Probably in another year this will finally be something close to what they originally envisioned and maybe then I'll hop in, but I'm still a bit more excited about Astroneer.

I restarted a new game and did up until getting a hyperdrive and traveling to a new system.

The game seems quite more polished and objectively better. The interface of the ship, for instance, is fancier looking and gives you more information. But my heart just isn't in it anymore. I'd rather play a new game. Problem I have with all early access games. I need to wait for the "full" release or else I get my fill from the portion of the game they originally release.

So I understand that the players that you see are just orbs, but do you still see them taking actions? Like if someone starts terraforming would you see that happen?

Pretty much my thoughts. It's a much more polished game compared to its launch but I found it just as dull as I did first time round. Definitely worth picking up if you're curious and see it at a decent discount, but I think I'm done for good now.

I bought it at release and played for like an hour and realized I hate survival games. This seems like a great update but they will never be able to clean up the mess that was made by the launch, the name will always be tarnished and I don't see it ever gaining a signifanct player base back because of it.

Seems to have worked, for now at least.

Grabbed it on GOG's sale, and I'm liking it. The UI is still absolutely terrible, but they've made a lot of improvements to the game. Mostly played the standard game mode though, tried starting up a survival game, but it spawned me on a planet where you can only be outdoors for 50 seconds before the environmental protection fails, and literally everything, including my crashed ship was more than 4 minutes of walking away. I managed to survive for a couple of hours, but couldn't find any of the resources you need to replenish life support within walking distance, so gave up on that mode and focused on the standard mode instead.

The FOV change on PS4 is enough to bring me back, the rest of it is just extra.

I fully expected the developers to run with the money they got at launch and not do any further work on the game, especially considering the reception, so in that sense I am pleasantly surprised.

On the other hand, the game is tainted for me. The developers didn't just make promises they couldn't quite fulfill, they outright said there were things in the game at the time, but that were nowhere to be seen at release. To me it feels immoral to support a developer that lies like that, no matter how good they make the game after the fact. Also, there were just fundamental flaws with the core design of the game. Updates may make some small changes to that, and add new features and content, but I doubt those core flaws have gone away.

I bought the game from GameStop a while back for about 12 dollars at GameStop. I would check there is anyone is looking to get it real cheap. I'm going to hope back in myself, seems cool. I ever spent a lot of time with it but it has a certain hook I enjoy. Plus it's a great game to play while you watch Something else or listen to a podcast.

@yesiamaduck: it's even more impressive is if you look at the recent reviews. It's currently at mostly positive, I thing I would have thought that to be impossible last year.

Up to 18,000 co-current players as well.

I think the survival aspects of this game are kind of fucked, but in the process of booting up creative mode to show this to my son, I found myself having a blast. It's fun to create and explore in this universe without the extremely frustrating constant recharging and refueling of every last tool.

Maybe it would have fared better if they even went more all-in on the exploration aspect and didn't make it so dependent on resource collecting and survival parts. Another year would have helped too, obviously. I still don't think Sean Murray is an outright liar; more likely he was just under a massive amount of pressure with such a high profile game and said the wrong things to try to appease the crowd. Not blameless and he could have handled it better, but he shouldn't be crucified so horribly for it either. Especially a year down the line and with him and the team at Hello Games showing their dedication to their product.

That said, I did boot it up and it was chugging something fierce at that star field loading screen, even though the framerate was mostly fine before. May have to increase CPU priority or tweak it some other way.

Why is multiplayer of all things a box check for people? NMS is touted as a lonely space exploration game, after all, and seeing some orb on my planet would ruin the vibe.

Well, I ended up buying the game after it went on sale. Hopefully after all of those revisions No Man's Sky is a better game now.

I'm playing again. I'm amazed by how much they added in a years time and I got the biggest respect of the technology they developed, but it's still missing something for me. They seem to have added some story that involves a sort of fetch quests (go there, go to that planet, go the space station, now back to the first planet again, etc)? It again shows the potential of this game, but it's lacking any depth. Survival mode made the game more of an exciting game, but it's waaaaay too frustrating for me (why is every planet hostile and why do I always get attacked the moment I set foot in space? 'Just make everything annoyingly hard' is not great game design in my eyes.)

Still amazing worlds and space stuff, but the game itself is still not much more then the biggest grind ever (want to make this? You'll need this material which is made by lots of that material. Etc. etc.).
I'm in love with parts of this game, though.

Also: I'm playing on PS4 and I remember that it ran pretty smooth half a year ago, but now I get the biggest FPS drops again while mining. :(

Its enough to peak my interest. If I found it for $5, then I'd prob pick it up

It's making me feel more optimistic about the game, but I think I'll still hold off until the next major patch.

Finally bit the bullet and started my game again. First thing is how fresh and new it feels - fixing your broken ship feels a lot more logical and your starter ship looks a touch cooler than the original one. Sounds like 65daysofstatic have created new audio for this starting process also. I complained in an early blog post about the Atlas Stones but now they are things you can create rather than objects that can be mistakenly sold. The new story mission has already uncovered a surprising reveal early on - which is pretty satisfying - and it feels more like there's an actual purpose to what you're doing in the galaxy.

Other things to note - you get money when you scan stuff straight away (the scanner screen itself is now excellent in the details it gives) although the structure of cashing in discoveries via the pause menu is still present. Dogfighting is a lot more satisfying - even to the point where the combat feels a lot more confident and less slap dash. Many a time I would accidently shoot friendlies and have them attack me - this doesn't seem to be an issue any more. There's more meaning and possibilities with factions in the game - you can give gifts to increase standing as well as exchange money/resources to learn words from races. One nice touch is you can contact pirates and bargain with them so they won't attack you on sight - be interesting to see how the faction stuff plays into this.

One of the nicer things is you can now fly your craft pretty close to the ground when navigating a planet - which means less fighting of controls and easier landing on platforms, although you do have to be careful not to hit stuff accidentally. At one point a bunch of pirates chased me to the planet's surface and stuck around as they tried to take me out.

Negatives are mostly UI - still. There's been some improvements although when playing on PC, I was stuck on the Galatic Map in my starting system until I tried RMB to cancel out of that system - something missing from the legend on-screen. Navigating and selecting destinations to warp gets a bit of getting used to, but perfectly fine once you get it; I think I prefer it to that rotary selection path tool of the original.

Seems like a really good patch?! I think I'll check it out if I can pick it up in a steam sale.

Is the PC version better optimized than it was at launch? I'm tempted to jump into this but I don't have access to my desktop PC for a few months and the footage I've seen of the launch version running on my laptop's GPU was a horrid lagfest that didn't seem to be entirely the hardware's problem.

Oh wow, that all sounds pretty awesome. I haven't played it in a while but I still have it installed on my PS4. Gonna queue up the download if it hasn't started already.

Judging from the reception, this DLC looks really well-done, and Hello Games should be commended for not giving up on their game after the vitriol they received last year. But the original version of NMS remains one of the biggest letdowns I've ever experienced in games. I felt deceived by all of the promises and allusions to systems that weren't actually in the game. This year has been great for games, and I don't see myself making time to go back to this instead of newer, more exciting games.

I haven't got far enough yet to start dabbling in freighter trade etc but the game certainly looks and plays a lot more polished than the earlier patches. Worth a buy if it's on sale but expect a lot of resource gathering. The game's flight mechanics with a mouse still feel awkward in combat and there is no ability to customize how the mouse controls the ship (ie. 1 to 1 direct movement vs. distance from reticle) other than the sensitivity. Even controller flight feels sloppy and uncertain as to what the ship is doing.

I downloaded it and my framerate was terrible. Not sure why. Maybe a 1070 isn't enough for the new look :p

This plus the steam sale was enough to get me in. I bought at launch on PS4 and actually really liked zoning out to it for a few hours but lost interest once I got what the loop was. I launched the new update just the other day and have remembered that sense of awe and discovery, but can't remember exactly what was and wasn't in before this update, so to me it's almost like this is the way the game is supposed to be (maybe like a re-first play). I'm enjoying it so far and will definitely mess around - first thing I noticed was even the difficulty I don't think was there the last time I played and the "Creative" option is really cool.

I bought it at launch and it took me way too long to realize there was nothing to do. I'm really happy they did not just dump the project but kept working at it but for me, all the appeal is gone, and with so many games i still want to play i think i'm just going to let this one go...

I put in around 25 hours at launch, and didn't touch it with the first two big updates, but the stuff for Atlas Rising seemed pretty substantial, so I jumped back in. This past weekend, I put in close to 20 hours, and I've been going home every day this week and playing 1-2 hours before dinner. They've really put in the work, and it shows. The storyline quests, the base building, vehicle options, etc, there's just a ton of stuff that would have been cool at launch, but I'm glad they hunkered down and got it in over time.

I've always been a big fan of a comeback story, and HG have definitely made a comeback in this case. The 1.3 update thread on Neogaf has been sitting on the front page consistently since Friday and it's up over 80 pages of posts now. The game has gone from less than 1k people playing regularly on Steam to regularly hitting 15k, and it was #2 on their Best Seller list over the weekend behind PUBG. I have a bunch of friends that have jumped back in and gotten hooked.

Haters will hate and dwell on the past, and that's fine, but if you can get past that, there's a fine game to be played now that offers a ton of options and a good guided storyline to boot. I remember the game at launch being equated to a puddle, wide but shallow. It's not longer a puddle, there's plenty enough depth to dive in now.

I tried it. I think if you did not like No Man's Sky before, you will still not like it now. The horrible UI is exactly the same. The main "game" of resource-gathering and crafting is still there. Though they have a mode that has no resource requirement, it has no story in that mode and it grew old really quickly for me. The core game is shallow and boring and adding more missions and vehicles is not going to fix that. Is there anybody out there that did not like the game before that thinks it is fun now with these additions?

I'm really loving this update. It's giving me just enough of a bread crumb trail of interesting story stuff to make exploring not feel aimless and lonely like the original release. The mission objectives can be a bit grindy but I'm ok with that. Havin' a blast so far.

I like the game before flaws and warts. But, i have to say I have not been watching closely with the past two big updates. When I go back in I want to be a bit surprised. I don't want to hear about improvement and then "headcanon" them into something else. I want to go in and play the game and see if I like what I see.

I'll get in again if they ever add PSVR support. After having played Elite Dangerous in VR, all non-VR sims just feel intensely underwhelming. Like DCS on a 3DS. Lost all interest in anything on a screen.

They SHOULD add VR, but I'm not sure they can. At least not for console probably. Already hard to hit 60. And that game might not be suited for VR, performance wise. Then again, neither was Elite.

HG have successfully turned a 3/5 game into a 3.5/5 game, which is no easy feat, but also means it's still pretty much the same moment-to-moment gameplay as before. It's relaxing to play and the secondary non-Atlas story mission is a big plus, but it's not exactly stimulating, you know? It's still:

1. Arrive in new solar system
2. Scan planets for stuff you need
3. Go to the planet and scan for question marks, only to find that most of them are an annoying distance away so you fly off planet to approach from space, and then the question marks disappear — OR — land and take off repeatedly while looking for the one resource you need
4. Find the resource you need and mine it until INVENTORY FULL occurs
5. Fly to a space station to offload the stuff you don't need.
6. Repeat.

The first time you find a portal or holo-terminus is enough to make you think that space is truly infinite and maybe, just maybe, HG has populated the planets with more mysterious Mass Effect 1-type space artifacts. But it still isn't that. It's just a nice space farming simulator. And that's ok too.

Got a solid 6ish hours screwing around in a new save and now it crashes when I try to load it, bleh. I think it had to do with mining an extremely large Emerald deposit (like 20 minutes of mining) so it might try and load that and then explode or something. All I wanted was to get enough money to fix the last 3 slots in my space truck I found and repaired.

The update, coupled with a company selling this for a day at £10 last week, convinced me to purchase it. Gaming time is limited these days, so only spent 3-4 hours with it but I am really enjoying it. Confused and lost yes, but also enjoying just wandering around mining, repairing and selling stuff. Had heard about the inventory limits before and holy smokes that is annoying (and it's better now than it was, I am led to believe), and the UI is clunky and generally unhelpful, but there is something at its core that I can't help liking.

I put about 25 hours into it at launch. The base building update didn't make any sense in a game about infinite exploration so I quit paying attention. The Atlas Rises update brought me back, and I put a few hours into it.

I made it as far as making the first hyperdrive jump, and that initial experience doesn't seem that different to me except for the Galaxy Map. I don't know what the hell they did to the map controls, but it's awful. The UI improvements were the most noticeable upgrade. I'm not sure when the quick bar was introduced, but that's a great addition.

I want to see the new story elements, but between the Fallout 4 DLC, Destiny 2, and whatever else it might be some time before I play more NMS.