So far, so interesting. Started a new game - my old one seems to be knackered, NMS would crash 15 minutes in regardless (this was before Beyond was released).
The start is now much more active in ‘hand holding’ and telling you what to you need to do. At least until you get a basic ‘shack’ built anyway. After that, you’re on your own. I haven’t seen any sign of hyperdrives yet, which is a little worrying, but hopefully they’ll show up soon.
Lots of the UI has been redesigned. The ‘discoveries’ UI is now more sleek, and the building system has been rearranged so stuff is in ‘tech trees’. The galaxy map has apparently been redone, but with no hyperdrive I haven’t seen that yet. Base item placement seems much less finicky. The biggest change to base building - so far anyway - is that things need powering, which works a lot like Astroneer if you’ve played that. You build a generator, batteries and solar panels (panels need 8 buried tech to research - ouch!) and run wires from them to things that need juice. Each thing has a wattage rating telling how much power it needs. Biomass generators go through condensed carbon like mad! You can also build switches and logic gates into the wires, so I really do think it may end up working the same was Minecraft Redstone, in which case I imagine things will get quite complicated.
I tried a bit in VR, not with the move controllers though just with the pad. It’s pretty brilliant - at times. Despite having reasonable ‘VR legs’ it did make me feel ever so slightly wobbly at times, and if you do too high a G turn in the ship it pretty much says ’oh, no, that’s vomit city what you’ve done there’ and just blanks the screen - I imagine you’d need a pretty iron stomach to dogfight in VR. There’s also a dynamic ‘vignetting’ effect which I assume is supposed to help, but I found a bit off putting. And there’s an obvious resolution issue when going from say 4K on a PS Pro on a TV screen to PSVR, I suspect this is what people actually mean when they say it’s ‘blurry’. Nevertheless, in moments the VR experience is.. outstanding. Flying along at treetop height and looking out the windows genuinely makes you smile and blasting up into orbit never gets old.
I really do feel like I’ve just scratched the surface of the new stuff after day. The staggering thing at the high level is Hello Games keep doing this - every year or so, they take NMS and twist it around, changing what it feels like and stretching it out in new directions. I find the fact they’re still driving this level of support to it at this point after release… has anybody ever done it to this degree before?