No Man's Sky

[Del Murder]

I'll wait for reviews. I like the exploration aspect but I hope there is actually something to do in the game other than visit random planets.

[Carl the Llama]

Well it's less then 24 hours till PC release (PS4 already have it I'm told, lucky bastards!) and I have just purchased the game, I've watched a couple of videos about the day 1 update almost completely changing the game, can any PS4 users let us know what the game is like?

They had an hour long stream of the game a few days ago, it can be found here: there are some buffering issues on the video I've noticed but it's worth a look if you want to get an idea of what's involved.

[Mirage]

combat is pretty rough, world amazing. visual style is great. it could use some patches still, but it's already a good game. It'll probably crash more often than any other game you've got. guess that's what you get when you've got a world that too big for even the entire world's population to completely playtest

[Perducci]

Been playing it on PS4. It's great, but I feel like it's a little short on things to do at the moment. Then again, I've only been playing for a couple of nights and I've yet to venture too deep into space... I hear they're planning to include base building in the future, so I'm sure after a couple of updates it's only going to get better. For now I'm just having fun exploring and getting lost in caves.

[Loony BoB]

Played it for four days straight. Maxed out multitool and suit, but ship is a real chore to upgrade so I've not really bothered so much with that. I've had some real good fun with it overall - I agree with the general sentiment of there being not enough to do to keep me playing much more this week, but literally all day for four days isn't a bad slam. If it were Uncharted 4 or Mass Effect 3 for example, I expect I'd have run out of things I wanted to do long ago based on the time I've spent playing. So it's still earned it's cost.

The exploration element is awesome. It could use more variation between planets and I have some gripes regarding there being foliage on EVERY planet (because of the base materials Platinum and Zinc being obtained, bizarrely, from plants... idk why), or that there are very few planets with large flat areas or oceans (I've yet to see a water-dominated world).

Despite this, whenever I think I've seen everything, something else pops up - often not by design. A building that has glitched with the landscape and has become a botanical garden (and it didn't look out of place because of that) with an alien analysing a tree in the middle of the room... the experience of a new kind of sentinel (it wasn't until the last day that I discovered they have yet another variation). Abandoned buildings at the bottom of the ocean. Insanely vibrant jungle worlds. I've yet to see one of the giant animals, but I hear they are out there. Yet to see a world that has already been discovered by someone else, too, and I've seen about 50-100 worlds now, at a guess.

I'd personally prefer a few things to be changed so that there is more variation and exploration to do, but the base game is great. Not often that a game comes out and I am excited for future patches because I know it has the potential for big things.

Biggest things I wish were different...
- Make plantless worlds, including base materials (Carbon, Zinc, Platinum). Just have them pop from other sources if plants are absent.
- Make predomintantly flat, lifeless planets a la Mars or the Moon.
- Increase the number of things you can get blueprints for and can craft. I am pretty confident this will happen, particularly with the base building patch, but at the moment I feel I had all the blueprints on the first day and that made the exploration a lot less interesting in the long run.
- A little bit more plot/lore couldn't hurt. There is some, but very little. I both like and dislike that. I'd love for there to be more story to a few NPCs, perhaps give them multiple quests. In fact, there are absolutely zero fetch quests, which is really odd because exploration games can thrive on that.
- I understand that they don't want more than one climate for a planet, and why. I get that. But I would really like to see more variation with land types. Forest, flat lands, canyons, this kind of thing. They all exist but it's rarely a case of "here is a world where traveling a long distance will suddenly make you feel like you are in a completely new area." Which is sad.
- Options for auto-repair when in a battle. Having to open your inventory during battle to repair shields means for a while you're a sitting duck while you do so, which is frustrating.
- Better waymark options for both the galaxy map (why can't I remove them!?) and the waypoint markers for structures. You should be able to switch them on and off permanently showing.

That said, I have spent multiple hours traversing particular worlds just because they were gorgeous and I wanted to. In a couple of cases I spent very, very long times on planets for the achievements/resources.

You have to stay on an extreme planet for 8 hours for the gold for survival, so that meant I stayed on one for ages and it was super-duper-extreme. I'm talking I had all the life support upgrades and I was getting blitzed by toxicity + storm combinations. There were times I wished I could leave but I made an internal monologue story out of it, a la The Martian.

Some people just leave their character in a room and top up the life support while doing something else, but nah, I decided I would spend my time upgrading the ship. To do this, I ventured out on foot to find the question mark spots, see if they had transmission towers and then use those transmission towers to locate crashed ships that would generally be one slot higher than my current ship. Doing this on foot made it so much more real. It wasn't an exciting world to look at, but I felt like a person really earning their survival achievement. I left my ship where it was (occasionally I would summon it so I could get materials from it, if I could find a structure that allowed me to do so) and spent a good four or so hours just walking around the planet, playing Matt Damon on it. xD It felt great.

For resources, sometimes you stumble across a planet full of goodies and you just stick around for an hour farming it while fending off sentinels. I like doing that to some extent but it wasn't as fun as pure exploration. I'm not really big on the earning units for ships thing, I prefer the idea of being a self-sufficient player. But that doesn't mean I don't use them on suit slot upgrades because it's the only way to get them. D:

Still 16,000+ light years from the center and can only travel 1,500 or so at a time. Not in any rush on that end.

[Psychotic]

Whether or not you love the game I think this is pretty smurfing funny.