The chances of this thing not mortally withering under the nuclear fumes of videogames punditry were so low on launch I'm feeling kind of compelled to see how it got its shit together. Plus I need something to actually do with my expensive and powerful PC these days because MHW Iceborn's not out yet.

I've got creative and normal playthroughs on the go on PS4 - if anyone wants to join up in MP once this launches, I'm up for that. I've been trying to transfer loads of materials and crafted gear to my freighter in case Sean decides to kill all the bases again with this update.

Pissed around with it over weekend. Honestly, they've managed to wed Minecraft and Elite really pretty successfully, and that brief is at least technically ambitious. They've managed to make actual traversal mechanically non-trivial in a way that's quite satisfying.
But it's always going to miss content, and I don't mean rare loot. It's the fundamental challenge of proposing a vast possibility space and then there're like, only 3/4 sets of mix-n-match races and construction assets to ever encounter and every system features exactly the same infrastructure and presentation of settlements and resources and. 
I guess the fiction/lore/whatever is written is such a way to constrain expectations here but I can't shake the feeling of a pretty unremarkable trade empire up in this Euclid place. Been spoiled by Banks books and more.

Oof, will need to clear out some space.

Ive it set downloading.....workin from home so gonna give it s a quick whirl shortly!

Uncannily accurate


EDIT VR FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Ooooof not great first impressions I have to say. Its super low resolution. Looking down the landing bay of a station and the end of the bay is horribly low res. Looking at the screen of the ps4 on the tv would confirm that, its showing the bottom left corner only.
The controls are odd too. In smooth movement you can go forward etc but it doesnt follow your head. Seems like you have to rotate the view manually with button presses and then its like 90 degree turns.Not impressed initially.

Im playing on a PS4 Pro btw.
Maybe there are some options I need to tweak. Will try later.

I cannot fathom the VR being particularly pleasant beyond the ship's cockpit, where you expect to be physically static.

digi wrote:

So the controls are a bit weird at first. With move controllers you reach to your back with right move and pull trigger to get your multi-tool. You use left hand to head to use visor for scanning. Smooth movement needs to be set in options instead of teleporting. Same with turning etc. Flying around is amazingly good. Being the same size as npcs is great. Some of the creatures look low res but are mental to look at how large they are especially vertically. I'm enjoying it but need a break for a while. Il be back to try it with pad later.

Did you work out how to turn in smaller increments than 90 degrees? Even with smooth movement enabled it just smoothly turns in that arc.

Nice....I noticed you can use the joypad to move also. Cant wait to give it a whirl later

Soooooo initial reaction is massive disappointment with this.
Now Im sure some of my problems I can sort out with tweaking the control scheme(eg the in ship controls are SUPER sensitive) and educating myself on it (only last night on an ObsidianAnt video I saw how to set the direction you teleport to).

First the scale. I've been rather vocal on the scale of the game not being right. I thought VR would help and to be fair it does. On certain things. NPCS,animal,plants,caves and walking around a planet in general is pretty great. But I cant say the same for space stations/space itself. After leaving a space station and looking back at it, it seems like football sized object, I could reach out and pick up. Same for the planets. No proper sense of scale at all.

Being in the cockpit is cool, but there are weapon names on some screens and the resolution is so bad I can hardly read them. (Im playing on a Pro btw) This is less noticeable on planets etc where that lack of detail doesnt jump out as much.

Ninja’s post has made me very happy. I really didn’t want to buy a VR headset just for this game.

To me this update just seems to have added more busy work for base builders (why not just add the logic elements rather than bolt them onto this whole power generator business?), but the nexus looks like it'll be a major change fir the best once it's patched to stop the servers crashing. As an explorer, I'm looking forward to trying out VR just for the extra immersion, but I've yet to see biome improvement.

Biomes get more better and more varied as you get closer to the centre of the universe.

Well I know before Beyond there was Exotic planets that you could visit with all kinds of weird shit. But I'm a bit disappointed that varied biomes are not available from the off. If there's one thing that's preventing me from going back to this is the thought of visiting all the those samey ice/fire/toxic level planets over and over again.

The QoL improvements do seem significant though and I love that you can now find wandering alien NPC's actually on the planet surface.

Might return to Space this weekend after all.

August 2016.
Hello Games: Here, have 18 quintillion planets to explore.
Gamers: There’s not enough content.



August 2019
Hello Games: Here, have all the things that were nothing to do with our original concept, but you said you wanted anyway.
Gamers: There’s still not enough content.