I tried NMS last night for an hr or so..... honestly I am still not 100% sure it is my kind of game, it is very open sand boxy where as i prefer a more scripted kind of game..... (Even Elite is more sand boxy than i would like and it is going more in that direction as the game goes on) - but i digress.......
but as a technical achievemnet esp in VR it is incredible.you could spend 10s of hrs just tooling around on 1 planet and there are billions of them.I am sure it will have the issue of all procedural games in that eventually they will all be alike, but for now, i am enjoying it just for what it is.
it is also impressive in VR. they did a damn good job with it esp for a free update, full motion controller support and menus which all work well.it is a complete bitch on resources however... my 1080ti heavily overclocked was pushed to the max and was still getting frame drops, even a 2080ti cant run on full bubble.running around was mostly ok - some stutter but minor - but flying did not run well. I read elsewhere there is a problem with monitor refresh rates and settings interfering with it.i made sure vsync was off - as some say if you dont it will lock to the refresh of your screen - 60hz for me - I didnt bother lowering the monitor resolution however and didnt mess around with steamVR to see if it was doing some insane super sampling.
I am hoping a patch will improve things and i think it is largely because it is steamVR rather than native, but still, it is easily one of the more technically impressive VR titles and I am not surprised it is a system killer. I do hope it gets an oculus store release however, if it does, I will have a decision to make (unless the devs give free oculus keys, IME the good ones do).
The more steamVR titles i play however the more i am convinced steam or developers should not be allowed to advertise rift support if it is steamVR. ...... SteamVR I am really glad it exists but I see it exactly the same as others see reVive, it is a hack, one i would support but not one that should be used to advertise official support. IF steam had to remove the oculus logo from all titles which states rift support but were steamVR only, it would encourage devs to support the rift properly...... then for those who choose not to anyway, then users could make a consious decision to use the hack that is the steamVR wrapper.
(and yes i would still have bought NMS and Fallout VR, but it is disingenous to call the rift officially supported.in that i think Dirt Rally 2 has got that 1 thing right.... but i digress again).
I think Vive and Index users are all suffering the same, so it's not a concrete conclusion to blame SteamVR.
UploadVR have reported on it: No Man’s Sky VR Suffers Major Performance Problems On PC
I certainly do not think it is the only issue.... but I believe it is not helping.
apparently if you muck around with the thread / core load balancing and what not you can improve things too.... but to be honest that is the sort of thing HG should be putting into a patch and not expecting us to monkey about with.
it does seem they are on the case however, there is already 1 beta update out for crashes. hopefully they will be performance patches put in sooner rather than later too.
again tho, just to reiterate... performance issues aside, it has taken some time but imo this NMS looks to me at least to be the game i was hopeing it would be way back when 1st announced.
Sean Murray definitely has a touch of the Peter Moleneux about him.... but after a disastrous launch he and his team clearly knuckled down and I think they can rightly be proud of the game they made now.
Just had a quick play. First time, so only wandering on the first planet so far trying to repair the ship. It looks good, but the controls are very unintuitive at the moment, at least for me. Performance-wise, it's a reprojection mess even on the lowest settings. A little disappointed if I'm honest.
so i went through the entire fixing the ship and then went for a little fly.
at 1st i was worried about the controls but the way the tutorial works is pretty good and through repetition it does stick.
I think I shall hold fire on this one until it’s optimised a little better. Don’t want my high hopes smashed to the ground in the first 5 minutes of play.
Those having performance issues may want to use my settings. I have a 6700K, 32GB of DDR4 and a 1080 and have had no problems with performance so far apart from some serious framerate drops when the game first starts off and you're moving through the universe with all the stars shooting past you.
I have Textures set to Ultra, Shadows set to Enhanced and everything else set to High. I've turned off AA completely, turned off vsynch and set the maximum frame rate from 60 to 90 (although I guess I should have set that to 80 with my Rift S 80Hz screen but I'm not changing it now cos I can't be arsed).
I think my RAM amount might be doing me a few favours though.
No issues so far but I'm still on the first planet and haven't been into space yet because I need to scan everything before I leave. I've had this problem ever since discovering Metroid Prime years and years ago. I need to scan EVERYTHING in games. EVERYTHING!!! data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7
I need to play with the settings. Pretty much the same setup, albeit with a Vive Pro. The Steam motion smoothing gives everything a halo/jelly look which is irritating.
I wasn’t expecting to like NMS but I do. Yeah I had to throttle back the settings a bit and got SteamVR running at 3k. It still looks nice but I’m only getting around 45Fps.
The game itself I find addictive. Everything you use runs out of juice like all the time, your mining tool, your suit, your processing unitso I’m constantly mining just to, erm keep mining.
The menu system is horrible though and you can tell it’s a port. It’s just takes a lot of learning to get up to speed. A bit frustrating but fun.
Funny how different folks are different. Whilst the menu is not perfect I kind of like it . I really dig the 2 menus which you access from each wrist and like cycling through with motion controls.
Given this is a free patch compare what they did for the VR patch changing the UI and fully embracing motion controllers and compare to the £40 VR release of fallout which in many ways is still using pad like controls.
Honestly as a game I am still not fully sold but the VR implementation inc UI I am happy with