No Man's Sky: Is it Worth a Buy?

by Leanne Williams

A good dollop of controversy is almost impossible to escape in modern gaming.

It's a symptom of how connected and clued in we all are as players. We can watch the conception of a game through twitter feeds and blogs, see the equivalent of the triumphant 12-week baby photo at the E3 demonstrations, then follow it through to it's birth and (increasingly often) its first shaky patched-up steps into the unforgiving world. When we're all so involved in the rumor-mill early on, the hype train sets rolling, and when games don't meet our (often over-inflated) expectations controversy hits. No Man's Sky - one of the most hyped-up underdog stories of the past few years - has certainly created a storm. And not necessarily a good one.

To help you keep a little sanity intact (as opposed to being forced to listen to the many spittle-drenched 'Sean Murray lied!' videos on Youtube), I'd like to give you the perspective of just your average gamer who caught the hype train a little late and is, perhaps, a little less invested:

 Is No Man's Sky worth your money?

When it wants to be gorgeous, No Man's Sky really is gorgeous.

Before I can answer that, really you have to first look into what it is about No Man's Sky that excites you. For me, as I went into at length on my other blog, the sheer inventiveness and vastness of the game was the draw. The game focuses around an impressive set of mechanics that uses maths to create a procedurally generated universe of 18 quintillion planets - effectively the closest to a universe sized universe that you can get. Animals, planets, colour palettes, soundscapes, ships and aliens were all to be procedurally generated to offer endless combinations without setting your harddrive on fire. When you go out exploring, you genuinely discover something that no other human eyes have seen. What's more? The whole massive game was designed by HelloGames - a tiny indie company with less than 20 staff members. They were the underdogs, creating a game that rivalled triple-A titles in ambition. 

For my two cents, I don't believe that we were ever promised much more than a exploration sim for pretty landscapes, with the amazing freedom of gliding between star systems at will. There were undercurrents of space battles and trading expected and the promise of a plot based on the Atlas and about how different aliens would interact with you, but basically the team were very sure to emphasise that this is an indie game. You're not getting Skyrim in space, basically. It's more akin to something survival and crafting based like The Long Dark, Minecraft or even the latter stages of Spore. But it did look amazing, and made the little childhood Trekkie in me do a backflip of excitement.

The problem is, they're charging £50 for this indie game, and for many it has failed expectations.

My first steps on an alien world.

When I first started playing, I was absolutely in love. It was everything that I wanted in a space game: the experience of a lonely confused little scientist wandering about trying to make sense of where they are. The magic moments - the first perfect landscape, the first transition off world into space, the first dive through the atmosphere, the first sentinel attack, the first encounter with the Atlas, the first pirate attack, the first alien - were all truly magical. The limited inventory, while maddening, gave you a real sense of needing to choose your resources wisely, and the upgrades were nicely weighted for progression. For the first few hours it's an excellent experience and I would absolutely recommend it. But, like almost all procedurally generated games, it starts to get a little long in the tooth after the six-eight hour mark: not a problem if you hop in and out casually, but a real issue if you intend to binge the game and try to charge for the end goal.

In short...

Pro: The game is beautiful and clever and varied, and special moments are truly awe-inspiring.

Con: It isn't quite as varied as it needs to be.

As I mentioned above, No Man's Sky succeeds at creating a real sense of wonder. The whole point is that you can glide around space. In one sweeping movement you can mine asteroids for fuel, dive down through the atmosphere of a new unique planet and have a planet-sized-planet appear below you for you to swoop around and land on and explore. There's nothing quite like it, and everyone will remember the first time they landed on the virgin snow of a freezing planet to see a herd of strange creatures, or the first jolt of panic when your life support system starts warning of incoming storms. It is a beautiful game, and the art direction blended with the maths of the coding is really an achievement. The game supports you for dipping in for 20 minutes or for getting addictively moving between new discoveries for hours at a time. You can get lost in it easily and it's a great game for casual play when you want a relax or play something non-committal.

The problem is the game isn't quite as clever as it should be. You start to see the same basic building blocks that get swapped out repeated on different worlds a lot. One mushroom shaped rock will appear ad infinitum, but it'll be a different colour. All the plants that randomly drop zinc look identical on every planet, even if they register as a different species. Unfortunately, while you'll definitely get some crazy animal combinations (some good, some goofy), you'll mainly see a hell of a lot of the same body type, only now this one has a very slightly different face. It can become repetitive when the selling point is that it should never be repetitive. Sure they're technically all different, but it may take a few patches and tweaks to improve on this. For example, even in space while you might get very different looking shapes for space stations, the inside layout is always identical. That's frankly a bit of a letdown. Fixable, I'm sure, but not quite good enough given even the most realistic expectations.

Feeding animals to make friends out of them so they search out rare materials is cute though.

Pro: It nails the 'stranger in a strange land' feeling perfectly when it works.

Con: There are aliens and buildings are goddamn everywhere.

No Man's Sky is supposed to make your feel lonely. You wake up first with a crashed ship that you need to fix. Exploring an alien world while fretting over gathering resources and working out the crafting system was genuinely engaging. The game doesn't really hold your hand but for a few prompts, but manages to not leave you up the creek without a paddle: it's fair while also adhering to the procedural unique world. As you get deeper in the game and move between the planets, especially the harsher ones, you will have plenty of moments where you feel like a small piece of something bigger. A lone human in a world they don't understand, full of aliens that feel genuinely alien because of the language barrier. I love that you have to work to learn how to understand the alien languages. You are a human who doesn't belong here, but also has a greater purpose hinted at by the quests of either getting to the centre of the galaxy or following the Atlas path.

One concern I had about No Man's Sky before release was a worry that, given that the worlds are random, you might end up stranded on a dead planet that didn't have the resources available to allow you to leave. Being trapped, while realistic, isn't exactly fun. Luckily the developers had thought of this, so all planets - no matter how harsh- will have at least the bare bones of resources you need to get off it again. The problem for me, is that they seem to have taken this concept of a safety net and ran too far with it.

While you may have planets that are 'dead' in that they don't have flora or fauna, every single planet was absolutely swimming with waypoints: that is, little shelters, pods,monoliths and even trading ports (though the latter is rarer). Fly around long enough and every 5 minutes you'll spot another '?' symbol on your map. These waypoints are addictive, I grant you, and I lost plenty of hours hopping between them, but when they are so plentiful on every planet, they lose what makes them special. When you know that every planet will have 10,20,30 + waypoints of every type, you're less inclined to stick around and properly explore one which seems abundant. For me, No Man's Sky definitely creates a nice 'lived-in' universe (and I love the aliens), but when alien activity is everywhere you no longer feel like an explorer on frontier space. You feel like a tourist. At a shopping mall. 

Give us some genuinely uninhabited planets. Give us true loneliness. Make us anxious as we walk for miles with little or nothing but the occasional lonely monolith. Vary it. Here, No Man's Sky frustratingly lost it's tone for me.

Ruins, on the other hand, are relatively rare, so felt special.

Pro: The aliens are very cool and learning the languages is genuinely engaging and authentic.

Con: Your conversations don't have an awful lot of carry-on to any plot

As I mentioned, one of my favourite elements of the game was my interactions with the aliens. I was so damned thrilled when I first met one, and throughout the game one of my favourite waypoints to look for are the monoliths so that I can learn more languages. Each translated word that pops up in their speech bubbles is a little victory, and understanding more about the lore and background of the aliens is pretty neat. You feel like they're genuinely superior to you, and you're the out-of-place, nervous human desperately seeking approval. When it's granted, you're genuinely chuffed.

The con is that these conversations don't necessarily mean much. While your standing goes up and down with them, as far as I can see there is no 'faction loyalty' as was supposed to have been woven into the game. Your standing just allows for more possible dialogue options in some cases. Which is a shame. As with everything, repetition means that even when you don't know the language it'll be a rare moment when you can't logic out what the correct answer is supposed to be to keep the alien happy.

Xenolinguistics are one of my favourite parts of the game.

Pro: The trading system is engaging enough in the short term

Con: Because you have no inclination to revisit planets, you don't get your true Frengi-on.

For the most part I quite enjoyed the simplistic trade set up as it is in that it had enough detail to give you options. Either through radom aliens who have a trade machine in their shelters, or through formal trading hubs and space stations, you can find places to sell your resources. In stations, which is where you'll mainly go, you have the risk of space pirates who might attack you for valuable cargo. Get to the station safely and you can either go to the galactic trade machine for basic prices or go direct to visiting ships captains for prices that might be different. Against each item there is a plus or minus figure that shows it's price at this particular trading area compared to a galactic 'average', so you know if you're getting ripped off.

It's difficult to say how much we were 'promised' a varied trading system, but the main issue I find is that while we do have this profit-measure against the galactic average, the game isn't set up to encourage you to ever travel about or set up trade routes to try to get the best prices. It's not as if one star system has a lack of heridium, so you'll have to go out to another system swimming in heridium and then ship it back to this previous system for super profit. The prices as far as I can tell don't seem fixed and don't reflect the environment they come from. It's random, basically. You can have fun jumping between ship captains on one space station looking for the best price, but outside of that there's not much of an opportunity for you to let out your inner Ferengi.

Pro: The sense of progression is pretty neat and encourages you to keep exploring.

Con: Some will find the tiny inventory maddening. Also the walking speed is pants.

Gameplay-wise it certainly does the job. People have complained about the slow walk/run speed and the tiny inventory, but you could argue that these restrictions keep you grounded and are all part of the mechanics of the game.

The sense of progression, at least in the first batch of hours, is balanced well. I always want to move to the next waypoints and you can get an addictive chain going. Many hours in I still feel this way, though it does become less effective when you turn yourself to the big question: "Why am I doing all this really?" That is a question of plot and that is our last big issue that needs to be addressed....

Pro: The Atlas quest is genuinely awe inspiring at first.

Con: The end game plot is completely broken.

Spoilers. Obviously. But these seem to be the sort of spoilers that you actually need to know about going in.

When you get the game you can choose to either make a break for the centre of the galaxy or you can follow the 'Atlas Quest' to effectively meet your creator (or some godlike ancient alien consciousness at least). The Atlas quest encourages you to seek out the lore of the game and when you first encounter an atlas station with the geometric red orb in its centre it's genuinely awe inspiring and a little unsettling. You become curious to find more.

Whether you choose to follow the Atlas path or ignore it, or whether you aim to make as many jumps as possible and get to the centre of the galaxy, for No Man's Sky these are the closest you're going to get to plot. The developers were very clear on that and said the secret was something special. You would think that they would make sure to make the end plot worth achieving, wouldn't you?

I'm a long way from finishing the game myself, but some people have managed to finish both quests and the results are, apparently, incredibly disappointing. This article from Forbes explains it best, but the consensus is that there isn't a proper ending, just basically a reset button. It's a huge disappointment and perhaps the biggest criticism against the game that can't be explained away as a 'taste thing' or 'unrealistic expectations'. We were promised a 'big secret' and to be steeped in lore and wonder. Instead we get an ending that is, frankly, insulting.

TLDR: "So do I buy No Man's Sky or not?"

In conclusion, £50 for this game is, frankly, too much. While I think it's a brilliant little experience that is sure to excite any space fan with an eye for exploration, it is an indie title that is overpriced, probably because it managed to get famous rather than because it's worth that triple-A price tag. I would recommend that you wait for it to slide into cheaper territory before picking it up.

That said, as an indie title, it's worth having on your shelf. At the end of the day you have 18 quintillion planets to explore and if you approach it as a fun little relaxation aid / time waster, it has real longevity. You will be able to pick it up and have an addictive time of it and get real joy from it. It feels unique and the mechanics behind it and the (at least initial) spirit behind it are genuinely clever and passionate and worthy of some support. It's flawed in many ways, but I certainly don't think it deserves the level of hate it has received. And who knows? Hello Games are a hardworking group of people, surely the game can only get better over time and lessons learnt. Perhaps we might even see the same generation engine appear as part of a bigger more plot heavy game from a big developer in the future. 

Now that really would be something.