I have played No Man's Sky almost every day since I got it but... I'm sort of bored already. I think I may quit until there's another update. I haven't gone to the centre of the universe yet, but... I don't really feel like it is going to be worth the trip.
I've maxed out my exosuit, I've got a nice spaceship with upgrades in columns so they connect, I've got 8 Atlas Stones, and I can understand so much alien language, I can sometimes even understand full sentences of Korvax.
I really like this game, but it crashes so often (there was a 1.04 patch released yesterday, and it still crashed twice after that!), and I feel like I've largely run out of interesting new content already.
At first, the main thing that strikes you about this game is its beauty. It really does resemble those alien worlds from sci-fi book covers and movies, and it is full of cool special effects which look stylish (and somehow a little retro). I grew up surrounded by old sci-fi novels - literally hundreds of them; my dad used to read piles of them, so I am quite a fan of the art style, maybe moreso than I am of what's actually written in the books!
So the first thing I thought to myself was - "Wow. This planet. It's incredible!"
And got all giddy with excitement and wandered about taking in the sights, and as soon as I'd gone past basic survival and set-up, I was scanning everything, naming everything, just taking it all in. Visiting monuments. Learning alien words. Upgrading my exosuit. Having great fun.
Then the next day, I found out that because I'd used my pre-order bonus DLC to redeem a spaceship with a hyperdrive, I'd missed out on the little in-game quest to get the blueprint for a hyperdrive. So I deleted my save-file (with a little sadness), and started over again. It didn't take too long to get the hyperdrive blueprint, build a hyperdrive.... then redeem my DLC ship and surpass my original progress.
In No Man's Sky, the first big problem you really have is that you keep wanting to pick stuff up on planets but you run out of inventory space. You can find "pods" that sell you one more inventory slot for an increasing price - 10000 units more every time. So I spent about a weekend shooting at rocks, selling them, and buying exosuit upgrades. When I had the maximum - 49 slots - I decided "hey now I can carry all these rocks, I can do better at making money!" so I went and upgraded my multi-tool (gun) to mine faster, mined stacks of emeril and gold, and bought myself a sweet new spaceship with 27 slots. Then I upgraded the ship.
And you know what? And sorry if this is a spoiler, but..... Getting a new ship doesn't really make it feel much different. Installing upgrades doesn't make it feel much different. All ships seem to handle about the same. They can just get bigger. All upgrades to suit and guns and shields and engines just make progress bars go faster or slower than the basic. This is the beloved "progress" mechanic of all idle / clicker games.
When I think back to the 1980s, and playing Elite on the C64 - which is really the first place I think when I am thinking about open-universe space games - I remember how the depth in ship customisation led to a drive in willingness to keep on playing, and return to it for such a long time. In Elite, different ways of playing were actually something to aspire to. You could play as a trader or a pirate or mercenary or whatever... it was all open so you were free to do what you liked with no restriction. But in order to perform a role well, you'd spend some time saving money in order to buy the ship and the upgrades you'd need to be the best at that. The ships handled differently. Your ship felt like your ship. And that was back in 1984. And here we are in 2016 and No Man's Sky feels like it has less depth in customisation of gameplay that's personally meaningful to the player.
The planets... are too samey. None of them have any real distinctive features, like for example - icy poles at the ends like the Earth does with different bands of climate, or a big red angry spot like Jupiter does. Every planet is a one-trick pony. They don't even seem to have much (if any) variation in gravity between planets. At the beginning you're presented a world to explore and have the opportunity to explore countless others, and you're like "wow, that's amazing!", but that's the power of your imagination, and your expectation having lived on a planet all your life and not even having seen half of it.
After too few minutes on a planet in No Man's Sky, you feel like you've seen all it has to offer. After a few hours you realise that the experience you are having on another planet is really not that much different from the last dozen or so. Repeating types of terrain, repeating flora, fauna, and rock formations. You start to see planets in terms of "what resources", and fail to see it as really unique from the last few you visited.
The flora and fauna of the planets... are designed to be spotted, and that's all. They have no behaviour that's notable other than "they wander about a bit" or "they attack you". There's nothing David Attenborough would be able to narrate an interesting 10 minute segment about on a single one of these creatures. If you see an aquatic creature it swims forever. If you see a land creature it hops forever. If you see a flying creature you will only ever see it land if you shoot it down. I want to live amongst the Hoppingderpyshrooms of my planet, study how they live, where they nest, where they sleep, etc... but there really is nothing.
The aliens.... the stories in the monoliths are actually a lot of fun to follow, and collecting alien words is a lot of fun, but I really wish that the aliens did more than stand about in their designated building waiting for you to interact with them. Like, they barely interact with others of their own species, and never with the other races. You never find a settlement of aliens living normal lives, doing whatever aliens do in their everyday lives.
I would love to continue to explore No Man's Sky, as endlessly as I did Elite back in the day, but I feel like its content is exhausted all too soon. Everywhere I search for depth, I find the realisation is shallow. And that's a little sour, you know? There are so many games in this world, this real world we have, where they have enough depth that you can literally play them forever. No Man's Sky isn't one of them, not yet.
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