All breadth and no depth, still the same. Some 12 different planet types, a number of neat looking anomaly planets that exist only for sightseeing (one of my favorites was a planet where everything is covered in a metallic hexagonal mesh). As I said in another comment in this thread, the game is very repetitive with some activities being needlessly padded out to make you waste as much time as possible (learning alien words, going into derelict freighters to get upgrades)
Yes, though it’s a cheap “new game plus”, without even feeling like a “new game”. Once you manage to get to the center, you’re thrown in a new galaxy in a random planet and have to get back to your ship, only some upgrades you’ve installed on yourself and your ship might break. Yet you can immediately call your freighter and any exocraft.
There’s also Artemis’ questline, with an interesting concept but overall underwhelming delivery.
Story spoilersArtemis is stuck in a simulation, just like you, player, are stuck in one. The whole universe is a failing simulation created by Atlas.
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interaction with other players?
From my experience, which pretty much ended around 1 year ago with the game, player interaction could be summed up to:
finding someone else’s buildings during a community expedition
finding someone else’s buildings in a quicksilver quest
someone giving you free stuff while you’re idling in the anomaly
Apparently there are guilds now? In any case, I never saw anyone looking for group, because the game has nothing that only a pair or trio can do, or do faster/better than a solo player, other than base building
The problem is that NMS is very repetitive and bland. Learning alien words takes for-fucking-ever, finding freighter upgrades is one of the worst time sinks in the game, combat feels more tedious and padded out than that of Everquest, looking for “that one cool ship” or “cool looking weapon” is pure RNG and lucking out on it not coming as a C class, upgrading inventory space is either a system jumping time sink or “planetary exploration” time sink.
Nearly nothing you do in the game gives you a sense of accomplishment and, after 4-8 hours or so after first starting playing, you’re unlikely to look forward to any specific activity because “it’s fun”. There’s a lot “to do” but very little motivation to, like why even bother being the mayor of a settlement?
Even on permadeath the game offers no real challenge once you’re off the starting planet.
Don’t stretch it. Maybe it could be #10 in a top 10, but when you have the likes of Elite Dangerous, Space Engineers, X4, Freelancer, plus little known indies like Empyrion Galactic Survival and Evochron Legends, it’ll hardly be anyone’s top choice.
This kind of talk always reminds me of Josh Strife. If memory serves, if what you’re doing in the game in the first few hours isn’t fun or entertaining, it’s unlikely that it’ll be after 100 hours, because it’s very likely that you’ll keep repeating the same activities for all those hours and beyond. What usually happens is that you just get used to it, plus sunk cost fallacy gets stronger the longer you play.
Even if you gave him a current-day computer to play with (otherwise, even supercomputers of the time would struggle to run UE5), he wouldn’t achieve much, consumer grade computers back then really struggled with 3D graphics. Quake, released in 1996, would usually play around 10-20 FPS.
It’s a question of cost-benefit spending developer time on a feature not many people would use
Which is super ironic when you look at games that had an obviously tacked-on, rushed multiplayer component in the first place, such as Spec Ops: The Line, Bioshock 2 and Mass Effect 3
You can’t see the store page anymore, that’s it. I know because I own a delisted game that I don’t even remember when/where I got, an astronaut FPS in zero-G asteroids or something. I can still install and try to play, can’t actually play because it’s multiplayer only and servers are dead.
Some stuff that caught my attention, from the 2001 IGN article
Yamauchi says that life would most certainly go on without the game industry, as it is not an essential part of anybody’s life
True. Entertainment, while desirable, isn’t essential. Besides, there’s entertainment to be had by socializing, something that would probably become easier with less “isolating” entertainment available.
The ironfisted leader believes that “games have nothing to do with graphics”
I agree, but graphics can help with sales, which is what matters for companies
The IGN article stops shortly after this, so onwards with what Metro lists:
‘If users can play the same game on every single system out there, then there’ll be no reason to buy one system over the other,’ he said. ‘It’ll be just like buying a TV; no matter which one you buy you’ll still have all the same channels.
For consumers, that’s great. For companies, not so much.
‘Up until now games have had nothing to do with movies, like I’ve kept on saying all this time, but now people are going on about how every game will be like a movie from now on,’ Yamauchi said.
This is interesting for various reasons. For the longest time (???BC ~1970s a.D.), storytelling and games were completely separate things. With the first RPG systems, storytelling became part of the game for the first time. Even then, it was something dynamic, full of unexpected things happening, no two games ever deliver the same story. A “table wide” theater play, if you will. Even with the same group of people doing the exact sequence of actions, it might look similar enough, but never “fully equal”.
Storytelling in general is linear. Stories have a beginning, middle and end. This is very noticeable in many digital games, as the players effectively play the middle and cutscenes to explain/advance the plot are bits where interaction is non existent. Even when the devs account for a variety of situations, such as Larian with Divinity and BG3, it’s still a limited selection of story branches.
It’s no wonder that some of the most popular and long lived games lack a “story”. DotA, League of Legends, Fortnite, Counter Strike, they’re not unlike boardgames that have a set dressing to “explain” why it is like it is, mechanically speaking. Skyrim and Diablo 2 also come to mind, both have a proper story, both have been around for ages, but neither is particularly remembered for “the story”.