Yep. The launch was an unmitigated disaster due to the over hyping, and many of the negative reviews even today don’t cite the game as it exists now, but rather harp about their disappointment/betrayal from a year ago (“No Man’s LIE!!!”).
I missed all that baggage, holding off my purchase until after the 3rd big update and while I’m enjoying it quite a bit, I agree with most of this review - it’s an odd mix that can captivate you for huge swaths of time, but there’s a puddle-deep, repetitive, pointless aspect that creeps in at the edges after a while (a long while for me) and the NPCs, alone in their far off outposts, with their actions described rather than displayed, do begin to feel like placeholders in a very shallow text based game. Of course all that can change with the next update. Anyway I love the aesthetic and sound, and something about jumping from world to world to world, scanning for weird fauna and battling space pirates in cool retro ships, scratches an itch for me–I’ll probably play some more as soon as I finish typing this.
I imagine there’s another universe where this game was released for about 14.99 dollarpounds with no prior warning or hype and everybody praised it for being such an impressively ambitious indie game - they went from joe danger to this!? I’ve not played it but it seems to me they should’ve focused on the lovely chris foss-esque ships and discovering some amazing abandoned alien architecture, procedurally generating buildings must be easier and more convincing than lifeforms that look like they have no connection to their habitat or even make sense.
NMS would be a growing magical cult at that price, like Minecraft was in beta.
$60 (with occasional deals) is a big part of the “problem”. Not that the devs don’t deserve it, they sure do, just in that it creates expectations of game-ness, completeness, “Skyrim in Space”-ness that mean less interesting things are prioritized. At least from the puddles-and-oceans perspective.
Mirror world NMS was launched out the blue for $20 and they spent the last year adding the Punctuated Equilibrium expansion, the Chris Foss Spaceship Maker, and space dinosaur weddings.
The NMS launch reminded me of Frontier: Elite II’s release -
Over 100 billion procedural generated star systems! Realistic orbital and space flight physics! Amazing! So, what can you do? Well, err, you buy goods from one star system and fly to other systems to sell them. And occasionally you get to shoot at another space ship.
I got NMS on release and played the hell out of it. I didn’t care about the lack of things to do. I was depressed, and I could lie in my living room exploring a whole lot of really pretty planets spread out on my 70" projection screen.
It was empty, and lonely, and that was a wonderful thing. I learnt enough of the alien languages to reliably figure out what artifacts wanted. I held onto my starter ship, first because I hadn’t found any crashed ships and realized that repeatedly salvaging slightly-better-than-your-current-ship ones was the main way to improve one’s ship, and then because by the time I’d saved enough money to buy one as a station I’d developed a sentimental attachment to the stubby little Rasamama S36 that I repaired at the start.
Maybe it helped that I’d play it curled up next to my boyfriend. Occasionally he’d look up from his computer and make comments. We imagined our own ideas into the gorgeous empty spaces.
Eventually I had enough, and moved on to other games.
And then the updates started dropping, and every time I tried the new systems out I just hated it more. Huzzah, now some things can only be broken up by Advanced Mining Lasers and I need to do this whole lengthy chain of fetch quests to get one! Yay, now I can build a base - something I’ve never been interested in doing in any video game, ever!
No Man’s Sky, at its best, was a gorgeous interactive painting of an endless succession of alien worlds. It was a simulation of hiking through a lurid seventies paperback book cover. And it succeeded admirably at that. But every piece of “game” they added just made me like it less and less. And I can’t ever play the version I loved, because you can never go back to earlier releases in this modern world of online patches…
I’ve been pondering this and wondering if you (the rhetorical you) could make a ringworld type game using a modded version of no man’s. It’d still be a vast world to play in but not infinite* and yet manageable. Actually i think it’d do that hitchhiker’s** thing of suggesting infinity better than actual infinity with the ring stretching off into the horizon. You can build ships sure but these would be sublight in order to explore the ringworld, handily limiting the range you can travel to within the boundaries of the game world. All still procedurally generated but within constraints to give a developer more artistic vision. Or a rama style game world! Yes please.
*Such as no man’s sky is infinite considering you’d barely explore a fraction of it.
**That place where they manufacturer the planets.
I’ve been noodling around with this game for roughly 80 hours, and it seems a lot like minecraft, only with better graphics. One feature I hope they eventually add, would be a way to capture plants and animals and put them in an enclosure at a base.
Creative Mode makes more sense on PC since one can use mods to circumvent the building limitations. On console i found that building normally throughout my gameplay that i inadvertently hit the building limitation and had to go back and start deleting things from my homebase and streamline so i could build some more.
The terrain editor is also a kind of neat feature but i think it needs a bit of a rework, it’s not easy to add a bunch of terrain. I think the game should let one place preset terrain down and then modify it or let one place featureless large blocks down and then let the player apply filters on it to modify how it looks in-game. Perhaps with a randomizer on it that one can re-roll until you get something that you like before you go in and manually change it further. The terrain editor is so fiddly i only tried using it a few times and quickly gave up in frustration.
