No Man's Sky (2016)

No Mans Sky - (Steam Deck)

It didn’t have the best start at launch 2016, but Hello Games has kept updating it and really managed to turn it around. Almost 10 years in and they still release new content and updates for free.

I had a hard time getting into it though. So many galaxies and infinite planets, it’s very ambitious. Had problems to understand the story of No Man’s Sky, what the goal of the game was. Every here and then I got small quest, on so many planets, had problem to navigate through it and it felt overwhelming.

Got into it more and understood all the mechanisms more with time, it was a lot to learn. It got more fun after a while. The exploration is the main thing, discover new planets, species ans settlements. Build and create bases in these different planets was a great aspect as well, it’s done good!

As mentioned, I had some problems with the story and understanding what I was suppose to do next. Sometimes it felt a bit unclear and directionless, which broke the flow for me.

Overall, it’s a much better game today than it was at release. But for me, it’s a bit hit and miss. Some great aspects but I had problems with finding the real fun in it.

Rating: 🌲🌲🌲 ➕

I recently picked up No Man's Sky during its sale after one of their newest updates and began playing for the first time since the game came out back in 2016 (I might've played in 2017, idk who cares), and let me say I am thoroughly impressed. As per my usual caveat, I think Grouvee should implement half stars like Letterboxd because, like many of the other games, I think this one is about a 4 1/2 stars in its current state.

NMS drops you into a random world, alone in the universe, and gives you a brief tutorial on how to survive, and then you set off. The first few hours are somewhat slow, scoping out the world and gathering materials to craft and repair your ship, but once the game opens up, it really just opens up. There will be continual story missions to point you in a direction, but you can go anywhere in a truly whole generated universe.

Now, the catch is that everything is very samey overall once you get into things, but I genuinely do feel that way about most open-world survival games. You sort of fall into a niche of crafting and exploration while doing the same gameplay loop fairly repetitively and slowly unlocking and expanding your bases or assortment of tools and NMS, in no way is different from that aspect. You will explore many worlds, with a wide variety of looks, feels, and effects-- but all in all, it has some flora, some fauna, and minerals to scan and see with a variety of high-grade materials, ores, or special events or bases. But that is quite literally every planet, no matter where you go throughout the galaxy. It could be I have just not explored enough (I am like 20 hours into one save), however, I would have honestly kind of liked to find barren planets or true gas giants, but every single planet without fail has been fairly similar. The biggest departure from the norm was an aquatic planet that had all of these things, but under the water.

Additionally, I'd be remiss to mention the graphics problems I've had, which mainly range from a lot of pop-in and poor smoothing that leads to frame drops pretty often. Also, the menu lags very significantly on occasion, and I'm not sure why. That and a few bugs with NPCs glitching or being unable to interact have been fairly common, which definitely drops the immersion and experience when it does happen. Thankfully, this was mainly at the start of my playthrough and has not happened much in recency, but I still do wish that I could find some better graphics options that looked good but didn't absolutely annihilate my computer somehow.

With that being said, I am still fully enjoying the feeling of exploring each planet; the wide variety of visuals and effects really leaves me impressed, and I'll feel compelled to take a screenshot or something, which is fairly uncommon for me overall. The feeling of flying through space, only to intercept a signal from a random ship hailing you to buy their wares, or warping to a new system only to find a federation ship under attack by pirates, is unmatched in anything I've played in a while. It just feels so well-seamed and connected, which really allows me to get into the mood for it. ALSO, I love the slow communication with different alien races, each with their own language that you slowly piece together and build upgrades to quicken is really fun and unique to me.

As stated in the title, I am a big fan of the game Spore and really liked the idea of the evolution of a creature to the evolution of its culture to their eventual achievement of interstellar expansion. Now, in that game, it was fairly limited, but I loved going from galaxy to galaxy, talking to factions, and making allies or enemies, and tbh I think that NMS is exactly what I was looking for from that. It may not be for everyone, but DAMN does this game really do it for me right now.

Honestly really enjoying the game. The developers have improved it drastically since it's initial launch, so I believe many of the reviews/ratings are outdated. It has always had a high potential and with a good system the immersion is incredible. The progression is satisfying and there are always seems to be more I want to do and discover.

There are still issues that hold the game back though:

• Connection problems when playing with friends... even though we are on the next-gen Xbox
• Get's very grindy when mining and searching for materials or assets which can get boring
• Lacking story regarding depth and excitement
• The beginning of the game can be hard to get past. I replayed the beginning a few times with friends that I wanted to try the game out with me and realized how boring it was after the initial excitement to discover what the game had to offer. The tutorial was sub-par and forces you to walk around an area to earn necessary tools, but it wasn't fun and still forced me to research several aspects that were far too complicated to understand without it but easy to include in a simple manner.

Favorite aspects that make the game worth playing

• As mentioned: Immersion... the lack of loading screens, beautiful views and animations, and opportunity to discover and make my own impact in the universe was the best part of the game for me. Took several hours of playing to appreciate fully, but it was better than basically any game I've played.
• Uniqueness, every planet I landed on had a different ambience and it was beautiful in its own way. I do wish there were more interesting things to discover on each one, but it is still a wonderful part of the game and makes the discovery aspect feel above and beyond. Additionally, the originality of each object from animals to ships made me feel like I was experiencing a completely different game from anyone else.
• Creation, base building in this game is better than most games with this feature. It takes an incredibly long grind to get the point you can build an interesting base in any of the survival modes, but it just makes it more rewarding.

I played this as part of a game club I'm in and I had an absolutely wonderful time.

I didn't get nearly as much co-op as I wanted and I feel like there's some more depth of the systems that I didn't explore, but there was little that drove me to explore more.

What I did play was a lot of fun. The loop of the everyday session was enjoyable (search, gather, build, unlock) and I had a sizable base before I decided that I had spent enough time with that. Ultimately, there was a bug with one of the mainline quests that got too frustrating, and I eventually fell off of it for now.

I may dip back in again some time in the future, and if I upgrade my computer more, maybe even in VR, but for now, I'll end my time remembering it well instead of frustrating myself because of my old-ish rig.

~David.

There is a pretty wide consensus that No Man's Sky is not a game that lived up to its own hype, and that in many ways it is not a game worth playing at all. I'm not here to challenge that. But as someone who bought in to all the pre-release hype I have been curious about exactly how this game fails. Finally, a year-and-a-half after its release, I bought the game on sale to test it out for myself. This also gave the game developers plenty of time to patch this game and update it and try and bring it more in line with the original vision. What follows are my experiences playing this game for 25 hours, and some thoughts as to why it failed (which I hope are just different enough from what everyone else is saying to hold your attention for those few extra minutes):

-- The Good --

This game works hard to feel strange and mysterious, from the minimalistic synth music (that often sounds almost like random electronic noises) to the sparse amount of written words and story details. While there are tutorial prompts, on some level this game was made to be hard to decipher. Simple tasks are not instantly intuitive because this game does things in slightly different ways than other similar games. For example, instead of clicking to confirm a menu choice you have to click and hold for a full second. This was a small detail but somehow made the game feel alien.

Honestly the beginning of the game was my favorite part. The mysterious feel of the game made it feel like anything was possible. I found myself dreaming about what it would be like to finally fix my ship and get off the ground for the first time. Of course strangeness of this game meant that I needed to spend a little more time learning how to actually get things done. I came at it with low expectations and a relaxed mental posture though, and that helped me to enjoy that initial learning experience.

After a few hours I had figured out the basic flow of this game. In the beginning flying from one planet to another was a magical experience. But after I had "discovered" my twentieth planet I had a system. I knew what to look for, what to ignore, and what hoops I had to jump through to keep my ship moving. It was at this point that my interest in this title began to dry up.

--The Bad--

I think this game failed because everything the player does feels meaningless. In general there are two ways that players can derive meaning from the games they play. First, there is the narrative. While some games are criticized for being too scripted there is something to be said for games with big cinematic moments and carefully crafted narrative. If a game can make you care for a character, or relate to a character, or hate a character then that can make it a memorable experience. And the interactivity in games can enhance that connection. But the story in this game was so sparse it was almost non-existent. I think that minimalism was a design choice. I think they were trying to make it mysterious and strange. But they took it too far. What little bits of narrative this game strings together are disjointed, difficult to connect to on a personal or emotional level, and are otherwise forgettable as "typical sci-fi fodder." A simple (and spoiler free) example of this are the aliens you encounter all over the place. They all have slightly different faces but they all universally lack walking animations. That means they just stand in place and make vague gestures at you. When you initiate dialogue you will get one of a dozen typical responses, or maybe a slightly rarer special event (which is less special after the third of fourth time seeing the same one). Every single character you encounter is little better than a cardboard cutout, and can be thrown away just as easily. Some might be tempted to blame the random generation that is the main feature of this game. But with some creative design work it is possible to create interesting characters from random narrative elements. It just felt like the developers didn’t care to try.

The other way a player can derive meaning from a game is by playing with the game's systems (sometimes called something like "emergent storytelling"). I don't play Skyrim because it has a good story. I play it because of the potential for wacky and unpredictable battles, with startling moments that make great videos and stories to tell my friends. I play it for how the game rewards you for all that time you spent crafting the perfect armor and weapon by letting you steamroll through all the enemies you encounter. I enjoy interacting with the game's systems, pushing and pulling to see how the game reacts and adjusting what I do accordingly. I think this is where the hype for No Man's Sky was the biggest and what 18 months of updates hasn't really fixed yet. This game just does not have that sort of flexibility in its systems. You push and you pull and the game hardly changes at all. You either have the resources to make the super-thing or you don't. You either fly to one planet with a random set of resources or you fly to the other planet with a different set of random resources. Way back in 2011 when I played Skyrim for the very first time and encountered my first dragon my horse ran up and killed it. No Man's Sky will never be able to generate a story as unexpected (and humorous) as that.

--The Verdict--

This game is a technical marvel in its own right. But with all that space there is very little meaning to anything I choose to do. I live, I die, and the universe just doesn't care. For those of you though who might be interested in playing a space sim game like this one I do think there is some room for you to enjoy yourself. You just need to keep your expectations low and come at this title with a relaxed mental posture and a willingness to move at a slow pace. For mindful gamers this title offers many chances to stop and smell the space-roses (before harvesting them for isotopes). I would wait for a sale though. For anyone with any kind of gaming budget it is hard to justify this game's full price with the relatively wooden and repetitive experience it offers.

Definitely not for everyone but if walking/jumping/driving/flying around scanning things and mining sounds like fun to you, you might just love it. At launch it was a good game but with the latest updates it's moved up to VERY good and could conceivably hit "great" eventually. There's still a lot of bad blood with Hello Games for a lot of people which I think is largely responsible for the score tanking pretty much everywhere but if a chilled out space sim where you explore, scan, and craft like no-ones business sounds good to you, I genuinely can't think of another game that checks those boxes like NMS.

If you've played Elite Dangerous, imagine that but with bright pastel colours, a UI like Destiny's loot screen, and an all 'round more accessible gameplay experience you have a good idea of what NMS is. Personally, I love it but I totally get that others may be bored to death by it.

No Mario's Sky

This awesome little game was developed for Ludum Dare game jam in 72 hours, and it's really cool. Made by the same dev who is currently developing Moonman (an Australian dev who lives in my city!). No Mario's Sky is a game where you play as Mario, the space-explorer. It features trillions of procedurally-generated planets, you can fly between them with your space ship, the goombas, environments, music, colours, etc. are all randomly generated. It's a really fun, fascinating little game. It's free and can be downloaded here: https://asmb.itch.io/no-marios-sky

Last night I decided to re-visit my starter system Utopia, and planet, Eden Prime. After traipsing about the galaxy for a week now I had forgotten how fortunate I was with my random starter planet. I had named it Eden Prime on a whim, partially because it was serene, beautiful and teeming with life, and partially because it is the first planet Shepard visits in ME. I thought, why not name my first planet after the first planet in ME. Ironically, I had no idea how spot on that would be. Like the real Eden Prime, the planet is lush and beautiful. It is also populated with alien relics and ruins pointing to a distant past in which machines were designed to monitor and regulate the galaxy. Just as Shepard first learned of the Reapers and their cosmic plan, I learned of the Atlas and the sentinels and the sense of an ever present synthetic eye watching my every move. Leaving Eden Prime I found other garden planets, but not quite that many. I found far more desert, glacial and irradiated planets than ones with lush plant life. To be honest, I've started to feel like someone needs to hand me an M35 Mako to deal with some of the terrain on these planets. Returning to Eden Prime last night was treat and I think it may be hard to leave. I left once, so I am sure I can once again. But first I might spend a little time exploring the rest of the planet now that I have a bit more technology available than I did when I started my journey.

Unfortunately there is a downside to procedural generation, and here is a good example. No Man's Sky has many planets with large bodies of water including Oceans, Objects can be found under water, which is great. I have found many an abandoned building and ruin under water. This is as it should be. Unfortunately I have found a glitch. If you use an observatory (which always locate ancient alien ruins) on a planet with large oceans, it will most often provide coordinates to a location under water. However, every time I have arrived at such a location there is no ruin. Now, in the video below this is not a significant issue because the coordinates are near land. But if they are further out in the ocean, you are in trouble because you have to swim there. And swimming is slow. I once swam six minutes out and six minutes back only to discover nothing. And swimming consumes resources because you have to power your re-breather. To add insult to injury, if you locate a ruin with an observatory, there is no way to clear the coordinate marker unless you travel to the location. If you don't clear it, it will remain in your HUD everywhere you go within that solar system, including other planets (it will display location off planet under the marker). So, if your coordinates are a twenty minute swim out into a body of water, that is 40 minutes total you will lose just to clear the marker. Needless to say, I no longer use observatories on water covered planets. Here's to hoping this glitch is eventually corrected.