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.

Comments

Fresh launch

[AlanBDee]

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!

I was really looking forward to it too.

[Iamthecheese]

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.

Re:I was really looking forward to it too.

[Dutch Gun]

It's not like they're Bethesda, shipping a game that's 95% done and expecting modders to fix the rest.

Bethesda tends to get a pass because their games (specifically their Elder Scrolls games) are so ridiculously big, complex, and ambitious, that gamers tend to be somewhat forgiving when the inevitable bugs are found - so long as they're not too persistent and/or game-breaking. Hello Games *may* get the same sort of treatment if they respond to these issues promptly, because this is a pretty ambitious game for an indie studio.

I've been developing professional games for quite a while now, and even pros can struggle with optimization issues. There's a bit of a black art to getting games running fast and smoothly, and if there are systemic issues in their code that don't follow good real-time coding practices, it's going to be hard for them to deal with after the fact.

BTW, if you guys at Hello Studios are reading this, get a copy of RAD Game Tools' Telemetry NOW. You should have been using it all through development (it's especially important with your own engine), but better late than never. It's fantastic at finding those real-time hotspots in code.

Oh, also, I'll also be giving them money at some point I'm sure, because I'm an 'explorer archetype' gamer. This is definitely my type of game, no doubt. But I'll probably either wait until it's released on Xbox One or I eventually get a PS4, as I don't have a very good PC gaming rig right now. For some reason, as I get older, I seem to be migrating more towards console gaming.

Re:I was really looking forward to it too.

[elrous0]

No, the harsh reality is that it's almost impossible to release a modern triple-A uber-complex game WITHOUT bugs and glitches. And even if it were possible, it wouldn't be anywhere close to practical, especially for an indie dev.

People always talk about the glory days of the NES when game released without major bugs. But they forget that those games had a few KB of code, were simple as fuck, and often were developed by a "team" of 1 or 2 people. There are several orders of magnitude difference between bug-testing Super Mario Brothers and some modern massive open world game. Today's games are simply far too complex to catch every bug, or even most of them, before launch. Until it's in the wild, with millions of play-testers, there is simply no way to catch every glitch. Add to this the almost infinite number of modern PC configurations possible, and it's an even more difficult task to bug-test for PC vs. a console.

Add to all that the realities of studios working on a strict timeline and budget, and well, all I can say is you had better get used to it. The alternatives are:

1) Delay every game several years and charge $120 for them instead of $60, so devs have the time and money to test for every bug.

-or-

2) Go back to the days when every game was as simple as an NES title.

It still amazes me how entitled modern gamers really are. You get massive incredible games that we could have only dreamed of 30 years ago, and for CHEAPER that the shit games we used to play, and all you can do is bitch about it. In the early 80's, we paid $35 for shit games like Pitfall (over $90 in today's money). And today you can buy a huge game like Fallout 4 for a mere $50-$60, and all you can do is BITCH about it!? You lucky pricks don't even know how great you have it.

Re:Linux

[elrous0]

Why no Linux version???

Because they surveyed the five people who game on Linux and three of them weren't interested in the game at all, and the other two said they would only buy it if they would open source all their code.

Re:Linux

[Arashi256]

Works fine under 64-Bit Wine - at least the GOG version does.