Sky Watch

No Man’s Sky Review

By mw @ Updated @

TLDR: Shut up and take my money!

Introduction

Game studios and publishers tend to exaggerate about their games before launch. Most of the time they lie a little bit just for the drama. Sometimes they lie quite a lot. In recent years the two most prestigious liars are Todd Howard and Sean Murray, and one of them is worse than the other.

We all know Sean was a liar, and in my book, once a liar, always a liar. Most of us would also agree that No Man’s Sky was pretty bad at launch, which lasted for a while. The following was my review in 2020:

I bought this game after their "2.0" update, and found it to be pretty lacking. Basically you collect some resources on your 1st planet, move to another one, and collect some more resources. That’s pretty much it. Yes the planets and their inhabitants are "different", but they are all made up from the same set of components, and it’s not a large set of components...

I got bored at ~8 hours. And uninstalled.

Today I fired it up again to see how it has evolved. I clicked "Play game", and was greeted with a number of save slots. I clicked an unoccupied one to start a new game. The game goes into a blank screen. Exited, tried again, same thing. Waited for 10 minutes, same blank screen.

Uninstalled.

In 2020, the game may or may not be in a good shape. I wouldn’t know, because as I have written, the game didn’t work on my end. But this is a space game. There are not a lot of space games on the market. So I kept an eye on the game. Recently I decided to give another try.

The current state

This game is great now! It is pretty much completely different from the 1st time I tried it. There is an impressive amount of content, and I’m not talking about the procedure generation. On the high level, the following is an incomplete list of the things you can do:

  • Exploration
  • Experiencing the “story” by following the main missions
  • Collecting and upgrading starships
  • Collecting starship parts and building your own starships
  • Building bases
  • Building settlements, and managing “town folks”. This is a different mechanics from base-building.
  • Fishing
  • Farming
  • Getting a capital ship and building a fleet
  • Building a mobile base on the capital ship. Technically this is just a feature of the capital ship. But it deserves its own place in the list. I even wrote a tool for this.
  • Collecting and raising pets (there are some weird ones).
  • Co-op on daily and weekly mission to collect meta-currency (you could also solo it).
  • (with the latest update) Collecting ship parts and building completely customized ships with interior!

When the game first came out, you could only do the first thing (exploration), and here lies the major difference: in that version, procedure generation was the content; in the current version, procedure generation mostly only adds flavor to the content, and apparently this is a very good thing.

Most importantly, all of these features are with some depth. For example, you could buy starships from NPCs. That’s usually pretty underwhelming. But soon you would find that there is a small chance to find A- and S-class ships, and the probability is related to the economical level of the star system you are in. Therefore you could formulate a strategy to maximize your chance. Then there are the exotic ships that are a small chance within the S-class probability (and there’s also the squid…). Besides all that there are the interceptors which is a completely different mechanics. Lastly of course there are the late-game grind that are the living ships.

Now some of the “live service” kind of games (and many others) provide a comparable amount of features. But usually the good content is locked behind significant grind which the players are expected to overcome to reach “the meta” in order to experience the full game. But this game is very different:

  • There is no “meta”. Sure the squid is the most rare, but I’ve seen plenty of players proudly fly their ugly haulers (probably because they were role-playing space truckers).
  • You can freely adjust the difficulty; not only combat and survival difficulties, but also things like if you can get other starships at all.
  • A lot of the times there are ways to skip the grind completely. For example, soon after you start, you would be able to get interceptors for free, and you could farm for an S-class very easily, which would also give you upgrades and money in the process.
  • But mostly importantly, as an extension of the previous point, the game respects your time (in most cases any ways…), and mostly don’t lengthen the game with arbitrary time sinks. For example your first freighter comes very early, and is completely free. You could just use that and set up your mobile base. But if you know where to look, you could also carry on to find a pirate dreadnought within roughly the same amount of time. That one will cost you from 20M to 200M in-game money. That seems to be a lot. But remember I said there were ways to skip the grind? You could farm interceptors and get that amount of money very quickly. This is unthinkable in a lot of other games: enabling the player to get the very best of anything in a game would likely just destroy the economy/player engagement; but not in No Man’s Sky.

The reason this game can do all these is very simple: it’s not design to be a competition. It’s more about the experience rather than the goal. In other games, you are provided with a seemingly large set of content, but the actual content you are expected to enjoy is only a small subset, which is the “end game” or the “meta”; all other content is just a way to get there. No Man’s Sky is not like that. It does have things that are designed to be the “end game”, such as the living ships, but you are perfectly fine without it, as most players are. Like I said, you could just be a space trucker and fly your ugly hauler.

The path to get here

So that’s the current state of the game, but how did it get here? This is where I found it a bit puzzling: it got here through free updates, a huge number of them! I don’t have first-hand numbers on this, but apparently the developer pushed out 30+ updates over the years. Those were updates with game-play-impacting features, not counting the bug fixes. Among these update there was at least one major change on the engine, because apparently the game uses Vulkan now. There is no paid DLC, nor micro-transactions! Depending how well the game ticks with you, you could argue that it’s Balder’s Gate 3 -level of value. In fact the game has such a good track of record in terms of free updates, many players have voiced that they wanted extra ways to pay the developer, because they didn’t want the update to stop.

I don’t know how and why it is this way, but this might be one of the rare cases where the developer/publisher has a genuine passion about their game (imagine that).

As a space game

By now it is probably obvious that this game has left good impression on me. It is a great game in general, but it is also a space game. The space game genre is sorta kinda like the flight simulation genre, in that it is very niche, usually very serious, and that it comes with a little bit of elitism. Right now there are four major competitors:

  • Elite Dangerous. I don’t actually know what the attraction is with this game. IIRC it didn’t even have landable planets in the beginning. When I played it, I remember all I did was doing easy missions and I got bored quickly.
  • The X series. This one is special in the group. I think mostly people play it as a industry/commerce management game. It has a pretty robust autonomous economical system.
  • Starfield. Just loading screens.
  • Star Citizen. I never played this one. I don’t have $250 to buy a small ship.

No Man’s Sky is different from all of them, in the sense that it is “casual”. You don’t need to spend 10 hours grinding trade routes just to get another ship. You don’t need to learn 100 hotkeys to navigate the ship and the UI. No Man’s Sky and Star Citizen are the only space games that has a seamless experience as a human character: you can walk in the ship interior (or exterior), walk in the capital ship interior (or exterior), walk on any planets and inside buildings; all without loading screens. No Man’s Sky allows you to do that as a common folk so you don’t have to have $250 to buy a ship. No Man’s Sky’s atmosphere is difference from all other space games: it doesn’t aim to be “realistic”, it has vibrant colors, and the story is not some high sci-fi space opera.