NMS: BEYOND pre-release August 14

It’s not been delayed yet. It’s been announced for summer, which for NMS always meant July or August. Plus, it is not uncommon to get the heads-up less than a week before release. So far, everything is perfectly consistent.
I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to hear some news. I’d like that very much, actually. But so far there’s no solid hint of them being off-schedule.

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SM tweeted this yesterday…has it been this way? I have never given it a thought.

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Well, this explains the crappy conversation on Discord yesterday.

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Someone suggested (on Steam?) that the comment indicates he’s writing patch notes.

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Might be a subtle hint that interactivity with & between critters is to be made more complex. (Plus it reads funny as a task note).
The more variation, the better I say…

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You’re right, I am perfectly aware that it’s notbeen delayed yet. I’ll just be very happy when we’ll get some fresh news (:slight_smile:

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If I were to think like a developer, I’d say it indicates they are testing features they likely have been working on. This may or may not have been an existing bug as well, possibly ending up in the ‘patch notes’ as @Polyphemus mentioned.

Either way, it appears they are working on finalising the update. How much longer this will take is of course anyone’s guess. I have personally been having August 6th on my mind ever since they announced Beyond, but I am likely going to be wrong :roll_eyes:

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It very much sounds like a bug report to me, i.e. something that needs to be fixed, rather than something that has been fixed (which is the thing you’d put into patch notes).

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Seems to me if Sean is starting to take note of perhaps,arguably the finer details of the game, then that could indicate the major update changes are closer to being finalised or are complete.

Everything on a world could potentially be more ‘interactive’ and have a purpose. I’ve always wished creatures could have more of a surprising or even funny ‘use’ in game rather than simply being canon fodder. I personally always try to keep things alive unless I really have no option.

It would be cool if maybe you could be rewarded for being nice to aliens :slight_smile: Maybe they could come to your aid, or lead you to a really cool piece of salvage or treasure you couldn’t have found otherwise, unless you reached a milestone of NOT killing them for a certain period of time or a milestone for the number of creatures fed.

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I want to be able to customise ships, upgrade them and give them a new paint job, and be a dodgy second hand ship dealer :laughing:

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I would like the STRESS removed from the game.

IF HG does not listen … I will sic EMILY on them!!!

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Isn’t that what creative mode is supposed to be for?

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NO,
they need to reset back to 1.3 game play.
Flying into planets and not crashing.
Cruise control when flying on planets.
No more stopping in space.
once moving ya keep on moving unless ya slow down and stop your ship yourself., not the game applying the breaks.
But I know HG will never see, read, or care about the posts on ETARC.
Oh well … I will continue to look for EMILY.

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Something I’ve always wished for is a button to be able to lock onto any ship and simply follow it to its destination, even follow your friend too. Maybe ‘cruise’ control could be an upgrade.

Something else needing attention is to return the thick luminescent ship trails of the original game. The updates gave them a cold electric blue hue. There is no life in the trails now. There is no minor variation of a warm to white colour. They are thin, just a hair too thin and narrow now.

There are no wonderful ripples or ‘heat haze’ wobbles anymore, just a hard spindly thin straight line. They seem awkward in every screenshot now. The original trails were a careful, important detail, of the great sci-fi art that inspired the game.



Perhaps the new trails had to be simplified for performance issues with the update to show wing tip vapour trails.

The visually appealing Atlas Rises starship trails:




The imperfections or trail wobbles, added a sense of heat, a kind of mirage alluded to something with tremendous energy.

No one would tinker with a ‘Van Gough’ painting and say it was an improvement. Sometimes I wish Hello Games might really believe in themselves and not only the loudest cry of the public. Their peers invited them to the Victoria and Albert museum. High praise indeed, despite the difficult reception from gamers, probably not all that interested in good art.

Visual cues, almost imperceptible make great art, just work. MMS has improved technically but I hope Beyond doesn’t dilute the illustrative sci-fi look it was trying to achieve even more.

The subtly superior classic sci-fi look of Atlas Rises: (though not to say NEXT does not look sci-fi, it does, but in a subtly less dramatic way.)

Below is the original release look, complete with Analysis Scanner digital interference and stronger vignetting and scan lines. The little details gave a subtly used and personal feel to the player experience. A sort of retro feel of a traveller who’d been in space a very long time, travelling the stars. Our starshps were not squeaky clean like they now seem with the Visions update :slight_smile:

Hello Games would do well to take a long look at the original and be reminded of their early brilliance, ignoring for a moment technical flaws and incomplete content. Maybe at the very least the filters could maybe work again outside of just camera mode.

Another point is the wonderful soundtrack fitted the mood and ambience best in the first release. Probably because the art and music were first ‘conceived’ together at that point with emotional inspiration.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could have an in game radio we could toggle on and off in our spaceship cockpits? We could select space tracks or something from 65 days or film music or Rocketman or something like classic hits like from Guardians of the galaxy. Anything really that might fit with what we’re choosing to do in game. Maybe even have static radio chats with friends in their spacecraft.

A director mode would be cool to set up camera trolley moves or pans or hand-held and stuff. Perhaps we could get a camera tripod upgrade. Land on a planet and make a short movie with an in game Go-pro camera to play with lol. Or a remote control drone camera that could be an upgrade we could control perhaps at our bases of over cliffs.

Lastly, will Beyond improve the 3d map monitor in the cockpit to actually look like it is designed to fit there or could we have a choice to use the original conception. Which functioned well and is more in keeping of the classic Sci-fi with the ochre coloured graphic, that fits into the square housing. I really liked the more colourful graphic map display, for me it complimented the overall muted dusty style, slightly worn, been around kind of feel, like Han Solo’s jacket :slight_smile:

I hope Beyond gets the lighting (and the number of lights used for procedural ambience) right in the next update.
The attention to detail of the classic Sci-fi look was what immediately set the game light years ahead of its nearest rival. I hope Beyond can rebalance that style. It adds so much to the game, more that we appreciate.

If not I have enough belief in the team they will do eventually. They are a bunch of artists with a lot of brushes after all. :slight_smile:

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Never been a fan of the trails. Hadn’t even noticed they changed…

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Youre right about the trails. In the original game, you could follow them - and they led you to spectacular pirate attacks on planet-based trading stations. Unfortunately, the attacks were very buggy, with attack ships flying through mountains and buildings. Still, they were a lot of fun.

Now, the trails are barely visible, and they disappear completely when you get close to them - which makes it impossible to follow them to their source.

Despite this forum being the official HG site, I suspect that they don’t listen to us much. HG are far more influenced by Reddit pressure groups. There are Reddit groups dedicated to removing all the fun from No Man’s Sky - and Hello Games clearly do listen to them.

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Wait, wait… this sounds like you’re not talking about the engine trails, but about the trade routes (the lines going from planet to planet). They were mostly there to lead you to trading depots, and I did notice that they’re almost impossible to follow now, but on the other hand there’s a lot of other options to find them, so I never missed them much. I think they were already pretty much impossible to follow in Atlas Rises, though.

I guess if I was on Reddit, I would be one of those… :smile:
As an old-time simulation and RPG freak, I wouldn’t mind something like a TANSTAAFL mode with a hardcore economy where your major concern is not going bankrupt or the ship literally falling appart while flying from planet to planet… death to free teleportation, I say! :wink:

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They’re still tricky to follow, but I’ve never been able to make up my mind if that was an intentional design mechanic of the original, so that we have to explore or might discover new things if we don’t find the Trading Post at the destination.

Trying to follow a NPC ship along one of the routes is full of stops and starts because our ship’s engine speed can not match the NPC. But it is possible to follow them, but only just. But like you hinted, now we can simply scan for a Trading Post using the installed scanner. Then again a scanned Trading Post never seems to pop up on the planet I might want to fly towards, so the trade routes do still have a purpose.

Overall the faint trade route lines seen in space, I think have become one of several distinctive ‘tatoos’ of the No Man’s Sky universe. Lose them entirely and I think it would be a shame now that they have established a graphic style to the design. It would be like the Apple trademark being replaced with a half eaten Pear or the classic Beatles black and white drum logo being spray painted. I’d be left constantly scratching my head thinking something isn’t quite right.

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Yeah I agree. It’s a pity sometimes. When the game was first released, I seem to recall in the game notes, chat forums or various interviews at the time, that if you followed NPC ships you could effectively watch them trade, going back and forth to planets. I thought that was great. I still think that’s one of the procedural charms of the game and if you see a ship you wanted to purchase you can simply follow it. Perhaps it is a technical limit of the consequence of additional graphics, that forced the length of time the trails should remain on screen.

But I too have noticed recently the trails on the whole not being quite so long. Despite one of my screenshots not playing by the new rules lol! I think I took this maybe October 2018, so it must have been after NEXT, but the Visions update has maybe tinkered again with the trails. (Perhaps to reduce their impact on screen. I thought the battle looked great though, but maybe it was just one of those procedural things, perhaps never to be repeated again. I dunno. Perhaps the trails here are a smidge too long and could fade off sooner.)

I can’t wait for Beyond. I’m really excited to see how things look. I hope things don’t change too much visually but new additions would be fine. Just don’t tinker too much HG and stay faithful to your original concepts. That’s where great things began :slight_smile:

I’ll have to start my own Reddit thread! lol (horror) or simply email HG… *thinks - maybe after Beyond drops… :slight_smile:

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On those occasions, I simply ensure I’m perfectly in line with them & then just fly ahead. I always find the Trading Post they were heading for.
Pays to watch the radar for the group spawning of ships near the Trading Post in case you stray off line.

Agreed…
but so long as you don’t aready have a Trading Post marked on your HUD, once you arrive at the planet & are near the surface, a scan will find a Trading Post on that planet rather than any random planet in the system.

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