Planet Nomads had my interest for a long time, as I sat hoping it would blossom into something special. Sadly, it released today and it has not. Disclosure: Key provided by the developer.
For starters, they went back on doing multiplayer so now it's a (rather lonely) single-player only experience. I could handle that, if they truly made Planet Nomads interesting enough with the story but it's just not. On top of that, they originally promised space-flight to go to other planets, that also didn't make it into the game. Basically, the game never actually got any of the really interesting ideas that were used to fund it in the first place on Kickstarter.
Honestly, at this point I don't know why anyone would pick up Planet Nomads, considering how dull it is overall. If you want a sci-fi sandbox survival themed game, No Man's Sky does almost everything better. At this point, I'm sure people who've played it are desperate to point out Planet Nomads has a block-based building system which is quite different. Yes, very true! But that doesn't actually make Planet Nomads interesting when there's many more games that also do this across different settings. Even on Linux, if you refuse to use Steam Play for No Man's Sky I still won't recommend Planet Nomads.
For those who would point out that I've previously said a few nice words about the game, that would be quite true. Some of that though, was in the hopes that it would continue to progress and not just leave Early Access like this.
Performance in the Linux version is also not good, at all! With model quality, shadow quality, texture quality all to low and basically everything else on low or turned off, it struggles badly to even remain at 40FPS often dipping well below.
The game is also very unstable. The first time I tried to save with the released version it just sat there. The entire game just got stuck, I tried to send an in-game bug report as the UI was still responsive and that also just got stuck and seemed to not do anything. I gave it long enough to finish doing both, making sure in case it was being slow and not a bug but 20 minutes later…yeah that's a problem. Naturally, I don't give up at the first sign of trouble, so I tried again. This time, the game spawned me in and I was stuck, I couldn't move my legs at all. Okay, fine, save and quit to menu…didn't work again. Now it won't even load a new game at all, which sounds much like this issue which I tracked down in the game before.
If you like playing by yourself, in a sci-fi setting and playing with a few blocks, making a vehicle or two you might enjoy a couple of hours on it. However, it gets stale very quickly and seems to be extremely unpolished and buggy on Linux. What a waste of potential.
(Mind you, sometimes people's artistic vision isn't up to supporting their artistic vision. I think there's been a fair number of games where the developers spun all these cool ideas that sounded really awesome, and then when it came time to actually do it they realized they didn't exactly know what the cool ideas meant in terms of gameplay or how it would turn out to be fun)
Quoting: gurvI strongly disagree about recommending NMS instead of Planet Nomads.I will respectfully disagree strongly. I won't get into a long debate about it but this is an incredibly inferior product when compared with NMS which continues to evolve with huge updates. NMS has incredibly different planets, I've never not even once visited a planet that was the same in it. Planet Nomads is the same every time and it's an unpolished mess.
Having played both, I can tell you Planet Nomads is way more interesting than NMS.
NMS gets dull very quickly because every planet and every solar system feels so generic (the exactly identical space station interior doesn't really help with that).
Considering how they just pushed this out the door, I think they're aware of how far they strayed from the vision and made a lacklustre game.
Quoting: DuncDown to one FPS?! Holy cow and I thought it performed badly on my end.QuotePerformance in the Linux version is also not good, at all! With model quality, shadow quality, texture quality all to low and basically everything else on low or turned off, it struggles badly to even remain at 40FPS often dipping well below.I recently started a new game. In the tutorial, the framerate dropped to around one frame per second at some points. A couple of years ago, I had no trouble at all running it on an older graphics card and CPU, with less memory. It's simply not ready for release.
Even in its current state though, with some optimization it would be decent enough. Not a “must play”, but interesting if it's the sort of thing you like. Maybe it didn't live up to the crowdfunding hype (and I can understand backers' frustration at that), but performance issues aside it's not a bad game. I've had a lot of fun with it. But right now... no. It shouldn't be leaving Early Access in this state.
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 3 May 2019 at 4:49 pm UTC
i really enjoyed it while it was in the 8.x series and they were making improve ments but halting dev on it for a bit killed it for me. also them finally releasing steam workshop support long after the fact made me quite mad i got it on gog. if they would have gotten mod.io working on it or something it would be tollerable.
Quoting: gurvI strongly disagree about recommending NMS instead of Planet Nomads.
Having played both, I can tell you Planet Nomads is way more interesting than NMS.
NMS gets dull very quickly because every planet and every solar system feels so generic (the exactly identical space station interior doesn't really help with that).
The building and discovery is much better in Planet Nomads, provided you have some creativity and like building and optimizing things.
Unfortunately, I must admit that Planet Nomads is plagued by performance problems that probably stem from their database storage (sqlite). This is what made me stop playing, but I still got 140hours out of it so can't complain.
And I will probably try to revisit it and check if performance is better (especially when I'll have my shiny new Ryzen 3000 series cpu :P)
Last edited by marcelomendes on 3 May 2019 at 6:26 pm UTC
Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: gurvI strongly disagree about recommending NMS instead of Planet Nomads.I will respectfully disagree strongly. I won't get into a long debate about it but this is an incredibly inferior product when compared with NMS which continues to evolve with huge updates. NMS has incredibly different planets, I've never not even once visited a planet that was the same in it. Planet Nomads is the same every time and it's an unpolished mess.
Having played both, I can tell you Planet Nomads is way more interesting than NMS.
NMS gets dull very quickly because every planet and every solar system feels so generic (the exactly identical space station interior doesn't really help with that).
In NMS, the planets all differ in some regard but the general feel of planets within the same biome is identical.
And it's really bland.
I've been thoroughly disappointed by NMS: sure it's infinite but it's infinite blandness.
And the building part is really lackluster.
I know it's a pet peeve of mine but I also can't stand that the space stations are always the same (interior wise). That's immersion-breaking level for me.
Edit: in a nutshell what I'm trying to say is that the grind in NMS is all too obvious while I have the feeling to actually construct something, make progress in Planet Nomads. And that makes all the difference for me.
Last edited by gurv on 3 May 2019 at 6:29 pm UTC
My time with PN? Bursts of 5 minuute plays, less than an hour. I gave up because it performs absolutely awful.
Quoting: liamdaweDown to one FPS?! Holy cow and I thought it performed badly on my end.In the tutorial, yes, although it varied wildly and that was absolutely the worst case. On the planet it's okay. Not great, but okay.
I assume it's because the tutorial is basically built entirely from construction parts. They seem to be where the problem lies (a Ehvis says, it doesn't seem to be culling properly, so what you're actually looking at bears no relation to what framerate you might expect).
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