No Man’s Sky – a ‘two worlds’ review

No Man's Sky

The procedurally generated design of No Man’s Sky, the latest release by Hello Games, lends itself to players potentially having wildly different experiences in their time with the game. To that end, we thought it would be interesting to contrast the opinions of two RGM writers who have extensive time in the game: Patrick Landry and Rod Oracheski.

 

Patrick’s Experience

Since its first announcement more than three years ago, Hello Games had an enormous task to bring 18 quintillion worlds to life in their most recent game, No Man’s Sky. After a number of delays, it has finally launched and after spending hours with it, I can actually talk about what I experienced.

First thing I have to mention, my original thought of what the game was is very different from what it actually is. With the videos I saw (only the official trailers) and what I got from some slim interviews and talks during the last couple of years during E3 and such, I was expecting a space exploration game with Minecraft-like elements.

This game is not that at all, but I was very happy, because it actually is something I love even more: a survival game.

The premise of the game is that you wake up on an unknown planet, your space suit (called exo-suit) is in really bad shape, and so is your ship. You are almost dead, and all of your life support systems are warning you that you are in danger. Then…that’s it. You are not told anything else, no hand-holding or help system whatsoever, and it starts like that. From this introduction, I then understood that No Man’s Sky is a game like Don’t Starve, a game released a couple of years ago from Klei Entertainment, a Canadian game studio behind games like Mark of the Ninja, Torchlist II and Shank. It means that everything you do, from collecting resources to travelling in distant galaxies is done for only one purpose: live a little longer.

Very early on, you are faced with a game-changing question: you fall on an orb that seems alive and communicates with you. It offers you to be your helper, a bit like the ghosts in Destiny, or you can decide to be on your own, and play like you are in a sandbox environment, without any help whatsoever. With a game of this scale, I decided to take the help, because I had the feeling that discovering all the layers of gameplay announced in this game by myself would be an overwhelming task. I can officially say that I’m very glad I did.

You discover very fast that the only thing you really possess in the game is a type of ray gun, that initially only serves as a mining tool, but can be modified to become a weapon, to defend yourself against the creatures that you can encounter on the many planets you explore, and the robot sentinels that move around the universe and actually attack you if you seem to be doing too much havoc. You can add to this also just the environment of the planets that you go to because your life systems need to be optimal to resist extreme temperatures, acid rains, etc. Everything seems to be dangerous at first, but when you start working on yourself (and upgrade/craft add-ons to your suit, your ray gun, your ship), you can really enjoy all the extra content that this world throws at you.

Another important upgrade to your ray gun that adds to the gameplay elements of No Man’s Sky is the ability to scan the creatures, fauna and flora of the many planets and galaxy you explore, a bit like Ubisoft’s Beyond Good & Evil did many years ago. By doing it here, you are building your own encyclopedia of the world you live in. If you happen to be the first person to discover the scanned element, you have the possibility of giving it the name you want. These names are shared through the online component of the game and connect every player in the world. One of the menu options allow you to track everything you analyzed. If you happen to scan everything on a planet, you will get a big monetary bonus. You can follow your progress in the same menu options.

One of the aspects I didn’t expect to be this important though is encountering aliens, either in bases and ships on many planets or in space stations all around the universe. They will try to talk to you, but they speak a language you don’t know. If you would like to change that, there is one way: on the many planets you will visit, there is one type of collectable you can gain. They are words from the language and can be collected at knowledge stones. You get one word per stone, and the more you collect, the chances get higher to actually understand what they say to you (at least, partially). The possibility to interact with them (like buying resources from them, sell them resources, etc.) are available even if no words are understood. This type of components really makes the world complete and living, and there is a very positive vibe you get from understanding what happens because of some knowledge you gain.

Not all aliens are friendly though: the first time you encounter a fleet of enemy vessels, when you are navigating in a part of the world you haven’t been before and they start chasing you, you are in for quite a surprise. After seeing first-person shooter gameplay, conversations, trading mechanics, crafting mechanics, you will now get space dogfights not unlike what we would see in a Star Wars Rogue Squadron game. It created a situation I didn’t expect and was happily surprised by the fluidity of the controls. Every gameplay changes happen smoothly.

Do all of those gameplay mechanics are just present in a sandbox-style type of game or is there a goal-main objective to all of this? The only mention you get is that you need to try to reach the center of the universe. To be able to do that, you need to travel to many galaxies, and to do so, you have to build a component for your ship (a hyperdrive component). To use it, you need to have warp cells by any means necessary. If crafting is your go-to, you will need components like antimatter, which can be tricky to find. You can also craft this component…. I think you are starting to see the pattern. Crafting is something you will do a lot to get to your objectives, and to learn how to crafts component, you need to explore, visit space stations, meet aliens, etc. By doing that, you will obtain blueprints, which will then allow you to create the resources you need.

Is it true this loop of collecting-crafting-travelling gets tedious after a while? I’ve heard a lot of people saying that it was, but for me, the variety of the planets that you can encounter makes everything so unique that it is not, because you will never know what kind of world you will encounter. I’ve been from ice desert, to desolated rocks, to planets with lush environments with many species of creatures. I’ve encountered extreme temperatures, almost boiling to Siberian, with acid rains that can be tricky to deal with sometimes.

The beauty of it all is also the power of the procedurally generated world. The engine powering the game is a force to be reckoned with! You can especially see it in action on planets with a wide variety of fauna, flora and creatures. When all the components are present, the scenery can be breathtaking. On desolated planets, of course, nothing special here, rocks are rocks; but this is the bet you do when you decide to land on a planet to explore it. Unfortunately, I’ve encountered technical problems, with the game basically crashing on some occasions. Personally, it happened to me when I was warping from a galaxy to another. Hello Games have been hard at work though, with a lot of patches already deployed since the game’s launch, and the experience seems to be getting better and better every time.

Going from Joe Danger to No Man’s Sky is quite an accomplishment for such a small team of developers, and the mission is accomplished. Could it be better? Probably.

Does it live to the expectations? Due to some marketing problems, no it doesn’t. The fact also that the showcases were based on exploration was confusing, because a lot of people believe that it was mostly an exploration relaxing game, and not a survival one. Is this game for everyone? No. The intensity of the survival aspect, combined with the simple yet addictive gameplay loops can scare a lot of gamers. Is it worth picking up? I will dare to say yes, because there is just too much quality to pass by, with the eery music, the living world, and the pure joy of going from an on-foot first-person view, to a ship, and going to the atmosphere and leave a planet without even a loading screen is quite exquisite, even after many hours of gameplay. The studio has already announced some upcoming functionalities like base building…

Could this be the way to make the game more Minecraft than Don’t Starve? Future will tell.

It is easy to get lost into this beautiful fictional world filled with many surprises and hidden artefacts. Like many others, I’ll continue to visit galaxies spread across the universe to discover…who knows? Maybe nothing special, maybe some breathing living world that will leave me in awe. One thing for sure: thanks to Hello Games and Sean Murray for not giving up on your project and I hope you will have many others like this one.

Rod’s Experience

I have to agree with Patrick on a couple of things to start off, namely that this game took a very long time to come out, and that it’s not exactly what people thought it would be.

Whether you want to blame Hello Games for over-promising or under-explaining, allowing fans to offer wild interpretations and projections of ‘what could be’ based on throwaway lines from interviews, the fans for allowing themselves to be caught up in unrealistic hype, or the media for not cutting through the bullshit to ask for clarity, ultimately what hit our hard drives didn’t match the hype.

Where Patrick found wonder and exploration, I was stuck with the opposite due to what’s perhaps a fluke, albeit one that – judging by Reddit posts – a number of other players encountered.

You see when I started the game I did the same ‘quick look around, then start the tutorial mission’ as everyone else. The catch came when it was time to blast off into space, and I instead decided to fly along the planet’s surface to check out something I saw that seemed interesting.

When I got there and landed, it turned out that it wasn’t that interesting at all. When I went to take off I found I had no more fuel for my thrusters. “No problem,” I thought to myself. “I’ll just get some more.”

Only the planet I started on didn’t have much for Plutonium, as in…any. I found the occasional small cluster that gave me one or two units, but hours of searching left me wondering if I was stuck for good. I turned to the Internet, hoping I was just missing something obvious…no such luck. So I journeyed on, increasingly becoming unable to not look ‘behind the curtain’ at the generic mess that procedural generation left in its wake.

The entire planet, or at least the fair-sized chunk of it that I covered in the seven hours I wandered its surface, was basically identical. Ridged hills interspersed with small flat areas that had the same three plants on them and the same three animal types roaming around them. No interaction between the animals and plants, or even between the animals themselves. Ships flew overhead, but never landed and couldn’t be hailed or shot.

Making matters worse, even though this planet was a hospitable one I continually had to mine carbon to power my suit and mining laser. I was never in danger of dying from my suit losing power, as there was carbon literally everywhere, but it became a routine I resented. Walk five minutes…blast some plants and energize my suit…walk five minutes…blast some plants and energize my suit and blaster…walk five minutes…  Repeat that for seven hours and see if the game doesn’t get a bit stale.

Eventually I got off the planet, thanks to a vendor I came across in a random settlement that was laid out exactly like all the other random settlements I’d encountered prior and that I’ve encountered since. I bought his entire store of Plutonium just to make sure I’d have enough to leave and never come back.

After that disastrous start, I wasn’t able to see past the parts of the game that are poorly designed, broken, or just plain missing to have the kind of experience that Patrick did.

Now I land on a new planet and notice that the creatures don’t really seem to fit the environment at all, there’s no sense of connected biology here, and they start to feel kind of ‘samey’ after a while. Creatures might well be getting procedurally generated, but they’re generated from a far too finite pool of body parts and movement types. Once you’ve seen your fourth ‘flying spaghetti monster’ style alien you’ve probably seen them all.

I notice that a game that revolves more around inventory management than it does around anything else has a terrible inventory management system, with far too few spots to be filled by far too many resources and intermediary ingredients for high-end crafting recipes. There’s no better feeling in gaming than agonizing over the decision to dump roughly a ton of some element so you’ll have room to create a piece that you need to create another piece to make the thing you ACTUALLY want…then discovering you need that element you just discarded. Wait, did I say ‘better’ feeling?

If you like mindlessly mining material or exploring sometimes weird worlds, there’s a lot to like about No Man’s Sky, but there’s a whole lot more that I’d have liked to see. The game would be a thousand times better with a straight up ‘Explore’ mode that dumped all the tedious an unnecessary resource gathering and crafting. Just let gamers jump from planet to planet finding new and weird things to name after their penis or favourite TV show’s main character.

No Man’s Sky reminds me a lot of Diablo 3 when it launched. Both games had a lot of promise and delivered on almost none of it, but just like Diablo 3 the base is there for something special In No Man’s Sky. They just need to get a Reaper of Souls remake out before everyone gets tired of a game that’s a mile wide and an inch deep.

No Man’s Sky is a giant 18 quintillion world sandbox, true enough, but it’s one that doesn’t give you a bucket and shovel to play with. By the fifth hour of play, if that, you’ll have seen everything the game has to offer and it’s all repetition from there on new planets that might be wildly different from the last, but might also be identical only with a blue tint to everything.

When I finally hit the center of the galaxy and found out what was beyond that final jump, I was done with the game. Anyone that didn’t have the patience to see it through, don’t worry – you didn’t miss a thing.

REVIEW OVERVIEW
Overview
7
Gameplay
6
Graphics
7
Sound
8
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I spent 10 years as an editor with Star News and, though I've moved on to other things, continue to write a weekly gaming column for the chain. I've also written for Incite - a short-lived magazine that most people sadly don't remember - as well as some freelancing for EGM and other online publications. I started as an arcade gamer, became a PC diehard when video cards first started being a thing, and have since become a primarily console gamer...though I try to keep the PC up to snuff for those must-have experiences. I'm also a lifelong Edmonton Oilers fan, though I wish it was easier to admit that these days...
no-mans-sky-a-two-worlds-reviewThere is no middle ground here, you will either love or hate it. There are some great qualities below the inventory management and the game can feel repetitive. It feels more like a survival game than an exploration game, and has potential to grow and become even better.