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No Man's Sky Launches On Steam and GOG and It's Off To A Rocky Start (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Ars Technica: No Man's Sky, an indie "video game that promises 18 quintillion planets" from a "small development team," has launched today for Windows PC gamers via Steam or GOG. Unfortunately, the "worldwide simultaneous launch on all kinds of PCs" is off to a rocky start -- as evidenced by the "mostly negative" Steam reviews. Many gamers have complained about frame rate hitches and total system crashes. Ars Technica reports: "Even users with high-end solutions like the GTX 1080 or two GTX 980Ti cards in SLI mode are reporting major stutters -- on a game that runs on a comparatively so-so PS4 console with a mostly consistent 30 FPS refresh. The game's PC version defaults to a 30 FPS cap, which can be disabled in the normal options menus. But with this setting turned on, the game can't help but hitch down to an apparent 20 FPS on a regular basis, not to mention throw up frequent display hitches of half a second at a time. Removing that frame rate cap can get play up to a smooth 60 frames per second, and we enjoyed more consistent frame rates without the cap. But even those frame rates can bounce down to 30 or less at random intervals. The game also suffers from freezing hitches, even without apparent spikes in visible geometry like creatures or spaceships." Ars also mentions that the on-screen prompts don't update the button remapping accordingly. There's been some frustration among PC gamers who have had to learn the hard way that the game's floating-menu interface was built with joysticks in mind. Mouse scroll wheels don't seem to work to scroll through text and between menus, and players are required to hold-to-confirm every menu interaction in the game. What's more is that alt-tabbing out of the game is a "guaranteed crash." For those looking for more information about the game, The Atlantic has a captivating report describing the game as if it were like reading a book.
Hm. Good!
Why no Linux version???
Who buys a game on release day and expects it to actually work? I mean, seriously, I know it "should" be tested before going out but that doesn't happen anymore. I'll check it out in a month... maybe!
It's your fault. You, the gamers. Yes, this one is in your lap. It's your fault because you persist in preordering games without looking into the stability of past releases. Your fault for putting features ahead of stability. Your fault for letting "ooh shiny" distract you from bugs. Your fault for believing reviewers who keep lying to you. Stop it! Start stopping it by not buying this game until it's rock solid.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
So, is this just a remake of Elite or what?
afaict pretty much every game type was created by the late '90s and now it's just a matter of adding fancier graphics and voice acting, so I don't really see the appeal in new games.
If we as avid gamers don't buy things expecting them to be rocky at the start and get better we'll never get anything worth having. What we need to do is make sure that we support the companies that DO make things right, and fail to support the companies that have a track record of failing to address issues. Another thing users need to do is take over the data gathering about bugs and features that need fixing by utilizing 3rd party forums and making links into the company support forums. Often less than responsible companies try and control 'official' support structures as if they were PR sources. By utilizing more open sources we can ensure that things don't get swept under the carpet or covered up. We as the end users need to be vocal in our support of said fixes and those companies that are most proactive, emphasizing responsive customer service and highlighting those that fail. The cost and procedures of making games these days has ensured that small companies will go under before they have a chance to fix things, or big companies will drop production houses if too much bad press comes out too early. You sort of have to grow a decent brand or it will wither and die on the vine and then everyone loses.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It's minecraft, in space, with better graphics, but shitty framerates and bugs, but without the following I see no gameplay to do
Crafting... Sorry, crafting my ship and weapon and armor is NOT crafting. I want to actually build a deathstar tyvm
Multiplayer... no multiplayer means no loarding over others the awesome stuff you've managed to do in game
Economy, a single player economy is NOT an economy
Exploration, again, no point unless you can share what you've found with others, IN THE GAME
Survival... whats the point of surviving IF death isn't permanent and there's no one to compete against.
This seems like an engine to present you with a beautifully taylored universe, full of NPC's to find (and kill) but with zero actual goals.
If I wanted to play for achievements, I'd just go back to WoW.
How annoying, I've been following NMS and had it on pre-order forever and was looking forward to finally playing this tonight.Rather than do it right, It sounds like they developed this primarily for PS4 then did a very weak PC port.
I've already decided I'm not going to play along with the "buy it before its finished" model anymore.
I've been caught out several times lately now, mostly by buying VR games still in development when I got my Vive. E.g Vanishing Realms was full price, looked great but only had enough content for about 60 minutes of gameplay. The dev promised "moar levels soon!!!!" yet absolutely nothing has been done other than a few tiny bugfixes/tweaks in 6 months since I bought it).
It sounds like No Mans Sky is yet another game to riff on the same "income through marketing high expectations" model. At least with Steam you can get a refund if you try for no longer than 2 hours, and I shall probably be doing just that.
NMS works great and is quite fun on my PS4. /em ducks and runs from the rabid "PC is the Master Race" crowd
There's nothing really there. Sure, you might have fun exploring for a bit, but you'll be confronted by the fact that you can't explore everything due to the sheer size.
This might be okay if there were some sort of story campaign like the Wing Commander Privateer games. The extra planets would be icing on the cake.
For me, personally, I don't like games without end-states. I'd like to say I completed the damn things.
More like Star flight
Twinstiq, game news
I've only pre-purchased one game in recent memory, and that's only because I was able to play it in open beta before release. The game was about as rock solid as you could get for a new release, barring a few balance issues. More publishers need to offer public betas or demos, if only to assure potential players that they won't regret their purchase.
You mean that game that many perceived as the holy grail isn't so divine right out of the gate?
I'm more shocked than I have ever been. Really, I am.
The game is total blah. Sci-Fi Pokemon Snap except off the rails. An empty MMO.
You do realize the PS4 has an AMD graphics chip and an x86-64 AMD CPU so there isn't much to port except the interface and well they apparently still botched it. But It really seem more of too small and/or pushed out the door before good QA and/or didn't have good beta testing for PC hardware configs.
It sounds like it is a 'not tested on Nvidia' problem, unless whoever posted this/ wrote the linked article is just an Nvidia fanboy, in which case they didn't think to try it on an equiv AMD gpu, given that the PS4 which it was released on has an HD 6xxx/7xxx series GPU in it.
Given the fact that they are selling via GOG though (assuming GOG is still no drm??) I am really considering buying a copy of this. If they had it on optical media without online activation or drm, it would already be bought (although probably played offline.)
> It sounds like No Mans Sky is yet another game to riff on the same "income through marketing high expectations" model.
It's funny... If you ignore the breathless (and clueless) noise generated by clickbait media and just listen to what the game's creator said and demoed, you come to the conclusion that what was delivered today is (modulo crashes and console-centric menus) exactly what we were lead to believe would be delivered: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/06/this-mans-sky-hello-games-sean-murray-is-making-his-dream-game/
Say that I'm selling a product for which a make a couple of claims: "Tastes pretty good! Makes a decent meal!". A couple of other folks who have nothing to do with me decide to make some outrageous claims: "Feeds a family of four for a week! Just as good as what's served in five-star restaurants! Improves your sex life!". It's entirely unreasonable to say that the marketing for my product is setting high expectations, when _I_ am making modest claims about my product and people with whom I have no association are saying ridiculous things.
You might argue that I should muzzle the people who are making outrageous claims. That -too- is unreasonable; there are too many blowhards out there for me to even _attempt_ to silence them all. What's more, most of them will (correctly) claim that their speech is protected speech and I have no standing to silence them. So, that's a battle that I've lost before I even decided to set foot outside my door.
But Novalogic had a closed beta for a vaguely wing commander/privateer-esque game (I forget the name now, it had Bruce Campbell voice acting the lead though!) I put in quite a few hours during the beta, however their bug site was already offline when I had collected feedback to offer.
Long story short, while the game had some issues (nothing at all with the SP, imho, although a number of levels had you dramactically underpowered compared to your opponents. The massive multiplayer playbalance however was wayy off. One time gets more players, which means more tech, which means they can destroy your base and you can't destroy theirs, their win by sheer numbers.), it came out far more polished than any modern games did, had lots of easter eggs/collection missions for repeats (the game was pseudo-linear, so while you visited the same areas multiple times you might only get one or two chances to go after particular items/bounties/etc due to time constraints.)
My point, agreeing with PP is that companies who are serious and do a good job on the beta often end up with a superior product, even if not perfect, by release day. Furthermore, depending on the handling of the beta, esp from the PR/gag angle, can make a huge difference in getting you loyal purchasers when it finally comes out.
If you think the price is going to be steady for a while, and you'd like to play the game sooner rather than later, pre-ordering is fine. I "pre-ordered" it last night because it offered an extra ship at the start (is it good? I don't know). Then I spent today forgetting I had even done that until I saw this story. I might try to fire it up, or I might wait for an update or two. Either way, I plan on playing it before the price drops to $30.
The only reason to not pre-order a game that you intend to play soon is if they aren't offering any incentives. Otherwise, if you don't care about playing it soon, then wait a year when it's hopefully cheaper.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
That's kind of funny, I picked this up for PS4 and immediately lamented that it was not a proper consolized interface.
Why do either of us have to hold to confirm? Why am I dragging around a mouse cursor with an analog stick instead of being able to D-pad around the menus?
Maybe it's just a 'bad' interface.
Enjoying the game so far but I'm not so sure that the novelty isn't going to wear off soon. It feels like Minecraft which was equally pointless, but at least had group interaction and allowed me to make some impact on the cold infinite world around me.
No offense, but that's absolutely terrible logic.
The reason you don't pre-order the game is the chance that it's over-hyped garbage. In other words, there's no way for you to know before it's released if you truly want to play it.
It's simple cognitive dissonance, what you're describing.
This is why I never buy PC games. The console games work fine the PC ports suck.
I similarly had it on pre-order, and was stunned that I simply could not load the game.
Not "played poorly," not "low frame rates," could not load the game.
I am evidently part of a large group of folks who can only get the game to make it to the "Hello Games" splash screen before it either crashes or becomes unresponsive.
For a $60 game, that is completely unacceptable at release.
And, as you said, I was quite happy Steam is pretty reasonable about refunds. At least I'm only disappointed by the disappointing product, not enraged at having 60 dollars sunk into an unplayable glob of code. Lord, I can't even remember the last time I sunk 60 bucks into a game...
Hope your refund goes well.
The big problems seem to be had by those with top of the line systems and who are jacking their settings to max. I have an older machine/graphics card, and i'm not having any problem at all... other than getting really cold when night rolls around (although i actually do think that in this game it's a feature, not a bug... (yes, place obligatory "fuck Sony" here)).
This is not a fast paced shoot 'em up game. I just spent ~ 2 hours figuring out the controls, how to repair my ship, and gathering the materials to do that. Along the way i found a language stone, an alien artifact plaque (i haven't got too yet), and made friends with 2 animals... one of which ran around digging up some materials that i hadn't found just laying around.
My only annoyance so far (other than almost freezing my nads off at night), is that you have to exit your ship to save game (apparently). So if you get in, construct a few things, then log out... well... you'll get to practice making things all over again when you log in.
So my suggestion is: if you're having trouble, turn your settings down a little.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
While not very impressive by modern standards, it ran extremely well on whatever I had at the time (I think a P3 or p4 and a Radeon 9100, the 'revised' budget version of the Radeon 8500.)
It was an excellent if somewhat linear game, beautiful graphics for the era too. Biggest thing was it had ship customization during an era where others didn't, and it actually had a split storyline to choose your loyalty (like WC4 implied it had, but really only had the rebel path to go down.)
Alternative summary: A new game is mediocre. Why is this a news?
When I got divorced 8 years ago my gaming box did not survive the move, for whatever reason the power supply took a dump on the 5V rails and took out the motherboard and the graphics card (the initial smoke, then the scorch marks when I opened the case, told the tale). Bought a PS3, got used to gaming sitting in my La-Z-Boy with my cat in my lap. Granted, not as good as a gaming box, then again with a gaming box I'm in an office chair with no room for the cat.
My laptop won't run this game, this is the first time I've thought about building another gaming box and the cat can lick his balls. Except I had his balls cut off years ago, so he can look cute from across the room.
Crappy, half assed console port is crappy.
This is news? I always had the impression news should be, well, new. Or at least uncommon.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nvidia drivers OMGLOL!!!11!!11 or something. Nvidia drivers had always more power to bring down the system more frequently when I tried them years ago compared to ATI's drivers. Navigating between them was like choosing between two poisons, each one killing you in different way.
Every game has bugs at launch, but let's be honest: has there been any game recently hyped this much that WASN'T a disappointment?
Surprise Answer: Yes! Star Citizen, because it hasn't come out yet so it's not YET a disappointment though it CERTAINLY will be. If I could sell short on that, I'd drop $10k on that bet.
-Styopa
Fortunately, Steam lets you do that when the hype begins to crumble. The too-high price should have warned me earlier though.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Buy games made for PC. Very few PC games, as a percentage, are ports.
For a $60 game, that is completely unacceptable at release.
Indeed, it is. I am sorry for you poor experience.
I am holding off on buying it, personally, for a while.
The developers do appear to be very focused on fixing any issues as quickly as they can, so I think it is likely that most of the issues people are currently having will be rectified fairly soon. If and when that happens, I will probably buy it and have a go.
What I do not get is the vile hatred spewed forth by so many. I just do not understand how people can get so incredibly riled up about something so mundane as a little game, with everything else going on in this world. There is an astounding lack of perspective replaced by a towering sense of self-importance displayed by so many...
> The reason you don't pre-order the game is
you got burned over "Human Resources" and you still aren't over it.
This is why I never buy PC games. The console games work fine the PC ports suck.
And that is why all the pros play CS:GO on the PS3.
Also Terraria on Nintendo 3DS and so on.
Quite enjoy it.
I guess I should have learned from indie music. Just because a game is indie, doesn't mean they can't charge 50 quid for it. 50 for a game!!!
That said, kinda of which this had a Minecraft like Mac OS, Windows clients as the universe is stupifyingly vast. And I tend to play similar Minecraft sprawling/wondering around occasionally on whatever machine I happen to have in front of me ... which thought NMS is smooth on PS4, typically is not the machine I have in front of me.
A lot of people are having issues because the game requires openGL 4.5
So cards that are capable of playing most recent games can not be used to play this game.
I am in the same boat. I still have an HD6800 series which plays Witcher 3, Shadow of Mordor, iRacing on 3 27" screens and many more. Here comes NMS with shitty graphics and it requires a video card that it does not even utilize.
I returned by game for a refund. Gainward Golden Sample GTX1070 is arriving on Monday. Can't wait to use it with proper PC games.
Fuck Hello Games and their shitty PC port.
1) I can't justify that amount for one game.
I mean, I have a good job, disposable funds, and I have an "slush" fund that I just put random things into (e.g. a bit of Bitcoin, spare cash, Paypal refunds, stuff from Steam market sales, etc. - it all adds up and there's several hundred GBP in there a year). But that kind of price for one game when I could get ten smaller ones spread over the course of a year?
2) Although I was quite intrigued by the "this won't be multiplayer" aspect, which is unusual nowadays, there doesn't seem to be much at all of how the game actually works, plays or progresses.
(I hate games that focus on multiplayer at the expense of the single player... they are two DIFFERENT kinds of games. CS:GO is obviously only good as multiplayer, and other things are obviously only good as single-player - and some are great single-player games where you think "It would be so cool if" and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't)
Back in the day, Elite could have an infinite procedural map (effectively), but first and foremost it has stuff to do rather than wander around. I see nothing of that. There was a game set on Mars I played that I got for nothing. It was basically wandering around in an empty world, and then you found out that it was on rails because any deviation just let you wander for hours but you couldn't progress until you came back to the right spot. So dull, and despite being a beautiful game, I wasted an hour of my life on it.
3) No demo. No demo, no way to test, no compatibility assurance, no game. People are literally buying and then hoping Steam refunds will work so they get a demo out of it. That's just shit. There's obviously a reason there's no demo of this turd, but come on. Put out demos, people.
4) Indie games, to me, are things that studios wouldn't have developed. I understand that's not the official definition, but no big studio would have put their money behind, say, SpaceChem or Factorio. That's an indie game. Made by people trying to make it on their own with something that they'd never find being made by EA in their local store. This isn't.
5) Value. I'll be honest, I've got hunderds of hours in both SpaceChem and Factorio and wouldn't have paid anywhere near what No Man's Sky cost for them both. If you work out the gameplay-per-cost of things, then up the top are the indie games which draw you in and don't let you leave. At the bottom are the flops of commercial releases, and then the commercial releases just about them. Great fun was had, but only for a handful of hours, and cost a premium.
My friends got into Ark: Survival and it's been great for them. Dozens of hours (a lot for non-gamers), but it cost them a bit. That's okay, they enjoyed it and it was disposable cash and they got a lot back for that. But I can't justify full-price games that last a few hours or are crap or boring and getting reviews this bad. Certainly not against silly casual indie games that cost pence and can entertain a room full of people for the whole night.
6) First-day releases, pre-orders, etc.
Er... no. Unless there's a demo and I know what I'm ordering and that I'll get it.
Unfortunately, a lot of people pre-order games and make the devs to commit to a certain release date no matter how many confirmed bugs they still have.
STOP PREORDERING GAMES!
People will never learn to refrain from buying games before all the bugs and patches are resolved.
Yet, they continue to complain when everythings works as expected. ( It doesn't )
My sympathies for them have long since expired. If you haven't learned patience yet, then you deserve the experience you get as an unpaid beta-tester. Whine about it all you like. As long as you keep buying it on day one, games will always have this problem.
If I decide to play it, I'll do so six months from now when they have their act together.
Which is why I stick to consoles. Because I can actually play my games guaranteed whenever I want. No OS troubles, driver troubles, compatibility troubles, etc etc.
Twinstiq, game news
I bought it, and I've so far played enough of it to get off world, see large ships and go to a space station.
So far, I have experienced no noticeable frame rate drops during gameplay or crashes when alt-tabbing.
My system is good, but it's not the best available and it's not SLI.
Coming from the automotive industry, this is a bit of a cop-out. We have razor thin margins and enormous complexity. And, while modern automobile electronics like infotainment and navigation systems are somewhat poorly designed from a UI/UX perspective (a problem the industry seems to be working on from my time in Ford's research division), the vehicle as a whole cannot suffer massive problems on launch.
Just because cars are expensive, don't think that automakers make a lot on each car. You need volume to make real money, just like computer games. This article suggests that VW only makes about $500 Australian on each car and this quora answer estimates a similar figure for Toyota. Car margins are very small, much smaller than computer games, even indie games.
So, just like video games, automobiles have tremendous complexity, tremendous software complexity (even in the vital and semi-vital control systems in the vehicle), thin margins (much thinner than computer games), high volumes with enormous amounts of in-field hours upon launch (this adds to the likelihood that rare bugs are encountered) and high pressure from competitors. Relatively rare bugs, which are the bane of the auto industry are not the issue here. The issue is widespread malfunctioning. It is a total cop out to say that game studios cannot deliver a better experience on average on launch, especially big ones (I know we're talking about an indie dev game, but your comment is about all AAA games). The game studios deliver a shit experience on launch because they know people will still buy it. If the consumers didn't accept this, AAA games would not launch this way. Because the whole industry sees that consumers still buy buggy products from their competitors and time (to launch) is money, everyone has to deliver a buggy product prematurely to compete. Everyone working in software deals with many orders of magnitude more complexity than 25+ years ago. It's because consumers accept this "move fast and break things" crap that it keeps happening. For garbage like Facebook, I really couldn't care less, so "move fast and break things" does have it's place, but I think most of us would agree that it's place is not in video game launches.
Video games could and should deliver a smoother launch experience, even the most complex AAA, online games. They deliver a terrible launch experience because the consumers tolerate it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't see any cognitive dissonance in what I'm describing (my god, maybe it's more pervasive than I think).
The reason you don't pre-order the game is the chance that it's over-hyped garbage.
OK, in this case the game was out for several days on PS4 before I "pre-ordered" it. Regardless, even though it might be garbage, it looked interesting enough that I was willing to check it out. I don't put a ton of faith in reviews, especially "professional" reviews (people who get paid to give their opinions). I like to make my own judgment on things like that. That being said, there are very few games that make me interested enough to pre-order. And, especially with the case of smaller developers, I'm willing to give them a good faith assumption that they'll fix any major problems and otherwise listen to the community. Bigger publishers, not so much.
Also in this case, even though I've continued to see a bunch of bad press about the PC launch, I had no problems playing for several hours this weekend. I think I started the game 3 times and it crashed on startup 2 of those times (where I just had to launch it again, and it worked), and otherwise I saw no graphic issues or performance problems. It worked fine, and I think I've only got a GTX 580 or something. I don't regret "pre-ordering" it 1 day before it came out on PC, after it had been on PS4 for a few days.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
From the Atlantic article: "If no player EVER finds 49,979,687, the planet won’t ever be grown. The geometry of its trees and lakes, and the length of its quadrupeds’ legs, won’t ever be calculated."
Somehow that all seems very philosophical and kinda sad. :(
It's easy to say "You can't expect a game to be perfect day one" in regards to performance, but I have seen many people reporting that the game shows the initial company logo splash screen and then crash. I don't know the reasons for the crashes - maybe all those people are below the minimum specs, maybe it's something obscure that their testing missed - but having a game that won't even run on a large number of machines seems unacceptable. My experience with the game so far was no issues at launch, excluding the so-so performance and hatred of the console-style UI. (Hold to confirm? Really?) Second day it seems they released a patch and my game would no longer launch at all. Managed to fix it and it mostly runs fine (performance isn't great, but definitely playable), except that after a while of playing all of a sudden the frame rate will drop to a constant 10fps or less and I need to restart the game to get it back to playable. Also, the game has not actually crashed on me, including the many times I have alt-tabbed, so at least there's that. I guess the performance is pretty mediocre all round, but the stability is a bit different for everyone.
> What's more is that alt-tabbing out of the game is a "guaranteed crash."
I was playing NMS from its release on Friday until Sunday night, alt-tabbing *constantly* to chat on IRC. It never, not once, crashed that way.
However, refueling the Launch Thrusters from two slots in very rapid succession did.