No Man’s Sky Beyond Review – A Story of Redemption

[MissyS]

No Man's Sky Beyond Key Art.jpg

No Man's Sky launched with a sputter three years ago. Now, it has earned a "stellar" reputation. Terris reviews the changes and Version 2.0.

Read it here.

[MissyS]

If I were to re-review NMS myself after all this time, I'd move it up to a soft 4/5.

The biggest problem for NMS, I feel, is its lack of diversity in world, fauna, and flora creation. Terris touched on the world issue here, but there is just an overall 'sameness' despite the procedural generation. While it has improved over 1.0 in these areas, even my explore-loving heart gets bored cataloging recolors of the same flora or rocks or slightly different fauna. I still get surprised or wow'd from time to time, after about 300 hours over the past three years, but those are rare occasions.

The second biggest problem, and a technical one, is the pop-in. It's gotten worse and worse over time. I have to spend 20-60 seconds circling around a landing pad before it's fully popped in; I can suddenly smack my ship into trees that weren't there ten seconds before, etc. Even though I'm used to the pop in, it just adds another element that drains the fun out of the game - get to a place, wait up to a minute before I can 'use' the place, rinse, repeat.

[NWOrpheus]

That pop-in thing isn't an issue that I have experienced on PC. Perhaps it's something that's going on with the PS4 servers, which would make sense as to why it's gotten progressively worse. I know 2.0 put in a lot of optimization stuff that was supposed to reduce issues, and for me it did seem to.

[Abhorsen]

very nice review i see we both flew the same ship at some point lol:

except mine was a red variant.

I believe the pop-ins are CPU based, back on my i5-3450 i noticed a lot of this as well, but now on my i5-9600k everything loads in nicely. this game never really had "actual" pop-ins though because it uses a fade-in technique for all the objects, making it slightly more subtle than just things spawning in, im not sure how this is handled on ps4, from what i read you're playing on one?

I agree with the lack of diversity, Planets seem to still only contain 3 different biome's, the landscape, the caves, and the underwater biome. so if you've seen these 3, you've seen the entire world.
My biggest concern however was that there's too much progression tied to units, and there's too many shortcuts to skip all that "progression", be it farming and creating expensive trade items, activated indium miner setups, or just straight up breaking the market with ionised cobalt. I was able to jump from C class ships and multitools, straight to A-S class with max slots, which i later regret because this immediately puts you in what you could consider endgame with nothing left to work for. its tough finding a good balance between speed and progression, and this game got it wrong on that department. I think this game would be more fun if i sticked purely to selling found items only and maybe even ignored the entire left section of every space station, since everything they offer, can also be found on planets.

[NWOrpheus]

Really, you can find the S class modules on planets? I've never done so. Though my time spent on planet is limited compared to some.

[Abhorsen]

Really, you can find the S class modules on planets? I've never done so. Though my time spent on planet is limited compared to some.

i think i found some from damaged tech out in the field, and some from helping npcs you find on planets too