Anyone who has seen my videos on No Man's Sky (if you haven't, you can look at them here) probably knows that I don't have a very high opinion of it. A lot of it I attributed to simply not being into the exploration/mining/crafting genre that NMS is in, but even within that I found a number of issues that I feel need to be stressed as they seem to be hidden behind the common complaints of boredom, tedium, and graphical glitches.
First off, I wish AAA developers would stop with the notion of "Bigger is Better." It's not. It really is not. You don't see this in other forms of art. You don't see books having their page numbers advertised, or a movie's length being used in the marketing like "So long, you'll need 3 bathroom breaks!" No Man's Sky's reported 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets sounds really cool in theory, but the fact that they can't possibly all be discovered seems like a loss to me. And the argument of "It's basically unlimited content!" doesn't do much if said content isn't great, or if you have to do tons of searching for it. I mean YouTube is full of billions of videos and provides free content, yet millions upon millions of people subscribe to Netflix due to its focused, curated content.
Sure there will be quite a bit of variety, assuming of course that the algorithm doesn't suck, but rather than just leaving the universe to essentially be created by math, I'd prefer a universe created by creative minds. A universe created like that of Star Wars or Mass Effect I think brings more to the table. I mean, why the hell aren't there any sprawling cities or metropolises on any of these planets? How cool would it be to land on something like Illium from Mass Effect or Hosnian Prime from Star Wars and see a big community of NPCs that you could communicate with? Nope, in this universe, it's all barren lands, save for perhaps a few animals if you're lucky.
It also shows a lack of commitment IMO of the developers to just have an algorithm create everything. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that developing the algorithm like that isn't hard or an easy way out of doing work, but it basically takes away the responsibility of making a world you actually care about, or a real reason to keep playing. To be fair, as I've mentioned elsewhere I would never have played NMS if it weren't the one of the biggest releases of the year, but goddamn I really saw NO motivation to keep playing once I had started. I realize not all games need to have an "end game" as you see in stuff like MMOs and crafting games, but if you're putting us in a closed universe where our accomplishments can't really be shared with anyone else, and without an overarching antagonist or greater goal, why am I doing this? Then it just becomes the quest for more stuff. I realize that there's "lore" in the game but I'm sick and tired of "lore" being used as an excuse for not having a real story. It did absolutely no favors for Vanilla Destiny and No Man's Sky is no different.
This game would have truly benefited from being a REAL multiplayer game as opposed to this weird "Yes it is, no it isn't" line that's been floating around. Exploring the galaxy with your friends actually sounds sort of cool. Imagine looking around a brand new planet with your friend and trading resources and helping each other upgrade their gear and ship. Sadly we don't have that here. Instead we get a very lonely and desolate setting in my opinion. Some have called No Man's Sky "Space Exploration meets Truck Simulator," which is another franchise I will probably never get into. But if a multiplayer element had been introduced I don't see why you couldn't have had both worlds. With a universe allegedly so vast surely there would have been plenty of areas to chart off on your own, and if you didn't want to be in touch with anyone I'm sure a single player mode where the universe is in tact but it's only you there wouldn't be that hard to pull off.
I suppose I'm harping too much on what isn't in the game though. I feel at this point I may as well harp on what WAS in the game that I didn't like. First off, the game is very vague when it comes to things. It took me 2 hours to get off the starting planet. If you know what you're doing, you can probably do this in about 15 minutes. Now I'm not saying that every game needs to hold my hand but in an open ended game like this that's so broad with so much to do, you can't exactly let people run off and do their own thing. It would have been nice if the game had told me how to do simple things like how to fix my life support, or that in order to survive acid rain you need to get under cover or in a cave. If you're telling me where objectives are, you should also be telling me how to play the game. I don't mind a 2 hour tutorial in a game as vast as this. If I wasn't trying to become a video game commentator I likely would have just said "Fuck it" about an hour in of running around on the first planet, but I felt the game deserved more of my attention if I were ever to be taken seriously.
I truly wonder how much play testing went into this game, or at least play testing that went on by people other than those that MADE the game, because the narrow focus and standard usability issues are just glaring. The whole issue with people who got their hyperdrives early but didn't go through the tutorial of getting the blueprint, which is necessary to get a hyperdrive on other ships shows an great example of QA failure. And while I will put at least some of my early problems due to my inexperience with these sort of games coupled with a too high to drive BAC, I felt I was running into too many issues for someone coming into the game blind. When you're designing a game, you need to hook the gamer ASAP and not put up huge barriers in the beginning, unless you want that to be the theme of your game a'la the From Software games. But that is clearly a niche series of games. No Man's Sky was clearly marketed as a system seller for PS4. If you have a system seller it needs to be easily accessible to the masses. When No Man's Sky fails to be accessible to a guy with nearly 30 years of video gaming under his belt, something has clearly gone wrong here.
Finally, I suppose I could comment on the insufferable hype surrounding this game and the absolutely insane level of fanboyism that came out before the damn game was even released, but Jim Sterling already did a fine job at doing that so here's his video:
In conclusion I can really only recommend No Man's Sky for those who are into games about isolated exploration, mining, crafting, and upgrading. If you don't like doing any of those things, then this game is not for you. I suppose the best thing I can say about it is that it did not disappoint me because I had no hype or expectations of greatness when I played it. But if I WERE hyped up for it then goddamn this would have been a shoe-in for Most Disappointing Release of 2016. Instead, Uncharted 4 is still the front-runner for that dubious honor.
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