So the other thing I did was discover that No Man's Sky has an issue with retaining data about Points of Interest on your visited worlds. Players will probably be annoyed to figure this out after the hours it can take to map out even a tiny part of these massive planets. I'm here eating my fist because I can't make cities and play a real-time Sid Meier's Civ/Tycoon style game on a properly sized world and in a universe with more than enough planets to make automating the expansion of an empire feel rewarding.. but none of that's possible. I can live with that for now..
Instead this fucking game can't even retain the points of interest after I leave. Stares shell-shocked at the floor. 70 dollars.... Would have been enough for Sid Meier but not enough for Sony and Hello Games.
It feels like the developers are hell bent in making you realize the game is so much more mind boggling larger than it has any right to be that too fucking bad you can't understand how big it is. It was obvious that they actual result would be fuck you, I want to make the most of the little I can interact with. But you're making that hard AND you're taking it away from me and telling me to keep moving forward.
I can't speak for other players but I really could make the most of what's here exactly BECAUSE I've played so many hours of Maxis and Meier simulation games (and many others).
I mean I've been waiting for this games for a very long time. Not this exact game of course, I figured something more complete and polished.. but Star Citizen shits all over that idea too.. but just something that works and fits the scale offered by NMS that gives you a ship and doesn't tell you what to do.
Facepalm.. AT LEAST LET PEOPLE KNOW HOW TO PLAY this joke of a garbage POS travesty of an excuse for a game! Jesus Christ.
But after leaving my starter world because I didn't see any point in staying on it without any more slots to work with.. I started warping through the next few systems.
There's nothing wrong with doing either.. it was just a choice to want to strip mine those first few worlds and level up my suit and ship slots. Just didn't realize that I might have gotten further staying on that first world by scanning for transmissions and earning more money to buy more suit slots from drop pods and locating crashed ships to scavenge. You just don't make enough money fast enough for it to be practical to do that on your first planet unless you're lucky.
I felt validated in leaving and warping to a new world because I found one filled with Vortex Cubes... of course by the time I got there even my patience with this game's senseless shit was done. I was just playing to max out my slots. I even sold my Atlas Stones like there were so many magic beans because I don't care about using them in the galactic core because I don't know how long it will take to get there once everything is maxed out. All I know is I'm too frustrated by this games current state to care.
But while on that planet I found that this game really is fucking broken. All it offers is a clue as to what a great game at this scale could be.. and what seems to be the industry standard of compromising everything else to push the game out of the door. I'm willing to concede that there's still platform, and network limitations that make it impossible to accomplish what Spore could have been.. like making it a realtime version of civ playable on gigantic planets... But right at this moment I don't know if those limitations are based on consoles.. or purely contrived by the developer.. or actual limitations that make it acceptable to have presented this shit to the world of PC gamers. The ones behind the 'don't fuck this up or we'll kill you' type threats.
This is 'not fucking it up'? I hope they are all hiding in WitPro.
So against every ounce of better judgement and because I was convinced to do so by MissKyliee in order to complete my last task.. maxing out my multi-tool and ship.. I tried to locate a Gek system and a transmission tower.
This game's bullshit and my horrendous bad luck conspired to make even something as simple and locating a system in a game with only 3 alien races.. a long and arduous task.
Several hours of searching later I found a system with a vacant space station. I'm like wtv. I don't even care.
I went down to the planet and eventually located what I needed to try the exploit MissKyliee demonstrated on her Twitch Broadcast.
A few hours later I had something like 20 crashed ships to sort through.
I'd already figured out the strategy was valid because I'd already had multiple crashed ships to scan on previous worlds and it made sense that each would roll a new ship once the player would get nearby.
She wasn't sure but we proved it..
So I went through the 20 ships and then a bunch more to max my ship out. With each one she recommended scrapping all the tech and consolidating the resultant salvage into neat stacks and selling off the rest. I got annoyed again by thinking that while this ship is maxed.. I don't have 60 million to buy a replacement and it would somehow be unlikely to locate another 48 slot ship if I stopped looking for one now.
This wonderful exploit she explained wasn't bad because she wasn't actually breaking the game.. she was just taking advantage of a probably corrupt or lazy Gek at a transmission tower that could have turned it off but had opted not to.. No skin off it's nose to leave the scanner on and allow you to find as many ships as you needed.
I even got a tweet about this exploit while editing this blog XD but it was posted a day or two ago. How random.
And frankly it reduced a process that would have taken several days down to a few hours. And still represented work because it takes 30 or so crashed ships to max out your inventory.. and as I was warning Kyliee before she started, she'd still have to rebuild all the tech for that final ship.. since it wasn't one she was buying she'd have to make do with the last one she needed to max out OR continue scavenging for a nice one.
Which to be fair I considered before I set out and was like fuck the consideration of finding a nice ship. This game is ass and I might as well max everything out now and IF and when I had enough units.. I'd maybe look for a nice ship. So far I haven't even seen the model I want in game.
But that's only the part about getting max slots in my Suit and Ship. But by then I mean the game is broken anyway because something like Destiny, the game doesn't recognize or care that you're maxed out. There's no scaling up of the rewards or choices presented to you when you're at least on paper all powerful and godly. Even the enemies don't scale to you. Sean Murray had said that the game would scale as you got closer to the center. Fucking more bullshit that I'm couldn't be bothered really to verify at this point because nothing has scaled at all so far.
I was like.. done with this planet I should find that vortex cube world again to make that 60 million.
So back out into space and in a still half-destroyed salvaged ship that has no functioning guns and duct tape for shields.. I realized I was lost. And after 30 ships I felt like I'd just accomplished the single most useful thing in this game given is paucity of features. Find a ship and flip it.. even when something that simple was reduced to a bare ass minimum because you can't sell it afterwards. You can't get a lift by any passing alien if you somehow end up without a ship.. each space station just sees them landing and taking off and isn't in any sense a common area like the Destiny tower or Mos Eisley spaceport. Would that any aspect of this game evoke the roguish charm and ever constant rush of any locale described or shown in Star Wars lore. And you can't even (yet if ever) get a meaningfully larger ship to get out of the mind-numbing doldrums of salvaging derelict ships.
I couldn't figure out a way to locate that vortex world.
I mean it took another 2 days to try to figure it out. But the only thing I was really learning is how inexcusably shit this game is.
The star map should have an option to show what planets you've been to (and does). But the button for it just says press Tab to scan which does fuck all.
So I'm like lemme individually look at the names of each nearby star and try to trace my flight path since I starting warping from my starter planet.
No-go really because it wasn't a straight path. Also the only two labeled paths are the Atlas path (which is moving away from the galactic center for no god damned reason, and the path towards.
A little math told me I was fucked because the systems I'd been through kind of went in all different directions each time.
That and trying to figure out the names, and retain them from a cloud of glitter suspended in space was driving me nuts. Like once you start to think you're getting familiar with individual stars in a cloud of glitter.. but have to keep rebuilding that knowledge because the map keeps closing or the game crashes, or the computer crashes.. I was starting to regret my life choices..
I went to Google and found that no one was really having the same difficulty I was. And I found that in my surveying I noticed 2 stars that were claimed by another player.
Eventually I noticed that the internet was saying to do things I wasn't getting an option to. And my brain must have been like.. sigh.. let me jump in here and give you a hint.
It reminded me that I had a Sony Dual Shock controller already plugged in and with it I found the expanded options to view all my previous claimed systems. Or at least the nearest ones.
This annoyed me twofold because it meant the UI DID have options.. but they are either not available to people on Keyboard and mouse or it literally isn't clear enough how to access them with only Keyboard and mouse.
And I'd already located all but the next damned planet over the two days of surveying. Since the times discovered and their positions in space didn't lead to a linear flight path I was about to give up.
But I found the oldest from the pool of nearest claimed worlds and tried again from that one.
Eureka.
I found the system with the vortex cube planet and eventually landed on it. I'd have kissed terra firma only to be blessed with never having to look at that star field ever again. But nothing I had as waypoints is here.
Was my profile too big already to have saved them?! I have an obscene amount of local terabytes of storage to work with. So against my better judgement I had to look.
Less than 10 megabytes. Less than the size of an Mp3 or an email with an attachment.
So minuscule yet the game wasn't actually saving important details. Now that's the stuff on my side.. and I can imagine it's more important for the file to remain tiny on the PS4 side even though that system also has Hundreds of gigabytes to work with.
It doesn't make sense for profile data to be so small. And no I don't know how much of my profile resides on servers but that's exactly the point in having them AND paying anything as much as we are short of a monthly subscription.
It became painfully obvious that the morons at Hello Games decided that the only objective the player should be interested in is moving to the next system until they reach the center. Back tracking will be rewarded with a bat to the face. I had figured the difficulty in doing anything else was because they picked that as the goal, and shit, well fuck everything else! We have a release date!
But a little math tells you that no matter how quickly you get to the center your profile would accrue a shit ton of data. Fine.. the solution isn't to keep only a bare minimum of data.. especially not for PC players.
So 18 with 18 more numbers after it planets and being able to visit any of them by itself means all players need to connect to a server. Keep that data off your Ps4. But at the same time your profile is only so large meaning it can only store so much data at a given time. Sony probably set limits on that too.
I just hadn't figured that less than a dozen stars and back and everything would have vanished. Is back tracking really that bad?!
I just can't fathom the difficulty and resultant frustration of this whole situation. Where either the devs are really that garbage that they couldn't make it at least possible to have figured out the method to play the game as is (on PC).. but the only difficult thing about this game IS figuring out how to play it. There's no difficulty in dealing with the weather, the enemies or dirt stupid economics of the game.. There's not even any diplomacy. Nothing that was expected is actually in the game. Ignoring the fact that many players made up most of their expectations.. many concrete things we were shown aren't in the game and the game itself is frustratingly incomplete.
Personally I'm able to play the game and get through it because I want to actually enjoy what little is in here because much of it was promised and hinted at by dozens of games that failed to deliver. This one does and somewhat excels at the technical aspects of what it promised.
It just wasn't clear how incomplete the gameplay and UI would be. At some point a seed was planted and I got annoyed enough that I set up a fake 4 screen out of my 3 24" LCDs. Playing this game at 4K resolution.. or close to it with 3 screens stuck together for a resolution of 3600x1920 with a couple of black bezels in between.. is amazing. It took maybe an hour to get used to it.. but it really help to stop hating on this game so much. I'm guessing that 4K really shines in the star field view because it helps to see local groups of stars and where yours are among them even when they are poorly labeled.
Basically they state very clearly in the few interviews available that they only recognize the game is lacking obvious shit by listening to player feedback.
I god damned tore a hole into a planet and could see its core and another planet through that hole and wasn't even surprised.
Should I jump and see if I yoyo the planets core a few thousand times? or smashed into it? or pass right through it because there's no collision for something that shouldn't be there but IS actually there? or would I keep 'falling'.
I was so done with this shit that I didn't even care.
Had they taken the time to get proper QA done.. and actually done a god damned tutorial.. it would have been obvious that while functional every aspect of the game is ass backwards to the point where anyone that can get the game going, and is actually trying to get through it.. and this is from observing them on Twitch.. most have the same difficulties. Ones that make no sense because they generally complain about the same things. Things that should have been caught before the games release.
So after launch.. and even when Hello Games is saying only 1% of players are having problems.. I'm like now you're going to come out and say you want to polish the game before releasing content AND they have the balls to say some future content will require more money.
I bite my lip and allow my eyes to bug out while taking several deep breaths. These guys need to come back down to earth because where ever the fuck they are from.. they must be getting way too much radiation exposure if they think the majority of early adopters would pay a single cent more.
BUT even after that there's Sony. Sony is like if you refund the game we're revoking your right to ever play it again.
The facepalm that caused me to explode in a super nova so powerful its light reached every single one of the 18 with 18 more numbers after it planets in this miserably stupid game.