The Therapist Gamer

No Man's Sky

About three years before No Man's Sky was released it was revealed in a trailer at an award show.  It caught a lot of press not only for it's visual style, but because it showed a person getting on a spaceship, leaving the planet, and going into space without a loading screen.  How could this be possible?  Everyone was curious.

 

In time we learned that No Man's Sky was created entirely by a complex algorithm that created over 18 quintillion (18,000,000,000,000,000) planets, each with their own unique style, animal life, and plant life.  Each animal would make a unique sound. We were told that each planet would actually orbit a star and that this would not be simulated in a sky box as is done in all other games.  We were told that testers were often disoriented when leaving a planet because, due to the rotation of the planet they were standing on, everything in space had moved in comparison to where they landed their ship.  It all sounded awesome and I was excited!

 

This game was being made by the same people that made Joe Danger, a relatively straight forward (but great) game where you control a stunt driver on a 2D playing field.  It seemed amazing that a team of about ten people were making a game as large as No Man's Sky, but there were numerous trailers and live demos so we could all see the game in action.

 

The main spokesman for No Man's Sky was the studio head, Sean Murray.  He's a likable guy who is clearly out of his element in front of large crowds, in an endearing kind of way.  He said that there were different alien races that you could encounter, and that you would have a standing with each one.  In your space travels you might stumble upon a huge space battle (shown at E3), and that you could take sides to improve your standing with various groups.  We were told they had created their own periodic table, and that you would use the elements to create upgrades to your ship and your weapon systems.  Sean stated on multiple occasions that the whole game was online, and that while you could bump into other players it was simply unlikely due to the size of the game. Sean also mentioned that while you could play in a variety of ways, the primary objective was to reach the center of the universe where something special was in store.  Many of the game trailers showed large dinosaur-like creatures roaming the planets, both individually and in packs. One trailer even showed a giant snake - the whole screen only showed a portion of it's body.  Sean said that each alien race had it's own language which you would need to learn in order to effectively communicate with them.  Sean mentioned that in real life many planets are made entirely of gas, and that almost all planets likely don't have fauna or flora.  He stated that planet's in No Man's Sky would be populated just because that will be more engaging from a gaming perspective.  

 

As you may be able to tell from the style of this writing, most of this was simply not true.  No Man's Sky is known as one of the biggest disappointments in recent gaming history.  As I type this almost 5 months after playing it, I'm still annoyed. To be clear, it is amazingly impressive that such a small team managed to create such a huge universe populated by beautiful planets and unique life. There is a lot to like about No Man's Sky.  I think I might actually have liked it if I hadn't been promised something so different.

 

Did they invent their own periodic table?  If you consider me an author for having this website then maybe you'd also say they created a periodic table - there are maybe 15 elements in the game about about 4 are made up - the rest are real.  I'm not an author and they didn't create a new periodic table.  I didn't expect they'd created an entire periodic table, but I expected more than 4 elements.  Are there alien races with which you can form allegiances?  There are three alien races and occasionally some text would explain that they liked me more, but that was it.  It made no difference if I was aligned with one or the other, nor could I even tell if I was aligned with one or the other.  There certainly weren't any large scale space battles and I certainly couldn't take sides.  While many of the planets are beautiful, a great many are completely void of life.   This is realistic, but I don't want to travel for hours at a time and just find giant empty rocks.  The planets simply do not rotate around the sun, nor on their axis.  That was all untrue - I was very disappointed to realize this as I stood in the same spot and everything in space stayed in the same place.  They used a skybox just like every other game.

 

Though the creatures and plants I found were probably technically unique, some of them must have been different on a microscopic scale.  A great many of the plants looked exactly like the ones I had seen on previous planets.  I ran across the same crab creatures constantly.  And I never saw anything big or dinosaur-like.  After maybe 60 hours of play the biggest thing I saw was about the size of a hippo. It was such a bummer to never find anything big.  I was excitedly looking for a long time and it just never happened.

 

I wasn't particularly jostled by this next point, but millions of people were - contrary to Sean's remarks, there is no multiplayer.  There simply isn't.  On the day of release two people were on the exact same spot on the same planet, but nothing happend.  Even when one of them destroyed the terrain nothing occurred in the other's view. Sean's response to this was "Two players finding each other . . . on the first day.  That has blown my mind."  It's almost as if he was just hoping no one would realize that there wasn't multiplayer.  As a result of all of the false advertising for No Man's Sky (and there is still a lot that I haven't mentioned), the game is derisively called "One Man's Lie."  He made tens of millions of dollars from us, so many people are quite upset with Sean Murray.

 

While there is some fun to be had in the game, it generally isn't very fun.  You collect minerals on planets in order to create upgrades, and the upgrades essentially help you to better collect minerals.  It's a short and fairly uninteresting gameplay loop.  The hostile creatures are pretty easy to dispose of if you build a couple of upgrades to your gun, and as I mentioned none of the creatures are big and menacing.  According to Sean Murray, players will try to reach the secrets held at the center of the universe.  After I reached a point where I was fed up with the game I thought I'd at least try to "complete" it.  Well, in order to get to the center of the universe you need to warp from one star system to another.  The fuel needed to do this requires a wide variety of components to create - it takes about 10-15 minutes (maybe longer) to collect enough resources to make one jump.  Because I had played the game extensively I also had maximized my ship in terms of how far I could travel.  I began jumping from one star system to the next, and noticed that I jumped around 700-900 light years each time.  The center of the universe was 170,000 light years away.  Screw. That.  That's over 200 jumps.  Over 50 hours of play time, just collecting the same resources and warping.  Out of curiosity I looked up on YouTube what happens when you get to the center of the universe: you start over.  I'm not kidding.  Literally nothing happens and you just start back on the outer edge of another star system. What were they thinking?

 

If everything wasn't bad enough, the user interface is poorly designed.  In order to select anything in your inventory you need to hold the selection button for a second.  Why?  Why not just select the item right when I press the button?  I'm not using Kinect!  Much of the game involves going into your menu to manually reload your weapon, manually fuel your ship, manually power your space suit, manually refill your ships guns, and on and on and on.  They should have just made it automatic.  

 

And one last thing that really annoyed me: before release I was primarily excited about exploring planets and seeing the wide variety of creatures.  You can scan the creatures and enter them into a global database.  There are in-game incentives to finding all of the animals on a planet, but there was a bug (or something) that made this impossible.  Every single planet I went on I could find all but one of the animals.  I would spend hours searching for the final animal, but I could never find it - on dozens of planets, if not over a hundred.  It must have been a bug, and it was so annoying to never be able to find all of the creatures on any planet.

 

I sincerely hope Sean Murray and his team get their act together, fix their game, and find success in the gaming industry.  However, after No Man's Sky there is no way I will buy one of their games unless it's been released for some time and the broad consensus is that they've totally redeemed themselves.