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668 - Neighbor of the Beast

Exploring the stars in No Man's Sky.

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by
Dark Pulse
, August 24th, 2016 at 07:09 PM (7134 Views)
Love it or hate it, I've been playing a lot of it, having put in over 100 hours in the last two weeks.

For what it's worth, I will say the game definitely has its problems. It's by no means worth $60 in its current state, and if you actually want to do more than explore planets, it's probably not good for you to play at the moment.

That said, I do think that despite the considerable discrepancies from the trailers to the game, the devs will actually grow it into that. Within a day or two of the PC version's release, they went and did something I've never seen a developer do in all of the years I've been gaming - they went and rewrote their engine.

Without getting too technical for the non-PC geek crowd, processors have these little things called instruction sets - stuff like MMX, AVX, and SSE. No Man's Sky, when it came out, needed a fairly recent processor - one that supported SSE4. This means basically Intel CPUs from 5 years back, or AMD ones from about a year or two back (AMD didn't support SSE4 for awhile.)

The problem? Plenty of people tried to play it on AMD Phenom IIs. Those supported only up to SSE3. The game would not run on those systems.

Overnight, the devs literally went in and rewrote thousands of lines of code to make their engine need nothing more than SSE2. For a moment, everyone rejoiced!

Then they crashed due to physics. Their version of Havok (used for physics) required SSSE3 (not to be confused with SSE3 - I don't make these acronyms up, guys), and those processors also did not have those.

They got in touch with Havok. Havok provided them SSE2-compatible libraries. And just like that, the game became playable on those aging, AMD Atomic Toasters.

It actually irritated me to see how many people were accusing the devs of just taking the money and running, because that's not something a team of devs who wanted to make a fast buck would do. It's what's got me ultimately being optimistic about this game, and hopeful that even if it's not as great as some would like it to be now, that in time, it becomes that.

But anyway. During my play, as it turns out, I've taken over 450 screenshots. There's no way in hell that I'll paste all of them here, but I will go ahead and put up a handful that I like.



Here's the very first picture I took, on my very first planet. This actually became the planet I named in honor of this site - "The Lair." (I tried to do "Beast's Lair" but due to a bug with apostrophes, I couldn't.)


Some perfect arches.


SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE


Some of the scenery in this game is just beautiful.


Really beautiful.


OMG IT'S SO TINY AND CUTE


Guess the correct answer.


Did I mention the beautiful scenery?


This game has some amazingly thought-provoking quotes when you die.


More beauty.


What a view.


Good morning, sun.


It really was.


Best parking job ever.


What lies within...?


This place was nasty. Alkaline Rain that made the planet ridiculously toxic, with frequent storms. It will eat your hazmat suit in seconds - you need some upgrades to survive more than about 60 seconds on this planet's surface.


A crisscrossing of ships flying from planet to planet, and to the station, for trade.


My latest multitool! Looks like a Portal Gun.


And finally... I swear to god this is the name this place actually came with. (You can tell, actually - since it's "Undiscovered," I haven't even had a chance to rename it yet, since you have to discover it before you can rename it.)



So, in short, would I suggest you buy this now...?

The answer depends on if you like walking around, and exploring different planets that, after a little while, can look a little similar, and create your own sorts of rules/goals as you go along.

If so, the game's great. If not, watch some videos on Youtube first (not the trailers - real footage) and then decide for yourself if it's worth the dosh.

All I know is I got my money out of it.
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  1. ZidanReign's Avatar


    what happened
  2. Dark Pulse's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by ZidanReign


    what happened
    My guess: Sony demanded release by a certain date, devs had to cut a bunch of shit to get it to fit in by that date.

    It's only like 15 people making the game, after all.

    (Also, never trust trailers, ever. They've basically been lying about how the actual game is for the last decade-ish.)
  3. Strife ❤️'s Avatar
    My main gripe with the game is that it doesn't seem to render at native resolution on PC. It looks blurry as shit even at 4K.

    Some people say it looks exactly the same no matter what you set the resolution to but I didn't try messing around with it that much.
  4. Dark Pulse's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Strife
    My main gripe with the game is that it doesn't seem to render at native resolution on PC. It looks blurry as shit even at 4K.

    Some people say it looks exactly the same no matter what you set the resolution to but I didn't try messing around with it that much.
    That is bugged right now, yes, but there are mods that solve that issue. The PC version already has mods, some of which are going a long way to fixing annoyances. (Like LowFlight, and Immersive Space.)

    It's pretty much as simple as dragging and dropping a file into your GAMEDATA folder. I have to use it too, as the game definitely don't render at my native resolution either, but some of the screenshots in my post were done under the influence of this mod, and you'll see those ones are way less jaggy and more crisp.
  5. Draconic's Avatar
    How long do you think it'll be before someone starts building a Metroid mod?

    Like, with a story, and you'd have to explore the overworlds of multiple planets to find the Space Pirates' research facilities. Or would you even need a lot of modding for that? Maybe just a few renamed weapons, a few different ship models to match some of the GFed ships you see in Corruption (the Stiletto comes to mind), and of course, Space Pirate mobs, but couldn't they just be placed in various buildings?

    Is there anything you can do in these places you discover besides naming them? At least in the case of the obviously 'man-made' structures, so to speak? Like, would you be able to write some sort of story in terminals, or notes that would lead other players to various different places?
  6. Mcjon01's Avatar
    I think they did that ten years ago and it was called Metroid Prime
  7. Dark Pulse's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Draconic
    How long do you think it'll be before someone starts building a Metroid mod?

    Like, with a story, and you'd have to explore the overworlds of multiple planets to find the Space Pirates' research facilities. Or would you even need a lot of modding for that? Maybe just a few renamed weapons, a few different ship models to match some of the GFed ships you see in Corruption (the Stiletto comes to mind), and of course, Space Pirate mobs, but couldn't they just be placed in various buildings?

    Is there anything you can do in these places you discover besides naming them? At least in the case of the obviously 'man-made' structures, so to speak? Like, would you be able to write some sort of story in terminals, or notes that would lead other players to various different places?
    Awhile, since the mod scene is very much in its infancy right now, and to do that properly, you'd have to be able to change the whole algorithm generation.

    As for that, pretty much nope. You can rename stuff, that's about it. It's very much a game focused on exploration and also a game that pushes you to remember that your time on this world will be transient; you can't discover everything, and once you move on, there's little reason to go back, either.

    Stuff like that enhances the "solitary and alone" feel of the game, and I dig that.