After all this time, No Man's Sky finally releases....

[Draco18s]

Right now, "game X" for a lot of people is Star Citizen.  I wonder what it'll be if that one goes boom?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTBsm0LzSP0

[Misery]

Aye, that sounds about right.

Probably wont be much left after that, nope....

[eRe4s3r]

There is a very big difference between pre-ordering and kickstarting something. For me Star Citizen is a 30$ investment to get SQ42 with VR possibility (the rest is bonus ,p) and so far it seems they deliver that.  Albeit horribly out of the timeplans. But I already knew this would happen before I kickstarted. As long as a kickstarter has income it won't be stopping development of it's actual KS vision. And that is how great things, or great failures happen.. with Star Citizen the judgement is yet to be delivered.. but for me, only SQ42 really matters.

But then again, I was one of the original founders, to me the MMO digital sale peddling behemoth it has become is kinda worrying. Worrying in the sense that I am not sure I'd even want to play that since I find the community it has attracted post KS extremely toxic, if however 33% of missions end up as involved as the one they demoed then Star Citizen SQ42 will blow every other space game so far out of the universe that they need to develop new jumpdrives just to get back....

[Misery]

Had never heard of SQ42 before... hmm.  Another "I don't get it" sort of game, in my case. 

Not one I'm going to follow; it's SC itself that has the potential for entertaining internet-wide chaos.   Gonna be awhile though, that's for sure, but... it might be interesting to at least see how quickly the insanity of it's fanbase rises.   And how far it goes.  I keep imagining things like a ravenous horde of fire-breathing zombies that ride flying f-bombs into battle, however that might work.  And then they smash together and the universe crashes.

Now I've had too MUCH caffeine, if I'm thinking up stuff like that.

[eRe4s3r]

Had never heard of SQ42 before... hmm.  Another "I don't get it" sort of game, in my case. 

You never played Wing Commander 1-4 or Strike Commander? ;P

[Misery]

I've seen them, my brother had those way back when.  Not my sort of thing as gameplay goes, at least back then.  Too much of the talking anyway though.  Lotsa cutscenes if I recall correctly.  Cutscenes & me tend not to get along very well.  With games I tend to just lose interest the moment the game looks like it might get like that.  I miss the days when everything was just told with text boxes and such.  I could just read at my own pace, not wait for people to act it out.  Or just not bother, if I didn't care enough.  Which was most of the time.

[Mánagarmr]

Had never heard of SQ42 before... hmm.  Another "I don't get it" sort of game, in my case. 

You never played Wing Commander 1-4 or Strike Commander? ;P

Yeah, they were pretty clunky and awkward for the most part. Overall pretty good games though.

But as has been proven a billion times over by now:
Just because someone has made good games in the past, does not mean they'll make good games in the future.

[TheVampire100]

Reminds me of Mighty No.9. It was created by the original creator of Mega Man, so everyone excepted a true Mega Man game. But they got the same "I want to be new and cool" trash that you can get anywhere. No wonder the people were outrageous about. Seriously, I cannot see anywhere int he game where all the money went they got from Kickstarter.
I think people payed more for the fame of the creator than the actually development process.

Happened also to Peter Molyneux and Godus. This guy made so cool games in the past but Godus was one of his biggest mistakes. Probably the biggest.

[Misery]

I frankly was surprised that people bought into Mighty No. 9, it just screamed "trying to be NEW Mega Man!!!" instead of trying to be like the classic ones.  I ended up finding a game called 20XX on Steam, plays like the old Megaman X games did (instead of the original NES series), except ACTUALLY feeling like them, and looks a lot like them too.  A zillion times better than No. 9 was and it didn't need a massive budget to do it.  I really do wonder where the money goes on ALOT of projects like that, not just Star Citizen.  I mean, seriously, I look at No. 9 and I just cant see where it all went. 

Wheras Star Citizen... they're dumping deeply stupid amounts of money into graphics, that's definitely part of it.  Gotta have every tiny screw or bolt on the interior of a ship be HYPER FREAKING DETAILED, after all!  That's the most important part!   Stuff like that is why I keep thinking that there's a really good chance that the final version of the game isn't actually going to be very good, as gameplay goes.  The focus is just all wrong.  It's all going to be cutscenes and shiny stuff, instead of actually playing well. 

Though, that only explains so much of the money... a TON of it doesn't make sense, as to where it went.  Very shady developer.  That people trust them at this point is bloody baffling. 

[Draco18s]

I think the real problem with Mighty No. 9 was that the publishing company, without asking the actual developers, created an advertisement that insulted the core audience.

Like, actually directly insulted them. "Anime fans who still live in their parent's basement" direct quote.

[Pepisolo]

That people trust them at this point is bloody baffling.

Now, I should disclaimer this with the fact that I haven't been keeping up to date with Star Citizen for a while, so maybe some things have happened that I'm not aware of....but when I used to follow its progress one of the things that those guys seemed to be getting right, was that they were pretty open and seemed to communicate quite well with the community. For such a massive project there seemed to be a lot of interaction with its backers. Then there is the fact that parts of the game are actually available to play -- or test is probably the more appropriate term. There is the Hangar Module, Dogfighting Module, Social Module, and maybe some other modules that have appeared since then. So, even though progress has been slower than expected, you can at least see the pieces coming together. Chris Roberts also has a pretty good record when it comes to delivering products and seems to be saying and doing all the right things. All this together, combined with the massive scope of the project that they're undertaking, has probably helped a lot in terms of them maintaining the trust that they have with their backers.

So, do these guys look dodgy? Not for me. Do they look like they might've been bitten off more than they can chew? Quite possibly, although my last impressions were cautiously optimistic. I also think that hype levels have probably reached the point that the actual game can never meet those expectations, although if it is eventually released I think it'll do a much better job of meeting those expectations than No Man's Sky did -- although it's not really possible to do worse than No Man's Sky did in this regard, so that's not saying much, I guess.

[zespri]

So now we have this: http://www.no-mans-sky.com/foundation-update/

Do they think that it will make the game any less... underwhelming?

[Draco18s]

So now we have this: http://www.no-mans-sky.com/foundation-update/

> You can now build shit!
No one cares!  There's no multiplayer to show off your shit to, so what's the point?  I also see nothing in there about addressing the main gameplay loop or the ending, sooo....

[Misery]

Actually, they changed ALOT of things.  I tried it tonight, it may as well be a whole new game as far as I'm concerned.

Aside from a giant pile of new content (they call this a SMALL update?  Seriously?) there's the new survival mode.  This is one of the reasons why base-building is in before multiplayer.  Because it helps you not die horribly as the game gets continuously more cruel.  It has a variety of practical uses that you need later in the game (such as an area to grow plants in, among other things).  It's not just a pretty box to jump around in.  Also, you use a portal to travel back and forth to it like in Starbound.

Survival mode is.... brutal.  Utterly brutal.  The core gameplay loop is no longer "pop resource, wander, pop resource", because the game is non-stop trying to murder you.  Everything is deadly.  Everything.  Most players are having a bloody hard time even reaching their damn ship after the game starts.  They get killed by weather, gravity, sentinels (even the basic ones can beat you over the head with your own face now), horrible little poodle monsters, angry plants (I hate those things... so much...), your damn shield falling off for the 103509275th time...  Pirates in space are also outright murderous now, and aside from just being outright stronger, they have new AI.  Old exploits no longer have any effect other than killing you.  And good luck defeating a marked pirate.  So the game has gotten to where a "survival" game really should be.  I mean, those all have repetitive resource gathering... but they also have high difficulty and the universe trying to wreck you.  Now this finally does too (and the lack of it had been my own central complaint).  A lot of "quality of life" improvements too, like a quick-inventory function, and the ability to scan planets from space to see what sorts of resource nodes they actually have on them.  Since everything is so freaking dangerous now, you need to be choosey about where you go.   Also:  the landscape isn't drowning in resources anymore.  Good luck finding the things that keep life support going, among... everything else.  You have to actually explore now, to find what you need.  Carefully, and quickly. 

This is in addition to the ability to buy giant freighters (which you can build inside with a similar interface to the one that the bases use), and a bazillion new items, and.... yeah.  There's ALOT here.  I wasn't expecting any of this.  I was expecting a rather small update with simple little things.  Not a "HEY GUESS WHAT, TIME TO RELEARN THE GAME" followed by lots of angry stabbing.


Apparently next is a "big" update.  My own theory is that this next one might be the one that adds multiplayer, as the stuff that they added this time seems like a great foundation for it (and that's what the update is called, the "foundation" update). 

[Mánagarmr]

So core loop remains identical, just harder and more grindy. Gotcha.