He's clearly a talented programmer with vision and ambition and the game wouldn't exist without him. It'd be a shame if he took all the constructive criticism/death threats to heart, we've enough grey shooters already.

The parallels with Molyneux are interesting, he's easy to demonise now but there was a time when Bullfrog were ambitious developers creating classics like Populous, Syndicate and Theme Park.

Pootling is great, if you enjoy a pootle you'll enjoy this.

Nobody is allowed to use the word hyperbole around here, since I learned its correct pronunciation it upsets me greatly.

I don't think it's fair to call him a deluded nutjob either. He is a gobshite though.

The new Molyneux

TBH, seeing a lot of the timescales for green light/early access games, he wasn't way off - what screwed the pooch for the timing was Sony and the other big publishers getting interested and escalating the scope of what would have been a fantastic indie game into an attempted AAA boxed title. Live and learn, eh. I'd warrant that Hello Games' next will scale back to mid-to-large size indie (Firewatch or The Witness kind of scope).

Tempy wrote:

Joe Danger's Sky

Would play

monkey wrote:

Although even then I think there's limits with how much you can do with an exploration game that destroys the environment you've discovered as soon as you leave it

It categorically does not do that.

Yes

I recently travelled back through a couple of systems that weren't waypointed and everything was still there too

And to balance out my comments which have just been me shitting all over this game, they have completely nailed the procedural environment generation. There's nothing there to tell you this wasn't hand crafted. I really hope they licence this out or its replicated by other companies. Not just to make procedural games but to increase game world sizes in standard games. 

If you can input the parameters you want, and generate an planet sized environment of this quality, you can tweak it after, add in hand-made bits. I think that would be a huge change to the pipeline. Even if it just leads to eg having a hundred arenas in a shooter rather than 10.

Would ocean trenches and mountainous ravines be too much to ask for you think?

I had a little dabble a few days ago. The base building felt shit and pointless.

I do think this game did some real cool stuff and that opening hour was amazing... but I'm only really keeping it because I like the cover art more than is warranted.

It's a shame you can't sell on digital purchases as I'd pay someone ten quid to have mine

Tazzing about in the fast car looks kinda fun (not sure why you'd do it if you've got a spaceship, mind). The big truck thing that you can mine while driving is probably more useful. New base stuff looks nice as well. It mentions that damaged ships will crash in survival mode as well now, so maybe that means you can do the ship upgrade loop by shooting up the NPCs, downing their ships and nicking them? That might be fun an all.

Nice to see they're sticking with it and providing these free updates.

They look like Goodyear's sphere tyres.

It was the one thing that stuck out to me as a weird, thematic departure over what has come before. I don't like it either, and if they continue down that route then I may be out too.