I came across this Gizmodo piece today:
Why I'm Loving No Man's Sky. For those of you still on the fence, I think this gives a great summation of the parts of the game that are keeping some of us coming back for more.
A few comments are great, as well:
I Am No One:
There’s going to be a lot of hate for this game, and I wonder if (outside of the obvious need for bug fixes and a stable PC build) it comes down to how games are played:
In a “normal” game, danger is thrown at you constantly by the game, and your play is a reaction to the dangers presented. I sneak and snipe in Skyrim because the game wants to throw wave after wave of baddies after me. I play cautious, I hoarde resources, I grind my stats, all in reaction to the ever-present danger I feel. The rewards thus come from surviving challenges I know were designed to test me.
In No Man’s Sky, you can play the game for hours and not be in any danger. But, you can bring danger to you through your own actions (harvesting sac venoms, straying too far away from the ship on a dangerously toxic planet). This is basically the inverse of the Normal Game Model. If you play cautiously in the traditional sense (hoarding, grinding, sneaking, sniping), the experience will seem boring, no-stakes, and shallow. The game isn’t playing with you the way you’re used to being played with.
No Man’s Sky isn’t challenging you intentionally; sometimes it tests you reactively by sending some pirates after you or sentinels after you steal something or kill an animal or something. Sometimes the tests are unintentional: storms randomly happen and on certain planets you can be in real danger if you are too far from your ship. Sometimes, there are no challenges. If you are expecting strict intentionality, you are in for a shock.
The universe of NMS is indifferent to your preferences, the god that created it is (mostly) hands-off. A world like Dark Souls III, lovingly crafted just to kill you the player, feels different because it is burdened with terrible purpose. You are that universe’s savior or antichrist, sent to destroy all you see before you, with clear goals. NMS has a goal, but you have to supply the motivation. If you can’t motivate yourself to play the game as presented, you can think it’s defective.
But it’s not defective. It’s just engaging in a different style of play. Games like this haven’t been remotely mainstream for decades. This is like Collosal Cave Adventure or Starflight. Games like NMS haven’t been popular for decades, and a different game playing paradigm became more prominent in the meantime. For me, a gamer who fell out of love with games more and more after 1992 or so, with the death of games like Starflight, this is like a gift. I love this game because it meshes with how I like to play in real life. But I definitely can see where it doesn’t mesh with others.
I think the design philosophy of No Man’s Sky can be summed up in how storms are handled. If you’re on a planet already taxing your exosuit, and a storm hits, your life support drains away FAST. So you go to your ship or hide in a cave to keep your filtration systems intact.
And then you wait.
A storm can take three or four minutes to pass. And you’re sitting there in your ship, listening to the rain hit the windscreen, watching the shadows of the flying creatures as they circle above you, watching the grass sway in the wind gusts, contemplating your next move.
There’s no rest button, no fast-forward, no concessions to modern gameplay. You sit, and you wait. Maybe you pore over your tech blueprints or strategize, or maybe you just watch the world go by. But what you’re doing right then? That’s the game too. It’s not waiting for the game to happen. THIS IS ALSO THE GAME.
Can you imagine modern games doing that? I can see where it’d be baffling to a lot of players.
noodlesintheface
Yes. I know that in my experience, despite the memories of Starflight, the past 20+ years of games have conditioned me to expect more handholding.
I launched NMS for the first time. Title screen, and then immediately dropped on a planet with a nonfunctioning ship. There’s no cinematic of where I came from, there’s no wall of text telling me where to go, there’s just me and my ship and a toxic world burning both my life support and filtration systems. I mine some isotopes and start repairing a few pieces, and suddenly two Sentinels attack. I find some grazing alien creatures and they scatter. Eventually I repair my ship and lift off, and ... there’s the rest of this planet, orders of magnitude larger than Skyrim or Red Dead Redemption or Fallout, and there are seventeen quintillion, nine hundred ninety-nine quadrillion, nine hundred ninety-nine trillion, nine hundred ninety-nine billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine more planets out there.
The idea of “completionist” isn’t there. It can’t be there. As a player I was reluctant to leave my first planet because I didn’t find everything on it, until I reminded myself of the above scope.
This is one of those situations where humans are bad at visualizing big numbers. Billion, trillion, it’s all the same to our primate brains. But when I moved on to the next planet, and I thought about the people complaining that they wanted multiplayer, I thought about this:
Imagine all six billion people on the world are playing No Man’s Sky. They’re playing it all at the same time. Each one of those six billion people would have three billion planets all to themselves. If everyone were randomly distributed, you could play it for thousands of lifetimes and never see another player. The NMS universe is vast, incomprehensibly vast, amazingly vast.
And it’s just the kind of game I’ve wanted for so long.
