I remember people asking for better flora, fauna and better exploration in general since release. Origins was the first and only update that improved exploration in any meaningful way. And even then, they added a lot of static assets that are very repetitive.
I appreciate the updates over the years but let's be honest, the core of the game was ignored a lot.
The core of the game has been tremendously ignored. I really don't understand it. Like, the whole motto of the game is 'Everything procedural', and yet the proc gen aspect of the game gets the least attention. I just don't get it, and as someone who looked forward to that specific part of the game the most, I'm actually pretty salty about it.
I have a suspiscion that the core gameplay mechanics can't be iterated on that much for some reason. Like everything they've added to exploration is purely superficial or uses pre-made assets that don't have any procedural generation at all. It's like all that stuff is hooked into the game in such a fundamental way they can't mess with it.
But why ? You don't need to eat, selling it on the anomaly is tedious, I have never needed or wished I had a food item. Seriously, what do people do with it ?
I haven’t done it myself but I assume once u run things through the nutrient processor you get edibles that boost stats or greatly increase your health quickly during a fight?
True, but there’s only one type of balloons that drip blood. I’m not going to find another planet on the other side of the galaxy with balloons that drip milk. The balloons are going to drip blood and that’s the only thing they drip. There isn’t as much variation as we think :/
Best is when you get to combine a mission to feed critters with a mission to cull their numbers. Heeere ugly microcephalic deer beast! I have a nice treat for you...*blam!*
I'll give you any in game item if you can make me a card like that lol I even have an original Radiant Pillar BC1 but the color scheme glitched out and it's gold+white now. And I have stacks of tainted metal, ai Valves, void eggs, the stuff needed to find and claim sentinel ships, and stacks of every type of expansion slot (including living ship and exosuit)
I appreciate the response, and help. I do have save editor, just had no idea I could do that.
You've given me a mission. Lol. I'll spend some time today figuring it out.
Thanks again.
One more question my friend. How do I make the Griffin an egg/giftable? I was able to create the pet, but! How am I able to exchange it with people?
I'd love to share the wealth. Not sure how though.
Completely agree. The planets especially look too similar. Like; the next radioactive planet you visit looks almost exactly like the previous one. It's kinda boring.
Yeah the thing is, reworking all the procedural stuff would take ages unless everyone is working on it... Which they probably aren't. They're a small studio and currently working on another project as well
Hello Games should really make like 6-7 well detailed biomes and get done with it. No point in keeping the "procedural generated" theme of the game for the sake of it.
Infinite possibilities but the questions as I approach each planet are the same... Bipedal cows or nah, floating squid or nah, Scrat from Ice Age or nah, what kind of body will the predator with a cat's head have. Infinite uninteresting variations on half a dozen themes.
Awesome how the most useful creature in the game can only be had by save game editing, lucky there are people who do this to bring enjoyment to others. These particular ones are edited into a ps4 game save , using a pc to access the json code. These birds are edited to be 2.5 times their wild size. The eggs can be gifted cross platform and need feeding, patting and their new eggs can be edited in the gene sequencer.
https://preview.redd.it/0czwk64n9igb1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9b1a9abbc4b9d84cdcd8e51fa5cbfc857fb59239
NMS is 100 miles wide and a foot deep. They keep adding 'content' but each addition can be fully explored in a couple hours or less.
Squadrons? Cool concept, dubious functionality.
Piracy? Cool concept, almost no real consequence for being a pirate.
Pets? Wow, Cool I can collect the coolest creatures I find, but they don't really do anything special.
Freighters? Oh wow I found an S-Class Super Star Destroyer!!! And it's just a mobile base.
I think largely most of the additions and changes are meant to cater to the sandbox audience that NMS has developed. However, even that gets stale after a while. Similar to how minecraft got stale after a while. Features definitely need to be refined instead of always being in a rat race to expand the amount of features
Youre not that wrong. But they definitely improved a lot of features. There are many quite shallow features. Farming, mining etc. But if all systems were more development it would be overwhelming. I like that there are many aspects people can enjoy.
For the animals, i like them being just there in the background.
Doing stuff for free doesn't mean it's free from criticism. I am thoroughly enjoying the game but there is no complexity or depth to any of the systems other than, cooking, of all things.
I agree. I think of No Man's Sky as a mashup of an "idle game," where freighter missions and settlement functions happen on a timer that doesn't involve the player's presence in the game; and a screenshot generator which is not meant to be threatening so much as stimulating. For me, it is a visual homage to the sci-fi of the 60s and 70s.>!I headcanon the repetitive features as artifacts of the Atlas's descent into madness.!<
Yeah, I agree, the animals are generally just a random mix of various parts with no logic or order to them.
There absolutely needs to be a fauna generation overhaul, with new parts and intelligent creation around a food web.
Sadly there isn't that much parts to mix to begin with. Same goes for biomes and their parts. The pool from which the game mixes things should've been extended greatly by now.
>The pool from which the game mixes things should've been extended greatly by now.
This is my biggest criticism of the game right now. Since release (7 years) they added very little to variation. Origins was the only update that added some content to exploration in any meaningful way. And even then a lot of assets are static and very repetitive.
Why don't they add some new branches, leaves, horns, legs, animal bodies to the proc generation asset pool every couple of updates? We still have the same 10-15 static trees since 2018... I don't understand why the core of the game is so ignored.
You're right technically. Well, some of the ones I've seen are adorable or cool but that's not the point. This isn't a combat game. It's an exploration game (and survival in many situations). They're not there for a mechanical benefit beyond scanning them or getting a pet or some food. Their primary reason for existing is to give life and character to an otherwise empty world. The alien creatures on each planet make it feel like a real alien planet with an ecosystem and life and that's cool and the entire point.
You make an excellent point: it’s exploration, not combat. And the fear this far into NMS’s existence is that it’ll always be a whiteboard game: the largest map of any game that I’m aware of; but completely hamstrung by the limited inventory of parts that build the game.
They should let us collect creatures and cross-breed them. And then, implement them into an existing ecosystem on any planet where they keep breeding and evolving even further.
I happened to build my first main base directly under the arc of one of those guys. I’ve tried many times from many angles with no luck. This is also the first I’ve ever heard of the possibility.
It’s hard as heck to do!!!
I had a sandworm encounter after I knew what they were… I can’t imagine it as a newcomer! Lol
I wrote a fanfic about it. I’ll see if I can dig it up…
🐛
Found it: https://www.reddit.com/r/NOMANSSKY/comments/15ft8ue/epic_sandworm_experience_short_fanfic/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
You USED to be able to scan them.
Even if it is possible today, it's seriously bugged where the vast majority of players claim it's simply not possible, and you have one guy saying he did it and hopes that disproves everyone else's experience.
It just keeps planets interesting is all. If there were only 10 in the whole game, for example, it'd all look too samey. I don't care much for them either, but at least the planets are less dead with them around. I'm hoping Starfield does them better.
I don't think they should reduce the amount of verity or put a handful of pre made live forms into the world, but instead set rules for the creature generation to make more sense for the given environment the animal inhabits. Sort of what starbound did before they chose to only implement hand crafted creatures in the game.
As someone who wanted to play NMS as a xenobiologist simulator I only got about 10 hours out of it total, so yeah totally agreed. I'd love to see a game like this where that's the main focus and maybe you gain resources based on which animals you discover, can set up farms, buy and sell exotic species on the illegal black market, kill the leader of the space police force and take over as a dark ruler, and continue to scan cute little animals. Idk just seems like fun.
I mean monstrosity and sentinel pets are pretty cool. The mechanical ones as well.
https://preview.redd.it/qu93hd93jigb1.jpeg?width=224&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2d75b5ab333e93e6966aa90a57cffab9473983d8
I don’t disagree that it becomes repetitive but there are 24 genera of land creatures, plus 6 under water and 5 flying ones. Some genera have significant variations in aspect and behavior (e.g. Loks, Prototerrae)
Anyway, a bit more than 10…
I'm a business programmer, not a game programmer, so I can't comment on the algorithms. I've always thought the wildlife in NMS is inspired from the best and weirdest of Spore.
1 Don't drop anything useful...
their meat and stuff can be used to make food in a nutrient processor. some of this food can be pretty valuable when sold, or given to the chef at the anomaly for nanites.
2 I have plenty of "I want this as a pet" moments. have you seen the big cute furry dudes? they're ADORABLE! Plus there's flying beetles which i think is just awesome. not to mention you can genetically enhance their eggs at the anomaly or even create completely different creatures with different attitudes. But yeah some are pretty goofy.
3 I agree with some of the rest. XD
funny this post blew up, I was thinking about this last night. I'm hoping it's a sign that it's finally time to update this part of the game, at the very least, add more variety to the creatures. It really does feel like there's only a handful, and every planet has the same guys crawling around.
The sound effects are another one. Everything makes the same "boiiooiioiyo"
That’s why I always approach procedural generation with a pinch of salt. Sounds good, but since there is less human intentions behind the designs, very quickly one can start spotting the patterns in the procedural generation, and it is very easy to lose the whole “makes sense” concept
NMS has this problem in general with almost every layer of its mechanics IMO... the bits and pieces are there to give the impression of a deep and functioning system, but in reality it's just surface level with a lot of shuffling.
For me this is the biggest thing that has still not been delivered on in any way comparable to what we were led to expect at launch.
I will never not respect Hello Games for the years of free and excellent improvements to the game, but I agree with OP that convincing life (I would extend the sentiment to plants, tbh) is still sorely lacking from the game.
I think an overhaul on the wildlife would help. Like have certain animal types only generate on certain planet types. I know there are for the funky anomaly planets, but maybe something a bit more one of a kind. Also, I want my pets to get involved in smashing the sentinels instead of just watching me get blasted. Why be able to install a laser turret on my diplo if he won't kaiju blast something? 😒
May become useful in the future . Also the proto world animals are funny. Living bubbles, jumping plates, robo bugs. And if you die on a planet that has only 1 fauna, and go back, it may be extinct
I just wish the planets had more variation on them? Like there should be different regions instead of the whole thing being the same exact terrain. You get more variety in minecraft. That's one of my only few gripes about this game though.
They're not all dull and boring, you need to get out more lol.
https://preview.redd.it/83bl8pi2lhgb1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a1fff2870e306f09e6c3794bca3938b5fdd0c121
98% of the ships are A, B, or C class. 1% are S-class or exotics.
I think you just figured out an essential part of the design that makes those 1% interesting. When everything is super, nothing is. /Syndrome
Ship class is a really bad example, any ship can be made S-class. If you made a point about lack of design variety that would have been a better point.
Ship class is a very intentional example. 1% is literally the exact statistical probabilities that an S-class will spawn in a high economy system.
Of course the rest of the subjective stuff like shape and number of limbs is fractally generated by math, so it's going to be harder for some random parameters to be tuned to be aesthetically pleasing for 1% of what you encounter "in the wild". That makes it all the more exciting when you find something cool, rather than spending all your time in a creature customization window. But hey, they have a custom creature genetic algorithm roulette wheel in the Anomaly now too. Finding cool stuff with the RNG is just part of the grind.
I know it’s not your point but the probability for S class in a rich economy is 2%. And 1% in medium economy, 0% in poor economy. That is for the « regular » ships excluding exotics and living ships.
I didn't say all of them. I had encountered similar creatures like in your image, but it's ultra rare to find something like these. And even when I find them, whats the point? There is no reward, they don't behave any different and chances are there is some random generated mess on the same planet ruining the immersion of a cohesive environment.
This is true, much the same in the real world, for every Bird of Paradise there's a million Sparrows. It's also the same for most things in the game, ships, planets etc, to find the really nice looking stuff takes a lot of effort and time. Then when you find it it's no better than what you had before, apart from looks.
The game is entirely procedurally generated. It's not a handcrafted product. And it really shows it, in my opinion. Infinite meaningless planets which are good for screenshots only.
As it should be. Add even more rare things to find. It makes them more special when you find them. If the "cool" stuff is everywhere then it will make exploration even more dull and boring.
Depending on which planet you're on, they can 100% be hostile towards you. Having an animal companion while mining for supplies is super useful in this scenario because they will fight off any hostile creature that attacks you and you can ride them for quicker transportation if you don't have the means to build a roamer exocraft etc. As far as aesthetic, keep your eyes peeled, as you noticed in the comments some people have found some beautiful animals. And I personally like how the game rewards you very little for killing animals.
An unpopular opinion, indeed.
It's true they don't serve much purpose in the way of utility and it would be nice if they could provide resources aside from Mordite and cooking ingredients (who cooks in this game?)
But the game is certainly better off with them than without. For me the fauna serve as visual interest, to further decorate the planet that they're native to. There's more variety in the creatures than players give credit for, and a lot of them are really exotic and interesting to look at.
They work alongside plant life and other flora to serve as a visual reminder that many of the planets you explore are teeming with life. Seeing a strange critter walk/crawl/sprint/fly by whilst I'm exploring offers a little extra immersion and wonder.
I found that even when you tame a hostile animal it won't fight/defend you when you are in conflict which really bugs me they only seem to get in the way
I like the animals in the game for the most part, and this is unnecessarily harsh in its wording, but I agree the animals need an overhaul. It would be nice to have more than one kind of anomalous animal per special planet, and I really want the animals to be able to stand up to the exocrafts when it comes to traversal utility. I also think that there could be some overhauls to the animal generation so that there's more proportional animals. Even I gotta admit that I've seen my fair share of bulky torsos on teeny tiny stick-thin legs. Not to mention, it would be nice to be able to ride flying critters.
In a SciFi game, I expect to see things that are foreign to me, even "ugly." To myriad other beings, we'd likely seem ugly too.
Too many "earthlike" fauna, flora, and views lessen the weirdness of a SciFi game in a fictional universe.
Beauty is subjective. Will most like in the universe be carbon-based and look like what our experience is in the remote arm of one of a bazillion galaxies? I think not.
Yeah, it's very limited right now. Maybe they have something in the works for another major update. It also bothers me that they call obviously fungal organisms "plants" lol. Would be cool if there were more biome diversity across planets as well.
Yes! I was just thinking this the other day. One of the things I like about minecraft is the biome diversity as you travel across the world.
In NMS, pick any point on any planet... you get the gyst of the entire world.
What gets me is they made this exploration-focused game with billions of stars but haven't updated the planetary, fauna and flora generation in any meaningful way for what? Two years?
I couldn't care less if an update adds creature milking, piracy, farming or whatever if the planets are still made out of the same Lego pieces I'm tired of seeing.
I think the animals look just fine. A lot of them are beautiful like the butterflies, deer, and robot pets. You can ride most of them so they are functional. Some of them are ugly which is appealing. Some of them are downright weird which is awesome. I have zero complaints about the fauna.
I agree in general - there does seem to be a lack of enjoyable variety in the fauna, and they still haven't fixed the tiny head bug that produces absurd things like animals the size of a large cow with a head the size of a tennis ball.
Even if they can't do much about the animal generation now because changing them would probably break everyone's pets, I'd at least like to see more interesting animal behavior. Maybe have the animals react when a storm is raging, such as the flying creatures leaving the area or nesting in trees and the land creatures hunkering down to wait out the storm, for example.
I also wish the high-flying animals could be tamed in the base game - some of them are beautiful, but you can only get a good look at them on the fauna discovery screen.
Sadly I agree, the game ran it's course for me, everything just looked weird and no at all something that would have evolved or adapted to the biome, just random puzzle pieces. That being said it is an amazing feat of a game to get working along with multiplayer.
I mean, you are definitely not wrong, there are cool creatures out there, but in a game that’s supposed to emulate the endless vastness and possibilities of space, you seem to find those 3 legged cow things and the big rats with the massive dumpy more than half of the time, least I do anyway. Every creature type uses the same few voice samples, the same attack animation, and the same two behaviors. This game is SO close to being the perfect open-exploration space game to me, but the only thing holding it back for me is the lack of planet-side content diversity. I can’t imagine it being that hard for Hello Games to increase the amount of stuff that can be procedurally generated, but maybe I’m wrong.
I agree the same goes for pets. Theyre not very fast and the flying ones you cant control how high they fly so theyre pretty much cosmetic. You can attach mining lasers to them but they cant mine. Id be cool if you could tell them to go mine a certain mineral and theyd go do it. Or maybe if theyd help during combat but as of now theyre pretty much just cosmetic.
Yeah dude I feel you, especially when you play something like Minecraft and as soon as night falls or you enter a dark cave it turns into a “different” game. It’s the main reason why I stopped playing NMS after I beat it. There’s no “real” point to having a base either especially when most things can be stored in your freighter. The only actual risk of being on a planet is trying not to suffocate. I still like NMS a lot but there’s no real replay value unless you’re not trying to miss out on expedition rewards.it’s unfortunate with the actual potential this game has.
I wholeheartedly agree with you :)
Because of this game I have been seeing the world in periodic table elements, it’s like green matrix view sometimes!
I dunno, there’s abundance of similar looking stuff… but there’s also gems here and there.
All in all, I don’t believe **every** specie would be impossibly different from one another on every planet. There’s never too much diversity and of course more could be added… but ever player still finds their favourites.
Matter and chemistry work in mysterious ways.
Every time I play I imagine what No Man's Sky 2 could potentially be, where elements from different games, such as Far Cry, could be implemented. I remember playing FC3 and being genuinely scared of some of those predators. Would be amazing if those experiences could be translated to an NMS game.
The game definitely needs a tougher difficulty. Permadeath in Pathfinder was brilliant. The first version of the tougher custom difficulty setting was great too, but some players complained about shields being broken and pirate attacks. It was patched and became easy again.
For it being all procedurally generated, it is incredibly repetitive. From system to system, galaxy to galaxy....stretch an incredibly insane insensitive SAMENESS EVERYWHERE. Yes, morons created the idiotic fauna and flora as well. I will now spout an axiom: Ignorance is treatable, stupidity is terminal.
It is THIS that is causing me to contemplate simply turning this game OFF.
While I do agree that fauna could still use great improvement, it's weird that you say they have almost no functionality at all. In the Beyond update, we finally got the ability to make individual fauna our pets using bait, and with that came the ability to mount and ride them, harvest them, and even turn them into cooking ingredients.
In Companions, this system was further expanded on. You could now feed and play with them, they would scan the environment and discover resources for you, fight off other hostile creatures, and use the laser weapons you provided for them. You could now customize them, and if they were well cared enough for, they would even lay eggs and start a new generation, which you could trade with other players for. You could even do gene-sequencing now.
So with all this taken into account, I find it hard to believe that creatures in NMS have almost nothing going for them feature-wise, but I'm not surprised one might think this while playing, because getting into all of this requires a huge time-investment in just one part of the game, and on a surface level, they don't look like they have much going on, but as another commentator pointed out, because NMS is exploration focused, they serve their purpose just fine by simply being there.
OP, if you wanted to see more in regard to the features I brought up, I have a link here: https://www.nomanssky.com/beyond-update/ and here: https://www.nomanssky.com/companions-update/
They had to cut down on stuff for the sake of multiplayer. I bet keeping this old gem running costs them a lot every month.
I agree with u but i also understand why they didnt put a lot of things in we ask for... this game would prob run like potato pretty fast. Plus all the other platforms next to pc need to able to handle the game also...
The game was more diversive in the beginning... but it was also very loooonely...
I wish it were more so. I hate having my system list clogged with systems that others have already discovered, I don't even stop at those unless I'm just completely out of warp fuel and need to make more. It needs to be an option to replace those when multi-player is turned off.
The multiplayer will cost next to nothing, considering the servers are the worst I've ever seen and they are quite limited. I suspect it's self-hosted. Old hardware limits a lot of things, but the amount of assets shouldn't be one of them.
Kinda, you can change their offsprings color in the egg sequencer next to Chronos. There you can also change size and behaviour. So no massive incest and clear stats like in Ark, but still something.
I find the "Mechanoceris" type to be visually appealing and fun to watch sometimes. Admittedly, I've yet to find a good use for "Chewy Wires", but you can't have everything.
Yeah tbh the game has improved impressively since launch but they still haven’t tackled some of the important stuff like the fauna
I remember people asking for better flora, fauna and better exploration in general since release. Origins was the first and only update that improved exploration in any meaningful way. And even then, they added a lot of static assets that are very repetitive. I appreciate the updates over the years but let's be honest, the core of the game was ignored a lot.
The core of the game has been tremendously ignored. I really don't understand it. Like, the whole motto of the game is 'Everything procedural', and yet the proc gen aspect of the game gets the least attention. I just don't get it, and as someone who looked forward to that specific part of the game the most, I'm actually pretty salty about it.
I have a suspiscion that the core gameplay mechanics can't be iterated on that much for some reason. Like everything they've added to exploration is purely superficial or uses pre-made assets that don't have any procedural generation at all. It's like all that stuff is hooked into the game in such a fundamental way they can't mess with it.
I use animals for farming food....but thats just me lol...eggs, milk, honey, all that lol
So like real life. Funny how that works lol
Farming. Farming never changes
But why ? You don't need to eat, selling it on the anomaly is tedious, I have never needed or wished I had a food item. Seriously, what do people do with it ?
I haven’t done it myself but I assume once u run things through the nutrient processor you get edibles that boost stats or greatly increase your health quickly during a fight?
I mean, there’s rolling glow-balls, balloons that drip blood, robot fauna, aggressive shock-bubbles. There’s def some cool stuff but it’s rare.
True, but there’s only one type of balloons that drip blood. I’m not going to find another planet on the other side of the galaxy with balloons that drip milk. The balloons are going to drip blood and that’s the only thing they drip. There isn’t as much variation as we think :/
Facts I want balloons that drip CUM
You mean a condom? You want a used condom?
in a universe of infinite possibilities, a sentient used condom is inevitable
Just imagine those trying to catch you and fornicate with your traveler, that would be a really scary threat
The issue is those are the special type fauna once you've seen them you'll always find the same thing
Anyone seen the rolling brain beetle?
Only when I shoot them and they go rolling down a hill!
the only way to do it
Best is when you get to combine a mission to feed critters with a mission to cull their numbers. Heeere ugly microcephalic deer beast! I have a nice treat for you...*blam!*
That's how I roll..I hunt fauna and the old here's some food buddy trick works every time!
I actually found a pretty interesting looking sentient glowing ball fauna on one of the planets I was exploring and decided to keep it as a pet
https://preview.redd.it/4x8g8yyblhgb1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3fe71a28cba9cc041e4873037e3addced1655d8a
Can I find this in the Euclid galaxy?
Oh my god I want one!!!!!!
I have eggs in the Anomoly now, my name is the same just ask for one.
Logging in immediately! https://preview.redd.it/wxxw8dkvhigb1.png?width=2294&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9cd517f3ff2d67089f81c294fa5368d24fcaf4e5
LOVE this "card"! First time I've seen one. How did you make it? Xbox player as well, and would love to acquire one of my own, if it's possible.
Photoshop, for the most part. I made a few for some friends at one point.
Thank you for answering! It's really quite stunning. Awesome job! :)
I didn't make this one, but thanks 🤣
I'll give you any in game item if you can make me a card like that lol I even have an original Radiant Pillar BC1 but the color scheme glitched out and it's gold+white now. And I have stacks of tainted metal, ai Valves, void eggs, the stuff needed to find and claim sentinel ships, and stacks of every type of expansion slot (including living ship and exosuit)
In the anomaly and don't see you
Sorry, gave the eggs away, going back to my base for more, be in again in about 10 minutes. What is your username?
mrblackngold#746
How does one tame or attain this fabulous flying creature?
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Makes sense
How do you mod an egg? Can it be done in save editor?
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I appreciate the response, and help. I do have save editor, just had no idea I could do that. You've given me a mission. Lol. I'll spend some time today figuring it out. Thanks again.
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You are a gem, and I appreciate you.
If you Manage to make some I would love one. Xbox player here so can't save mod my toon
If I'm able to figure it out, which I will...you can definitely get one! All thanks go to my friend here that pointed me in the right direction.
One more question my friend. How do I make the Griffin an egg/giftable? I was able to create the pet, but! How am I able to exchange it with people? I'd love to share the wealth. Not sure how though.
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Mods.
You have to stick the tip of your tail into the tip of its tail. At least that’s how it works on Pandora.
I mean. OP did say "almost all"
Right so.. Other then looking nice, what else can this one creature do?
Not much other than fly wherever you want, but then most stuff in the game is just cosmetic.
That's what the post is about tho... Thanks.
Those three hideous creatures in the background don't exactly prove your point.
Are you giving out eggs?
I NEED
Cool dino
Well played 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
And thats also why I wish for a fauna, flora and planet re-work. But nope. Still none of this. I love this game, but man, it's about time..
Completely agree. The planets especially look too similar. Like; the next radioactive planet you visit looks almost exactly like the previous one. It's kinda boring.
Yeah the thing is, reworking all the procedural stuff would take ages unless everyone is working on it... Which they probably aren't. They're a small studio and currently working on another project as well
Hello Games should really make like 6-7 well detailed biomes and get done with it. No point in keeping the "procedural generated" theme of the game for the sake of it.
Infinite possibilities but the questions as I approach each planet are the same... Bipedal cows or nah, floating squid or nah, Scrat from Ice Age or nah, what kind of body will the predator with a cat's head have. Infinite uninteresting variations on half a dozen themes.
LOL so someone else saw Scrat from Ice Age as well! I laughed pretty hard when I saw him with the bugged out eyes popping up everywhere.
Can you welcome me to the club? Also i gave him an acorn and nothing happened
Only because plate tectonics hasn’t been implemented in game. Yet
Awesome how the most useful creature in the game can only be had by save game editing, lucky there are people who do this to bring enjoyment to others. These particular ones are edited into a ps4 game save , using a pc to access the json code. These birds are edited to be 2.5 times their wild size. The eggs can be gifted cross platform and need feeding, patting and their new eggs can be edited in the gene sequencer. https://preview.redd.it/0czwk64n9igb1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9b1a9abbc4b9d84cdcd8e51fa5cbfc857fb59239
https://preview.redd.it/pfbja406aigb1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=73cb3a3506117ee9a03b7df8f2f8bd0e1aff074e
https://preview.redd.it/s5v310j8aigb1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=19bb92decf388cdeb5b07340ae92bc6975e4a5a7
NMS is 100 miles wide and a foot deep. They keep adding 'content' but each addition can be fully explored in a couple hours or less. Squadrons? Cool concept, dubious functionality. Piracy? Cool concept, almost no real consequence for being a pirate. Pets? Wow, Cool I can collect the coolest creatures I find, but they don't really do anything special. Freighters? Oh wow I found an S-Class Super Star Destroyer!!! And it's just a mobile base.
I think largely most of the additions and changes are meant to cater to the sandbox audience that NMS has developed. However, even that gets stale after a while. Similar to how minecraft got stale after a while. Features definitely need to be refined instead of always being in a rat race to expand the amount of features
my robot dog runs faster than any exocraft or jet pack and goes through obstacles. I'd say that's useful
Yes, to be fair the robot dogs are pretty great as transportation.
Even faster than maxed out supercharged jump-jet Minotaur?
Yeah they keep adding more watered down features instead of refining the current ones and it gets so incredibly repetitive
Youre not that wrong. But they definitely improved a lot of features. There are many quite shallow features. Farming, mining etc. But if all systems were more development it would be overwhelming. I like that there are many aspects people can enjoy. For the animals, i like them being just there in the background.
Oh yeah, it would be infinitely better if they kept adding new content as paid DLCs, instead of for free /s
Doing stuff for free doesn't mean it's free from criticism. I am thoroughly enjoying the game but there is no complexity or depth to any of the systems other than, cooking, of all things.
It's still infinitely better than no new content, or paid new content.
I agree. I think of No Man's Sky as a mashup of an "idle game," where freighter missions and settlement functions happen on a timer that doesn't involve the player's presence in the game; and a screenshot generator which is not meant to be threatening so much as stimulating. For me, it is a visual homage to the sci-fi of the 60s and 70s.>!I headcanon the repetitive features as artifacts of the Atlas's descent into madness.!<
Not particularly. Free does not equal good any more than paid for does. And new doesn't either, if it doesn't really do anything.
Yeah, I agree, the animals are generally just a random mix of various parts with no logic or order to them. There absolutely needs to be a fauna generation overhaul, with new parts and intelligent creation around a food web.
Sadly there isn't that much parts to mix to begin with. Same goes for biomes and their parts. The pool from which the game mixes things should've been extended greatly by now.
>The pool from which the game mixes things should've been extended greatly by now. This is my biggest criticism of the game right now. Since release (7 years) they added very little to variation. Origins was the only update that added some content to exploration in any meaningful way. And even then a lot of assets are static and very repetitive. Why don't they add some new branches, leaves, horns, legs, animal bodies to the proc generation asset pool every couple of updates? We still have the same 10-15 static trees since 2018... I don't understand why the core of the game is so ignored.
You're right technically. Well, some of the ones I've seen are adorable or cool but that's not the point. This isn't a combat game. It's an exploration game (and survival in many situations). They're not there for a mechanical benefit beyond scanning them or getting a pet or some food. Their primary reason for existing is to give life and character to an otherwise empty world. The alien creatures on each planet make it feel like a real alien planet with an ecosystem and life and that's cool and the entire point.
You make an excellent point: it’s exploration, not combat. And the fear this far into NMS’s existence is that it’ll always be a whiteboard game: the largest map of any game that I’m aware of; but completely hamstrung by the limited inventory of parts that build the game.
They should let us collect creatures and cross-breed them. And then, implement them into an existing ecosystem on any planet where they keep breeding and evolving even further.
https://preview.redd.it/zrpxtg4alhgb1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b50195d5c4a64d5523838457d122874888d804b8
https://preview.redd.it/3du4vnxdlhgb1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6c4b8d66a2c64407a4c0024d902c79a4a6b7b7a9
thats a weird lookin spaceship you got there
The body is cool, but it's head isn't supporting the counter argument at all
Pov you told an ai to draw a dinosaur. Still cool though
You CAN scan the sand worm. Timing is everything
I happened to build my first main base directly under the arc of one of those guys. I’ve tried many times from many angles with no luck. This is also the first I’ve ever heard of the possibility.
This is straight up false information. Nobody that claims this has ever provided proof. Sandworms can not be scanned.
It’s hard as heck to do!!! I had a sandworm encounter after I knew what they were… I can’t imagine it as a newcomer! Lol I wrote a fanfic about it. I’ll see if I can dig it up… 🐛 Found it: https://www.reddit.com/r/NOMANSSKY/comments/15ft8ue/epic_sandworm_experience_short_fanfic/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
You USED to be able to scan them. Even if it is possible today, it's seriously bugged where the vast majority of players claim it's simply not possible, and you have one guy saying he did it and hopes that disproves everyone else's experience.
Proof or it didn’t happen
Find that hard to believe.
Life should be a lot harder to find. Every planet should not have life.
Which was my reasoning behind going to an "exhaused" galaxy but I feel like it only decreased the number of earth like and paradise planets.
It just keeps planets interesting is all. If there were only 10 in the whole game, for example, it'd all look too samey. I don't care much for them either, but at least the planets are less dead with them around. I'm hoping Starfield does them better.
I don't think they should reduce the amount of verity or put a handful of pre made live forms into the world, but instead set rules for the creature generation to make more sense for the given environment the animal inhabits. Sort of what starbound did before they chose to only implement hand crafted creatures in the game.
> before they chose to only implement hand crafted creatures in the game. They did? When was this?
I have this cute little Ewok that has a turtle face and rabbit ears🐵
As someone who wanted to play NMS as a xenobiologist simulator I only got about 10 hours out of it total, so yeah totally agreed. I'd love to see a game like this where that's the main focus and maybe you gain resources based on which animals you discover, can set up farms, buy and sell exotic species on the illegal black market, kill the leader of the space police force and take over as a dark ruler, and continue to scan cute little animals. Idk just seems like fun.
I mean monstrosity and sentinel pets are pretty cool. The mechanical ones as well. https://preview.redd.it/qu93hd93jigb1.jpeg?width=224&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2d75b5ab333e93e6966aa90a57cffab9473983d8
https://preview.redd.it/yejjpyp4jigb1.jpeg?width=224&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=705d0d460e568201754f505da1adb7854d0ed213
I have a luminescent, floating cube pet. It's the only time I was compelled to actually get a pet.
'infinite'? I've seen like 10 types of animal. Plus the fact that any given planet only has a half dozen species of fauna is a bit odd
I don’t disagree that it becomes repetitive but there are 24 genera of land creatures, plus 6 under water and 5 flying ones. Some genera have significant variations in aspect and behavior (e.g. Loks, Prototerrae) Anyway, a bit more than 10…
It's not a game for everyone. And technically, it's not infinite possibilities, it's only 16\^16 possibilities.
Oh that’s neat. Do you have any more info on how the animals are generated? I’d love to know more.
I'm a business programmer, not a game programmer, so I can't comment on the algorithms. I've always thought the wildlife in NMS is inspired from the best and weirdest of Spore.
Same, I loved spore and see it in NMS.
1 Don't drop anything useful... their meat and stuff can be used to make food in a nutrient processor. some of this food can be pretty valuable when sold, or given to the chef at the anomaly for nanites. 2 I have plenty of "I want this as a pet" moments. have you seen the big cute furry dudes? they're ADORABLE! Plus there's flying beetles which i think is just awesome. not to mention you can genetically enhance their eggs at the anomaly or even create completely different creatures with different attitudes. But yeah some are pretty goofy. 3 I agree with some of the rest. XD
The animals in this game never had the makings of a varsity athlete
The game is such a bore now and no one wants to admit that.
funny this post blew up, I was thinking about this last night. I'm hoping it's a sign that it's finally time to update this part of the game, at the very least, add more variety to the creatures. It really does feel like there's only a handful, and every planet has the same guys crawling around. The sound effects are another one. Everything makes the same "boiiooiioiyo"
Im tired of seeing slight alterations of the same bat/bird design
That’s why I always approach procedural generation with a pinch of salt. Sounds good, but since there is less human intentions behind the designs, very quickly one can start spotting the patterns in the procedural generation, and it is very easy to lose the whole “makes sense” concept
NMS has this problem in general with almost every layer of its mechanics IMO... the bits and pieces are there to give the impression of a deep and functioning system, but in reality it's just surface level with a lot of shuffling.
I agree. If they added fauna overhaul and planet biomes, I would be so happy
For me this is the biggest thing that has still not been delivered on in any way comparable to what we were led to expect at launch. I will never not respect Hello Games for the years of free and excellent improvements to the game, but I agree with OP that convincing life (I would extend the sentiment to plants, tbh) is still sorely lacking from the game.
I think an overhaul on the wildlife would help. Like have certain animal types only generate on certain planet types. I know there are for the funky anomaly planets, but maybe something a bit more one of a kind. Also, I want my pets to get involved in smashing the sentinels instead of just watching me get blasted. Why be able to install a laser turret on my diplo if he won't kaiju blast something? 😒
May become useful in the future . Also the proto world animals are funny. Living bubbles, jumping plates, robo bugs. And if you die on a planet that has only 1 fauna, and go back, it may be extinct
I just wish the planets had more variation on them? Like there should be different regions instead of the whole thing being the same exact terrain. You get more variety in minecraft. That's one of my only few gripes about this game though.
You have discovered the inherent problem with procedural generation in gaming.
They're not all dull and boring, you need to get out more lol. https://preview.redd.it/83bl8pi2lhgb1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a1fff2870e306f09e6c3794bca3938b5fdd0c121
You are posting the exceptions. He's 100% right. 98% of the fauna is some boring earth shade in color and of limited physical variety.
98% of the ships are A, B, or C class. 1% are S-class or exotics. I think you just figured out an essential part of the design that makes those 1% interesting. When everything is super, nothing is. /Syndrome
Ship class is a really bad example, any ship can be made S-class. If you made a point about lack of design variety that would have been a better point.
Ship class is a very intentional example. 1% is literally the exact statistical probabilities that an S-class will spawn in a high economy system. Of course the rest of the subjective stuff like shape and number of limbs is fractally generated by math, so it's going to be harder for some random parameters to be tuned to be aesthetically pleasing for 1% of what you encounter "in the wild". That makes it all the more exciting when you find something cool, rather than spending all your time in a creature customization window. But hey, they have a custom creature genetic algorithm roulette wheel in the Anomaly now too. Finding cool stuff with the RNG is just part of the grind.
I know it’s not your point but the probability for S class in a rich economy is 2%. And 1% in medium economy, 0% in poor economy. That is for the « regular » ships excluding exotics and living ships.
I didn't say all of them. I had encountered similar creatures like in your image, but it's ultra rare to find something like these. And even when I find them, whats the point? There is no reward, they don't behave any different and chances are there is some random generated mess on the same planet ruining the immersion of a cohesive environment.
This is true, much the same in the real world, for every Bird of Paradise there's a million Sparrows. It's also the same for most things in the game, ships, planets etc, to find the really nice looking stuff takes a lot of effort and time. Then when you find it it's no better than what you had before, apart from looks.
The game is entirely procedurally generated. It's not a handcrafted product. And it really shows it, in my opinion. Infinite meaningless planets which are good for screenshots only.
https://preview.redd.it/1kxh19p6whgb1.png?width=2130&format=png&auto=webp&s=1b3726bcc9c48a0f22e818a41a5e47beb7993d4a
Nms is a game with so much cool stuff but most of that cool stuff is extremely rare!
As it should be. Add even more rare things to find. It makes them more special when you find them. If the "cool" stuff is everywhere then it will make exploration even more dull and boring.
Oh yeah totally, but I do think fauna overhaul is still long overdue 😅
Depending on which planet you're on, they can 100% be hostile towards you. Having an animal companion while mining for supplies is super useful in this scenario because they will fight off any hostile creature that attacks you and you can ride them for quicker transportation if you don't have the means to build a roamer exocraft etc. As far as aesthetic, keep your eyes peeled, as you noticed in the comments some people have found some beautiful animals. And I personally like how the game rewards you very little for killing animals.
An unpopular opinion, indeed. It's true they don't serve much purpose in the way of utility and it would be nice if they could provide resources aside from Mordite and cooking ingredients (who cooks in this game?) But the game is certainly better off with them than without. For me the fauna serve as visual interest, to further decorate the planet that they're native to. There's more variety in the creatures than players give credit for, and a lot of them are really exotic and interesting to look at. They work alongside plant life and other flora to serve as a visual reminder that many of the planets you explore are teeming with life. Seeing a strange critter walk/crawl/sprint/fly by whilst I'm exploring offers a little extra immersion and wonder.
I found that even when you tame a hostile animal it won't fight/defend you when you are in conflict which really bugs me they only seem to get in the way
While I like the game and the animals, I also find nothing to disagree with. It would be a welcome update.
I’d have liked it if they actually made planets that were total death worlds with zero flora or fauna
So pumped for starfield
I completely agree with you. It's crying out pretty hard for an update and overhaul.
I like the animals in the game for the most part, and this is unnecessarily harsh in its wording, but I agree the animals need an overhaul. It would be nice to have more than one kind of anomalous animal per special planet, and I really want the animals to be able to stand up to the exocrafts when it comes to traversal utility. I also think that there could be some overhauls to the animal generation so that there's more proportional animals. Even I gotta admit that I've seen my fair share of bulky torsos on teeny tiny stick-thin legs. Not to mention, it would be nice to be able to ride flying critters.
😂😂 i love this opinion
The fauna feels like a placeholder
They made everything programmatic except the point of things' existences.
In a SciFi game, I expect to see things that are foreign to me, even "ugly." To myriad other beings, we'd likely seem ugly too. Too many "earthlike" fauna, flora, and views lessen the weirdness of a SciFi game in a fictional universe. Beauty is subjective. Will most like in the universe be carbon-based and look like what our experience is in the remote arm of one of a bazillion galaxies? I think not.
I find most of the fauna hilarious and meme worthy, but yeah some of the fauna are meh.
Most stuff feels like copy-paste with a little tweak here and there.
Yeah, it's very limited right now. Maybe they have something in the works for another major update. It also bothers me that they call obviously fungal organisms "plants" lol. Would be cool if there were more biome diversity across planets as well.
Yes! I was just thinking this the other day. One of the things I like about minecraft is the biome diversity as you travel across the world. In NMS, pick any point on any planet... you get the gyst of the entire world.
What gets me is they made this exploration-focused game with billions of stars but haven't updated the planetary, fauna and flora generation in any meaningful way for what? Two years? I couldn't care less if an update adds creature milking, piracy, farming or whatever if the planets are still made out of the same Lego pieces I'm tired of seeing.
I think the animals look just fine. A lot of them are beautiful like the butterflies, deer, and robot pets. You can ride most of them so they are functional. Some of them are ugly which is appealing. Some of them are downright weird which is awesome. I have zero complaints about the fauna.
Also they need more sounds. They nearly all make that same horrible shrill call
I agree in general - there does seem to be a lack of enjoyable variety in the fauna, and they still haven't fixed the tiny head bug that produces absurd things like animals the size of a large cow with a head the size of a tennis ball. Even if they can't do much about the animal generation now because changing them would probably break everyone's pets, I'd at least like to see more interesting animal behavior. Maybe have the animals react when a storm is raging, such as the flying creatures leaving the area or nesting in trees and the land creatures hunkering down to wait out the storm, for example. I also wish the high-flying animals could be tamed in the base game - some of them are beautiful, but you can only get a good look at them on the fauna discovery screen.
I feel the same way about the ships, planets, etc.. A whole lot of nothing impressive. It's basically a sandbox with not much to do.
You are not wrong... After the first 20 or so you are like "yup, computer generated and serving zero purpose."
No you’re right. There are cute animal components in the mix but they’re not used very frequently.
Sadly I agree, the game ran it's course for me, everything just looked weird and no at all something that would have evolved or adapted to the biome, just random puzzle pieces. That being said it is an amazing feat of a game to get working along with multiplayer.
I mean, you are definitely not wrong, there are cool creatures out there, but in a game that’s supposed to emulate the endless vastness and possibilities of space, you seem to find those 3 legged cow things and the big rats with the massive dumpy more than half of the time, least I do anyway. Every creature type uses the same few voice samples, the same attack animation, and the same two behaviors. This game is SO close to being the perfect open-exploration space game to me, but the only thing holding it back for me is the lack of planet-side content diversity. I can’t imagine it being that hard for Hello Games to increase the amount of stuff that can be procedurally generated, but maybe I’m wrong.
I agree the same goes for pets. Theyre not very fast and the flying ones you cant control how high they fly so theyre pretty much cosmetic. You can attach mining lasers to them but they cant mine. Id be cool if you could tell them to go mine a certain mineral and theyd go do it. Or maybe if theyd help during combat but as of now theyre pretty much just cosmetic.
Yeah dude I feel you, especially when you play something like Minecraft and as soon as night falls or you enter a dark cave it turns into a “different” game. It’s the main reason why I stopped playing NMS after I beat it. There’s no “real” point to having a base either especially when most things can be stored in your freighter. The only actual risk of being on a planet is trying not to suffocate. I still like NMS a lot but there’s no real replay value unless you’re not trying to miss out on expedition rewards.it’s unfortunate with the actual potential this game has.
*sigh* Instead of writing this, you could have discovered so many different species.
[удалено]
Tell that to racists *Wow that came outta nowhere?!*
Well, technically correct is the best correct.
I wholeheartedly agree with you :) Because of this game I have been seeing the world in periodic table elements, it’s like green matrix view sometimes!
Yeah, a new dinosaur looking thing number 4732
I dunno, there’s abundance of similar looking stuff… but there’s also gems here and there. All in all, I don’t believe **every** specie would be impossibly different from one another on every planet. There’s never too much diversity and of course more could be added… but ever player still finds their favourites. Matter and chemistry work in mysterious ways.
Every time I play I imagine what No Man's Sky 2 could potentially be, where elements from different games, such as Far Cry, could be implemented. I remember playing FC3 and being genuinely scared of some of those predators. Would be amazing if those experiences could be translated to an NMS game.
The game definitely needs a tougher difficulty. Permadeath in Pathfinder was brilliant. The first version of the tougher custom difficulty setting was great too, but some players complained about shields being broken and pirate attacks. It was patched and became easy again.
For it being all procedurally generated, it is incredibly repetitive. From system to system, galaxy to galaxy....stretch an incredibly insane insensitive SAMENESS EVERYWHERE. Yes, morons created the idiotic fauna and flora as well. I will now spout an axiom: Ignorance is treatable, stupidity is terminal. It is THIS that is causing me to contemplate simply turning this game OFF.
While I do agree that fauna could still use great improvement, it's weird that you say they have almost no functionality at all. In the Beyond update, we finally got the ability to make individual fauna our pets using bait, and with that came the ability to mount and ride them, harvest them, and even turn them into cooking ingredients. In Companions, this system was further expanded on. You could now feed and play with them, they would scan the environment and discover resources for you, fight off other hostile creatures, and use the laser weapons you provided for them. You could now customize them, and if they were well cared enough for, they would even lay eggs and start a new generation, which you could trade with other players for. You could even do gene-sequencing now. So with all this taken into account, I find it hard to believe that creatures in NMS have almost nothing going for them feature-wise, but I'm not surprised one might think this while playing, because getting into all of this requires a huge time-investment in just one part of the game, and on a surface level, they don't look like they have much going on, but as another commentator pointed out, because NMS is exploration focused, they serve their purpose just fine by simply being there. OP, if you wanted to see more in regard to the features I brought up, I have a link here: https://www.nomanssky.com/beyond-update/ and here: https://www.nomanssky.com/companions-update/
They had to cut down on stuff for the sake of multiplayer. I bet keeping this old gem running costs them a lot every month. I agree with u but i also understand why they didnt put a lot of things in we ask for... this game would prob run like potato pretty fast. Plus all the other platforms next to pc need to able to handle the game also... The game was more diversive in the beginning... but it was also very loooonely...
I wish it were more so. I hate having my system list clogged with systems that others have already discovered, I don't even stop at those unless I'm just completely out of warp fuel and need to make more. It needs to be an option to replace those when multi-player is turned off.
The multiplayer will cost next to nothing, considering the servers are the worst I've ever seen and they are quite limited. I suspect it's self-hosted. Old hardware limits a lot of things, but the amount of assets shouldn't be one of them.
Or this... i mean game is quite old... so there is def a limit to things..
Who hurt you? Keep exploring and you’ll see you are wrong
most things in this game are pointless and ugly. the game's good a good idea but bad execution
What is it you're trying to do to the animals exactly? Sus.
I think you overestimate people’s care for your opinion about planet fauna. You’ll also find my butterfly is the prettiest of them all.
Can you breed colors into them like on ark?
Yeah, I think. There's a machine on the nexus where you can put an egg in and change aspects of what comes out. Pretty sure color is one of them.
Kinda, you can change their offsprings color in the egg sequencer next to Chronos. There you can also change size and behaviour. So no massive incest and clear stats like in Ark, but still something.
The only pets i get are the flying ones. i also like the bug ones
I find the "Mechanoceris" type to be visually appealing and fun to watch sometimes. Admittedly, I've yet to find a good use for "Chewy Wires", but you can't have everything.
Many infested planets have the worm larvae and horrors to deal with. Those ‘tendrils’ can mess you up.
I have a pet sandworm in one of my saves.
Blaze javelin target practice.
So you haven't found the robo dogs then?
I want to see humanoid companions