No Man's Sky

So after years and years of updates and tweaks, the devs at Hello Games still have yet to produce a stable product. Quite simply, this game is too much for anything but the most robust pc systems and possibly the new gen consoles. 100% guaranteed to freeze and crash if you play for longer than an hour. It does not auto save except in certain instances, so if you have not been entering and existing your space craft, or carrying a portable save point with you and using it every ten minutes, you will get screwed out of your hard work every time. You have been warned.

I never played this game at launch. I recently got into this game and I am really enjoying it. The exploration elements work really well with the story and there is a real sense of progress as I continue to play. As you unlock new technologies within the game, you gain access to further exploration and mysteries that planets have to hide. The only downside Is that each planet seems to be all one biome.

Where do I start? A lot was shown before the launch. Promised a lot. But the launch of this game was an absolute disaster. It was empty, lifeless, and ugly. A gigantic list of things that were missing from the game. Things that were promised. And Hello Games went silent. I refunded my game. But why did it get so quiet?

They worked. They worked hard. In 2016, the year of the launch, Hello Games published the Foundations Update. Base construction, freighters, new technologies ... It was something. But it wasn't nearly enough. This was followed by the Path Finder update. Exocrafts, multiple spaceships, spaceship classes, online base sharing ... Some players returned. It was a good update. But still not enough. I refunded my game again.

And then came 2017. Atlas Rising, the next big update, was released. A new, completely redesigned storyline that contains about 30 hours of playtime. New graphics, new textures, new stuff, new everything. Also a touch of the long-missed multiplayer. Finally! You only saw yourself as blue spheres, but slowly we got there, what was promised to us. And hey, portals! They were finally active. I actually ... did not refunded my game this time. Why? It was slowly becoming clear that Hello Games is doing everything to develop this game further and to give us what was promised - and ... what was next?

The next big update followed in 2018 and it hit like a bomb. NEXT was here. Real multiplayer. Greatly expanded base building. New weapons. New ships. And another revision of the graphics. My mixed feelings about the game gradually turned into good feelings. I started to love and actually enjoy it. And with The Abyss came a big update for underwater worlds! Great. Oh, and Visions brought new stuff too.

With Beyond, however, I started to really play and love No Man's Sky in 2019. The multiplayer has been completely redesigned and improved. Virtual Reality Support. And generally a complete overhaul of the game. This update was more than we all hoped for. But Hello Games wasn't finished yet.

Well. Now we are here. No Man's Sky 3.0, Origins. What can I say? The update is gigantic and above all improves the variety enormously. But it's best to take a look at the game's huge release log for yourself.

I'm looking forward to the next few years with No Man's Sky and can now really recommend it to everyone!

...is a seductive one: Simulate a living universe and forever explore its wonders. Sadly, like so many other attempts, this game falls back to just-get-it-done semi-procedural planets filled with handmade assets, handmade if-then-else logic, handmade systems, and a vapid handmade story. Npcs have minimal economy & ecology, no interplay of instincts/bodily-functions vs circumstance, no autonomy besides aimless wandering or fighting. There is no simulation in progress here. The effect is to make the player feel alone in an endlessly propagating universe of hollow pre-scripted geometry.

Gameplay consists of: Base-building, Treasure-hunt, Accumulation/hoarding, Ground combat, Space combat, Dress-ups, Bonus-stacking, and Errands.

The game does a lot of things but at a super basic level, especially combat, which is plagued by 'faster-horse' lack of imagination, its like a childish imagining of simplified WWII-era pew-pew, but with glowy-bits! Exploration is also frustratingly primitive, like worse than 'look out the window', because glass blocks your scanner, and you have no computer to map/track it all anyway. Technology is just a hand-wavy vibe here; set-dressing.

This game is still strangely addictive, but in an unhealthy, unthinking way. I felt like a zoned-out slot-machine player, forever trying one more turn of the RNG, to get more... stuff.

Props to the developers for the scope here, but its ultimately a casual-game, with the simple highly abstracted grind that entails. There's no reward for being clever, as the game simply doesn't permit it.

Artwork is of a stodge generic sci-fi style you've seen many times before. Fx basic. Assets repetitive dumps of handmade data, as opposed to a few kb of instructions to generate it on the fly (an old, old argument that was lost here). Design also needlessly sticks to dumb 20th-century budget sci-fi tv conventions like: 1G in space, most sapient aliens being humans in tacky costumes, manually operated handheld props, sets with purely decorative screens/consoles etc.. Sound felt a little amateurish in places to further hurt immersion. Music was distracting enough to switch it off.

Ran on Linux via Steam Proton.

This is the game that keeps on giving. There is a steep learning curve, but if you like Space Exploration and building games this is the game for you. It plays great in a PS5. Warning, don't start this unless you are prepared to park your other games. This will engulf your game play as it has so many things to do. It is fun though!