Welcome! This column is part of a regular series where we share what members of the Tom’s Guide staff are playing and enjoying right now, to help you find great games you may have missed. Be sure to check out our previous entry where we talk about Cyberpunk 2077.
I’m a late bloomer, both for No Man’s Sky and for space games in general. Aside from Star Wars Battlefront I & II, I’ve spent most of my two and a half decades of gaming playing almost everything but space titles. Survival and/or exploration RPGs haven’t really been my thing either. Combine the above with the horrendous launch of No Man’s Sky in 2016 – truly a publisher and developer’s worst nightmare – and understandably I’ve completely overlooked the universal epic of Hello Games.
And oh boy, did I miss.
No Man’s Sky (NMS) recently appeared in my Steam recommended list and, intrigued to see how the game fared six years after its disastrous debut, I took a look. Considering all I knew about the game was its messy release, how overhyped it had been (glad we all grew out of that…) and how disappointed the community felt at the time, the reviews surprised me. They were positive. Apparently developers Hello Games have been working non-stop for over 6 years to fix their mess, patch the game and continue development. All without making users pay a cent for major updates or DLC.
As a result, through hard work and an apparent sense of duty to their customers, they have earned a devoted fan base and made NMS what it is today: a masterpiece in my opinion. Soon is my second weekend devoted entirely to playing it, and I can’t wait.
Open world? Try open universe
Have you ever had that anxious feeling when you swam into the sea in open world games? I get it when I play GTA San Andreas or Morrowind again. It’s called thalassophobia, defined as a fear of large amounts of open water. Whatever the space equivalent, No Man’s Sky gives me that.
The game is huge. One of the main goals of the game, besides staying alive, building stuff, and buying goods, is to explore as many of the over 18 trillion randomly generated planets as you want. That’s right: trillion. Traveling within a single planetary system can literally take weeks without warping, that’s the scale. Yet it is so beautiful that I have sometimes considered taking the slower route.
I’ve spent about 30 hours in NMS now – a comparable amount of time as I would spend on an entire story-driven major title before happily considering it finished. In those 30 hours I played drums… hit 8 planets, although 2 were technically moons. I have fully explored none of those.
People talk a lot about replayability when it comes to games, especially when it comes to value for money. With NMS, the whole ‘replay’ aspect is simply redundant. This game just offers so much playability to begin with.
I’ve heard and read reviews from people who have played and logged thousands of hours since its release. The only thing that kept them from using their original saves was the massive development the game went through during gameplay, which has made their early save files unstable. If that’s not a nice testament to how much this game has to offer, and the work the developers have done, then I don’t know what is.
nothing is perfect
It’s not all sunshine and daisies, though. And while I’ve just jumped on the size, beauty, and work that went into it, I’m not sure I could spend as much time in No Man’s Sky as others.
One of the common launch complaints still rings true today. The gameplay is already starting to get somewhat repetitive, even after my meager count of just 8 of the 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets. You farm resources, explore places to find things, fly to a galactic or pirate station to sell stuff, then possibly take up the gauntlet of the sentries (the evil realm of robots) to return to your base or to a new planet . Then repeat. I wonder: is that all there is to me now – doing that 18,446.744,073,709,551,608 more times?
Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun at the beginning, role-playing for a space trader and all, but without a range of different enemies to fight (there are just the sentries and they can be avoided pretty easily) there’s never really much danger to keep things interesting. And with a main storyline that is frankly flimsy, bordering on downright boring, I have my doubts that No Man’s Sky is the right long-term one for me.
There is, however, a saving grace, for me at least. Basic building.
The office (in space)
Building a base in No Man’s Sky is brilliant, and for me the most beautiful aspect of the game, closely followed by the option to get hold of huge spaceships called freighters. And while I joked that I haven’t done much on the game in 30 hours, realistically about 20 of them were spent building my first base, which is basically two large, square office blocks, one with a spaceship launch pad. on top.
It’s just so much fun. Especially if, like me, you spent a lot of childhood on The Sims. You build, break down, add, subtract and when you’re happy, you do the most fun activity of all: decorating. I spent 5 hours on my wiring last Sunday night. It’s glorious and will only get better as I progress and unlock more base building blueprints and start building crazy underwater bases and what not. I would even go so far as to say that I build bases, and what I have in mind for future bases is what is holding me back from getting resources in the first place. That and saving up for a freighter.
Admittedly, building a base has also struck me the most which bugs this game still has. At times I had to completely pull out of the game because the game decided it no longer wanted me to put walls in the right way, that sort of thing. But where this game comes from, the bugs are relatively minor, and if your opinion of this game is based on the bad state at the beginning, I suggest you reconsider.
So while I’ve called the game a masterpiece before, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have flaws. It does. Aspects are monotonous, the storyline and enemies suck, and there are still a few bugs. But don’t all masterpieces have flaws? The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Beethoven’s symphonies. futurama. They are all great artistic achievements, but there will always be something someone doesn’t like about them. We can still objectively rate them as fantastic achievements, and that’s how I feel about No Man’s Sky. Its scale and beauty; that it shook off a reputation as one of the most buggy flops ever for not only working, but also being verified and running perfectly on the Linux-based Steam Deck; that it can be fun for someone who isn’t even into the genre and provides literally thousands of hours of gameplay for the dedicated player base that does. These are really great achievements. So well done Hi Games.
Now another Sunday spent on wiring.
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