My fiancee and I both adore NMS and have played together for several years and have seen countless awesome updates over that time Hello Games’ unwavering and frankly staggering commitment to the name and it’s community has left a very sweet taste in our mouths. That said, I’ve had a pretty rough time with VR. I’m on PC, and performance is definitely an issue, but I especially take issue with just how the game goes about handling VR interactions and movements. There’s a lot to love about the VR experience, but the point of this particular thread is just to discuss some bare necessities and nice-to-haves that I’d love to see added to the game which would make a huge difference to the VR experience in my humble opinion.

1: It is not fun accidentally giving yourself an out-of-body experience by slightly adjusting your seating position, nor is it nice that it’s not possible so far as I can tell to physically stand up and then sit down (for on-foot and then flight respectively) since the game seems calibrated with whatever height you started with. It makes orienting yourself frustrating, causes you to end up mis-aligned with your arms, removes immersion (which sucks for a VR experience), and causes me to go through re-entering constantly trying to shift myself around properly until I’ve got a good mix of “mostly full range of my arm movent” without clipping into the armor of my suit and having to see it.

2: This is likely tied to the first point, but I get the feeling that there’s basically no inverse kinematics happening (In VR, inverse kinematics figures out arm poses based on hands and head location to make your virtual body look more natural), just your hands dragging your arms around. It’s kinda unfortunate that you can’t even wave properly. It looks like a normal wave from my perspective, but others and my partner see me breaking my arm repeatedly instead. It also is disappointing because I like other titles like say Pavlov, Onward, Population One, or Contractors your body doesn’t generally follow you, meaning you cannot gesture with your head, you can’t crouch or make movements. And again, if you even try to do that stuff now, you just physically end up walking out of your virtual body.

3: Performance IS pretty gross in VR. I don’t have a hulk of a compouter, so maybe I’m just poor man having a bad time, but my 3600x / 24GB DDR4 / 2070 Super w/overclock handles most any other title in VR just fine at good resolutions. With NMS in VR, I have to play with graphics settings somewhere around the level of “No Mans Sky, but there’s vaseline in my eyes” or “I think this might be Aliasing: The Video Game”. Mind you I’m very aware VR is always going to be more taxing than normal 2D gameplay due to having to render twice, but it feels bad and nauseatingly laggy enough at times to feel unwarranted.One thing that helped (apart from obviously using DLSS) was switching to Steam Link, which stopped a lot of performance issues that made it unplayable. I just have to wonder if there’s something that can be done to improve optimization in VR.

4: the gun controls just don’t feel right – it’s unintuitive in VR, even though toggling through modes with a button or two works great with a mouse and keyboard. I think it’s because you can’t see the buttons of the controller in VR and normally in first person VR titles you handle stuff with your virtual hands directly. Like, instead of pressing R to reload, you would press a button on the controller to eject the mag, but then youd grab the clip / magaIne, stick it into the gun, then pull the slide / charge handle. A minor thing related to this is that while not being able to hold the gun with 2 hands isn’t important on PC obviously, it’d be nice to give multitools additional grip points for your non-dominant hand. It just feels more natural especially with long multitools, and helps you to stabilize your other arm by smoothing out any jitter from what hand.

5: Just mapping the existing menus from 2D to somewhere you can access in VR as a projection is a really clunky way to do it. And that wrist-mointed menu, oh my God I struggled with that. I accidentally moved it a couple of times in the beginning and for the longest time struggled like mad to find it again, it o ly stopped being a problem once I figured out how to reposition the menu on my arm so I could move it somewhere that I could realistically use it comfortably without accidentally grabbing and moving it again or involuntarily triggering it. TL;DR, just strapping the 2D interface to something in VR doesn’t work very nice. It’s clunky, disjointed, and slow to wade through in VR.

6: This is just minor nitpicks. I’d sure love to be able to make basic hand gestures with oculus controllers – again I’ll call back to Pavlov as it does this exceptionally well, it milks several gestures from a very limited finger tracking system. Other games like Bonelab and Boneworks and others do some gestures better or worse or have other varieties too. Mind you, I don’t need to be able to flip people off, that’s not really in the spirit of this game, but it would feel much more natural and liberating and FUN just being able to point, look inquisitive / puzzled (thumb and index finger extended, 3 other fingers closed and then position near mouth), wiggle my fingers (via alternating pressing down on thumb, then index finger, then 3 other fingers using the grip), make thumbs-up / thumbs-down, and the “Okay!” / “Perfect” gesture by pinchingthumb and index finger while releasing grip trigger. In VR, we can’t use pre-programmed gestures, so you have to make do with your hands. Normally in VR you can be FAR more expressive with just your hands and arms because of the nature of VR, but this is very backwards in NMS.

7: If hello games ever addresses point 6 (I’m doubtful someone will actually see or take this seriously though 😟), it’s be nice to be able to jesture / use both grips for gesturing while in the camera instead of it closing the camera when you grip with left hand.

I just researched and it seems that No Man’s Sky offers no rewards for killing other players. I just read that you can’t loot other player’s graves or get loot from their ships.

I just bought the game cause I was really, really hyped. I went to a featured base cause hey, it’s featured and it looks amazing!

I spend all my credits that I got from scrapping a couple A-Class ships I found into 150 navigational data (in order to find more ships to scrap) and a bunch of resources to build a base and upgrade my gear. I had no weapons other than the mining beam, and no shields.

I enter the base.

I see a player. I look at them. I prepare to do the hand waving emote. He kills me before I can do it. Chat says I died due to multi-tool combat.

No biggie, I can just grab my items from my grave.

The player searches for me at spawn. Kills me again. Then skedaddles out of there with their ship.

I grab my second grave. No items. I look for my first grave, the one that’s supposed to have my items in it. Not there. There’s random terrain there now. Did they add terrain in to de-spawn my grave? My entire inventory, gone.

Now I don’t even have 50 ferrite dust to repair my now broken multi-tool.

And according to a Google search, this player gained nothing from this.

Why does No Man’s Sky have PvP against everyone enabled by default without telling the players, with the possibility to lose your entire inventory, even though no one gains anything from it?

It just seems like No Man’s Sky is encouraging spawn-sniping and griefing for annoying-new-player’s sake. This is such a bizarre design decision!

I also play WoW and engage in world PvP, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, and even this game which does reward you from PvP has the following features:

1. Rewards for PvP. PvP isn’t guaranteed to be just in order to anger you.

2. Reward the winner, don’t delete the entire inventory of the loser.

3. PvP is disabled by default, and it’s an opt-in feature because not everyone likes PvP and when you are in PvP your player yells “For the Horde!”/”For the Alliance!” so that you very clearly know when PvP is on. You also get an in-game icon when PvP is on so that you know that hey, you could get attacked at any moment.

4. Since the game was built with PvP in mind, there are certain rules for when and how you can or can’t enable and disable PvP so that you can’t just disable it if you feel like you’re losing.

No Man’s Sky has none of these things, in fact has the opposite, and it just seems like they added PvP just cause, without giving much thought about the actual gameplay aspect and experience of PvP.

Isn’t it bizarre? Opt-out, inventory wipe, non-notified, un-asked for PvP.

As a new player, I shouldn’t have to google how to disable PvP, or whether or not the game has PvP, or whether or not you lose your items, and even worse, I shouldn’t have to discover the answer to these questions without even googling it, because it makes the game less enjoyable.

I saw this extraordinarily helpful video that illustrated all the various ways one can acquire Nanites…but despite using nearly all of these methods, it took me about 5 hours of non-stop grinding, just to get 4,500 Nanites. I had around 1,500 Nanites left( so I’m just over 6,000 Nanites.) However…it costs 8,250 Nanites just to upgrade the class of my ship(& I have 3 other ships, yet to upgrade.) So that’s roughly over 32,000 Nanites I have to come up with…which will take about 80 hours…so I’m looking at 2 solid weeks of doing nothing but grinding for Nanites….ouch.