Wasted Potential | Content

[Feaden]

I have experienced the game for an average of 100 hours and all I can say for the game is that the game has incredible potential and unfortunately the producer could not utilize this potential. The game has things it tries to do and I appreciate it, but there is a huge lack of content and diversity in the game. The game repeats the same things on all planets. I don't feel like I've come to a different planet, I feel like I've visited different biomes on the same planet. because there is almost no difference between the planets. While I was waiting for a planet belonging to an alien race that had built their own city, it was a big disappointment for me that all the planets had similar structures with only different colors and they were all just primitive animals. I have a lot of things to say, but I don't want to prolong the subject by telling more. What I want to say safely is that the game has trashed all of its potential.

[-OrLoK- Слава Україн]

it improved vastly since release and while not a deep as I hoped now has lots to do and see.

tried the expeditions? I thought they'd be not to my taste but they're rather fun and imho should be part of the full game proper.

it'll never please all our wants and needs but I don't think it's wasted its potential.

I'd like the Leather Godesses of Phobos to be ingame but I'll take what we have now.

[Faceplant]

What you say is all true, but what you want and what's achievable are two different things. I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of the players want what you said, and I would be willing to bet that the developers want that as well, but the technology is just not there yet. I'm sure that's where we're headed, through, either through Hello Games or some other developer.

[[PC]Roco45]

Yea OP I feel you. Every update that releases with this game, I play it and I like, but in retrospect, it's all half baked. Like a whiff of content but no full meal lol They did improve the game vastly compared to release and continue to improve it, but again, the content every single update is just lacking.

[TheJebblue]

Originally posted by PCRoco45:

Yea OP I feel you. Every update that releases with this game, I play it and I like, but in retrospect, it's all half baked. Like a whiff of content but no full meal lol They did improve the game vastly compared to release and continue to improve it, but again, the content every single update is just lacking.

Whiff of content? Really?!?!?

It's like Minecraft, Subnautica, Space Engineers (for bases), Empyrion (for building and fun), Scrap Mechanic (for funnies), Elite Dangerous (for excitement), Avorion (for economy and galaxy capitalism) and probably half a dozen games I'm not remembering at the moment...COMBINED.

[Krash Megiddo]

How does a game have incredible potential and trashed all its potential?

[morph113]

Originally posted by jebblue:

Originally posted by PCRoco45:

Yea OP I feel you. Every update that releases with this game, I play it and I like, but in retrospect, it's all half baked. Like a whiff of content but no full meal lol They did improve the game vastly compared to release and continue to improve it, but again, the content every single update is just lacking.

Whiff of content? Really?!?!?

It's like Minecraft, Subnautica, Space Engineers (for bases), Empyrion (for building and fun), Scrap Mechanic (for funnies), Elite Dangerous (for excitement), Avorion (for economy and galaxy capitalism) and probably half a dozen games I'm not remembering at the moment...COMBINED.

Except it's doing everything much more poorly than those games, like significantly much worse. Yes it has elements from all these games but not anywhere even remotely close to their quality. Much of the content they add just lacks quality and don't add much purpose to the game. Like settlements are pretty much pointless. Pet companions are useless. Basebuilding is still also just to be creative but otherwise useless. Exploration still hasn't much improved from initial release apart from underwater. Fighting in space is still a joke. You can easily fight many pirates at once in a slow and badly equipped hauler or exploration ship. Yes they keep adding new content, but none of it is really fleshed out or of decent quality.

[TheJebblue]

^ you're missing the point. To run all those games simultaneously as is would require a supercomputer. A lot of people don't have enough money to pay $50K for a gaming computer.

[BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!]

I am also of the opinion that this game is wasted potential. It is absolutely overflowing with millimeter deep content just begging to be fleshed out. Unfortunately, it never is an it remains as just a small glimpse of what it could be... and its all tied into an atrociously user unfriendly UI (especially the inventory mechanics).

The fact that planets have all the same structures really limits how unique a planet can feel. The technology exists to address that problem. Instead of structures all be a premade instance that just gets slapped on they could have them be procedurally generated (from premade stuff). A good example would be the way in which the recent X-com reboot games handle their maps. The game would say "okay this zone is a minor settlement" and then within that zone divide it up into segments and apply things within that segments. Add some landing pads here, storage silos here, buildings here, a trader here, etc. Further flesh things out by adding minor details to the structures themselves, like the coloring, what gizmos are on the roof, etc.


The derelict freighters are another wasted thing. The concept is awesome! But its literally the same thing every time. You go in to a dark random mess of a maze with no logic to it. There is gunk on everything. You'll either kill pointless and easy little bugs or you'll kill pointless and easy drones / turrets. You'll wander around reading logs that make no sense and all essentially tell the same story. Then you'll find a mid-point and end-point terminal to get your big payout.

Instead of a random layout they could do them as a more logical modular layout. The game Starcrawlers would be a good example. Its a sci-fi dungeon crawler with randomized base and ships that you explore. While the ships are randomly generated there is some logic to their layout. They all have some kind of entry point and they all have a cockpit / bridge area. They tend to also have a least one crew area like with bunks, a storage area, and a mechanical room presumably the engine or whatever. NMS could do this same thing so that interiors at least feel something like a functional ship instead of a randomly arranged maze of storage rooms.

The actual reason for the derelict situation needs some love as well. Why can't we ever come across a derelict that still has power or atmosphere in it? Why don't we ever run into situations where we have to spacewalk outside the ship to get other places (kind of like we can do on our own frigates when repairing them. And most importantly... do freighters only encounter eldritch horror events? Why not...
* Ship stranded due to mechanical issues. You can repair damage to gain further access. Maybe the crew is still alive and stranded.
* Ship is almost functional but is a trap set by sentinels.
* Pirates disabled the ship. Maybe fight some pirates on the ship and possibly save the crew.
* Literally just a dead vessel. No great calamity. Maybe their life support or engines failed. Maybe there isn't really anything to actual discover there. Not everything has to have major significance to be memorable.
* Ship appears intact. Inside appears fully functional. Crew either missing or exist as ghostly glitches (like fellow travelers on the stations are) and may even be hostile.

At the very least give us a bit more interesting or varied things to see any combat inside them.


Speaking of combat... that is more wasted potential. It amuses me how much hate was thrown at Cyberpunk 2077 for the awful way to combat was whenever you alerted the police and had to deal with a near constant spawning of police with brain dead AI but lethal accuracy, but yet NMS has its entire combat system function like CP2077 police alerts. You mined a rock? Have some sentinels. Killed them? Good there are infinite more. You outrun them? That's fine you'll interact with the planet in some fashion and they'll swarm you again. You escape into space? Oh man! Wrong move... have infinite spawns of sentinel space ships. You defeated all the waves and the big frigate? Nice! Maybe you'll have escaped but often the moment you move a couple feet from the frigate more will come and you end up right back in the same combat loop again. I think my record was 8 frigates before I got bored and just called the anomaly. Bored of sentinels? You can fight the horrific monstrosities which play out the same, endlessly spawning way. Combat is just two different flavors of endlessly respawning tedium

The game doesn't need amazing combat! I don't need to see enemies strategically using terrain as cover or anything like that. Just give some more interesting variety of enemies and how the engagements play out. Its really odd that the game has pirates in it along with the Vy'keen (and even the ancient Gek) being clearly established as warmongering and yet we never actually fight any humanoids in ground combat. If they reasoning as due to violence or whatever... just make it as violent as the wildfire combat. You kill them and they vanish. No need for bloody corpses. Just ragdoll them and make them glitch / fade away. Just making combat not pointless tedium would be pretty neat.


The weapons are another aspect of combat that is wasted potential. Honestly, if they made the weapons actually fun or interesting then combat mostly being an endless plodding fish in a barrel shooting gallery wouldn't sting quite as much.

Personally, if I was in charge of designing the weapons in this game I'd make it like a combination of Borderlands and Blacklight Retribution. Blacklight Retribution had their weapons made in a modular fashion. For example, your receiver would determine if the weapon was a pistol or rifle. Then you had a barrel, stock, magazine, etc. The combination of these would determine the attributes of the weapon. With the right parts a pistol could be anything from a sniper scope equipped man cannon of a revolver to a tiny machine pistol that spits its entire mag in a fraction of a second. Rifles could become anything from a slow and heavy LMG, a burst fire battle rifle, a sniper rifle, etc.

NMS would be perfect for this kind of weapon system. Much like chasing after your dream ship / freighter you could chase your dream weapon. Separate the multi-tool and the weapon. Then, let weapons randomly be made of a mix of...
* Fire type - single shot / burst / automatic / continuous (if its a laser weapon)
* Fire rate - how much time between shots. Additionally for burst how many shots per burst.
* Projectile type - energy (laser beam, plasma ball, etc) / kinetic (hitscan bullet, slow visible projectile, etc) / whatever else they can imagine...
* Projectile color
* Sway - How much accuracy is affected by aiming the weapon around rapidly.
* Recoil - How much accuracy is affected when firing the weapon.
* Accuracy - The spread of the projectiles (or wobble in the case of beam weapons)
* Magazine - how much ammo or charge the weapon has
* Ammunition - what it reloads with. Maybe normal ammo, maybe unstable plasma. Hell maybe you have a sweet laser pistol fueled by copper. Rarer ammo should mean a more powerful weapon. So a tradeoff between convenience and awesomeness. Maybe you even find a solar powered weapon or one that doesn't need any ammo but has a charge time.
* Coloring
* Style
* Special Properties - ricochet, burning, stunning, area damage, terrain damage, etc.
* Secondary weapon - An alternate weapon that can be switched to using "G". Not all weapons should have them obviously, but it could make ones that do more interesting.
* Sounds

There is probably a heaping ton of other neat things that could be done, but I think the above is a solid weapon procedural generation list considering I just made it up on the spot. The best part is that most of that stuff is already technically present and possible within the game since we already have varied weapon visuals, one-handed / two-handed types, projectile / beam, burst / single / auto, etc. It just needs to be mechanically handled in a more interesting and fun way.

If the weapon system was modular like this it would also mean that you could award players with parts that they could modify their weapon with. "I *LOVE* this gun I have currently, but I hate that its burst fire. Oh cool, this long mission I stumbled upon is offering a full auto mechanism as a reward! Now I have an objective to pursue."


Exocraft are still a huge heap of wasted potential. Generally they look awesome, but they aren't fun or interesting. All the vehicles you can drive around are tediously slow and there aren't any fun physics to goof around with. If they were faster and the games physics were good then it would be fun just to romp and ramp around on planets and build and dig tracks and things.

The minotaur also needs some work. As it is now its only real purpose is to environmental protection and sometimes its fast to travel with in a straight line. In my opinion it should basically be a end-game reward that functions like Player 2.0. By which I mean, it should be capable of everything that the player can do on foot but better. Be able to use your scope to look at and scan stuff, be able to run faster, jetpack higher and longer, collect, mine, fight, etc. We should be able to tweak the hell out of it make it faster, stronger, more agile, customize weapons, customize tools, appearance, etc.

There should be certain things that only the minotaur can really handle as well. Like certain things only it can collect or mine. Things only it has much chance of fighting, etc. And let us fight some other minotaurs whether AI minotaurs or maybe even duels against other players. It would be nifty to stumble upon stations that are a gladiator sports arena where you can do minotaur fights for prizes.


The games UI is another major issue holding this game back from greatness. When you're flying around or walking around the minimal interface is fine for the most part. The only real annoyance I have there is that I sometimes will be missing a large amount of health and it won't show me it unless I take more damage or try to heal. The rest of the interface sucks badly. Its obvious that a lot of the problem stems from it being a console port instead of actually being designed for a PC that doesn't explain a lot of the bad decisions.

The scanner you use to analyze stuff. It really shouldn't need to constantly have you hold down the button to scan. I can understand it on creatures since that is kind of fun to keep focused on them but seriously... rocks and plants? Just let it scan them by looking at them instead of holding a button. Why not let us get a tool / weapon mod (or if using my weapon system above let it be a possible special feature) that lets use analyze things be hunting or mining them? That feels like a natural progression. Instead of what ends up happening, where after the first planet I never scan a single thing with the exception of the occasional goofy looking animal.

Crafting things could be streamlined to be less tedious. I'm fine with it being tedious when I have to have specific machines to combine or refine materials, but if I need to make Warp Fuel and don't have Antimatter and Antimatter Housing, but I *DO* have the materials to make each of them.... then just let me do it without having to manually go through the steps of making those sub components first. Maybe give a message to confirm that warns me I'm missing whatever and it will use whatever materials to make it.

The inventory management is a mess...

The "E" key isn't just to use items or unlock tech items to move them it also switches through tabs. So every time I try to use or move tech I end up swapping tabs. If I try to swap tabs I end up using something or grabbing tech. Its annoying.

Everything requires you to hold the mouse button and watch a ring spin. Tedious and just adds bloat.

You don't just have one inventory but three of them (inventory, technology, cargo) and its not just for your player themselves either as your ship, exocraft, and freighter have them too. Ugh! The majority of any time spent in the game for me is me engaging the boring task of shuffling things around in my inventory to allow me to have enough space to actually try to play and try to squeeze some fun out of the game.

Honestly, I'd rather see only items themselves going into the inventory slots. Things like the eggs, relics, modules, etc. Things that are more limited in quantity and more unique. The materials I don't think should actually go into inventory at all. Instead, make them function more like how Borderlands handles its ammo. You can hold a certain amount of a given type. You can invest in upgrades to allow you to hold me.

So as an example your player (suit) should only be able to hold a set amount of each of the games materials. Initially maybe your suit could only hold 250 of carbon, sodium, oxygen, and di-hydrogen. You could upgrade it to increase the amount of a given material that you could hold. You could also give it the ability to hold more advanced types of materials, such as Condensed Carbon, and upgrade to increase those amounts as well. If you have a Portable Refiner upgrade in your suit and you collect a material that you are maxed out of but have room to hold a higher or lower variant of it then it should convert it at a loss. For example, I if am maxed out on Carbon but have room to harvest Condensed Carbon then any Carbon I mine would instead be convert (at a bad exchange rate) into Condensed Carbon.

Your ship and freighter should work the same way. So I could hop in my ship and pump my materials into my ships tanks without having to manually transfer everything in a boring fashion. Likewise when you dock at your freighter your could exchange it easily. Better yet... we could be given the ability to set minimum limits on or ship and suit. So I could set my suit to keep a minimum of 100 sodium, oxygen, carbon but automatically offload other materials or excess sodium, oxygen, and carbon onto the ship. Likewise with the ship I should be able to set limits and anything over could be set to automatically offload to the freighter. This feature could be a form of upgrade you purchase or unlock adding some quality of life content to pursue.

Hell, you could even tie this directly into the recharge mechanics of the game to eliminate that annoyance. Make players still manually have to use Life Support Gel or Ion Batteries like they do currently, but material recharging of life support / hazard protection could just automatically draw from your material stocks if it reaches the critical level. Give players the ability to toggle which materials the system automatically has access to. Like maybe I'm okay with it draining my sodium, but I don't want it to automatically use my dioxite.

Literally I just want anything done to make inventory management not such a tedious tile game of item and material micromanagement. I find collecting and dealing with items and modules at least partially fun because that's essentially the "loot" of the game. But counting and arranging thousands of grains of sand so I can pick a flower is just dumb and boring. When I encounter a game situation that makes me stop and think "I have more fun doing my taxes" then it typically means that part of a game isn't a game... but is just boring work.


Ugh. So much wasted potential. I barely even scratched the surface even. I could still rant about ships, creatures (taming, hunting, etc), planets, space and space combat, etc. The game is literally filled with *almost* interesting content that has no depth. Its like playing a game entirely made of placeholders. But the game wasted enough of my time checking out the latest expedition. I think I'll go play something fun now... or do my taxes...

[BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!]

Originally posted by morph113:

Originally posted by jebblue:

Whiff of content? Really?!?!?

It's like Minecraft, Subnautica, Space Engineers (for bases), Empyrion (for building and fun), Scrap Mechanic (for funnies), Elite Dangerous (for excitement), Avorion (for economy and galaxy capitalism) and probably half a dozen games I'm not remembering at the moment...COMBINED.

Except it's doing everything much more poorly than those games, like significantly much worse. Yes it has elements from all these games but not anywhere even remotely close to their quality. Much of the content they add just lacks quality and don't add much purpose to the game. Like settlements are pretty much pointless. Pet companions are useless. Basebuilding is still also just to be creative but otherwise useless. Exploration still hasn't much improved from initial release apart from underwater. Fighting in space is still a joke. You can easily fight many pirates at once in a slow and badly equipped hauler or exploration ship. Yes they keep adding new content, but none of it is really fleshed out or of decent quality.

This I completely agree with.

I mean I have 7 Days to Die which is also a voxel style procedurally generated game. It has base building, combat, exploration, vehicles, biomes, etc.

Unlike No Man's Sky it doesn't have space or multiple planets. You're literally confined to just boring old Earth. But yet I've played 800+ hours of that and less than 200 hours of NMS!

The scale of 7DTD is miniscule compared to NMS but everything is more fleshed out and interesting as a whole. The enemies are all zombies with fairly little to differentiate them but fighting them is actually enjoyable and can be dangerous. The weapons are fairly basic and nothing crazy but the limited variety and customization is still miles beyond NMS. Survival and collecting materials is fairly easy but more varied than NMS. The base building is simple but its enjoyable and since you need to built a base that can survive attacks your building style has more purpose than just solely for creativity. The areas you can explore are essentially just all buildings but the variety in layouts, the loot / material collection, and the more interesting and fun combat and weapons make the otherwise basic exploration better than anything in NMS. The games UI and inventory management also isn't a massively tedious disaster.

Truly if NMS would just take the placeholder content they already have and just flesh it out and take the mechanics and interfaces they already have and just make them tolerable this would easily be one of the best games out there.

[Jaggid Edje]

I actually love this game and have played probably a couple thousand hours (Steam doesn't track offline play, so I don't know precisely).....and I even agree with the general sentiment expressed in this thread. I love the game, but I also can see it could be much, much more than it is.
Technological limitations have nothing to do with the shortcomings...but rather that Hello Games just never dives very deep into any specific thing the game does.

[Wile E Coyote, Super Genius]

True, but for a game with a 12gb footprint that has a zillion planets and can run on most mortals pc isn't bad at all.

What we wish for (huge ever changing worlds, big cities, large populations, etc) could be accomplished but the file size would be 10000gb and a super computer to crunch all those numbers.

[BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!]

Originally posted by Wile E Coyote, Super Genius:

True, but for a game with a 12gb footprint that has a zillion planets and can run on most mortals pc isn't bad at all.

What we wish for (huge ever changing worlds, big cities, large populations, etc) could be accomplished but the file size would be 10000gb and a super computer to crunch all those numbers.

I don't really see any technical reason they couldn't do big cities with large populations.

The buildings in the game are all cookie cutter structures. If they used a loading screen to separate inside and outside of the structures (like the freighter with its ramp hallway leading from the hangar to the base area) then it shouldn't be a big issue. The outside structures wouldn't use up much more memory than any other structure currently does and with the inner area being its own separate instance they could allow for more NPCs and things inside.

I mean they manage to have settlements which are a fairly large number of buildings with a decent amount of variation and no loading screen area to transition from the interiors and exteriors. These settlements also have a decent number of NPCs which roam around entering and exiting buildings. If the game can handle all that while also having to deal with the planet stuff like animals, weather, terrain, etc then it should easily be able to handle a large more detailed but contained instance that you transition into.


Edit: I mean, they could easily add explorable derelict freighters to a planet surface. It wouldn't be any different than it is in space. A model of the spaceship with no see-through windows or anything from exterior to interior. A landing pad or whatever. Some entryway that acts as a loading screen (the slow hallway from derelict pad to initial airlock and then the airlock door itself). The interior is its own separate instance. The computer doesn't have to process anything going on outside the derelict interior since it essentially doesn't exist. Just like the inside doesn't exist until you land and enter the freighter.

A large city or other sizeable outpost could work the same way.

[+VLFBERHT+]

Originally posted by BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!:

I am also of the opinion that this game is wasted potential. It is absolutely overflowing with millimeter deep content just begging to be fleshed out. Unfortunately, it never is an it remains as just a small glimpse of what it could be... and its all tied into an atrociously user unfriendly UI (especially the inventory mechanics).

The fact that planets have all the same structures really limits how unique a planet can feel. The technology exists to address that problem. Instead of structures all be a premade instance that just gets slapped on they could have them be procedurally generated (from premade stuff). A good example would be the way in which the recent X-com reboot games handle their maps. The game would say "okay this zone is a minor settlement" and then within that zone divide it up into segments and apply things within that segments. Add some landing pads here, storage silos here, buildings here, a trader here, etc. Further flesh things out by adding minor details to the structures themselves, like the coloring, what gizmos are on the roof, etc.


The derelict freighters are another wasted thing. The concept is awesome! But its literally the same thing every time. You go in to a dark random mess of a maze with no logic to it. There is gunk on everything. You'll either kill pointless and easy little bugs or you'll kill pointless and easy drones / turrets. You'll wander around reading logs that make no sense and all essentially tell the same story. Then you'll find a mid-point and end-point terminal to get your big payout.

Instead of a random layout they could do them as a more logical modular layout. The game Starcrawlers would be a good example. Its a sci-fi dungeon crawler with randomized base and ships that you explore. While the ships are randomly generated there is some logic to their layout. They all have some kind of entry point and they all have a cockpit / bridge area. They tend to also have a least one crew area like with bunks, a storage area, and a mechanical room presumably the engine or whatever. NMS could do this same thing so that interiors at least feel something like a functional ship instead of a randomly arranged maze of storage rooms.

The actual reason for the derelict situation needs some love as well. Why can't we ever come across a derelict that still has power or atmosphere in it? Why don't we ever run into situations where we have to spacewalk outside the ship to get other places (kind of like we can do on our own frigates when repairing them. And most importantly... do freighters only encounter eldritch horror events? Why not...
* Ship stranded due to mechanical issues. You can repair damage to gain further access. Maybe the crew is still alive and stranded.
* Ship is almost functional but is a trap set by sentinels.
* Pirates disabled the ship. Maybe fight some pirates on the ship and possibly save the crew.
* Literally just a dead vessel. No great calamity. Maybe their life support or engines failed. Maybe there isn't really anything to actual discover there. Not everything has to have major significance to be memorable.
* Ship appears intact. Inside appears fully functional. Crew either missing or exist as ghostly glitches (like fellow travelers on the stations are) and may even be hostile.

At the very least give us a bit more interesting or varied things to see any combat inside them.


Speaking of combat... that is more wasted potential. It amuses me how much hate was thrown at Cyberpunk 2077 for the awful way to combat was whenever you alerted the police and had to deal with a near constant spawning of police with brain dead AI but lethal accuracy, but yet NMS has its entire combat system function like CP2077 police alerts. You mined a rock? Have some sentinels. Killed them? Good there are infinite more. You outrun them? That's fine you'll interact with the planet in some fashion and they'll swarm you again. You escape into space? Oh man! Wrong move... have infinite spawns of sentinel space ships. You defeated all the waves and the big frigate? Nice! Maybe you'll have escaped but often the moment you move a couple feet from the frigate more will come and you end up right back in the same combat loop again. I think my record was 8 frigates before I got bored and just called the anomaly. Bored of sentinels? You can fight the horrific monstrosities which play out the same, endlessly spawning way. Combat is just two different flavors of endlessly respawning tedium

The game doesn't need amazing combat! I don't need to see enemies strategically using terrain as cover or anything like that. Just give some more interesting variety of enemies and how the engagements play out. Its really odd that the game has pirates in it along with the Vy'keen (and even the ancient Gek) being clearly established as warmongering and yet we never actually fight any humanoids in ground combat. If they reasoning as due to violence or whatever... just make it as violent as the wildfire combat. You kill them and they vanish. No need for bloody corpses. Just ragdoll them and make them glitch / fade away. Just making combat not pointless tedium would be pretty neat.


The weapons are another aspect of combat that is wasted potential. Honestly, if they made the weapons actually fun or interesting then combat mostly being an endless plodding fish in a barrel shooting gallery wouldn't sting quite as much.

Personally, if I was in charge of designing the weapons in this game I'd make it like a combination of Borderlands and Blacklight Retribution. Blacklight Retribution had their weapons made in a modular fashion. For example, your receiver would determine if the weapon was a pistol or rifle. Then you had a barrel, stock, magazine, etc. The combination of these would determine the attributes of the weapon. With the right parts a pistol could be anything from a sniper scope equipped man cannon of a revolver to a tiny machine pistol that spits its entire mag in a fraction of a second. Rifles could become anything from a slow and heavy LMG, a burst fire battle rifle, a sniper rifle, etc.

NMS would be perfect for this kind of weapon system. Much like chasing after your dream ship / freighter you could chase your dream weapon. Separate the multi-tool and the weapon. Then, let weapons randomly be made of a mix of...
* Fire type - single shot / burst / automatic / continuous (if its a laser weapon)
* Fire rate - how much time between shots. Additionally for burst how many shots per burst.
* Projectile type - energy (laser beam, plasma ball, etc) / kinetic (hitscan bullet, slow visible projectile, etc) / whatever else they can imagine...
* Projectile color
* Sway - How much accuracy is affected by aiming the weapon around rapidly.
* Recoil - How much accuracy is affected when firing the weapon.
* Accuracy - The spread of the projectiles (or wobble in the case of beam weapons)
* Magazine - how much ammo or charge the weapon has
* Ammunition - what it reloads with. Maybe normal ammo, maybe unstable plasma. Hell maybe you have a sweet laser pistol fueled by copper. Rarer ammo should mean a more powerful weapon. So a tradeoff between convenience and awesomeness. Maybe you even find a solar powered weapon or one that doesn't need any ammo but has a charge time.
* Coloring
* Style
* Special Properties - ricochet, burning, stunning, area damage, terrain damage, etc.
* Secondary weapon - An alternate weapon that can be switched to using "G". Not all weapons should have them obviously, but it could make ones that do more interesting.
* Sounds

There is probably a heaping ton of other neat things that could be done, but I think the above is a solid weapon procedural generation list considering I just made it up on the spot. The best part is that most of that stuff is already technically present and possible within the game since we already have varied weapon visuals, one-handed / two-handed types, projectile / beam, burst / single / auto, etc. It just needs to be mechanically handled in a more interesting and fun way.

If the weapon system was modular like this it would also mean that you could award players with parts that they could modify their weapon with. "I *LOVE* this gun I have currently, but I hate that its burst fire. Oh cool, this long mission I stumbled upon is offering a full auto mechanism as a reward! Now I have an objective to pursue."


Exocraft are still a huge heap of wasted potential. Generally they look awesome, but they aren't fun or interesting. All the vehicles you can drive around are tediously slow and there aren't any fun physics to goof around with. If they were faster and the games physics were good then it would be fun just to romp and ramp around on planets and build and dig tracks and things.

The minotaur also needs some work. As it is now its only real purpose is to environmental protection and sometimes its fast to travel with in a straight line. In my opinion it should basically be a end-game reward that functions like Player 2.0. By which I mean, it should be capable of everything that the player can do on foot but better. Be able to use your scope to look at and scan stuff, be able to run faster, jetpack higher and longer, collect, mine, fight, etc. We should be able to tweak the hell out of it make it faster, stronger, more agile, customize weapons, customize tools, appearance, etc.

There should be certain things that only the minotaur can really handle as well. Like certain things only it can collect or mine. Things only it has much chance of fighting, etc. And let us fight some other minotaurs whether AI minotaurs or maybe even duels against other players. It would be nifty to stumble upon stations that are a gladiator sports arena where you can do minotaur fights for prizes.


The games UI is another major issue holding this game back from greatness. When you're flying around or walking around the minimal interface is fine for the most part. The only real annoyance I have there is that I sometimes will be missing a large amount of health and it won't show me it unless I take more damage or try to heal. The rest of the interface sucks badly. Its obvious that a lot of the problem stems from it being a console port instead of actually being designed for a PC that doesn't explain a lot of the bad decisions.

The scanner you use to analyze stuff. It really shouldn't need to constantly have you hold down the button to scan. I can understand it on creatures since that is kind of fun to keep focused on them but seriously... rocks and plants? Just let it scan them by looking at them instead of holding a button. Why not let us get a tool / weapon mod (or if using my weapon system above let it be a possible special feature) that lets use analyze things be hunting or mining them? That feels like a natural progression. Instead of what ends up happening, where after the first planet I never scan a single thing with the exception of the occasional goofy looking animal.

Crafting things could be streamlined to be less tedious. I'm fine with it being tedious when I have to have specific machines to combine or refine materials, but if I need to make Warp Fuel and don't have Antimatter and Antimatter Housing, but I *DO* have the materials to make each of them.... then just let me do it without having to manually go through the steps of making those sub components first. Maybe give a message to confirm that warns me I'm missing whatever and it will use whatever materials to make it.

The inventory management is a mess...

The "E" key isn't just to use items or unlock tech items to move them it also switches through tabs. So every time I try to use or move tech I end up swapping tabs. If I try to swap tabs I end up using something or grabbing tech. Its annoying.

Everything requires you to hold the mouse button and watch a ring spin. Tedious and just adds bloat.

You don't just have one inventory but three of them (inventory, technology, cargo) and its not just for your player themselves either as your ship, exocraft, and freighter have them too. Ugh! The majority of any time spent in the game for me is me engaging the boring task of shuffling things around in my inventory to allow me to have enough space to actually try to play and try to squeeze some fun out of the game.

Honestly, I'd rather see only items themselves going into the inventory slots. Things like the eggs, relics, modules, etc. Things that are more limited in quantity and more unique. The materials I don't think should actually go into inventory at all. Instead, make them function more like how Borderlands handles its ammo. You can hold a certain amount of a given type. You can invest in upgrades to allow you to hold me.

So as an example your player (suit) should only be able to hold a set amount of each of the games materials. Initially maybe your suit could only hold 250 of carbon, sodium, oxygen, and di-hydrogen. You could upgrade it to increase the amount of a given material that you could hold. You could also give it the ability to hold more advanced types of materials, such as Condensed Carbon, and upgrade to increase those amounts as well. If you have a Portable Refiner upgrade in your suit and you collect a material that you are maxed out of but have room to hold a higher or lower variant of it then it should convert it at a loss. For example, I if am maxed out on Carbon but have room to harvest Condensed Carbon then any Carbon I mine would instead be convert (at a bad exchange rate) into Condensed Carbon.

Your ship and freighter should work the same way. So I could hop in my ship and pump my materials into my ships tanks without having to manually transfer everything in a boring fashion. Likewise when you dock at your freighter your could exchange it easily. Better yet... we could be given the ability to set minimum limits on or ship and suit. So I could set my suit to keep a minimum of 100 sodium, oxygen, carbon but automatically offload other materials or excess sodium, oxygen, and carbon onto the ship. Likewise with the ship I should be able to set limits and anything over could be set to automatically offload to the freighter. This feature could be a form of upgrade you purchase or unlock adding some quality of life content to pursue.

Hell, you could even tie this directly into the recharge mechanics of the game to eliminate that annoyance. Make players still manually have to use Life Support Gel or Ion Batteries like they do currently, but material recharging of life support / hazard protection could just automatically draw from your material stocks if it reaches the critical level. Give players the ability to toggle which materials the system automatically has access to. Like maybe I'm okay with it draining my sodium, but I don't want it to automatically use my dioxite.

Literally I just want anything done to make inventory management not such a tedious tile game of item and material micromanagement. I find collecting and dealing with items and modules at least partially fun because that's essentially the "loot" of the game. But counting and arranging thousands of grains of sand so I can pick a flower is just dumb and boring. When I encounter a game situation that makes me stop and think "I have more fun doing my taxes" then it typically means that part of a game isn't a game... but is just boring work.


Ugh. So much wasted potential. I barely even scratched the surface even. I could still rant about ships, creatures (taming, hunting, etc), planets, space and space combat, etc. The game is literally filled with *almost* interesting content that has no depth. Its like playing a game entirely made of placeholders. But the game wasted enough of my time checking out the latest expedition. I think I'll go play something fun now... or do my taxes...

LoL

[BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!]

Originally posted by +VLFBERHT+:

LoL

Cool story bro. Love the thoughts insight and feedback you contributed. You're really adding to the conversation in the thread. Keep on keeping on.

[+VLFBERHT+]

Originally posted by BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!:

Originally posted by +VLFBERHT+:

LoL

Cool story bro. Love the thoughts insight and feedback you contributed. You're really adding to the conversation in the thread. Keep on keeping on.

Sorry ... just a little snicker at how long your post is.

I think the time you spent on it times out at least decades worth of Tax returns :)

But i should add, it is an well thought critique of what you had been thinking about during your NMS play experience.

Even though i personally don't agree with much of what you have written, I suspect Hello Games seeks out posts such as yours, if only to mix them into the cooking pot of the countless glowing with admiration and praise posts for NMS, to form an objective conclusion of what the community likes and dislikes... if i were a Dev of anything in the entertainment industry, i would too.

Have Fun