The implication from what I've read - admittedly, not much - is that you'll have to join up with people deliberately, rather than just stumbling across randoms. There's definitely been a "play with friends" emphasis in the marketing, at least.
Team up a small team of friends and explore the universe together, or be joined by random travelers.
Ugh. Random people can get to fuck.
You can help friends to stay alive, or prey on others to survive.
UGH. Griefing. No thanks.
I get it, it's the kind of game that people want multiplayer for. But I hate playing with other people. Other people are, as a rule, arseholes. Only game I've played for ages where I didn't mind was Laser League, and that's because it's sports, not killing.
I'll still give it a go though, since the game's still on my PS4. Would be rude not to.
I mean, I do think the odds of running into someone else are astronomically small (even on the same planet, there's room for multiple players to truck around and never meet), and escaping to a different system should be easy enough. It depends how obviously the game telegraphs the presence of other humans.
I share Mart’s concerns about the multiplayer but I’ve been telling myself for ages that I need to give NMS another go as I haven’t played it since launch. This is clearly the point at which to do so.
Bought it in the sale. First impressions are all over the place.
It's a lot weightier, prettier, and more polished than I expected, having watched videos online. Perhaps that's the NEXT patch. It's also obscenely exciting – I still haven't fixed my ship up yet, but exploring this genuinely alien landscape, and knowing that the whole universe will open up to me soon, is just an absolute wonder. And the world I started on is much more interesting than a lot of what I saw from previous versions of the game. It has mountains, caverns, flora and fauna that look genuinely possible.
However. Jesus Christ it's kicking my arse. Does everyone start on an irradiated planet with electrical storms and killer everything, or did I just get unlucky with some random spawn? Before the game had even explained the life support system to me I had depleted the entire thing, as it valiantly tried to fight off an entirely hostile planet. Radiation everywhere, storms every few minutes that kick the shit out of me.
And I need oxygen to repair my ship – I searched for one whole hour last night, scanning plants and minerals, and found a single plant with oxygen. It gave me 29, I need 30.
So I think I'm loving it. But I know it doesn't love me.
I haven't played Next yet, but in previous NMS your starting planet is completely random and can be gorgeous or desolate and occasionally deadly. Mine was full of pretty plants, lots of high mountains and lots of robots that tried to kill me when I tried to harvest certain things.
The first system I (re)started in with NEXT only had irradiated planets; it took two jumps before I found one that didn't have an atmosphere that wanted me dead. It's got huge trees and orange grass, and islands that float in the sky.
I haven't played Next yet, but in previous NMS your starting planet is completely random and can be gorgeous or desolate and occasionally deadly.
I must just be unlucky then, because mine is frequently deadly. I'm having to farm mission objectives minerals in 60-second bursts, then do a 60-second burst of farming for the hazmat/health materials, otherwise any longer and I'm dead.
I know some planets used to be listed as "high security", or something, and the sentinels were more aggressive. The only attempt at mining I've done yet, I pulled the wrong trigger and blew myself up with a grenade.
I've found that the sentinels will attack me if I keep mining while they're watching me. If I stop and wait for them to fly off, or move away and find another resource node to laser, then it's usually fine.
It looks large. This game has always been about the exploration for me, so improving the world generation is definitely the most exciting thing they could do.
In amongst hundreds of game-changing patch notes, the most important is clearly:
I share Mart’s concerns about the multiplayer but I’ve been telling myself for ages that I need to give NMS another go as I haven’t played it since launch. This is clearly the point at which to do so.
I love that I wrote this six years ago and still haven’t played it, because every time I think about doing so there is always another humongous update on the way. I see the new one is called Worlds Part 1 so there is at least one more just around the corner.
I, as I have done many times, returned to this to review the new update. I want so desperately to like NMS. I want to believe in the redemption arc of the nice man who led the development of it.
But… I just don't like it. I admire the scale, but it's just a bloated crafting-game mess, and getting increasingly more so. I landed on my first planet post-update and the first amazing animal I saw was a triceratops head on an elephant body all coloured in lurid yellow. It looked shit. Everything else looked…. NMS? The new clouds were, OK. Everything just has a sort of chuntery indie game feel to it. I visited a station and the NPCs were just laughable. Morrowind level. Everything is such a weird collision of huge ambition and underwhelming implementation. All in the same GenZ gameplay loop ("find 16 blorples to craft a norple, then collect 15 norples to build a flowerpot!!!11!!!").
I do think their next game will be more me. I think some of the tech, distilled into one world and with better gameplay systems could be great.
