A complete gamechanger for the Hello Games game: No Man's Sky NEXT
No Man's Sky is a curious title, starting as one of those Indies dream games that bet on game values similar to those of Minecarft, procedural and previously prefabricated worlds and a vast world of galaxies and worlds to explore, each with its unique fauna, flora and environment, everything seemed perfect to grow a new legion of Hype waiting for this game as one of the most anticipated releases of the video game, But in the middle of its promotional campaign, a few misunderstandings without (or with) intention condemned this game to be a shadow of what it once promised, its worlds were empty, lacking that spark that was promised almost from the beginning, its mechanics were simple and did not fit much in what had been said in the trailers. . In short, a broken game had reached the market and Hello Games were not happy, they had let shareholders and business strategies corrupt their game, so they made a plan to return it to its original glory, what really should have been the masterpiece of Sean Murray, a series of updates that would gradually add new features in the game while fixing other bugs that came from the patch one of the work, did it work? Let's find out.
I can't entirely defend Hello Games' work, as I'm of the opinion that only since they started bringing the updates is that the game started to be attractive, just a little bit at first but I think that now the world of No Man's Sky offers a beauty in its universe that you might not want to miss, and quiet that I was also skeptical with what a small Indie studio with a lot of wasted concepts and ideas could do, but they have done decently since the moment the industry decided to hit them with everything for their bad strategies back in 2016.
Not everything about the game concept it initially had was bad, the foundations the game possessed since its inception had potential but there was a clear lack of development and depth in its mechanics, this is why most buyers went into a rage when the game came out, something that could have buried Hello Games in the industry but to the surprise of almost everyone, it pushed them to make their game what it was always meant to be, a survival game yes, but more a game of special exploration and being in constant discovery of new details and ways to play it.
The updates have made a special emphasis on the gameplay, and is that from the basics, the biomes and how they are constituted we can see how the game has changed significantly, now the resources are not simply used to unlock new information not relevant to the planet where we are but the minerals that we are taking out can be used to significantly improve our ship, our bases and vehicles as well as our equipment, giving us a reason to go explore the caves, run into new creatures (which are immediately registered once we scan them) and generally explore the planet as a whole, the progression becomes much easier and the pace of the game more agile, another measure much requested by players was the inclusion of a third person camera and I can say that they have succeeded, with all the challenges that the modeling and animations were for the team in England.
The bases are also a new addition that shines from the first moments we start grabbing materials and put them to work as it has a very attractive system to raise unique constructions not only in the landscapes of the planets where we land but in space as well. The combat while not completely restructured if I notice that it is much more agile and simplified, we will no longer have to go through endless tutorials to know what things we can do but the game lets us loose in the first few minutes and lets us try for ourselves the controls. Vehicles are another important part of the updates since we will no longer have only spaceships but we can also build ground vehicles to explore the planets we visit more easily, and these vehicles also have a progression system added to the ships so we can upgrade and improve them every time we have new materials.
Also its graphics have improved considerably, I think especially in its style and how it uses colors, the universe of No Man's Sky never leaves us without a landscape to see or creatures that are designed in a peculiar way with vivid colors, a design that is also transmitted to when we are sailing in our ship through space and I think that even before this was one of the hallmarks of the title, the most important feeling of all is that now it seems that the game has no end, Sean Murray already mentioned it when he said that they were working on a practically infinite world and now with these updates we can start to believe that this universe does aspire to surprise the players, and being a little more optimistic to all the studios with bad releases to the market, because Hello Games has shown their efforts in the NEXT version of No Man's Sky and I want to believe that this will be good for the video game industry in the long term.