This is well deserved. When the game first launched I could tell something was off about it. It obviously had a dreadful launch.
I can’t remember how many years later I was in the mood for a space exploration and saw NMS had an update. I grabbed it for about £8. Since purchasing it seeing constant substantial updates has been amazing. Every time one comes out I think “Ok guys, you’ve redeemed yourselves, you’re allowed to stop now!”
I like to work on a £1 per hour with my games, I’ve played 85 hours (I know, rookie numbers compared to what some people have) and I’m really pleased with my purchase.
Seeing the pride they have in their game and the efforts they have gone to to make the game they wanted and the lessons Hello Games have learnt, it leaves me looking forward to Light No Fire.
Because I bought it blind (no expectations), I actually enjoyed the game at launch. It was very chill.
I come back to it every few months but I never managed to really dig the game, that said I’m truly impressed but all the work that was delivered post launch to deliver the game that was promised and even more.
I’m the same way. I feel like I check it out after every expansion but it never really grabs me. To me, most of the systems feel quite separate from each other, and a lot of stuff feels the same despite procedural generation (space stations, buildings and bases on planets, planets themselves). I feel like a tighter focus would make for a more engaging game, but there are obviously tens of thousands of people enjoying its current state
The procedural generation is the issue for me. Everything feels the same, even though it’s random. The animals all do the same stuff, they’re just made of different parts… And the “stuff” that they do is basically just walk around. The planets are just lumpy noise. There are no forests, just evenly distributed trees and plants.
Okay now I might buy it just for the redemption arc.
An astounding story of what could have happened if we hadn’t arrested Elizabeth Holmes and let Theranos just keep going.
There is a great video about NMS redemption arc but I can’t find it, it’s not this one from the Internet Historian, it was someone else I think https://youtu.be/O5BJVO3PDeQ
NMS is one hell of a redemption story, a really amazing job at persevering to follow through on their vision.
There’s now a new candidate for the same thing, a game called Techtonica that just released this month and totally tanked.
In the early access builds, the game was the lovechild of subnautica and factorio, two of my favourite games ever. It had the gorgeous and eerie alien open world exploration and compelling storyline, along with all the conveyor/inserter and min-maxing goodness that I crave.
It had some optimization problems as you scaled up, though, and I suppose sales in the early access must have been quite bad. My guess is that, with money running out, they opted to release on consoles for that extra buck, and completely gave up on solving the optimization issues.
Instead, they chopped up the world map into “levels”, that you unlock by constantly feeding this elevator/drill thing.
This totally breaks the open world immersion, the sense of scale from the big map, the unease one felt when running through all those miles of cavern, the thrill of finding gorgeous spots out there or hidden loot…
Plus, the dialog is at times incoherent with the revised narrative/progression path, and the factory production chains are a mess and the math doesn’t work, the balancing is just awful.
I mean, it’s still a gorgeous game and worth playing, but it has the potential to be so much more :(
Probably means its no longer playable for me
