Licking a wall socket is like tasting the rainbow.
It’s been too long, and the excuses would just be excuses. So let’s talk about No Man’s Sky.
So Pretty
Credit: ElcaYouTube
No Man’s Sky launched in August of 2016 to…….not so great reviews. It was touted as a super crazy intergalactic game with limitless possibilities to how you can play the game, with an infinite number of randomly generated planets populated with an equally infinite number of animals and plant life that you will be able to explore, with multiplayer, and trading, and space fighting, and base building, and black jack, and hookers (probably).
Yeah!
Credit: Tenor
The reality was a lot less cool, there was definitely no hookers OR blackjack to be found anywhere. The planets were very sparse, the wildlife generated were……..unimpressive.
The fever dreams of a meth addict.
Credit: nicktweetshere
The company that made the game, Hello Games, could have taken the money and run like most companies have these days. Instead they buckled down and kept releasing content updates to try and catch the game up to what they were promising people.
August 9th was the biggest content update since the games release and it feels like a completely different game. They revamped the planet generation, added actual multiplayer, player model customization, 3rd person view, and a myriad of other changes that have really breathed new life into it.
I picked the game up last year on sale for my PS4, played it for a few hours and moved on. The game was only ok. It wasn’t fantastic but it wasn’t terrible. I loaded it up on my PS4 after the NEXT update went live and I have been dumping hours into it whenever I can. I’ve hopped around from planet to planet, I built my first base (it was a shack, literally a wood shack), I even have a frigate! The story has a lot more meat on it’s bones, and random encounters are pretty great. I was hopping to another planet and as soon as I came out of warp I saw a frigate being attacked by filthy space pirates. I was getting hailed by the ships captain and he was pleading for help. So I engaged the pirates and took them out. The captain radioed me back and thanked me. I could have just gone on my way but I decided to land in the frigate to see what it was like inside. I wandered around and ended up on the bridge and spoke with the captain. He was stressed out from being in command and asked me to take over. Uh, sure? And that’s how I became the captain of a space frigate. That’s the kind of random stuff that makes this game fun. Other times I just turn on some music or a podcast and fly around the planets, collecting resources and trying to build upgrades for my ships, my space suit, or the multitool laser….blaster…..thingy. I even customized my character, now I look like someone who tried out for the Rebel Alliance and didn’t quite make the cut.
Behold! Captain Sassypants.
Unfortunately, for a game that came out two years ago there are still a LOT of problems in the game. I backed out of the menu for the teleporter and soft locked my game, on a PS4, I softlocked a video game. I have never done that in my life and I owned a CD-I. I had to go back to the PS4 dashboard and force close the game. Other than that there have been times where the screen goes black during a warp from one planet to another, sounds like the mining laser not triggering until 1-2 seconds after I’ve fired it, things like that. They’ve added so much to the game but I don’t know how little things like this still aren’t fixed. I can’t be the only one experiencing these glitches.
All in all the game is good, not great, but good. It’s obviously trying to tick all the boxes on the list of features they originally promised. But it feels like a mile wide puddle, tons of possibilities but not a whole lot of depth to the individual parts. I’m under 20 hours into the game so hopefully it gets fleshed out some the more I play. It’s still not perfect and I don’t know if it ever will be. But for now it’s a pretty good game and a nice way to relax in front of the TV or computer for an hour or two.