Yesterday evening No Mans Sky got released.
But be warned. Atm this game suffers massive technical problems on PC.
Thousands of players reported that the game does not start, that you can not alt+tab or that the game crashes frequently.
Next to that is the performance of the game for many players a catastrophy.
Even on high end PC the FPS remains terribly low.
I have installed the game yesterday and I am one of the lucky ones which can at least get the game started and i didnt have crashes.
My first tries inside the game however were not so great due to 20 FPS max and drops down to 5-10 fps from time to time.
I dont have a bad PC... a 8 core with a pretty good graphic card and lots of ram. I am way above the requirements for this game.
My advice right now is to wait.... if you intend to buy this game.
The performance problems are known and maybe a patch will roll out in the next days or weeks.
If you already have the game you can do a few things to improve the performance.
I first patched rolled out which simply updates a few redists on your PC. Personally I doubt that this will help much since I had the bad performance even after that update. But who knows.
You can also try to go to the options and disable vsync, switch from full screen mode to borderless window and raise the max FPS to the highest settings. Some players reported that improved everything a bit.
The game itself... from 2 hours gameplay last evening isnt bad.
It is very intuitive. You instantly know what to do and how to do it. Thats pretty good.
The start of the game felt somewhat short.
You are a pilot that crashed on a planet and now you need to find a way to get away from it.
So you start collecting resources, repairing your space suit, repairing your scanner... find an energy source for your mining laser and eventually find all resources to construct whatever is needed to repair your ship.
In my eyes this part of the game is too short... too easy.
Dunno, maybe I just had luck and crashed in an area where most of the resources could easily be found.
And thats where it gets where i can do a small review.
Putting the technical problems aside (I have faith that they can fix that).
The game feels a bit fast paced in the beginning... but that could be intentional to motivate players.
Its very easy to play and easy to understand. No complicated rules... no restrictions.... just try not to die while exploring that world.
And there it gets to the more problematic parts.
The world is big.... incredible big. There are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets. If you want to explore them all you will need to buy some extra livetime because if you want to explore them all you need roughly 584 billion years (of course minus the 2 hours that I already played).
It is an online game where in theory it is possible to meet other players. I havent met someone yet.... and probably dont meet someone in future because of the size of the game. You are pretty much lonely out there.
And thats in my eyes ... well... Id rather have a smaller game but more player interaction than a giant game where you never encounter another human being. But thats just my opinion.
In my short test I have managed to fly away from the planet, dock at a space station, sell my commodities... make some money and fly to the next planet in that system.
I explore artifacts, monoliths and other objects to learn the language of the dominant species of the system.... well... I have learned 15 words so far which allowed me to do a quest on their space station.
If you interact with other species you can see what they say on your screen but in their language. IF you learn words then parts of the alien language gets translated. This way learning the language helps you to understand the other species and allows you to interact with them. But that takes time.
Overall an interesting game for explorers.
I just hope that additional content will be added later because I fear this game could be very repetive soon.
