Topic: No Man’s Sky - Thoughts/Impressions?

The day is finally upon us, and No Man’s Sky has been released on the Switch!

I’ve been incredibly interested in the game since it’s inception. I’ve been a gamer since the Atari days, but over the last few years, stopped playing entirely. Only recently did I come back as a Switch gamer. When one of the Directs announced NMS was coming to the portable, I was locked in if the port was in good shape.

Got the Switch version just yesterday, and wow, it’s amazing a game of this scope can fit on the cartridge. I did play a little bit on Xbox Game Pass to determine if the gameplay was to my liking, and once I knew it was my kind of game, I stopped playing so I could experience it all on the Switch.

Obviously, the graphics are not going to compare to the beefier consoles or PC, but the gameplay appears to be fully intact (sans multiplayer, which was not a deal breaker for me). With a few hours put into ‘Normal’ mode already, I see myself really enjoying this for a long time.

What about everyone else? Have you purchased/plan on purchasing it? If you purchased it, what are your thoughts and experience level with NMS? I’d love to hear about it!

@Divide_and_Wander This is my most wanted game at the moment, I can't wait to play it! I have looked at a few how to guides on youtube and the amount of stuff you can do seems insane!

@MarioBrickLayer - I spent a good portion of the morning looking at the guides I’ve unlocked in game, and it seems pretty staggering.

Right now, I’m just mining materials and I started building a simple base on the starting planet to complete a few objectives and get familiar with the basics. Visited dozens of waypoints and scanned plenty of objects to get a decent amount of currency for when I start buying/trading.

How's the optimization of the port?? Is it a fairly smooth experience? Any issues with frame rate issues during certain times, cutscenes, or sequences? Or, and other problems?

The initial startup load is a little long (1-2 mins I think), but after that everything is pretty stable. I haven’t encountered anything that has taken away from the experience, and I’ve played about 4 hours total so far. I’ve been exclusively playing it handheld on the OLED.

The first time leaving a planet to head to a space station was pretty amazing because there was no loading through the entire sequence. Not sure yet if lengthier flights through space would trigger loading screens, as I haven’t left my initial cluster of planets.

@Nahr_Alma I've played a couple hours, having made it off the initial planet to the space station and am now working on the hyper drive. I've experienced texture pop-in when making 180-degree turns. But the frame rate hovers around 30 fps most of the time. No complaints so far.

I don't like the third person perspective so I toggled the camera to first person.

Keeping my eye on this thread. Absolutely intend on getting NMS for Switch, but holding off for now due to sheer number of gaming purchases, using it as an excuse to gauge the word-of-mouth on it before committing.

@gcunit I'm similar, I'm a few hours into Alien Isolation and I wanted to go back and finish Dying Light after that. I think I'm 100% committed though! This game looks amazing!

I think Hello Games pulled off some wizardry with their engine and this port. By comparison, I've seen Unreal 4 games look like smeared peanut butter and Unity games perform herkey-jerkely. Although I'm not sure if I would qualify NMS as a "miracle port", I think the effort Hello Games have made should be applauded.

Yeah this is gonna end up like Skyrim for me. Portable on switch, tv on xbox (gamepass). Super excited however.

Edit: question: is it possible to lower encounters/crafting requirements and the ramp it back up later? I don’t want to regrind but don’t want the game to remain easy.

Four hours in. I have the hyper drive built and I'm now hopping from solar system to solar system. I like how these early hours still feel dangerous. You don't want to begin flying around the universe without supplies to cruise around for a while, i.e. - extra fuel for boosters and hyper drive. You might end up in a portion of space that doesn't offer those resources and you could get marooned.

However, now that I'm flying often I can see some of the cracks in the game's performance on Switch. The load from coming in and out of a planet's atmosphere takes a while. The base camps I've set up take some time to load in, even after I've landed on the ground and have walked around for a minute or so. It's as though I'm seeing the Switch's 25 GB/s memory bandwidth bottleneck in effect in real time.

But it doesn't deter from the experience. The gameplay loop of exploration, gathering resources, and maintaining survivability...is really good.

Been to five different planets now but still haven't found one that is devoid of environmental hazards and has the resources necessary for me to consider it a permanent home.

It's rough out there in the vastness of space.

I'm loving NMS switch version. But I've noticed a huge difference between the original PS4 version and switch version.

In the original PS4 version the base building mechanic was never openly offered to the player. You had to find it by accident (in my case) or look on YouTube to see that base building was an option. I like that they made the base building mechanic a part of the tutorial first few hours section of NMS

One just has to go to Youtube to see the reviews and gameplay are night and day and they like it alot as of the best update ports so far.

I bought this game on NSW and PC (50% off on steam now, so €27) and I am very impressed with the switch performance. Compared to my laptops 4K screen, my switch lite looks very good. It has more pop in, but my laptop also has pop in. The controls on NSW are much better than PC imo. Loading times are only there when going to another planet or space, so that’s not bad. And the PC has also quite some loading time in those cases.

Am I the only one who's feels the most recent patch improved the perfomance and visuals a bit compared to how the game was at launch? The reviewer at SwitchUp seems to agree:

I didn't play last night due to Halloween festivities, but I'll have to try out the update tonight and see if I notice any improvements. Thanks for the heads-up!

I'm about 35 hours into NMS on Switch and overall I am pleased and quite hooked. The draw distance and pop in can be a bummer - like it seems you can't cruise a planet's surface very well in your spacecraft, looking for interesting sites or resources from the air, because the draw speed is too slow (and you can't do ground scans from inside your ship?) - but just the scope and variety of things to do has been amazing so I will not complain.

I puttered around my starting solar system, accumulating resources and power ups, playing the beginning of the story, then dedicated a night to repairing the crashed ship that turns up when you learn of Apollo. That may not have been an efficient use of resources, but it was nice busy work and I love the freedom of building up my collection of ships that way. As of last weekend, I'm hyperdriving around, checking out the different planets, just learning alien vocabulary and scanning flora and fauna for credits, and shopping all I can. It seems like I'm just scratching the surface of what the game offers, though. I'm really amazed that Hello Games crammed as much as they did into this Switch release, and grateful for the (ongoing) effort!

That very fact we even got NMS on Switch is Amazing at best otherwise PC would've been the only other way to experience this game. Also the fact Nintendo Switch is Portable makes it all the more amazing accomplishment by the developers to get this far and launch onto the Switch. Only couple other games would stand here: for their sheer graphics pumping out.
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