A lot of hype and talk about this, 2nd only to that Pokemon fuckery craze this year.
There's also another kind of explorer game out -
'' ‘Abzu’ Lets You Explore the Sublime Waters of Creation ''
Back to the title -
Quote: No Man's Sky: Eight tips to get you started
The highly anticipated exploration game has finally arrived. Here’s what you need to know to begin your journey
Well, it’s finally here. After two years of beautiful trailers, ambiguous claims and lofty expectations, No Man’s Sky has touched down and opened its blast doors. Judging by its opening hours at least, it is a big, bold and bewildering experience.
In my first few minutes, I headed out across my starting planet to find the necessary materials to fix my crashed spaceship, saw my first animal and promptly scared it away when I destroyed the rock it was prancing around, fell down a big hole, was discovered by a sentinel drone, and died.
I’m really enjoying No Man’s Sky, so much so that it was very difficult to drag myself away to write this, but my first few hours were a learning process. So here are some things you may want to know before you start your intergalactic journey. Note: I’m playing the PS4 version, so any reference to controls will involve a PS4 controller.
1) Keep moving
Space is a dangerous place, and most planets in No Man’s Sky are eventually lethal. Even if the world you’re on has no wildlife, or at least none that’s hostile, it probably has laser-equipped drones flying around it, and it almost definitely has a poisonous or radioactive atmosphere that’s chipping away at your Exosuit defences. While you’re actively playing, it’s hard to forget the atmospheric dangers because of the computer voice that tells you every time the Hazard Protection on your suit loses a chunk of its charge. But it’s all too easy to forget that it’s often not safe just to put your controller down for a few minutes, or that the minerals you must collect to power-up your suit might be many minutes away. If you do want to sit back and admire the scenery, it’s best to find a building or sit in your spaceship.
2) The environment is your supermarket
When you first start no Man’s Sky, you need to gather the materials needed to repair and fuel your ship. Everything you see in the environment has some sort of redeemable mineral value – piles of rocks, plants, chunks of metal – the HUD will tell you what you’ll get from any article. To collect the goods, just point your MultiTool and shoot – this will gradually mine the contents. Be careful not to let the mining laser overheat, as this slows you down. Also, be careful not to run out of isotopes – these are the fuel you need for the laser. If this happens you can actually use the melee button to physical batter ingredients out of rocks or vegetation.
Upgrade your Multi-Tool.
3) Run and gun
Sprint is mapped to R3 (click in the right stick), which isn’t obvious when you begin – and it feels very unintuitive. Stamina depletes fast, so install the Stamina Enhancement technology as soon as you find it. Master the jet pack too – large drops will hit your health gauge so get a feel for how long you can stay airborne and make sure you hit the thrusters just before landing.
Also in “controls it took me far too long to figure out”, once you’ve upgraded your Multi-Tool to include a projectile-based Boltcaster (useful for destroying reinforced steel doors, and those bloody sentinel drones) you need to press triangle to switch back to the mining beam.
Trust your ship and ignore the red haze
4) Trust your ship
The first time I entered the atmosphere of a new planet I panicked, convinced that the red haze that appeared around the edges of the screen meant my ship was going to blow up – it’s won’t. In fact, your ship is intelligent enough to correct itself when it gets close to the surface, so you don’t even have to pull up to avoid hitting the ground. Just press square when you get close enough and your ship will land itself.
One thing you can’t rely on your ship to do is avoid asteroids. Your shield will protect you from too much damage, and you’ll even collect some Thamium, useful for charging your Pulse Engine, but it’s best to fly around them or shoot them for the raw materials. Of course, you don’t have to worry about obstacles when you’re in a Pulse Jump. You don’t even have to steer; just point your cursor at your target, press and hold L1 and R1, and your ship will do the rest, pulling you out of the jump once you get too close to a planet or space station. And if you want to exit Pulse Jump before that point you can: just press L2.
5) Upgrade your ship, suit, and tool
I’m pretty attached to the little ship I started with, especially given all the trouble I went through to repair it. But one thing that will easily tempt me to switch is a bigger inventory. Your ship, suit, and Multi-Tool all have a limited number of slots, and each upgrade or item takes one up – so the more weapons you equip to protect you from pirates the less room you have for cargo.
Sometimes you’ll come across crashed ships on the planet surface that have a bigger inventory than yours, and if you’re willing to fix them up they’re an economical way of upgrading. Alternatively, you can sidle up to one of the much bigger ships parked in a space station and ask its owner if they’ll sell, but bigger inventories cost a lot of units.
An Exosuit upgrade pod
The only way I’ve found to get a bigger Exosuit or Multi-Tool involves rummaging around in buildings on the planets themselves. You can find Exosuit upgrades in relatively small pointy pods that contain terminals where you exchange units for a single extra inventory slot. And if an alien asks to see your Multi-Tool, hand it over and they’ll offer a better one (or at least, one with more room for upgrades) in return.
6) Don’t enter a conversation empty-handed
While you have to keep your inventory relatively clear, it’s important to hold on to a few raw materials a) to refuel your ship, and b) in case you need to feed a dying alien. I struck up a conversation with a Korvax only to discover it needed sustenance and I had nothing to offer, at which I was told that the creature had died and a new consciousness been downloaded into its body, and that I had gone down in the estimations of the entire Korvax race.
Oh, and interact with every knowledge stone you come across, since they teach you words in alien tongues. Knowing the language helps you to guess what kind of item an alien might be looking for, as well as proving useful when you’re rooting around in an abandoned manufacturing facility and the instructions for how to switch off the alarm are written in Gek.
Knowing the language helps
7) Make a quick buck
First things first, I’m pretty sure there’s no actual use to the objects with green backgrounds (known as trade items), so just sell those. Inventories are too small for hoarders.
Probably the best way to make money, however, especially at first when you’re bound to spend a lot of time looking at all the weird and wonderful animals you come across, is to upload your discoveries. You discover star systems and planets simply by virtue of entering them, but for flora and fauna you have to tag them with the Analysis Visor on your Multi-Tool. Press L2 to bring up the visor, click in the right stick to zoom, and hold it over an object of interest to tag it. Once you’ve discovered a new species, press Options to load up the Discoveries menu, and press square over each one to upload it, or triangle to give it a funny name first.
Individual discoveries net you a few hundred or thousand units each, but our intrepid editor Keith Stuart has been working all day to demonstrate that filling in 100% of the empty records for a planet nets you a nice bonus in the hundreds of thousands.
Did you know you can feed the animals?
8) Speaking of the weird and wonderful animals…
Did you know you can feed the animals? Different creatures eat different materials – oxides, carbon, what have you – but once you’ve got the right food you just have to get close enough to press square next to a hungry beast and the next thing you know it’ll have a little smiley face icon to show that it’s your friend. I’m not actually sure if this serves any practical purpose, but I fed something the size of an elephant and it started following me around, honking and running around in circles, so it’s definitely worth it for that alone.
They made this type of game before on the 16 bits:
Quote: No Man's Sky's cultural influences, from Dune to post-rock
Hello Games’ title is one of the most visually interesting games of the past decade. But where does its approach to sci-fi come from?
From the very beginning, No Man’s Sky has looked unlike any other modern science-fiction video game. With its bizarre creatures, hallucinogenic skylines and polychrome environments, it eschews the gritty, steel-grey aesthetics of Mass Effect, Halo and Gears of War.
The themes of the game, too, hark back to a different form of sci-fi literature, less interested in galactic wars and more concerned with the philosophical and psychology elements of space exploration.
Here then, are some of the cultural influences Hello Games appears to have drawn on.
Chris Foss talks through his work
Along with Star Wars conceptual designer Ralph McQuarrie, Foss has been mentioned several times by Hello Games as a visual inspiration for the technology in No Man’s Sky. The British artist, who has produced illustrations for dozens of classic sci-fi paperbacks, including Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, imagined futuristic spacecraft as highly complex architectural wonders rather than glorified airplanes, and used bright contrasting colours instead of traditional metallic greys (a look inspired by steam train design). He also worked with Alejandro Jodorowsky, producing astonishing concepts for the director’s abandoned Dune project.
Post-rock music
The game’s ethereal soundtrack, provided by Sheffield group 65daysof static, exudes the sort of hypnotic, woozy grandeur typical of post-rock, a genre known for its epic, instrumental soundscapes (see also Mogwai, God Speed! You Black Emperor, Labradford). Incidentally, 65daysofstatic has also written an alternative soundtrack to ... Silent Running.
Silent Running
Douglas Trumball produced special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey and Andromeda Strain before directing this ecological masterpiece about a spaceship carrying the Earth’s last forests into space. No Man’s Sky shares the film’s tranquil pace, and its interest in the cold vastness of space counterposed with the intricate wonder of the living organic world. The game’s protective sentinel robots (which often attack players who try to mine isotopes from plants) hark back to Silent Running’s gardening drones – Huey and Dewey.
The Culture novels
Rejecting the austere, logical galactic empires envisioned in the sci-fi golden age, Iain M Banks developed the concept of the Culture, a vast post-human utopian society, organised by a class of machine demigods known as the Mind. But with their stories of remote anarchist settlements spread throughout a vast cosmos, Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons, Excession, etc, deal with similar themes to No Man’s Sky.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C Clarke’s story depicts the idea of alien intelligence through the medium of discovered artefacts, and in this way 2001 is surely an influence on this game’s use of abandoned outposts and strange extraterrestrial monuments to impart information to the player. Also, the hyperdrive graphics sequence in No Man’s Sky owes an obvious debt to 2001’s famed stargate sequence.
Dune
Frank Herbert’s grand vision of a feudal human civilisation scattered across countless planets is present in the very structure of No Man’s Sky. There’s also the same sense of a galactic economy providing shape to a scattered society, and of the interplay between finance and ecology.
Acornsoft
No Man’s Sky designer Sean Murray played the classic 1984 space sim as a child, and its mix of galactic exploration, trading and space combat is blatantly apparent in the Hello Games title. Mining astroids, docking in space stations and getting chased by greedy space pirates are also familiar features.
The games of Novagen Software
In the mid-80s, Novagen Software produced several of the most fascinating sci-fi games of the home computer era. Created by programmer Paul Woakes, titles such as Mercenary and Damocles used simple vector-based graphics to produce incredibly well-realised worlds. As in No Man’s Sky, the player takes part in the stories as a lone space traveller trapped on deserted planets, but slowly discovering complex alien societies and intrigues.
Designer’s Republic
The seminal Sheffield design house mixed vibrant blocks of colour, Japanese iconography and the visual language of corporate logos to produce its classic work for bands such as Pop Will Eat Itself and Aphex Twin – as well as the PlayStation racing sim Wipeout. That game’s cool spacecraft design and chunky retro-futuristic fonts seem to be subtly referenced in No Man’s Sky.
With its lonely environments, scattered relics, minimalist narrative and plaintive soundtrack, award-winning PlayStation game Journey has a very similar feel to No Man’s Sky. Both games have a sort of mystical, quasi-religious approach to exploration, and both purposefully give the player enough ambiguity and freedom to interpret the meaning of it all in their own way.
Robert Heinlein
Throughout his writing career the influential SF author explored the philosophy of solipsism, an individual’s sense that they’re the only real, significant part of the universe – a feeling that No Man’s Sky and its millions of desolate worlds seems to be engendering in players. He also developed the theory that universes are created through the act of imagining them and that fictional realities exist as parallel dimensions. In No Man’s Sky, the generative algorithm is a form of imagination. The universe is therefore real.
Quote: 'No Man's Sky' Is the Stress Reliever I Didn't Know I Needed
August 9, 2016
First, we wanted to offer you a picture of our experience playing the game in time for today's release. Second, we want to spend quality time with NMS before coming down with any sort of "verdict" about our feelings. So to do both of these things we decided to write a series of letters or dispatches to each other (and you), about what we'd discovered in our first hours of gameplay. Over the course of the next week we hope to paint a picture for you of what the game feels like—its strengths and flaws and frustrations. And hopefully by the end of the week we can all come to some kind of agreement (or not) about what kind of game it is.
So here we are. After three years, a delay, and expectations stretched to the very limits of believability, No Man's Sky is really, actually out.
I'm sure you've both been following development to some degree, but just in case you missed some things: No Man's Sky is an exploration and survival game that tasks the player with exploring a procedurally-generated universe of countless planets in order to piece together a galactic mystery.
I'm grateful that I don't need to do a comprehensive breakdown here, partially because I haven't had a lot of time with the game's final build yet, and partially because to try to explain every mechanic No Man's Sky offers might be to miss the overall effect it produces. An encyclopaedic explanation of NMS really risks missing the forest for the trees—and as you'll see in a bit, you don't want to miss these forests.
There's another reason that I'm glad we get to be conversational about this: Because my No Man's Sky story has two distinct starts. And that complicates things a little.
Some stuff is the same between those starts. As the game begins, you come to on a strange planet at the far edge of the galaxy, standing next to a grounded ship, all sparks and smoke. NMS uses this scenario as a sort of "soft" tutorial to its survival and crafting systems: You need to use your multi-tool—part mining-laser, part self-defense blaster—to gather some basic materials, improve your equipment, and get your ship back into space-worthy shape.
The thing is, the first time I started NMS was last Thursday, after scrounging an early copy from a local retailer. Part of the reason I did the legwork to make that happen was because I was curious to see exactly how much the game would differ between it's on-disc version and the version that most players would get come launch day. But I'm glad I took that effort, because the result has made me hopeful about NMS, not only in its current form but also for the future of the game in general.
See, my first experience was pretty mixed. The planet I started on felt disappointingly sparse. A couple of neat creatures, some glowing mushrooms, a few caves. I plodded along collecting my iron and carbon and zinc, repairing my multi-tool and my ship's launch thrusters, and eventually left that planet to visit another in the system, but found it hard to get too excited. It didn't help that I was already struggling to manage my inventory space. And even though each new planet had a new climate, they each felt lonely in the same way.
The basic promise of the No Man's Sky still spoke to me—each new horizon was followed by another, each planet offering a vista onto another unseen world—but the moment-to-moment experience failed to really capture anything special.
And then, a few hyperjumps later, it all came together. I reached Avkazatelnye Saito, a snowy moon about six or seven star systems past my starting location. As I descended down to the planet, the first thing I noticed were the huge chunks of earth floating above the ground, as if scooped out of gravity itself by a celestial spoon. Each chunk was covered with pine trees, and the sky took on an orange-blue hue as the sun set—a glowing winter paradise.
It wasn't long until a beacon led me to a crashed ship—an awkward looking space truck that I decided, right then and there, would be my awkward looking space truck. After all, it had a bigger inventory than my starter ship, and a few upgrades I hadn't been able install yet. The only problem was, yet again: it was all sparks and smoke.
This time, though, repairing my new ship was exactly the relaxing, quiet experience I needed. It was a joy to dip, dive, and bound across the natural hills, valleys, and floating cliffs of the planet I'd re-christened Zhivago—I'm a self parody, sometimes, I know. I found strange alien monuments here, and a few more sentient lifeforms than I'd anticipated. A synth track (one of the procedural, ambient tunes designed by 65daysofstatic) repeated itself regularly letting me drift into a rhythm I needed more than I knew.
I knew in my heart that I loved what I was doing here—what we were doing here—but it was easy to get caught up in the details and well...
Here, two hours after landing on Zhivago, the tension emptied from my shoulders, I finally lifted up above the snow and the trees in my brand new space truck, and I saw it: The forest. Ah, I thought. Right. This is what No Man's Sky can be. It was 2 AM, later than I'd imagined it was, but that wasn't so upsetting. It had been a reminder of why I was pulling the long nights to begin with. Yes. This is what video games can be.
This morning, I started a new game of No Man's Sky, featuring the extensive launch patch announced this weekend. It starts off well enough the same: A crashed ship, all sparks and smoke. But it gets to the metaphorical forest much sooner.
This time it wasn't an ice planet, it was a little corner of my starter world. After speeding through a low canyon in my ship, I emerged into the arid plains where a bright blue swarm danced in the distance. I got close enough to make out their shapes: They were ships, and under them a landing platform.
It was a trade hub, something I hadn't seen in nearly ten hours of the previous build. Immediately, NMS teemed with life and possibility. New ships landed at the market, each one with a unique design. There was still a sense of loneliness here—after all, one of the game's cleverest mechanics is its alien language system, something I'm betting we'll circle back around to in a future letter. Regardless, the loneliness was less severe now, the universe didn't just feel procedural, it felt inhabited.
At least, that's how it feels a couple of hours into my second start. Who knows how I'll feel 10 or 20 hours from now. Given how things are going so far, though, I can't wait to begin again, once the PC build is available later this week.
Quote:My First Three Hours of ‘No Man’s Sky’ Have Been Dark, and Full of Terrors
"No Man's Sky Is the Stress Reliever I Didn't Know I Needed." All I can really say to that is I'm glad to have had Abzû as my shut-off-the-outside-world escape these past few weeks, as if I'd come into my No Man's Sky experience anticipating a relaxing time, I'd be a shivering wreck in the corner right now.
But then, that's what's wonderful about No Man's Sky, isn't it? Already, hundreds of thousands of players across the globe are beginning their journeys to the game's center, following the word of (the?) Atlas, a mysterious presence/gloopy blob that has laid down a breadcrumb trail from your starting point to whatever the end game is, and every one of these trips, spanning who knows how many hours, evenings and weekends, is going to be entirely unique and very personal to that pilot, that explorer, that trader, that survivor. And the last word's key, because what's already struck me about No Man's Sky is that its close-to-infinite universe is not a safe space.
I've been shot out of the stars four times now, I think, in around three hours of play. I'll be on my way between markers—from a crash site on one planet, where I scavenged from a fallen, sparking vessel, to an alien monolith projecting from an orbiting moon, from which I can learn more about the culture and language of one of the game's alien races (I believe there are four in total, and I've made contact with two of them)—and suddenly, the worst words the game can throw at you fill the cockpit: "Warning: Hostile Ships Approaching."
I'm yet to exchange my starting spacecraft for anything bigger, stronger, faster, and deadlier. I've window-shopped a little and seen what's out there, but right now my in-game coffers aren't at the level needed to trade up. So whenever these small, agile crafts have jumped into my vicinity—and there are usually four of them, each gunning for my cargo of, well, not very much beyond raw materials—I've not been able to exterminate them all before a fatal hit's been taken. On death, the game adopts a take on asset retrieval that should be familiar to Dark Souls fans: You must find your "grave" amid the asteroids, otherwise all of the minerals and metals you've accumulated to craft new gear from will be forever lost.
I've not had an easy ride, then, and that was the case from the very beginning. My starter world was fairly barren bar some pretty indifferent life forms pottering about, waiting for me to scan them for a units-rewarding discovery. The temperature was below freezing, and the air toxic. I couldn't wait to leave, but bouncing around its purple hills, strapped into a jetpack, searching for the remaining zinc to repair whatever part it was of my ship that was still shot, took what felt like forever. Along the way I found a crater and renamed it Gary's Crack, because why not—Gary's a name that's practically extinct, so it needs all the help it can get. I feed a space dinosaur, and it's happy with me, with a comedy smiley appearing above its head. But it's another half hour or so before I find another humanoid being.
And I'm glad I did, because otherwise—much like Jake Tucker's piece here outlines—this could be a pretty lonely game.
The animals that don't hurt you don't care about you, and those that do take an interest mostly want to kill you. (One such nasty gets renamed and uploaded as "Crabby Douche," on account of it pestering me constantly with its oversize claws, while another, which is now forever known as "Toothy Angry Rat Thing," simply won't quit, so I have to put it down permanently.)
But even when you do finally meet the more sapient sort of space beings, things can be rocky. If you haven't got what these LED-faced aliens want—rare materials, in a few instances—then they'll dismiss you completely, and your understanding of their civilization will take a knock. Through my time with it so far, No Man's Sky is, to some extent, an unforgiving game of patience-testing fetch questing and interactions that are as likely to go nowhere as they might set you off on a fresh find-this-so-you-can-craft-that mission.
Beneath the flying and the strolling, the mining and the shooting that comprises the ostensible mechanical side of proceedings, there's an inventory system that looks a little like what you've seen in Destiny: all simple boxes and easily identifiable icons. But such are the small number of inventory slots to begin with, that No Man's Sky becomes PlayStation 4: The Video Game, as you're constantly deleting assets to make room for new ones, or shifting them between ship and exosuit, just as you shuffle games on your first-model 500GB console to free up room for another Rocket League update. Earlier, when I mentioned the "Hostile Ships Approaching" thing? Scratch those for the worst words you'll hear in the game and replace them with: "No free slots in suit inventory."
The thing is that despite the constant juggling of what I'm carrying aside, and even with the not-a-fucking-gain ganking from AI adversaries, I'm having a good time with No Man's Sky. Although, if you asked me right now if I think it's an absolutely essential game for our age, as so many people out there have hopes of it being, I'd have to get back to you in a few days. Or weeks. Maybe months.
There's a lot I really like about it, foremost the fact that it really is a pick-your-own-adventure affair, with galaxy and planet scans opening up new areas to investigate, and poking around in those spots then sending you off elsewhere. When these spin away from component collecting, which is fairly tedious, and into more lore-centric avenues, the whole game lifts, and I'm immediately more connected to it. I find the threads of story here fascinating, all of the little clues about the origins of the strange structures left in dusty desert wastes and verdant worlds alike—I just wish that the aliens I've met so far were more patient with my piss-poor Korvaxian. Korvaxese? What's the adjective form of "Korvax" again?
I'm always building up little stories in my head—and the time it takes to travel between some of the more distant planets in any given system affords you plenty of time to speculate about what you'll find when you reach that distress beacon, or crash site, or abandoned facility. I've seen Alien, guys; I'm not rushing in without a couple of flybys at least, first.
I found one place where a strange fungus, almost fleshy, had taken over an outpost, while a lone sentinel circled the area, like it was patiently waiting for a dead master to return. I accessed a terminal inside the derelict building, and the text that came up was wonderfully ominous: "It looked like a wound on the world. Crimson and ragged-edged, like something that once lived but was then torn asunder. I should have stayed away." Brrr.
I won't be staying away from more No Man's Sky, I know that much. I've definitely got the itch, now, but part of me wishes that my early hours hadn't been so, well, grim. Getting my ass bitten at by gnashing beasts, and my ship exploded into pieces by hostile fighters: This isn't quite the game I was anticipating.
To answer your question, Austin: No, I've not quite found my own forest, yet. I've landed on water worlds dead of life and supposedly desert ones where lumbering titans have trumpeted at my arrival. But even metaphorically, I've not been there, so far. My universe has largely been dark, and confused, and full of terrors. But I can't wait to see where the next hyperdrive-powered jump takes me.
Quote:No Man’s Sky isn’t the game I expected: thoughts on the first 10 hours
Exploration takes a back seat to survival in Hello Games' long-anticipated title
Between its surprise announcement back in 2013 to impressive E3 showings to appearances on popular mainstream talk shows, it doesn’t feel like a stretch to call No Man’s Sky one of the most anticipated games of this generation, if not ever. When I sit down with a game I know I’m going to review, I do everything in my power to remove myself from that hype — both my personal expectations and those raised by the increasingly loud fervor from an eager audience.
With a game as buzzed about as No Man’s Sky, though, it’s really hard to fully rid oneself of any assumptions about what awaits. In the spirit of honesty, I’d rather just be forthright about what it is I thought No Man’s Sky would be and how that compares to what it actually is, based on my first 10 hours or so with the game.
To be clear, this is not my final review. That will be coming later this week or next, depending on how long my journey to the center of the galaxy takes. Instead, consider this my first impressions and my initial attempts to work through the confusing mix of emotions storming inside me as I play No Man’s Sky.
(Also, a small technical note: As you may have heard, No Man’s Sky has a rather massive "day zero" patch that is now available. While I procured an early copy of the game and played a few hours pre-patch, these impressions are 100 percent based on my feelings with the post-patch version of the game.)
The biggest shift in expectations I’ve had to get used to in No Man’s Sky is simply regarding what genre it slots into. In the initial heady trailers and demos that I saw, my mind went wild imagining the joy of simply exploring a universe — wandering around, flying from planet to planet without a care and so on. I didn’t follow interviews with Hello Games closely, because I didn’t want to spoil much, but this was the tone the game seemed to be giving off in the little I did see.
In actuality, No Man’s Sky is first and foremost a survival game. From the confusing outset, where you’re thrown onto a planet with a crashed ship and told only to gather the resources needed to repair the ship, it’s all about hunting down various minerals and isotopes needed to live.
"No Man’s Sky is first and foremost a survival game"
Even beyond fixing the ship so you can leave the planet, you’ll need to keep up a steady supply of zinc and titanium to keep your exosuit's hazard protection operating, and carbon or plutonium isotopes to feed into your life support power pack. And that’s only the beginning; you’ll need elements like heridium, iron, emeril and a half dozen others to build new technologies and upgrades as you progress.
The survival element is especially pronounced in No Man’s Sky’s death penalty. Like in Dark Souls, you drop your items and a small grave marker when you die. You respawn at the last checkpoint you visited, and you need to run back to that grave marker to collect your carefully gathered loot.
What is No Man's Sky like before the day-one patch?
To be clear: The game, thus far, isn’t actually very difficult. I’ve only died once, so I’m not even sure if the items disappear if you die a second time before getting back to them. But the many ticking timers that make it a survival game — the draining life support, the hazard protection on planets with harsh environments, the wear on your mining tool and so on — add just enough tension to be, well, kind of annoying.
In these early hours, I am enjoying the parts of No Man’s Sky that are purely exploration. Studying weird alien lifeforms and scanning them in to a growing database, for example, really helps get across a sense of believable biology on planets, even as I’m aware that they’re all procedurally generated.
The problem, then, is that those parts are so constantly interrupted or put on hold for the sake of a survival loop that just isn’t very fun. Shit, I’m almost out of carbon, which means I need to wander over to some local plant life and slowly cut it down with my mining tool. Damn, I’m ready to leave this planet but my thrusters are low on power; time to wander mindlessly until I happen across some plutonium.
The mundanity of this cycle is exacerbated by an insultingly tiny inventory space that requires near-constant juggling and micromanaging. Was it plutonium or platinum that I needed? Can I actually keep all of these tradeable trinkets I’ve found until I stumble across an NPC willing to trade with me, or can I just not spare the space? These are the types of strategic questions I found myself asking as I played No Man’s Sky, and frankly they just don’t make for a terribly engaging experience so far.
This all sounds terribly harsh, I’m sure, but for what it’s worth, these problems seem to be fading the further into No Man’s Sky that I get. I’ve come across a few enhancements to my exosuit, granting more inventory slots, as well as bigger multi-tools that allow me to craft more mining and shooting upgrades. If I save up enough credits, I could even purchase a new spaceship that can store much more. It’s just a matter of collecting these quality-of-life improvements over tens of hours, which could understandably be enough to turn some players off of the whole experience.
Let me tell you one spot where No Man’s Sky unequivocally succeeds, however: It is a complete technical marvel, to a degree that I cannot even begin to comprehend how it works. The rush of blasting off from a planet, zooming into space, aiming to another planet, rushing into its atmosphere and landing — all with no visible loading — is unmatched by anything I’ve ever experienced in another game. That’s not hyperbole; the sense of scale is just amazing.
I’ve only explored a handful of planets so far, but they’ve all been interesting too — varied and fun to explore even without the hand-crafted feel that I usually prefer in level design. One planet had a constant toxic rain and no alien life but was full of monoliths that taught me words in alien languages. Another was a lush jungle world with dozens of new creatures to document and a huge bonus payment when I was able to track them all down.
Which I guess just brings me back to my initial point: I would love the opportunity to just explore these places, jump between them at will, explore the galaxy and see what awaits me without the constant pressure to collect a bunch of crafting materials just to survive.
Maybe that’s just not the vision Hello Games had in spite of my initial expectations. And maybe after a few more hours, I’ll start getting their vision more and come to appreciate it. We’ll see how it shapes up in full, but for now I’m just working on coming to terms with a game that is almost entirely different from what I thought it would be. Babykayak
(This post was last modified: 08-12-2016 01:19 PM by Dope Man.)
it's crazy cuz my first star system was real mellow, easy going, by the third I was getting chased by sentinels and weird alien creatures. I fucking love this game, but it's not for everyone for sure.
and I just finally got my physical copy today, though I swindled gamestop out of more money to buy me a digital copy, I may sell it on ebay.
(This post was last modified: 08-15-2016 07:23 PM by MF STORM.)
I was hyped for this game but now I'm not so sure. Seems too complex for me and too much hard work hunting for fuel and shit. I need something I can pick up, have a quick blast, put down and forget about.
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