Watch this week's episode of Zero Punctuation on Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan - www.escapistmagazine.com/rainbow-billy-the-curse-of-the-leviathan-zero-punctuation/ - Watch it early on TH-cam and support our content via TH-cam Memberships for $2/month. th-cam.com/channels/qg5FCR7NrpvlBWMXdt-5Vg.htmljoin
Maybe just me, but also it could potentially be, just maybe...a pair of bunny ears? I don't know, this is The Escapist after all. For all we know, everything inside that box that you CAN'T see is nothing but knobs and muffs.
Streaming on TH-cam, having kids, wanting to go back to E3, revisiting games he's already reviewed. Man, would love to see Yahtzee from 10 years ago reaction to present day Yahtzee
I still remember the classic joke: "No Man's Sky? More like No Game!" "That wasn't your strongest attempt at wordplay, Yahtzee." "No worries! I'll just patch something better in later!"
I defy any man to beat the obvious one "No Mans Lie" that literally wrote itself on day 1. Even the most quick mind will not be able to outwit dumb-luck. And that was the thing which generated the obvious one :) Napoleon said it best "I'd rather be lucky than good!". Which is exactly what NMS was to begin with, they were lucky people waited for the game to improve, but when it did it was amazing.
Be careful Yahtzee, you might be conditioning us to love the game drought season because of the stuff you have to do to keep the content stream flowing.
Honestly, if he's that hard up for reviews, he should just play Warframe. He'll love the gameplay and the story, hate the organization, and probably have lots to talk about. And it's free, hard to go wrong with that.
I was just rewatching the 2018 review of Observer, where he resists revisiting No Man's Sky because "it's against my principles to encourage this 'let's just fix it in post' culture." Four years later, he finally gives in.
To his credit, No Man's Sky is a special case. If you compare what the game looks like today against initial release it's incredible how much quality of life changes/improvements have been made. It feels like an entirely different game. If this was Assassin's Creed, you wouldn't see this much change occur over a single IP until 4 sequels down the road.
This actually touches on one of my main issues with No Man's Sky. The whole selling point was exploration. The idea that you had this insanely large universe to explore and discover. And obviously that fell flat. But now they've updated and update the game making it massively better..... by basically completely changing the direction to being about basebuilding and crafting. Yes it's a better game. Yes Hello Games deserve some major recognition for turning things around. But as someone who was originally excited on the idea of exploration it is kind of a bitter pill that so much of the improvement is at the further expense of having much reason to explore. I booted up the game yesterday to check out the last few updates that I hadn't gotten around to trying and basically felt like all it was was more progression mechanics and things to craft while the original central point of exploration and discovery feels like it's kind of just sitting there gathering dust as the dev team turns it into a completely different game from what it was originally supposed to be. This isn't me necessarily bad mouthing Hello Games too much. We didn't get that grand exploration game at launch and I can't really fault them for giving many players what they wanted. I just also can't help being a bit sad that it doesn't look like it will ever be the kind of game that had me so excited to begin with.
I completely agree. When base building was put in, I was excited to have a home base I could come to, to unload stuff or improve a few things, entirely so I could go out farther and farther in the universe. But as Yahtzee said, it got samey and I stopped really caring. The crafting and base building really should have been a support to the exploration, not the main focus of the game. I'll forgive it to a degree, just simply because of how far the hame has come. But all enjoyment I could get from it, I already have. Might revisit and start a new save in a year or two when I forget a bunch of stuff.
Grand exploration and procedural generation just don't go together, we don't have the technology to make those work together yet. Exploration works when the worlds are handcrafted to be interesting to explore, like RDR 2, Outer Wilds, the Deus Ex games, etc. Just try to go explore your hometown. It may be interesting or it may be an absolute drag. So in a video game, the world needs to be made interesting as in procedural generation, there is always the possibility of you ending up with the drab outcome.
Video game exploration is not like real life exploration. You could find something YOU don't expect, but nothing the game devs don't expect. Well, except bugs and glitches. It's like exploring your neighbor's backyard: it's new to you, but probably not worth while. You might find that screwdriver your neighbor lost, but he pretty much knows what's around and could just give you a tour that lasts 2 minutes.
@@shizuwolf Haha. I immediately imagined the Darth Vader meme "Nooooooo!" sound after reading this...though now I randomly wonder if he ever reviewed _Super Mario RPG_ even though we're probably never getting another one. (Fucking Square Enix....)
@@shizuwolf id kill to see yahzee slog through a dragon quest builders game, it would give me the same feelings that the romans got after putting a person on the stretching wheel.
Fun fact: the game doesn't spawn in anything for missions. It just forces interactions/dialogue onto existing locations/npc's. Otherwise they just produce their fixed, procedurally generated interaction.
@@GrandSupremeDaddyo The procedural generation is fixed. What that means is that every location in the universe exists whether you visit it or not. That's also kind of the whole reason No Man's Sky is a bit magical. It's a shared virtual universe that all of us explore simultaneously.
I've some seriously mad respect for Hello Games. No other developer would've given the abject failure that No Man's Sky was at launch a second thought. Anyone else would've taken the money and disappeared to some random island in the south Pacific. But Hello Games dug in and got to work. They fixed every problem, and delivered on every promise. And then they just kept going... Giving us even more content than they ever promised and continue to do so. It's crazy, and I wish more devs would do the same.
It's worth adding that their "expeditions" allow players to have a much more condensed and objective driven experience with the game if the more free form "wander wherever" is a little too amporphous for interest. The best part being that they are also free, give you a bunch of stuff and make an excellent jumping off point for new players who then get a boosted start to the game. I've started over several times and my current save file is one that I started for an expansion because I lucked out and got an excellent ship and some really solid mods. NMS is one of the only games I keep installed on my console to revisit once a year or so.
I went to the space station once and a player randomly for no reason at all gave me 1,000,000 credits and I think some resources, as you can guess that catapulted me forward in progress quite a bit.
Nice, same thing happened to me when i first started and after that I wanted to do the same for others. I played a lot and the money helped me progress much quicker. after a couple months a glitch was found which lets you dupe any item with a refiner and I was able to use that to dupe the ship ai valve i was given at the start since i saved one. My 2 friends also duped with me and we were able to buy all the ships and freighters we wanted as well as give back to others at the anomaly, it was a great helping out new players out. I did stop playing after a while since there was nothing else to do but i recently played again and the dupe definitely still works. I guess the devs don't care about fixing it, which was good news for me cuz i duped a bit more and gave more ai valves away for old time sake. still one of the friendliest communities ive seen in gaming. If they ever do patch the duping ill still have vaults full of them lmao.
1 mil is a lot at the start but not a lot once you get a freighter. On my first save I found some ancient ruins with a 1m artifact in them which basically did the same thing. Now generally the first thing I do on a new save is look for monoliths/ancient artifacts for a quick starting cash stack and then get a freighter and start using it to make even more cash.
So how many infinitly theoretical universes do we have in the yahtzee household now that he revisits No Mans Sky, and what does he have to remove to fit it in the house.
I think the imaginary lynx that keeps urging him to kill the whores has moved out now, and only comes over to visit occasionally, along with most of the rest if the imaginary menagerie, so the second bedroom is free now
Thanks for checking this one out again yahtz, I would never pretend it's a game that's for everyone. But in an industry where so often the go to course of action for any adversity tied to your studios name is to jump ship, abandon the game, abandon the entire company in some cases, and then open again under a different name. I feel like the fact that they're still going like... What 6 years or something at this point? I don't even remember. Of free content updates, overhauls, reworks, and so on, all for free. (Which they didn't even have to do after a while, I know I, as well as a large part of the community would have been happy to pay for expansions or upgrades after feeling like they'd earned the right. But no, they still keep trucking.) You can tell that they were thrown under the bus to sell consoles, but that they truly love their game, and the community that grew behind it. I can honestly, and without a hint of irony say that I wish more studios were like hello games. I just hope any studios that follow in their footsteps do their best to stay away from big name publishers lol
And this review is not even mentioning what got me back on the NMS train- VR support. It makes it great just for sightseeing, cruising around in my ship looking for the coolest scenery to get out and look at up close. It gives an amazing sense of freedom, and the knoweldge that you can go in any direction for as long as you want without hitting any artificial barriers gives an incredible sense of it being a real place.
This was really really good. First one of these videos I've came across. It gave me 2009/10 vibes where the Xbox 360 dashboard would show you niche gaming shows produced by Microsoft, except this one is an adult rated version. It's excellent!
NMS has the same problem Starbound did: Space is too damn big. If you don’t make the player visit a myriad of locations for story or progression reasons, what was the point? If you do, then they’ll never be attached to anywhere. And at least in Starbound there were acidic oceans and platforming asteroid belts.
Right but starbound also had the ability to call a place home and always transport back to it. So it had exploration and a reason to care for the area you settled on. The only part I feel starbound lacked in was the story "progression" was go to x type of world scan y type of thing repeatedly until progress bar is done. Then go back to hub world and you can continue the story. It felt very much as filler. That and finding loot on planets was non-existent. You got better progress just going towards whatever tier armor material you were currently on then exploring and finding chests. Hearing all the changes for NMS I don't really see a difference between the original take on it and what it does now. They put more content in but it still sounds the very bland experience w/ stuff duct taped on to make it seem more interesting. There are far better survival crafting games out there that have a better defined scope. It does look interesting I will say that, but graphics has never been my draw on why I play games.
@@Zeratultheking You're such a pedantic pessimist I had to comment- This video is literally about the differences and changes made over the last 6 years- and here you are commenting you see very little. It's like you WISH it to be the case, so you insists upon it being thecase, even when it is not. Go be a pissant somewhere else.
@@SnuSnuDungeon yup, I got the base game for like 30 a year or two back and haven't had to pay for anything since, and nothing besides a few cosmetics are locked out
Its really funny how a lot of gaming is affected by this for both good and bad. There’s alot of games I’m hesitant to revisit to because there has been years of updates/patches/DLCs, so the generally experience/meta has greatly changed.
I agree but really depends on the game. I was late to Cyberpunk 2077, for obvious reasons, but the patched game is very mich playable. As a game, it's OK, not amazing. Whereas Stardew Valley has had so many updates and free DLC but it only enhances the experience or gives you more endgame tasks
Yep! I'm always afraid of that with Warframe. I play it with my brother and whenever we spend some time away there is always that sense of dread over whether or not updates have finally ruined the game our killed our playstyle. And while Warframe is still good, it's also an very different game from the one I started with my brother. I know it wouldn't be practical, but I wish these live service games would let us download and play old versions of the game.
It's also a blessing for me. There's a massive overhaul mod for a game that I really like (also a space exploration sandbox, funnily enough) that has gotten massive content updates as time has passed, so I check the mod like once a year and do a full playthrough. It's nice
Paradox's 4x games hit that, for me. Eventually, at some point, the game reaches the point where my brain goes "yeah, y'know what, I'm done", and I can no longer make any sense of the changes, nor have I the inclination to spend dozens more hours re-re-re-relearning things. For a lot of games, it's fine, and I don't really mind, but that's likely because it's usually only a few hours of getting to grips with things, rather than days.
1:30 Now all I can hear is Yahtzee doing a radio drama. Which, honestly, is something I’d be down for if Will Save the Galaxy for Food or Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash are anything to go by.
Honestly, if it wasn't still in the 30ish dollar range even when on sale, I would have tried it by now. But as great as it is for them to have come so far, it really just DOES feel like 'another one'. Don't have high hopes for Bethseda's upcoming space game due to suspecting its gonna be akin to this, for similar reasons, but very open to being wrong on that.
And the learning curve on these crafting games are often a pain too. They draw me in, but I seldom try more than one of them an year. I'm playing Astroneer and I probably spent half as many hours in the wiki as I did in the game.
I got it for £10 on PC last year, and despite not having any baggage about unfulfilled promises due to not gaming when it launched, it still didn't feel worth it.
@@UsernameyMcUsernameFace 100% agree. I love this kind of game, but all the stuff they keep adding feels like shiny decorations, rather than fleshing out the core gameplay. The economy still feels pointless and easy to exploit, the worlds still feel empty and samey, and somehow there's even *less* creature variety than at launch. I haven't seen any real standout animals.
@@TheGrumbliestPuppy The animals were a bigger issue for me than I was expecting. The way they move is just so... shit. I wasn't expecting super realism but jesus christ.
NMS is one of the few games that actually "fixed it later". It has had the negative affect of making people support games that have no sign of improving because of the slim chance a giant AAA studio will care enough about making an unprofitable game good like an indie studio would.
Much like another comment that said that the belated success of _NMS_ would be an excuse for companies to release unfinished games with the "promise" to "fix it later", I feel like those people--like those companies--would already engage in that behavior anyway for the most part. In this case, I don't think you're wrong to say that though; I just think that too many people already tend to live in delusions about things they like given human nature. [Insert pictures of people who still support _Yandere Simulator_ and that Kickstarter game _Star Citizen_ (?) here, with the latter apparently basically being more or less a cult at this point.]
@@MusicoftheDamned They've been doing this, yes, but now they have a success story to point at and be like "Look guys, we'll be just like this in a few months"
@@DioBrando-mr5xs Yeah, I agree with you on that point. My point is more that "anyone who believes them and isn't a literal small child is doubtless a deluded fool who was already going to fall the obvious lie anyway". I'm not even trying to be cynical here and say that it will *always* be a lie, but even in the (very few) cases it _might_ turn it to be true, it still will never be a valid excuse for releasing an unfinished game (especially if it's a physical on-disc game).
Wow that's weird! After not touching No Man's Sky myself since first reaching the center of the universe about a week after the game launched I decided only about 5 days ago to fire it back up and take a look at all the changes in the game and have been puttering in it for the past few days. Then Yahtzee posts this today. I don't know what hive mind vibe Sean Murray is broadcasting this past week but that was kind of a funny coinkiedink for me. Neat.
Honestly been really enjoying NMS since it updated so much. I like that you can teleport betwern systems easily so you don't have to move your base around. And I did end up needing other systems for specific resources for things I was building XD while the story isn't super strong, it's enough to get you going and for that I am enjoying it.
When you remember Yahtzee explicitly said hd'd never do this since he doesn't condone the "fixing it after post" mentality. Guess all things change, and not for worse! Also making those old timey bits in bloody windows movie maker is most impressive!
@@kclink1579 What happened with this game shouldn’t be held up as a good example of anything. Oh, wow, the game wasn’t completely worthless 5 years after realise. How admirable!
Honestly I'd be down to watch Yahtzee re-review most of the games he's covered, even the ones that haven't been patched or changed at all. Would be interesting to see how his perspective may have shifted over the years, the way it did with the Souls series.
"Oh, its a pun on No Man's Land. I just got that." Me: If it were a snake, it would've bit me, swallowed me whole and shat me out a month ago since I too just got that.
Between this and the review on escapist right now, I'm absolutely certain people are gonna plaster him with game recommendations the same way sharks bite when they smell blood
The most impressive thing about the updates to No Man's Sky is that they're still all FREE. 7 years and Hello Games has never asked us to spend money on more content.
My biggest issue with NMS is that they don't respect my time. Everything has a loading animation with its "awe" moments. Docking a ship, loading the game, going through a portal etc. I think a lot of these are holdovers from when it was first launched and they wanted to pad your time with the game but now its just showing its age.
I think the biggest promise that I DON’T THINK has ever been fulfilled was the idea that you could randomly happen upon any other players and their structures. I understand that’s probably a nightmare with servers and whatnot. But that idea seemed fascinating to me. Esp if the stuff aged or was degraded depending on the planet type I know it’s asking a lot, but the fact that there was the remotest chance that someone could come across what I’ve deemed Planet Butts with the flying beasts I’ve named Sphincter Eagles. And then they could relax in the dilapidated ruins of Anal Explorer Base Alpha. Just would’ve been so cool to leave my little mark on the universe
I haven't found another player's bases yet, but I have definitely found pre-discovered systems with re-named planets in a 'solo' game. I believe that the option to 'upload' your base puts it on the general map for other folks to stumble across.
I think the odds of randomly stumbling across another players' base are pretty slim, however there is certainly a guarantee of stumbling across another players' base on purpose. There are regions of the first 2 galaxies that have been "colonised" by various guilds/associations. Captain Steve on YT is a member of such an association, I believe they welcome newcomers settling in their region of space, so long as any new base is at least 1k distant from someone elses' base. The portal on the Nexus also has player made bases listed for anyone to visit, usually just 3 or 4. So long as a base is uploaded to the servers it is capable of being found and visited by other players, of course the first (starter) galaxy is the most populated.
@@WhoTookQuwhu Disable PvP under the Network options, and no more being shot. As for finding people; yes, the odds out on the galactic rim are vanishingly small, but most people get to the centre and then build there, where it's much easier to bump into each other. And you can give the planetary co-ordinates (the little row of icons when you take a screenshot etc) and players can leap straight to it by using the warp gate that appears in one spot on a single planet in each. You can also join a friends game, and play with them until the session ends, but it doesn't physically move you in the galaxy (so no getting straight to the centre by joining someone already there).
Am loving seeing him tackle things he said he wouldn't, still don't think he'll ever like Pathologic though, but REALLY want to see his full reaction to it :P
Thanks for doing this. When it rereleased all I saw people saying when they played it was "Oh this feels so much better" however as someone who never actually played the original, it all looks the same. It needed a comparison.
I think the NMS phenomenon is going to be a massive event in the history of gaming, for good and bad. you've got companies that will refuse to move on and incessantly try to throw bandaids at a broken or slowly failing product until it works because they don't want to leave behind the work they've put into it behind and "no man's sky did it, so can we" (most notable right now is destiny 2) alternately there's gamers who stopped reading into anything about the games progress past the release month that will forever only see it as an example of a bad release of broken promises and 'greedy devs' (totally misunderstanding either difference between crunch pressure and false advertising, or the difference between shareholders and game developers) In my opinion it can be used to show that shareholders should respect their developers more, gamers should educate themselves on how game design actually works, advertisment laws should cover more bases, and that good game developers will not only accept mistakes, but fix them *with* their community.
My issue with No Man's Sky now is that they've added all this extra stuff without bothering to integrate it properly into early game progression. There are very discernable gaps between each section of content and a number of references to stuff that's been superceded by choices made in new content. And there's still bugs from the launch, like the quest breaking glitches that force you to restart a quest because it wants you to go to a thing that is no longer interactable. Personally I think they'd have been better off having bases only buildable in (or on the outside of) Freighters and doubling down on the space nomad aspect of the original release where you had no ties to any planet and could just wander wherever you wanted.
Looks like they're kinda doing that on the latest patch, which enhances freighter-bases in a lot of ways such that ground bases (while still possible) are no longer really necessary -- you can even teleport directly to them now, which was the main thing keeping me from using my freighter as my main base! I'm definitely going nomad now!
@@HHTwice it's on par with every other space game. elite dangerous is ass and got boring after 10 hours and has no content beyond, same with star citizen. nobody can do space games right except maybe space engineers, but even then it's god awfully outdated. at least they all make you feel like you're in space though, which i enjoy.
@@Xexden yeah most space games other than space based RTS's get boring after a while. I've just reached the getting bored point quicker because the core ganeplay of NMS is so damn boring, everything still revolves around mining minerals on planets that all function the same with limited proc gen. Hell Games needs to address the exploration problem NMS has instead of further expanding ridiculous base building to appease autists and adding meaningless shit that costs man power and resources like pets and whatnot.
I like NMS and Starbound (not saying I like Chucklefish, though). I like the sense of community NMS has, and how serene the game can be. It's incredibly peaceful if you want it to be. And Starbound is fun because the base building is great, and it essentially fills the role of space-Terraria.
Thank you for the very entertaining review! I imagining it's kind of a moment much like the food critic (Ego) in Ratatouille had when he heard a restaurant he gave a poor review for was popular again. lol My mind goes to weird areas sometimes. xD
One thing about the freighters or whatever they're called again they changed, was the new base building system they can now have. They basically act as a space station you can call on-demand, and you can even put one of those fancy teleporters in it. All of the machines placed in a freighter/whatever, also get infinite power, and don't need a generator. However, the aforementioned teleporter doesn't accept teleports to it, unlike space stations, which do. This is likely because the "freighters" can be moved to other star systems. The bases you can make in the cargo haulers, I mean freighters, is surprisingly huge, and can have multiple floors.
It is as Miyamoto said. A delayed game is eventually good or canceled or maybe repurposed into another game, but a bad game is bad forever or at least until it's been patched so many times it's barely recognizable and revisted by Yahtzee.
yes yahtz do cyberpunk. they upended the quest system so now sidequests are delivered in batches so your map screen doesnt end up looking like a police investigation board trying to link up all the related suspects
Don't forget to add a healthy dose of battle pass-esque FOMO with the Expeditions. At least they can be pretty fun to complete and give you a huge boost in progression
They have re-run all the prior expeditions though; also there's no online cheat protection so you can just edit in the rewards if you miss them each time they've been available.
the great thing is they JUST updated the game the day this was uploaded. Reworked the freighters and theyre super nice now. I also jump systems like a mad man for some reason
I can’t believe Yahtzee missed an opportunity to reference Kurt Vonnegut in his „building St. Peter’s Basilica” bit. All you had to do was switch it to Taj Mahal!
Drought Suggestion (again) : Textorcist. Yahtz likes Typing of the Dead. He will probably like Textorcist. Yahtz likes Bullet Hell like Undertale. He will probably like Textorcist. Yahtz likes Retro Pixel Art aesthetic like...lots of games. It's pretty ubiquitous now. Yahtz likes Grind House stories, like House of the Dead Overkill. Textorcist has a better story, campy, but it also has heart to it. Yahtz and I don't agree Politically, but we share a fondness for many of the same games. Give Textorcist a shot Yahtz. You're bored. It's summer. Try something different.
I never played this game before and installed few weeks ago the first time. I agree with Yahtzee's previous / current comments. But still, the game keeps me in! "No strict objective" thing might've been the reason behind it, i don't know.
Yahtzee I can relate to this video. I too lately have been staring into the abyss that is 2022 and beyond, and finding myself do a 180 turn immediately back to the past to look for entertainment. I've even been playing old console games, like from the SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, PS1, PS2, eras etc. Not childhood classics I'm returning to for nostalgia either, games I've never played before and I'm playing for the first time in 2022. And some of them have been damn fun experiences even by today's standards, which may be at least partly due to the sheer number of retro indie games coming out lately that are trying to evoke the style of games from that era. Even been chasing down top 10/20/30/100 lists for the best games from those generations to find new ones to play.. Maybe it isn't such a bad thing to sometimes go back to the past. Just because something is old, doesn't mean it's no longer relevant or fun.
I've been experiencing (and suffering) the older Mystery Dungeon titles myself, checking a look at Shiren 1 and then the OG MD game, Torneko's Great Adventure. Really makes you appreciate all the advances that the future MDs do, but they're still unique enough experiences on their own.
Absolutely. By stunning coincidence, my (slightly more recent) example of choice for this, XCOM [dry heave] Enemy Unknown, is a decade old today and I challenge anyone who's never played it before to pick it and the expansion pack up and not have an absolute whale of a time. I mean, it's hardly a hot take to say that XCOM was good but it's a prime instance of game design being so ridiculously tight from top to bottom that you simply don't give a damn about the limitations of the engine by modern standards. EDIT: Oh, for new players, do yourself a favour and get your armour upgraded at least a bit as soon as humanly possible. Massively shifts the difficulty curve. The game _is_ designed to be enjoyably challenging with myriad constantly competing priorities but, if you're going to spend the first couple of months with your entire A-team in the hospital for a week after every mission because they were wounded a la my first playthrough, the strategic layer of the game will have you over a barrel from Day 1 and it'll never let up. I say this because the game's generally excellent at conveying its mechanics but it _is_ a bit of an oversight that it just lumps armour HP in with normal HP without telling you that you can lose it without getting the "wounded" status.
Just went back to it, and my experience was similar to Yhatzee's. In fairness I may have screwed things up myself in the log and was too busy following the Atlas quest which just got tedious, but I got to the part where you make the big decision and I think I've had my full. Yes I could keep going, but I feel I got what I wanted out of the gameplay loop and it really doesn't have much else to offer. That, and I am getting sick of the inventory and upgrade management!
@@laurencebrown3822 Not even close. NMS is an indiea developed game. FF14 has literally 13 other games to go and look back on andsee what mistakes were made. The trash that is ff14 will always be trash, and those that shovel it into their mouths are kinda the reason the gaming industry continues to falter.
what if hello games added a creature creator system like spore it would help in adding diversity to the games wildlife, and add little bit more to the whole idea that the game is connected to other people by seeing there creations.
Fittingly they just released *another* patch today. Honestly I was expecting Yahtzee to be a lot harsher on it. I enjoy it for what it is but there's still plenty wrong with the game, though upon further thought those problems only rear their head when you are well past the first impressions mark. Either way maybe being a dad has caused him to go soft >_>
In my opinion as someone who felt the game at launch delivered largely what it promised and what I wanted, the 20 subsequent small and large free expansions have been amazing to the point of ridiculousness - haven't even managed to get to the moon buggy stage, or the orbital base stage, or the leading a space fleet stage, or really further than seeing ten different planets or so, while just trying to explore as far as possible. (Maybe my problem is a severe attachment to permadeath mode.) It's probably true its biggest weakness is the potential to take up way too much of your time in too many varied and interesting ways. Anyway it's cool of you to give it another shot.
I would totally have supported Yahtzee's previous position that games that aren't ready by ship date deserve to be kicked around the playground for showing up with their pants down. Having said that, in this day and age, it's nice that game makers have the option to fix things in post, though of course they should never make that the standard by which they operate. It's also cool to see Yahtzee broaden his horizons, especially in aforementioned modern world in which a game can last ten or more years if the makers keep making content for it (Minecraft comes to mind and I don't even play that!).
So the basic problem remains. A captivating gameplay loop. It got a whole lot of busywork. Well, kudos to everybody who enjoys it. And kudos to hello games for continually adding and improving -for free- their game.
Lol 😂😂 After not playing since 2013, i started playing again last month. Only fitting Yattzie re reviewed it 😂😂 Dudes been the most honest, funny cynical reviewers of our time
The problem I still see with NMS is that the game is a sample platter. It's a bunch of barely connected, compartmentalized experiences wedged into a single game. If I wanted that I'd play Mario Party.
It is very cool and commendable that hello games has fixed this game, but as a day one buyer when it came out it was so empty and basically a 60 usd scam, remember the interviews saying “oh yea you can play with your friends in multiplayer” and all the other promises that were totally false or misleading? Yes, the game is cool now, yes the game has tons of free updates, but when they released it for 60 usd that was a real jerk move. I didn’t pay that a couple years ago so I could play a cool game now, I wanted what was promised THEN
Yahtzee isn’t a multiplayer guy so I’m not surprised he didn’t try it, but the Community Expeditions are a lot of fun. For a certain amount of time, you can create a new save on the current Expedition and it dumps everyone is dumped in roughly the same area of space and directs them towards various meetup points with other supporting objectives that vary each expedition. It’s a stark contrast from the normal solo experience where you never see a single thing visited by another player - the meetup points have tons of players actively in-system and lots of bases and other signs of player activity. I think it’s a really neat way to use the same universe and engine to create almost an entirely different game.
Thing is No Mans Sky wasn't originally released as if it were the finished article, or even released as the unfinished article with a view to never improving it. It wasn't because of the reviews that they continued working on the game, it was because in essence they knew they hadn't finished it yet but were forced to release the game somewhat early. In reality they should have pushed the release date back and spent more time on it, but they couldn't as they aren't a huge developer with mounds of funding. Their basement studio suffered in the UK floods at the time and they lost a lot of their work. It was almost completely submerged. I believe they did push the release slightly at this point but not enough to get back to where they were and they were ultimately forced to release an unfinished game with a view to continue to work on it after the fact. The reviews this game received however asks the question as to why they were so harshly treated compared to the devs who release a beta at full price for 5-10 years with barely any progress being made yet never make it into the news cycle.
I remember an experience in NMS which was actually my first experience with a VR Player. Long story short, my dad and I were playing it together when suddenly a VR player (evident by his strange stance and hands by his hips like Bully Maguire dancing saturday night fever) approached me and began shining my helmet and placing his hands all over my body before dancing. Considering how everyone up until that point had the same walk cycles and such, this was no-doubt jarring.
Thanks for the review, sounds like I’m not gonna go back to Ngo Mansky I may have been one of the few people actually wanted to explore a bunch of planets and see different flora and fauna, and maybe some ancient civilizations that did some cool stuff. Instead, as you know, there’s a lot of saminess. Is it really that hard to procedurally generate randomness? I mean isn’t that what life is? Isn’t a platypus just a procedurally generated duck combine with the beaver? In any case, here’s hoping that sometime in the next 10 years they’re able to figure out how to make it so that each planet has actually different looking animals and plants, and then maybe sometime in the future, they’ll be somethings kind of like archaeology where each system has a different architectural style, and you can actually find interesting things. They wanted to shoot of people in space, I just play elite dangerous.
Yahtzee giving NMS a good re-review really does encapsulate my enjoyment with it years later. Played it when it came out. Zzz. I play it now and I swear I'm 56 hours in and tryna learn how to create the best base ever.
The thing about the procedural generation isn't that you get to explore a billion slightly different planets, but that one day some player might find something generated that is really cool. There's an entire subreddit that is nothing but people posting cool ships, weapons, or animals they have found, or bases they have built or farms that other players might make use of. You get a billion people to throw a billion Lego on the ground and eventually one pile might resemble the Taj Mahal or the Sydney Opera House, and that's what No Man's Sky is. A billion robots dumping a billion Lego in a warehouse with people running around to say, 'Hey, look at this shit'.
Should check out V Rising. Tho dunno if you review early access games, it’s certainly one of the most complete looking early access games I’ve seen. You play as a vampire lord looking to retake your claim as ruler of the night. It’s a lotta fun.
The thing about No Man's Sky is that it is supposed to be a chill game with lots of options of what you feel like doing. The randomized missions at the Nexus, while boring, offer good rewards at least for awhile. If you want a good ship, well, think about what _kind_ of ship you want (Fighter, Hauler, etc) and find a 3-star economy system of the correct type and explore until you find the one you want (or buy it from a station). You can always build a base, if you're the type that likes to do that, some people build ludicrously elaborate bases. Maybe you just wanna kill crap. That's easy, just go pick a fight with some sentinels. The thing is, there's lots of stuff to do, and the fact the game takes place in a huge universe means that every time you start the game, it's going to be slightly different each time, what planets you get to work with, what the planets look like, etc. Some of them are very exotic and look really strange and are kinda neat. And besides, you said you sunk 30 hours into it and it sounds like you only did some of the things the game has to offer. That's already better than many $60 triple A titles that are running out of gas at about 30 hours.
@@enskje I'd rather have that, than "deep as an ocean and wide as a puddle" because that's even worse in some ways. That, and you know, they keep adding to it. Kinda like the mega update that _just_ released today that gives players even more stuff to play with.
I like the idea of Yahtzee looking back at old game reviews, not even just to game that have been patched into workability. After Dev Diary and Extra Punctuation going into video format I feel like we've been seeing a more creatively expressive and thoughtful series of dick jokes and I think it's worth returning to those old games, especially during the summer drought.
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 87 วันนี้!! คู่เอก "ก้องชัย vs โชคปรีชา"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YN6e7HVnekw/mqdefault.jpg)
Watch this week's episode of Zero Punctuation on Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan - www.escapistmagazine.com/rainbow-billy-the-curse-of-the-leviathan-zero-punctuation/ - Watch it early on TH-cam and support our content via TH-cam Memberships for $2/month. th-cam.com/channels/qg5FCR7NrpvlBWMXdt-5Vg.htmljoin
Yahtzee Fuga memories of steel review it will make you sad or happy
Yahtzee, payday 2 time yet?
4:41, fleshlight in the toy chest.......
Maybe just me, but also it could potentially be, just maybe...a pair of bunny ears? I don't know, this is The Escapist after all. For all we know, everything inside that box that you CAN'T see is nothing but knobs and muffs.
Since he replayed this, I suggest Yahtzee go back to Fall Out 76 and Cyberpunk 2077.
Streaming on TH-cam, having kids, wanting to go back to E3, revisiting games he's already reviewed. Man, would love to see Yahtzee from 10 years ago reaction to present day Yahtzee
Plus having game series where he's looking forward to sequels.
@@HonkeyKongLive which series?
Think this applies to most folks if you made their late teens gaze upon the horror of their thirties.
Why does it say you commented 7 days ago?
@@softwaffle8535 people with escapist subscriptions get to watch videos earlier
I still remember the classic joke:
"No Man's Sky? More like No Game!"
"That wasn't your strongest attempt at wordplay, Yahtzee."
"No worries! I'll just patch something better in later!"
AND SO THEY DID
@@Ramsey276one Now that you mention it, we're still waiting for that better pun from Yahtzee...
@@ArcaneAzmadi
Me: *Sighs and opens twitter*. Guess somebody is going to have to do the cancelling.
Other alternative titles to "No Man's Sky" on release:
No Man's Game
One Man's Lie
No Shame Sky
I defy any man to beat the obvious one "No Mans Lie" that literally wrote itself on day 1. Even the most quick mind will not be able to outwit dumb-luck. And that was the thing which generated the obvious one :) Napoleon said it best "I'd rather be lucky than good!".
Which is exactly what NMS was to begin with, they were lucky people waited for the game to improve, but when it did it was amazing.
Be careful Yahtzee, you might be conditioning us to love the game drought season because of the stuff you have to do to keep the content stream flowing.
Game drought season, more like Yahtzee without restrictions.
@@lagg1e Yahtzee with a mortgage and mouths to feed
Honestly, if he's that hard up for reviews, he should just play Warframe. He'll love the gameplay and the story, hate the organization, and probably have lots to talk about. And it's free, hard to go wrong with that.
@@Quantumironturtle cap.after you play the good quest it’s pretty boring just wait for a good quest and repeat
I was just rewatching the 2018 review of Observer, where he resists revisiting No Man's Sky because "it's against my principles to encourage this 'let's just fix it in post' culture."
Four years later, he finally gives in.
oh man
He had a good point though. Delivering an unfinished product isn't great.
Unfortunately indies are 99% deck building roguelikes these days, so that's not a good repository for drought season anymore.
To his credit, No Man's Sky is a special case. If you compare what the game looks like today against initial release it's incredible how much quality of life changes/improvements have been made. It feels like an entirely different game.
If this was Assassin's Creed, you wouldn't see this much change occur over a single IP until 4 sequels down the road.
In fairness, it was six years in between, and it was at the prompting of Nick the Editor. I do not expect Yahtz to revisit games as a regular thing.
1:30 Thanks Nick/Yahtz, I now have an impossible need to re-experience all the much older ZP episodes as grainy, static-ridden Bioshock diaries
Nick? Am I missing something or are you not aware that Yahtzee's real name is not Nick?
@@gracelandtoo6240 He's talking about Nick Calandra, you know, the CEO of the Escapist
This actually touches on one of my main issues with No Man's Sky. The whole selling point was exploration. The idea that you had this insanely large universe to explore and discover. And obviously that fell flat. But now they've updated and update the game making it massively better..... by basically completely changing the direction to being about basebuilding and crafting. Yes it's a better game. Yes Hello Games deserve some major recognition for turning things around. But as someone who was originally excited on the idea of exploration it is kind of a bitter pill that so much of the improvement is at the further expense of having much reason to explore. I booted up the game yesterday to check out the last few updates that I hadn't gotten around to trying and basically felt like all it was was more progression mechanics and things to craft while the original central point of exploration and discovery feels like it's kind of just sitting there gathering dust as the dev team turns it into a completely different game from what it was originally supposed to be.
This isn't me necessarily bad mouthing Hello Games too much. We didn't get that grand exploration game at launch and I can't really fault them for giving many players what they wanted. I just also can't help being a bit sad that it doesn't look like it will ever be the kind of game that had me so excited to begin with.
I completely agree. When base building was put in, I was excited to have a home base I could come to, to unload stuff or improve a few things, entirely so I could go out farther and farther in the universe. But as Yahtzee said, it got samey and I stopped really caring. The crafting and base building really should have been a support to the exploration, not the main focus of the game.
I'll forgive it to a degree, just simply because of how far the hame has come. But all enjoyment I could get from it, I already have. Might revisit and start a new save in a year or two when I forget a bunch of stuff.
Grand exploration and procedural generation just don't go together, we don't have the technology to make those work together yet. Exploration works when the worlds are handcrafted to be interesting to explore, like RDR 2, Outer Wilds, the Deus Ex games, etc. Just try to go explore your hometown. It may be interesting or it may be an absolute drag. So in a video game, the world needs to be made interesting as in procedural generation, there is always the possibility of you ending up with the drab outcome.
Dis you expect Sean Murray to personally craft 15 quadrillion Exciting Things for You to Find™?
Video game exploration is not like real life exploration. You could find something YOU don't expect, but nothing the game devs don't expect. Well, except bugs and glitches.
It's like exploring your neighbor's backyard: it's new to you, but probably not worth while. You might find that screwdriver your neighbor lost, but he pretty much knows what's around and could just give you a tour that lasts 2 minutes.
How surreal that 2016 Yahtzee was presented as ancient as a 1930s black and white film
That does feel like a very long time ago.
@@Doctorgeo7 Not at all. I refuse to believe it was 6 years ago already. It almost feels like yesterday.
Let's be honest, it feels like the Before Times, the Long Long Ago
It's even more surreal that I had to think for a sec and realize 2016 wasn't a couple years ago
A commentary on the public's attention span? Idk.
He said he'd never do it. Looks like he did it. Summer drought must be bad.
It’s either this or play a classic JRPG
@@shizuwolf Haha. I immediately imagined the Darth Vader meme "Nooooooo!" sound after reading this...though now I randomly wonder if he ever reviewed _Super Mario RPG_ even though we're probably never getting another one. (Fucking Square Enix....)
@@shizuwolf That or whatever current indie horror game is making the rounds now
@@shizuwolf id kill to see yahzee slog through a dragon quest builders game, it would give me the same feelings that the romans got after putting a person on the stretching wheel.
I was thinking the Chrono series
Fun fact: the game doesn't spawn in anything for missions. It just forces interactions/dialogue onto existing locations/npc's. Otherwise they just produce their fixed, procedurally generated interaction.
Don't most games do that? Skyrim you go to markarth and get a quest and the NPCs are just involved now.
@@aelechko not most games, but yeah that's a good example of another game with procedural quests
I thought it generated the location based on whatever nearest location hadn't been procedurally generated yet?
@@GrandSupremeDaddyo only if the system you warped from doesn't have the required things for the quest, like the weekend quests they do.
@@GrandSupremeDaddyo The procedural generation is fixed. What that means is that every location in the universe exists whether you visit it or not. That's also kind of the whole reason No Man's Sky is a bit magical. It's a shared virtual universe that all of us explore simultaneously.
This episode drops on TH-cam the same day as yet another free update.
God I love the treatment this game got.
Switch version???
I've some seriously mad respect for Hello Games. No other developer would've given the abject failure that No Man's Sky was at launch a second thought. Anyone else would've taken the money and disappeared to some random island in the south Pacific.
But Hello Games dug in and got to work. They fixed every problem, and delivered on every promise.
And then they just kept going...
Giving us even more content than they ever promised and continue to do so. It's crazy, and I wish more devs would do the same.
@@Ramsey276one that shit gonna run at 20fps
@@triple-d2640 DMC and Bayonetta are doing fine there.
I can manage
I don’t have a 4K TV either
XD
@@triple-d2640 I don't think framerate is as big a deal as load times, which will be helped by the singleplayer only
It's worth adding that their "expeditions" allow players to have a much more condensed and objective driven experience with the game if the more free form "wander wherever" is a little too amporphous for interest. The best part being that they are also free, give you a bunch of stuff and make an excellent jumping off point for new players who then get a boosted start to the game. I've started over several times and my current save file is one that I started for an expansion because I lucked out and got an excellent ship and some really solid mods. NMS is one of the only games I keep installed on my console to revisit once a year or so.
That "Hello, Games" made me laugh more than it had any right to
I went to the space station once and a player randomly for no reason at all gave me 1,000,000 credits and I think some resources, as you can guess that catapulted me forward in progress quite a bit.
Nice, same thing happened to me when i first started and after that I wanted to do the same for others. I played a lot and the money helped me progress much quicker. after a couple months a glitch was found which lets you dupe any item with a refiner and I was able to use that to dupe the ship ai valve i was given at the start since i saved one. My 2 friends also duped with me and we were able to buy all the ships and freighters we wanted as well as give back to others at the anomaly, it was a great helping out new players out. I did stop playing after a while since there was nothing else to do but i recently played again and the dupe definitely still works. I guess the devs don't care about fixing it, which was good news for me cuz i duped a bit more and gave more ai valves away for old time sake. still one of the friendliest communities ive seen in gaming. If they ever do patch the duping ill still have vaults full of them lmao.
1 mil is a lot at the start but not a lot once you get a freighter. On my first save I found some ancient ruins with a 1m artifact in them which basically did the same thing. Now generally the first thing I do on a new save is look for monoliths/ancient artifacts for a quick starting cash stack and then get a freighter and start using it to make even more cash.
I was once given 63 million in the first 12 hours
I discovered that CheatEngine works too, and can be used to boost other stats.
Some nice guy at space anomaly gave me 250 mil worth of ship parts
So how many infinitly theoretical universes do we have in the yahtzee household now that he revisits No Mans Sky, and what does he have to remove to fit it in the house.
I think the imaginary lynx that keeps urging him to kill the whores has moved out now, and only comes over to visit occasionally, along with most of the rest if the imaginary menagerie, so the second bedroom is free now
That’s a great throwback joke! Damn, should have more love on this comment.
Thanks for checking this one out again yahtz, I would never pretend it's a game that's for everyone. But in an industry where so often the go to course of action for any adversity tied to your studios name is to jump ship, abandon the game, abandon the entire company in some cases, and then open again under a different name. I feel like the fact that they're still going like... What 6 years or something at this point? I don't even remember. Of free content updates, overhauls, reworks, and so on, all for free. (Which they didn't even have to do after a while, I know I, as well as a large part of the community would have been happy to pay for expansions or upgrades after feeling like they'd earned the right. But no, they still keep trucking.) You can tell that they were thrown under the bus to sell consoles, but that they truly love their game, and the community that grew behind it. I can honestly, and without a hint of irony say that I wish more studios were like hello games. I just hope any studios that follow in their footsteps do their best to stay away from big name publishers lol
And this review is not even mentioning what got me back on the NMS train- VR support. It makes it great just for sightseeing, cruising around in my ship looking for the coolest scenery to get out and look at up close.
It gives an amazing sense of freedom, and the knoweldge that you can go in any direction for as long as you want without hitting any artificial barriers gives an incredible sense of it being a real place.
This was really really good. First one of these videos I've came across. It gave me 2009/10 vibes where the Xbox 360 dashboard would show you niche gaming shows produced by Microsoft, except this one is an adult rated version. It's excellent!
Congratulations! You get to experience an over decade long backlog!
@@TheShadow7771 Haha, thanks!
Welcome to Zero Punctuation! One of us...one of us...
I highly recommend the compilations of the whole year-long ones if you need background noise to nap to.
Huh. May your never sit through a quiet meal again.
NMS has the same problem Starbound did:
Space is too damn big. If you don’t make the player visit a myriad of locations for story or progression reasons, what was the point? If you do, then they’ll never be attached to anywhere. And at least in Starbound there were acidic oceans and platforming asteroid belts.
Right but starbound also had the ability to call a place home and always transport back to it. So it had exploration and a reason to care for the area you settled on. The only part I feel starbound lacked in was the story "progression" was go to x type of world scan y type of thing repeatedly until progress bar is done. Then go back to hub world and you can continue the story. It felt very much as filler. That and finding loot on planets was non-existent. You got better progress just going towards whatever tier armor material you were currently on then exploring and finding chests.
Hearing all the changes for NMS I don't really see a difference between the original take on it and what it does now. They put more content in but it still sounds the very bland experience w/ stuff duct taped on to make it seem more interesting. There are far better survival crafting games out there that have a better defined scope. It does look interesting I will say that, but graphics has never been my draw on why I play games.
@@Zeratultheking You're such a pedantic pessimist I had to comment-
This video is literally about the differences and changes made over the last 6 years- and here you are commenting you see very little. It's like you WISH it to be the case, so you insists upon it being thecase, even when it is not.
Go be a pissant somewhere else.
Starbound's got value as a game in that there's the Frackin Universe mod for it, at least
@@Zeratultheking True and thank god for someone actually saying it, but hey nobody seems to care that much about gameplay anymore.
Drought season must be apocalyptic this year if we're going back to No Man's Sky
the end times are approaching
maybe russia will have a new government by the time that's done, how exciting
A lot of people legitimately believe it's a heart-warming redemption story of game design.
@@iamyoursaviour were all the updates free?
@@iamyoursaviour Mate you can't heavily imply you think differently and then not explain yourself.
@@SnuSnuDungeon yup, I got the base game for like 30 a year or two back and haven't had to pay for anything since, and nothing besides a few cosmetics are locked out
Its really funny how a lot of gaming is affected by this for both good and bad. There’s alot of games I’m hesitant to revisit to because there has been years of updates/patches/DLCs, so the generally experience/meta has greatly changed.
I agree but really depends on the game. I was late to Cyberpunk 2077, for obvious reasons, but the patched game is very mich playable. As a game, it's OK, not amazing. Whereas Stardew Valley has had so many updates and free DLC but it only enhances the experience or gives you more endgame tasks
@@FlamRackett Absolutely! In my case it was was Rainbow 6: Siege.
Yep! I'm always afraid of that with Warframe. I play it with my brother and whenever we spend some time away there is always that sense of dread over whether or not updates have finally ruined the game our killed our playstyle. And while Warframe is still good, it's also an very different game from the one I started with my brother. I know it wouldn't be practical, but I wish these live service games would let us download and play old versions of the game.
It's also a blessing for me. There's a massive overhaul mod for a game that I really like (also a space exploration sandbox, funnily enough) that has gotten massive content updates as time has passed, so I check the mod like once a year and do a full playthrough. It's nice
Paradox's 4x games hit that, for me. Eventually, at some point, the game reaches the point where my brain goes "yeah, y'know what, I'm done", and I can no longer make any sense of the changes, nor have I the inclination to spend dozens more hours re-re-re-relearning things.
For a lot of games, it's fine, and I don't really mind, but that's likely because it's usually only a few hours of getting to grips with things, rather than days.
i like how you bring back old footage of previous reviews. classic.
Same
@@sjchew1539 it's a lot easier to add those on top of an old video than remake the old video and add the props.
1:30 Now all I can hear is Yahtzee doing a radio drama.
Which, honestly, is something I’d be down for if Will Save the Galaxy for Food or Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash are anything to go by.
Honestly, if it wasn't still in the 30ish dollar range even when on sale, I would have tried it by now. But as great as it is for them to have come so far, it really just DOES feel like 'another one'. Don't have high hopes for Bethseda's upcoming space game due to suspecting its gonna be akin to this, for similar reasons, but very open to being wrong on that.
And the learning curve on these crafting games are often a pain too. They draw me in, but I seldom try more than one of them an year. I'm playing Astroneer and I probably spent half as many hours in the wiki as I did in the game.
@@Yodah97 Thats Terraria for me. That game is impossible to play without the wiki
I got it for £10 on PC last year, and despite not having any baggage about unfulfilled promises due to not gaming when it launched, it still didn't feel worth it.
@@UsernameyMcUsernameFace 100% agree. I love this kind of game, but all the stuff they keep adding feels like shiny decorations, rather than fleshing out the core gameplay. The economy still feels pointless and easy to exploit, the worlds still feel empty and samey, and somehow there's even *less* creature variety than at launch. I haven't seen any real standout animals.
@@TheGrumbliestPuppy The animals were a bigger issue for me than I was expecting. The way they move is just so... shit. I wasn't expecting super realism but jesus christ.
NMS is one of the few games that actually "fixed it later". It has had the negative affect of making people support games that have no sign of improving because of the slim chance a giant AAA studio will care enough about making an unprofitable game good like an indie studio would.
Not only did they 'fix it later' they keep adding and making it better. A new update just drop this week I believe lol.
Much like another comment that said that the belated success of _NMS_ would be an excuse for companies to release unfinished games with the "promise" to "fix it later", I feel like those people--like those companies--would already engage in that behavior anyway for the most part. In this case, I don't think you're wrong to say that though; I just think that too many people already tend to live in delusions about things they like given human nature.
[Insert pictures of people who still support _Yandere Simulator_ and that Kickstarter game _Star Citizen_ (?) here, with the latter apparently basically being more or less a cult at this point.]
@@MusicoftheDamned They've been doing this, yes, but now they have a success story to point at and be like "Look guys, we'll be just like this in a few months"
@@DioBrando-mr5xs Yeah, I agree with you on that point. My point is more that "anyone who believes them and isn't a literal small child is doubtless a deluded fool who was already going to fall the obvious lie anyway". I'm not even trying to be cynical here and say that it will *always* be a lie, but even in the (very few) cases it _might_ turn it to be true, it still will never be a valid excuse for releasing an unfinished game (especially if it's a physical on-disc game).
@@MusicoftheDamned I agree, it's never valid, but I've seen the argument more and more now. Halo Infinite is probably the best example recently.
Wow that's weird! After not touching No Man's Sky myself since first reaching the center of the universe about a week after the game launched I decided only about 5 days ago to fire it back up and take a look at all the changes in the game and have been puttering in it for the past few days. Then Yahtzee posts this today. I don't know what hive mind vibe Sean Murray is broadcasting this past week but that was kind of a funny coinkiedink for me. Neat.
Honestly been really enjoying NMS since it updated so much. I like that you can teleport betwern systems easily so you don't have to move your base around. And I did end up needing other systems for specific resources for things I was building XD while the story isn't super strong, it's enough to get you going and for that I am enjoying it.
When you remember Yahtzee explicitly said hd'd never do this since he doesn't condone the "fixing it after post" mentality. Guess all things change, and not for worse!
Also making those old timey bits in bloody windows movie maker is most impressive!
2nd the Old Cinema Filter usage along with the tin can audio effect used to process Yahtz old review. It's a nice juxtaposition.
The game deserves to be play again ams deserves respect for what they have done with the game.
@@kclink1579 What happened with this game shouldn’t be held up as a good example of anything.
Oh, wow, the game wasn’t completely worthless 5 years after realise. How admirable!
It's kinda funny seeing this video now since Cyberpunk2077 also did get major updates since Yahtzee's review
Never thought I would see Yahtzee giving a second chance to a game
Honestly I'd be down to watch Yahtzee re-review most of the games he's covered, even the ones that haven't been patched or changed at all. Would be interesting to see how his perspective may have shifted over the years, the way it did with the Souls series.
"Oh, its a pun on No Man's Land. I just got that."
Me: If it were a snake, it would've bit me, swallowed me whole and shat me out a month ago since I too just got that.
Between this and the review on escapist right now, I'm absolutely certain people are gonna plaster him with game recommendations the same way sharks bite when they smell blood
The most impressive thing about the updates to No Man's Sky is that they're still all FREE. 7 years and Hello Games has never asked us to spend money on more content.
My biggest issue with NMS is that they don't respect my time. Everything has a loading animation with its "awe" moments. Docking a ship, loading the game, going through a portal etc. I think a lot of these are holdovers from when it was first launched and they wanted to pad your time with the game but now its just showing its age.
I think the biggest promise that I DON’T THINK has ever been fulfilled was the idea that you could randomly happen upon any other players and their structures.
I understand that’s probably a nightmare with servers and whatnot. But that idea seemed fascinating to me.
Esp if the stuff aged or was degraded depending on the planet type
I know it’s asking a lot, but the fact that there was the remotest chance that someone could come across what I’ve deemed Planet Butts with the flying beasts I’ve named Sphincter Eagles. And then they could relax in the dilapidated ruins of Anal Explorer Base Alpha.
Just would’ve been so cool to leave my little mark on the universe
I haven't found another player's bases yet, but I have definitely found pre-discovered systems with re-named planets in a 'solo' game. I believe that the option to 'upload' your base puts it on the general map for other folks to stumble across.
I think the odds of randomly stumbling across another players' base are pretty slim, however there is certainly a guarantee of stumbling across another players' base on purpose. There are regions of the first 2 galaxies that have been "colonised" by various guilds/associations. Captain Steve on YT is a member of such an association, I believe they welcome newcomers settling in their region of space, so long as any new base is at least 1k distant from someone elses' base. The portal on the Nexus also has player made bases listed for anyone to visit, usually just 3 or 4. So long as a base is uploaded to the servers it is capable of being found and visited by other players, of course the first (starter) galaxy is the most populated.
A random french guy warped into my system and killed me and my friend so yeah... Its definitely possible
@@WhoTookQuwhu Disable PvP under the Network options, and no more being shot.
As for finding people; yes, the odds out on the galactic rim are vanishingly small, but most people get to the centre and then build there, where it's much easier to bump into each other. And you can give the planetary co-ordinates (the little row of icons when you take a screenshot etc) and players can leap straight to it by using the warp gate that appears in one spot on a single planet in each. You can also join a friends game, and play with them until the session ends, but it doesn't physically move you in the galaxy (so no getting straight to the centre by joining someone already there).
@@TotalCowage is it server based?
Or is everyone’s stuff actually all actually there in the same “universe”
Am loving seeing him tackle things he said he wouldn't, still don't think he'll ever like Pathologic though, but REALLY want to see his full reaction to it :P
To be honest, seeing this video on my recommended feed made my heart sink for a moment, but I'm pleased with the way this review review was handled.
Thanks for doing this.
When it rereleased all I saw people saying when they played it was "Oh this feels so much better" however as someone who never actually played the original, it all looks the same. It needed a comparison.
Maybe you should try things for yourself then? That seems to be the issue in this comment.
I think the NMS phenomenon is going to be a massive event in the history of gaming, for good and bad.
you've got companies that will refuse to move on and incessantly try to throw bandaids at a broken or slowly failing product until it works because they don't want to leave behind the work they've put into it behind and "no man's sky did it, so can we" (most notable right now is destiny 2)
alternately there's gamers who stopped reading into anything about the games progress past the release month that will forever only see it as an example of a bad release of broken promises and 'greedy devs' (totally misunderstanding either difference between crunch pressure and false advertising, or the difference between shareholders and game developers)
In my opinion it can be used to show that shareholders should respect their developers more, gamers should educate themselves on how game design actually works, advertisment laws should cover more bases, and that good game developers will not only accept mistakes, but fix them *with* their community.
My issue with No Man's Sky now is that they've added all this extra stuff without bothering to integrate it properly into early game progression. There are very discernable gaps between each section of content and a number of references to stuff that's been superceded by choices made in new content. And there's still bugs from the launch, like the quest breaking glitches that force you to restart a quest because it wants you to go to a thing that is no longer interactable.
Personally I think they'd have been better off having bases only buildable in (or on the outside of) Freighters and doubling down on the space nomad aspect of the original release where you had no ties to any planet and could just wander wherever you wanted.
Looks like they're kinda doing that on the latest patch, which enhances freighter-bases in a lot of ways such that ground bases (while still possible) are no longer really necessary -- you can even teleport directly to them now, which was the main thing keeping me from using my freighter as my main base! I'm definitely going nomad now!
They doubled down on freighter building in today's update. ^_^
@@TCO_404 who cares? There's nothing new that actually matter to do lol oooooh base building, everything else is still weak especially exploration
@@HHTwice it's on par with every other space game. elite dangerous is ass and got boring after 10 hours and has no content beyond, same with star citizen. nobody can do space games right except maybe space engineers, but even then it's god awfully outdated. at least they all make you feel like you're in space though, which i enjoy.
@@Xexden yeah most space games other than space based RTS's get boring after a while. I've just reached the getting bored point quicker because the core ganeplay of NMS is so damn boring, everything still revolves around mining minerals on planets that all function the same with limited proc gen. Hell Games needs to address the exploration problem NMS has instead of further expanding ridiculous base building to appease autists and adding meaningless shit that costs man power and resources like pets and whatnot.
I like NMS and Starbound (not saying I like Chucklefish, though). I like the sense of community NMS has, and how serene the game can be. It's incredibly peaceful if you want it to be. And Starbound is fun because the base building is great, and it essentially fills the role of space-Terraria.
Thank you for the very entertaining review! I imagining it's kind of a moment much like the food critic (Ego) in Ratatouille had when he heard a restaurant he gave a poor review for was popular again. lol My mind goes to weird areas sometimes. xD
if you want a really good space fleet rpg, you should play starsector. its like top down elite dangerous but much better.
One thing about the freighters or whatever they're called again they changed, was the new base building system they can now have. They basically act as a space station you can call on-demand, and you can even put one of those fancy teleporters in it. All of the machines placed in a freighter/whatever, also get infinite power, and don't need a generator. However, the aforementioned teleporter doesn't accept teleports to it, unlike space stations, which do. This is likely because the "freighters" can be moved to other star systems. The bases you can make in the cargo haulers, I mean freighters, is surprisingly huge, and can have multiple floors.
literally right as this video dropped, another pretty big update dropped xD
I’ve tried to replay it a few times. That was it.
Oh and the way he uses an old-timey filter and a few other things when showing his old review was a very nice touch!
Ah yes, the summer drought season is back
It is as Miyamoto said. A delayed game is eventually good or canceled or maybe repurposed into another game, but a bad game is bad forever or at least until it's been patched so many times it's barely recognizable and revisted by Yahtzee.
you forgot the quotation marks and the year this was said in
To be fair, this was said during a time when games couldn't receive patches or be fixed after release.
That original quote really didn’t age well, I’m glad people meme it so much.
Miyamoto never said this
THERE IT IS, THERE'S THE REDDIT LINE
yes yahtz do cyberpunk. they upended the quest system so now sidequests are delivered in batches so your map screen doesnt end up looking like a police investigation board trying to link up all the related suspects
The fact that it's not simply a "new look" but a look comparing old ZP complaints and concerns makes the review revisit far more enjoyable.
The blended mewlette soup congealed enough for them to carve a nice little trophy out of its head and all they needed was another six years...
Well, if you look at the studio's size...I'm almost shocked how much they were able to add in just 6 years for what seems like an indie-studio staff.
Don't forget to add a healthy dose of battle pass-esque FOMO with the Expeditions. At least they can be pretty fun to complete and give you a huge boost in progression
They have re-run all the prior expeditions though; also there's no online cheat protection so you can just edit in the rewards if you miss them each time they've been available.
And you put this out right when they announced a ginormous overhaul to the freighter building and functionality!
the great thing is they JUST updated the game the day this was uploaded. Reworked the freighters and theyre super nice now. I also jump systems like a mad man for some reason
I can’t believe Yahtzee missed an opportunity to reference Kurt Vonnegut in his „building St. Peter’s Basilica” bit. All you had to do was switch it to Taj Mahal!
Drought Suggestion (again) : Textorcist.
Yahtz likes Typing of the Dead. He will probably like Textorcist.
Yahtz likes Bullet Hell like Undertale. He will probably like Textorcist.
Yahtz likes Retro Pixel Art aesthetic like...lots of games. It's pretty ubiquitous now.
Yahtz likes Grind House stories, like House of the Dead Overkill. Textorcist has a better story, campy, but it also has heart to it.
Yahtz and I don't agree Politically, but we share a fondness for many of the same games.
Give Textorcist a shot Yahtz.
You're bored.
It's summer.
Try something different.
one small problem, yahtzee didn't like undertale for having bullet hell gameplay, yahtzee liked undertale which happens to have bullet hell gameplay
Don't forget the city building and management systems, or the horror freighter dungeons and stuff
I never played this game before and installed few weeks ago the first time. I agree with Yahtzee's previous / current comments. But still, the game keeps me in!
"No strict objective" thing might've been the reason behind it, i don't know.
Zero Punctuation prog rock album of the week:
*Procedurally Generated Infinity* by *Cosmic Cul De Sac* (tracks include *I Revel In Chaos* )
Yahtzee I can relate to this video. I too lately have been staring into the abyss that is 2022 and beyond, and finding myself do a 180 turn immediately back to the past to look for entertainment. I've even been playing old console games, like from the SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, PS1, PS2, eras etc. Not childhood classics I'm returning to for nostalgia either, games I've never played before and I'm playing for the first time in 2022.
And some of them have been damn fun experiences even by today's standards, which may be at least partly due to the sheer number of retro indie games coming out lately that are trying to evoke the style of games from that era. Even been chasing down top 10/20/30/100 lists for the best games from those generations to find new ones to play..
Maybe it isn't such a bad thing to sometimes go back to the past. Just because something is old, doesn't mean it's no longer relevant or fun.
I recently played Ocarina of Time and I had a blast with it, couldn't believe how well it holds up.
I've been experiencing (and suffering) the older Mystery Dungeon titles myself, checking a look at Shiren 1 and then the OG MD game, Torneko's Great Adventure. Really makes you appreciate all the advances that the future MDs do, but they're still unique enough experiences on their own.
Absolutely. By stunning coincidence, my (slightly more recent) example of choice for this, XCOM [dry heave] Enemy Unknown, is a decade old today and I challenge anyone who's never played it before to pick it and the expansion pack up and not have an absolute whale of a time.
I mean, it's hardly a hot take to say that XCOM was good but it's a prime instance of game design being so ridiculously tight from top to bottom that you simply don't give a damn about the limitations of the engine by modern standards.
EDIT: Oh, for new players, do yourself a favour and get your armour upgraded at least a bit as soon as humanly possible. Massively shifts the difficulty curve. The game _is_ designed to be enjoyably challenging with myriad constantly competing priorities but, if you're going to spend the first couple of months with your entire A-team in the hospital for a week after every mission because they were wounded a la my first playthrough, the strategic layer of the game will have you over a barrel from Day 1 and it'll never let up. I say this because the game's generally excellent at conveying its mechanics but it _is_ a bit of an oversight that it just lumps armour HP in with normal HP without telling you that you can lose it without getting the "wounded" status.
Did Yahtzee get a new recording setup recently? The audio quality lately sounds great!
"After it managed to hook me in for most of a week"
D-did the sky just implode?!
Is it just me, or is the intro and outro music extremely loud compared to the talking in every Zero Punctuation?
Just went back to it, and my experience was similar to Yhatzee's. In fairness I may have screwed things up myself in the log and was too busy following the Atlas quest which just got tedious, but I got to the part where you make the big decision and I think I've had my full. Yes I could keep going, but I feel I got what I wanted out of the gameplay loop and it really doesn't have much else to offer.
That, and I am getting sick of the inventory and upgrade management!
It's pretty unique, I don't know other games that have been fixed like this
Only game that comes close to this in my mind would be Final Fantasy 14.
@@laurencebrown3822 Not even close. NMS is an indiea developed game. FF14 has literally 13 other games to go and look back on andsee what mistakes were made. The trash that is ff14 will always be trash, and those that shovel it into their mouths are kinda the reason the gaming industry continues to falter.
what if hello games added a creature creator system like spore it would help in adding diversity to the games wildlife, and add little bit more to the whole idea that the game is connected to other people by seeing there creations.
I’ve been looking forward to this ever since you mentioned it on the podcast, such an awesome idea of yours!
Fittingly they just released *another* patch today. Honestly I was expecting Yahtzee to be a lot harsher on it. I enjoy it for what it is but there's still plenty wrong with the game, though upon further thought those problems only rear their head when you are well past the first impressions mark. Either way maybe being a dad has caused him to go soft >_>
In my opinion as someone who felt the game at launch delivered largely what it promised and what I wanted, the 20 subsequent small and large free expansions have been amazing to the point of ridiculousness - haven't even managed to get to the moon buggy stage, or the orbital base stage, or the leading a space fleet stage, or really further than seeing ten different planets or so, while just trying to explore as far as possible. (Maybe my problem is a severe attachment to permadeath mode.) It's probably true its biggest weakness is the potential to take up way too much of your time in too many varied and interesting ways.
Anyway it's cool of you to give it another shot.
5:19 Oh... Now the title finally makes sense. I never made that connection either.
Literally the same day as a new update for the Freighters lol perfect timing
I would totally have supported Yahtzee's previous position that games that aren't ready by ship date deserve to be kicked around the playground for showing up with their pants down. Having said that, in this day and age, it's nice that game makers have the option to fix things in post, though of course they should never make that the standard by which they operate. It's also cool to see Yahtzee broaden his horizons, especially in aforementioned modern world in which a game can last ten or more years if the makers keep making content for it (Minecraft comes to mind and I don't even play that!).
So the basic problem remains. A captivating gameplay loop.
It got a whole lot of busywork.
Well, kudos to everybody who enjoys it. And kudos to hello games for continually adding and improving -for free- their game.
I had a lot of trouble enjoying the game when it first came out, but I've since really enjoyed my time with No Scope 360.
Lol 😂😂
After not playing since 2013, i started playing again last month. Only fitting Yattzie re reviewed it 😂😂
Dudes been the most honest, funny cynical reviewers of our time
The problem I still see with NMS is that the game is a sample platter. It's a bunch of barely connected, compartmentalized experiences wedged into a single game. If I wanted that I'd play Mario Party.
It is very cool and commendable that hello games has fixed this game, but as a day one buyer when it came out it was so empty and basically a 60 usd scam, remember the interviews saying “oh yea you can play with your friends in multiplayer” and all the other promises that were totally false or misleading? Yes, the game is cool now, yes the game has tons of free updates, but when they released it for 60 usd that was a real jerk move. I didn’t pay that a couple years ago so I could play a cool game now, I wanted what was promised THEN
Yahtzee isn’t a multiplayer guy so I’m not surprised he didn’t try it, but the Community Expeditions are a lot of fun. For a certain amount of time, you can create a new save on the current Expedition and it dumps everyone is dumped in roughly the same area of space and directs them towards various meetup points with other supporting objectives that vary each expedition. It’s a stark contrast from the normal solo experience where you never see a single thing visited by another player - the meetup points have tons of players actively in-system and lots of bases and other signs of player activity. I think it’s a really neat way to use the same universe and engine to create almost an entirely different game.
Thing is No Mans Sky wasn't originally released as if it were the finished article, or even released as the unfinished article with a view to never improving it. It wasn't because of the reviews that they continued working on the game, it was because in essence they knew they hadn't finished it yet but were forced to release the game somewhat early. In reality they should have pushed the release date back and spent more time on it, but they couldn't as they aren't a huge developer with mounds of funding.
Their basement studio suffered in the UK floods at the time and they lost a lot of their work. It was almost completely submerged. I believe they did push the release slightly at this point but not enough to get back to where they were and they were ultimately forced to release an unfinished game with a view to continue to work on it after the fact.
The reviews this game received however asks the question as to why they were so harshly treated compared to the devs who release a beta at full price for 5-10 years with barely any progress being made yet never make it into the news cycle.
Kinda surprised that this was a proper Zero Punctuation instead of an Extra Punctuation, but hey, neat!
I remember an experience in NMS which was actually my first experience with a VR Player.
Long story short, my dad and I were playing it together when suddenly a VR player (evident by his strange stance and hands by his hips like Bully Maguire dancing saturday night fever) approached me and began shining my helmet and placing his hands all over my body before dancing. Considering how everyone up until that point had the same walk cycles and such, this was no-doubt jarring.
Like meeting an actual alien traveller, would you say?
@@charlesboudreau5350 No, the alien travellers were pretty normal
Thanks for the review, sounds like I’m not gonna go back to Ngo Mansky
I may have been one of the few people actually wanted to explore a bunch of planets and see different flora and fauna, and maybe some ancient civilizations that did some cool stuff.
Instead, as you know, there’s a lot of saminess.
Is it really that hard to procedurally generate randomness? I mean isn’t that what life is? Isn’t a platypus just a procedurally generated duck combine with the beaver?
In any case, here’s hoping that sometime in the next 10 years they’re able to figure out how to make it so that each planet has actually different looking animals and plants, and then maybe sometime in the future, they’ll be somethings kind of like archaeology where each system has a different architectural style, and you can actually find interesting things.
They wanted to shoot of people in space, I just play elite dangerous.
I’ve been wanting a re-review of this
Yahtzee giving NMS a good re-review really does encapsulate my enjoyment with it years later. Played it when it came out. Zzz. I play it now and I swear I'm 56 hours in and tryna learn how to create the best base ever.
"Hello, Games!" got me so badly in the dumbest way possible
The thing about the procedural generation isn't that you get to explore a billion slightly different planets, but that one day some player might find something generated that is really cool. There's an entire subreddit that is nothing but people posting cool ships, weapons, or animals they have found, or bases they have built or farms that other players might make use of. You get a billion people to throw a billion Lego on the ground and eventually one pile might resemble the Taj Mahal or the Sydney Opera House, and that's what No Man's Sky is. A billion robots dumping a billion Lego in a warehouse with people running around to say, 'Hey, look at this shit'.
that line right at the end of the credits - oh yeah. i didnt think of that either.
Can't wait to hear his re-review of Fantasy World Dizzy
Should check out V Rising. Tho dunno if you review early access games, it’s certainly one of the most complete looking early access games I’ve seen. You play as a vampire lord looking to retake your claim as ruler of the night. It’s a lotta fun.
2:11 I spy with my little eye an Archer reference
Be careful with Cyberpunk Yatz, one of the updates they did changed the stat requirements on some of the weapons so your buikd may need tweaking.
The thing about No Man's Sky is that it is supposed to be a chill game with lots of options of what you feel like doing. The randomized missions at the Nexus, while boring, offer good rewards at least for awhile. If you want a good ship, well, think about what _kind_ of ship you want (Fighter, Hauler, etc) and find a 3-star economy system of the correct type and explore until you find the one you want (or buy it from a station). You can always build a base, if you're the type that likes to do that, some people build ludicrously elaborate bases. Maybe you just wanna kill crap. That's easy, just go pick a fight with some sentinels. The thing is, there's lots of stuff to do, and the fact the game takes place in a huge universe means that every time you start the game, it's going to be slightly different each time, what planets you get to work with, what the planets look like, etc. Some of them are very exotic and look really strange and are kinda neat. And besides, you said you sunk 30 hours into it and it sounds like you only did some of the things the game has to offer. That's already better than many $60 triple A titles that are running out of gas at about 30 hours.
"Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" is the best description I've ever seen for No Man's Sky.
@@enskje I'd rather have that, than "deep as an ocean and wide as a puddle" because that's even worse in some ways. That, and you know, they keep adding to it. Kinda like the mega update that _just_ released today that gives players even more stuff to play with.
And the Yahtzee lexicon expands with the glorious entry: "un-fuckup-ening"
I like the idea of Yahtzee looking back at old game reviews, not even just to game that have been patched into workability. After Dev Diary and Extra Punctuation going into video format I feel like we've been seeing a more creatively expressive and thoughtful series of dick jokes and I think it's worth returning to those old games, especially during the summer drought.
About those cyber-trousers...come september that might not be such a crazy idea
Funnily enough, the day this episode came out on TH-cam, NMS god a sizable new update.
I'd like a re-review of minecraft, after all it's changed significantly since it's the original review
They actually did fix the gock exposure bug in CP2077