No Man's Sky

No Man's Sky

While I'm enjoying Mass Effect: Andromeda, a space exploration game recently shelved by the publisher, I'd like to talk about a space exploration game that, against all odds, wasn't shelved.

I have been watching No Man's Sky for some time. Not just because it's My Type of Jam, an expansive procedurally-generated space exploration game described as "first player Starbound," but because the absolute clusterfuck of a launch is also my type of jam.

I doubt I need to rehash the story here, but for those who missed it, No Man's Sky was a hugely anticipated Kickstarter game that launched to myriad bugs and issues and was swiftly and mercilessly annihilated by its angry fan base. It's failure at launch was important for the medium, I think. No Man's Sky touches all kinds of issues in the industry: pre-release hype, pre-orders, crowd funding, developers shipping broken or half-baked games, player retaliation, and even--gasp--actual honest-to-god gaming journalism, be still my beating heart.

Most developers would have burrowed into the center of the earth after a launch like that. I have little doubt a publisher like EA would have cut it loose, but Hello Games believed in their vision. They kept developing the game, and as of the most recent update the game is receiving positive reviews. It took a year after release, but they're getting there. RPS revisted the game, arguing it was an entirely new game at this point and therefore warranted a second look. The Steam reviews tell a happy tale--too often, I see the reverse, a game with positive ratings overall that has mixed or negative ratings as the result of a recent update.

So NMS is back on the list. Throw in MEA, Starbound (which still receives content updates), and Astroneer, and that's a lot of space exploration. In recent years I've developed a tendency for open-world fatigue, so I have to space [erassflaj;ds] them out, but NMS might be the Christmas game I've been looking for.

Just a Phase

I'm going through this gaming phase I'm calling Ren Plays Legitimately Great Games and Feels Nothing where I play legitimately great games and feel nothing.

Like, I'm not gonna lie, I shed actual tears when Ori's mom-person died in Ori and the Blind Forest, and the play control is phenomenal, but damned if I can play it more than about 30 minutes before going eeeeh~~ that jump's too hard weeh weeeh and putting it down for a week/month. I have tried playing gonzo stuff (Baobabs Mausoleum Ep. 1 Ovnifagos Don't Eat Flamingos) and indie stuff (Zzzz-Zzzz-Zzzz) and retro stuff (Odallus: The Dark Call) and well-written stuff (Sunless Sea) and all of these are legitimately great or interesting games, and I have also attempted games that are not so legitimately great or interesting, and the only thing I have been able to play with any regularity is goddamn Pocket Camp, which will have (GARDENS) with actual (FLOWERS) and (CRAFTABLE CLOTHING) soon, and Fuck You Nintendo for giving me everything I ever wanted, how dare you consistently meet and/or exceed my expectations what even is this.

Anyway, I don't know what my damage is.

Then I figured well, if I'm going to flounce around and accomplish nothing I might as well install No Man's Sky cause something something and see if I can find this actual game experience, look I told you I was gonna post more I don't know what anyone expected but this is it. This is the show.

So far, No Man's Sky is my dashing, handsome self running around like an asshole destroying geological features mining ores or something and courteously walking around herds of procedurally generated critters that make odd noises and appear to only have wander behavior. They do have babies, which is nice, the babies make cute sounds. The player is given minimal supervision, which is appropriate, and I don't really have an opinion yet except the immersive-gaming-experience part of my brain appreciates the limitations for saving one's game while the only-has-scattered-pockets-of-time-to-play-games part of my brain does not. But the format, "Here you are, it's a planet maybe?, have fun!" is working for me where more structured gaming experiences currently fail.

Planets with Moderate Levels of Toxicity

I reached a point in No Man's Sky where I got randomly attacked and decided I'd find out what the cold, sweet embrace of death feels like, and I have to say starting over with a bit more knowledge of how the game works has increased my enjoyment. I understand now that there's no point in fiddling around with base stuff until I find a Quality Planet to build on. Quality meaning, Not Actively Trying to Kill Me With Temperature Extremes/Radiation/Toxicity.

As someone who plays a fair amount of exploratory games, I'm acutely aware of how samey everything is. I remember this game advertised having 4 quintillion planets or something, and (cue prescription drug commercial voice) I think this is a really good demonstration of if, and when, procedural generation is right for you. Starbound has a dozen?ish? designed biomes that are randomly utilized in procedurally generated planets, resulting in a cohesion that isn't really present here. The developer has to decide when randomization is a real value add. I'm... not really convinced it is here.

Exploration is fun, but a lot of it is roaming geographically uninteresting planetary surfaces (and the roaming itself is limited, because the planet IS trying to kill me) and finding cool caves full of lush planty stuff and observing small packs of animals that exhibit basic behaviors, but so far none of these planets have things like standing liquid (in spite of having rain? maybe I missed it) or significant forests. They are all various flavors of tundra sprinkled with alien flora and caves.

Having played several hours, my assessment is that No Man's Sky still isn't quite where it needs to be, and I am starting to better appreciate how aggravated players were at launch. Multiplayer isn't a thing yet. I can see other player's ships, but cannot see or interact with the players themselves in any way, which makes the game seem strangely lonely and isolating in a way that surely was not intended. The story is bog standard science-fiction so far, down to the narrator's somewhat coded descriptions of the other races of people they encounter.

The more involved pace of space travel ended up working for me, and it's not too hard to make sure you fuel up properly before you depart a planet, but it's not yet clear to me why I care about the economy or selling things or buying things. There is a large in-game instruction manual which I haven't read because why would I read that that explains how to make money and presumably why one would want to.

The Official No Man's Sky Post

I never made an official No Man's Sky post, and since I've got almost 70 hours logged I shall do so now. Long post, but it's a complicated game with a lot of THINGS so it's not easily summed up.

I went into NMS with a first-person create-your-own-story attitude and that has served me well. This game encourages user-created stories and I have many specific memories of gameplay moments. I remember the first time I was shot out of the sky by pirates, the first time I encountered a pearl and decided, "I'll poke that and see what happens." (Spoiler: Sentinels happen.) I remember sheltering from a massive ice storm in a cave system and getting lost. I remember the first time I found a large gold deposit and thought I was Rich, Bitch (ah, the naivete of youth). The mundane, day-to-day of gameplay is rendered memorable in this way.

I keep meaning to set up my NMS screenshot queue on ren-plays. There are beautiful planets to be found in the vanilla game. I ended up building a base on a nice lush planet with purple and green grass and white beaches, inhabited by peaceful mushroom creatures, with caves containing vortex cubes. A solid find. The planets do need work, there are no proper forests, for example, because they apparently had to reduce terrain density for PS4 (once again, I shake my fist half-heartedly at console players). There is a sameyness that is unavoidable for a procedurally-generated world of this magnitude, but something always pushes me to see what's in the next galaxy. I questioned the quintillion world thing before, but I take it back. There really isn't a game that I'm aware of that provides an exploration experience like this. I've obtained the Sigma and Tau warp engine upgrades (there are 3 total) so I am able to go to more advanced galaxies but they are not clearly marked as such once you can access them, so all I can say is as I slowly and infinitesimally move toward the galactic center the planets get more interesting and dangerous.

The current state of the game rewards farming/crafting much more than rare resource hunting, but I find hunting more fun. The exosuit cargo compartments hold large stacks (5 special items or 500 common items per slot), which is essential if you want to do serious pearl, gravatino, or cube hunting.

Easy money is equipping the scanner flora/fauna upgrades, with the Sigma and Tau upgrades I now get over 100k from scanning most new animals and around 20k for new flora. This just emphasizes how special resource hunting is undervalued in a really unfortunate way, and it's mainly the thrill of the hunt and the challenge of outsmarting/escaping the sentinels that kept my interest, I certainly don't do it for the money. At this point I can bring in about a million per planet just from casual scanning, which is enough for basic upgrades and saving up for multitools but is a drop in the bucket for the better ship and freighter purchases.

The randomness of everything can suck. I still don't have Atlas Pass v2 or v3 (an infamously common problem) and I'm still looking for Theta upgrades for flora/fauna scanners and the warp engine. There's no rhyme or reason, you just find things when you find them, and sometimes that's over 100's of hours of gameplay. There's lot of arcane theory about blueprint placement, theoretically you get a bigger boost if you have Sigma and Tau touching Theta. Okay, but that's... random and somewhat non-intuitive? And I don't think it's officially documented anywhere, it may very well be Player Lore. On the positive side, I stumbled across a wrecked 65 million unit ship when my current ship was worth about 5 million units, which was quite a trade-up. You can get lucky.

One big problem with No Man's Sky is you can end up in situations where you are stranded somehow or cannot progress the main questline. These are design problems, not player problems. The main questlines need to be completed in the galaxy they start in. In retrospect this seems straightforward, but a lot of players, including myself, did not consider the ramifications of making 50+ warp jumps to other galaxies thousands of lightyears away before deciding to complete these quests. Quest locations are not saved in the teleporter and backtracking in a game this size is sometimes impossible (see: blackholes). My distance and the general availability of Thamium9, which is required for warp fuel, means I need to start a new game to attempt the main quests.

NMS has a Survival and Permadeath mode. Survival is a completely different game, and if you don't understand the differences you will die a lot. You start on a more challenging starter planet and at least a klick from your ship. Just getting to the ship requires some planning and smart use of terrain and resources. It is entirely possible to start a game that cannot be survived due to lack of resources. Life support degrades more quickly and the scanner takes longer to charge, so not only do you use resources faster, they take longer to locate. Once you make it to the ship the launcher requires 200 plutonium for each use so it must be fully loaded for 1 boost. This makes surface flight prohibitive at first, and if the player doesn't realize this they can get stranded permanently.

Sentinel difficulty is much higher and you are guaranteed any sort of lush planet will have aggressive sentinels that attack on sight. Therefore, if you land on a lush planet and you don't have extra plutonium reserves, you are screwed if you can't survive long enough to find enough plutonium to refuel. It took me a few tries to figure this out. The best strategy, as far as I can tell, is to buy as much fuel as you can afford at the space station, pick a nearby planet that you hope doesn't have too many environmental hazards, and immediately set up a base. That way you can establish a teleporter. Pirates are aggro as shit in Survival and will attack you over the most banal resources. I really hated Survival mode until I realized I just had to treat it like a completely different game.

Permadeath is worse, and of course, when you die you're dead. (Me word good.) I would really only recommend that to people who don't mind replaying the starter planet bit over and over, because you will replay it over and over, but I can see why some people might enjoy that.

I ended up starting a new Normal game to play through the main questlines. The good news is I understand the game now and know what to do, so getting off the starter planet was a breeze. The problem is I now have to grind through the starter equipment until I get find the upgrades I need to get things back up to decent strength, and with a game like this, there's no telling how long that will take.

On the one hand, I'm curious about the main questline, but on the other hand, I shouldn't have to start over like this and that takes the wind out of my sails. I can appreciate the game for what it is and I enjoyed my time with it, but there are a lot of things about it that I find personally frustrating. I would recommend it to people who are into sandboxes and exploratory games and don't get too upset when things break.