jam.

But I still have to stress what Hello Games did is probably the best Redemption Story in Gaming. And they deserve all the good for it. Also please finall get me light no fire.

A huge vastness of nothing. The game has no soul at all. Worlds are ugly, animals are ugly, plants are ugly. With the first trailer I thought it could've been the game of my life, but it's just horrible, besides the feeling of moving around in the vastness of the universe, but once you get to a planet, it's just a turn off

I am just wondering where do they get the money to keep pushing out big content updates like this

I’m one of those weird people that liked the game from the very beginning, and I’ve bought it at least twice for myself (different systems). I played it like 50 hours at the start. I always wanted a simple, procedurally generated space exploration game.

They’ve done an incredible job fleshing out the universe, giving us new things we can build, simple city management for people that want that, and the same exploration system for those that wanted that.

It was sold as, is, and will always be a sandbox game with some simple, procedurally generated “missions” to get you going to the next point of interest or having the next, relatively low-stakes fight.

And that’s okay. People play Animal Crossing and Minecraft. People can play this. Some of us are happy to. Some of us see a $50 game and say “yeah, 50-100 hours of time in this is my money’s worth”. And some of us spend 3000 hours in the game because we love the creating and sandbox feel of it.

Some people like Farming Simulator 2020 - I’ll never understand it and it’s not for me, but plenty of people do. Some people like Powerwash Simulator.

It’s okay if No Man’s Sky wasn’t the *specific* game you were hoping for and if it hasn’t become it; but that doesn’t make it a bad game, it just makes it “not for you”.

I wish these threads weren’t always filled with people complaining about a game that wasn’t made for them. It’s been a decade. It’s time to move on.

NMS gameplay is just too lonely and when i used to play it, it would reinforce my sense of extreme loneliness (I was single, and a foreigner in the Far East).

Minecraft is another game that made me feel utterly depressed due to the loneliness factor.

At least in Fallout 4, there are companions, a robot, a dog, etc. and a lot of conversation and decision-making. I can't justify wasting time on NMS ever again.

Not a single comment here about the actual Cosmos update content?

Looks great. I just hope these alliances won't turn into the sort of thing like EVE Online Corporations but I guess this game is too different for that. Eve online makes me sick, its corporations are everything I hate in the real world :) I like games to be better than the real world.

Love the game, insane work from devs. Can't play it for too long, have to make a pause from time to time, which is similar in feel to Minecraft.

It has strong sales so must assume the gameplay loop is enjoyable by a lot of players, but I don't think I'll ever understand

10 years, i wonder what the codebase look like now !

What's also great about NMS is its all running on a custom bespoke engine they've built for the game and properly invested in. Wish they'd do more talks and deep dives into how it has all progressed, and how much it paid off for them. Things are getting far too homogenised around UE5 in game dev.

I need to revisit this game. I played at launch briefly then tabled it, but it's wholesome to see the creator stick with something, adding new features, and really see it evolve into something else. I wonder how wildly different it will be from my launch day experience?

The first time flying a ship in the game in VR was a pretty cool feeling. If you have a headset and this game (and you're not prone to motion sickness) it's worth the trip.

My Legion Go came with a free Game Pass trial. I spent 20 minutes playing No Man's Sky in VR and liked it, bought it on Steam, but haven't actually played it yet.

Maybe this is the nudge to move it higher in my queue.

Any word on if they will be fixing the flight model? Didn't see it in there but could have missed it.

Perlin Noise: The Video Game

i wish they considering making it multiplayer MMO, that would kill all its emptiness in one second (:

Give me Master of Orion II, please. Incredible gameplay. Never played this NMS, but based on the comments here, it seems the most boring thing ever.

If you haven't seen this video about no man's sky, it's really really good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ

Explore an empty cosmos.

Seems like some people are expecting it to be World of Warcraft or Elite

It's not

It's a chill sandbox and that's fine.

Props & respect to the devs for so many years of free updates!

Is it just me or am I more excited for the upcoming Light No Fire more than GTA6 in some ways.

Valheim had its 1.0 release today too

in a roguelike game, my incentive for playing is the discovery of weird new stuff. this might be the opposite of procedural. because procedural is just the same old stuff in new combinations. right?

how would we get a procedural thing or an AI thing to spit out truly new weird cool stuff? connect it to a good random number generator?

How the hell could that cookie consent form ever be legal? Fuck them.

Holy shit, they're charging $60 for a 10 year old game that only runs on windows.

Not even worth pirating if I have to set up a container with wine, I'd rather spend that time drinking wine.

Are we EVE yet?