WHY I LIKE NO MAN’S SKY….BUT CANNOT RECOMMEND IT.
For the past week or so, I have been playing a game that players have been looking forward to for two years: Hello Games’s No Man’s Sky (NMS) While I am enjoying the experience, the nature of that experience makes it difficult to recommend this game to others.
The reason for this is that NMS takes the rule that a videogame must be an increasingly difficult test of reactions and/or puzzle-solving skill and instead delivers what is perhaps the most chilled-out experience of any game I have played. I consider this a good thing, as for perhaps the first time ever I can explore a beautiful virtual universe without constant harassment from gun-toting enemies or find my progress barred by some fiendish conundrum I cannot wrap my head around. But for those who come to NMS looking for anything like traditional videogame challenges, NMS is likely to be the most disappointing game of the year.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF VIDEOGAMES
In order to see why NMS is so different, we need to take a brief look at how videogames began, for I believe that origin continues to shape most developers’ concept of how games should play. Videogames first gained popularity as coin-operated machines installed in third places like pubs, clubs and arcades. The fact that these were coin-operated machines encouraged a particular kind of play-style that demanded almost superhuman reflexes. The games did not want you to win, and indeed in many cases it was impossible in principle to complete the game because there was no ending, just a test of muscle memory and reactions that got harder and harder until the challenge got the better of you. This was partly due to the extreme limitation of computer hardware of the 70s and 80s: All they could really offer were simplistic gameplay scenarios that repeated ad-infinitum and the fact that what you were doing was pressing buttons lent itself to life-or-death situations in which reactions take over. You were also pumping money into the machines and that further encouraged the development of challenging gameplay, because the arcade wanted you to lose lives as quickly as possible, so you or somebody else would insert more coin into the slot as quickly as possible.
So, videogames entered popular culture as a test of one’s skills. The game developers crafted fiendishly difficult tests of visual memory, button-combination memorisation, and players competed against both the extreme difficulty of the game and for the chance to obtain that Olympic Medal of arcade gaming prestige: Your name at the top of the High-Score chart.
FROM THE ARCADE TO THE HOME
Now, decades later, computer gaming has progressed from those coin-operated machines to PCs and consoles that are at least a million times more powerful. And, in some ways, games have changed too. Whereas arcade games were meant to be continually played with no hope of ever completing the game, and had that coveted number one spot on the high-score chart as the incentive to keep at it, modern videogames are played at home. Rather than rent playtime we buy the game outright, and so games designers have moved from games that are never meant to be completed to games that have a story, a cinematic experience in which you are the hero (or maybe the villain) your character developing as you progress toward that final conclusion.
But despite the fact that many games now have pretensions toward being narrative driven, and are meant to be completed rather than endless, I still feel like that attitude that games must be difficult and frustrating is still very much alive.
EASY?
Now, don’t misunderstand me, I see nothing wrong with games that are difficult to play. I do not mind that there are games like Bloodborne or Ninja Gaiden that are a real test of players’ ability. If you want to play a game at its most extreme difficulty setting and gain the satisfaction of being more than a match for what the developers throw at you, good for you.
No, what really infuriates me is that game developers have no idea what the word EASY means. To me, easy means ‘not difficult.’ I play games on ‘easy’ because they are usually story-driven and I want to see how the story resolves itself and have fun getting there. I do not think a game should be a total pushover and not challenge the player at all, but nor do I think I should be made to fail, fail, fail to the point of rage-quitting, as is the case with too many videogames. And, no, it is not because I suck so much at gaming. I can get through Halo on legendary. Rather, it is down to game developers insisting that a game must always have instances of ‘test you to your limits of patience’ gameplay no matter what difficulty level you opt for.
RELAX, HERE’S NO MAN’S SKY
But not No Man’s Sky. There is very little challenge here at all, so far as I can tell from both my own experience and what other players and reviewers are saying. I have long wanted a game in which you are free to explore without the constant harassment of enemy encounters or the frustration of being confronted by a puzzle with an obscure solution you can’t solve and so can’t progress any further. NMS has none of that, just a totally relaxed attitude: Here is your world, now go out and see what you can find.
This brings me to No Man’s Sky’s most impressive feature, the one that almost certainly gained most people’s attention when it was announced: It's ability to procedurally generate a universe and fill it with unique, bizarre, sometimes beautiful planets. Because the game procedurally generates everything you see around you, rather than rely on teams of artists to pre-render everything and craft environments that way, NMS can be a journey of true discovery enabling you, the player, to see sights that nobody else has seen, not even the game developers. And given that we have planet-sized planets in this game and that there are literally trillions of them, chances are nobody else will ever see exactly the same sight again, either.
GREAT TECH, BUT WHAT DO I DO?
No Man’s Sky has some impressive tech, then, but is the gameplay similarly impressive? Well...no, not really. There is mining and crafting to be done, but if you come to this game expecting Minecraft levels of player-creativity your disappointment will be almost as large as the size of this game’s universe. Mining and crafting in this game is kind of dull and repetitive. You just point your ‘multitool’ (gun, really) at certain rocks that all look the same no matter what planet you are on, and then craft them into a few upgrades for your suit, your multitool or your ship. You can get into dog-fights with other spaceships but if you are expecting Return Of The Jedi-type epic space battles with the levels of action expected of a competent first-person-shooter, this game will make you yawn. Space battles in this game are just dull.
OK, so what about survival? This is an exploration game, right, so there should be a challenge of you against the environment as you build shelters, rely on your increasing knowledge of what resources you need, where to find them and how to manage them, and build up your capacity to venture further into the wilderness by crafting more and more survival gear out of available materials? Well, to some extent you do engage in gameplay of this kind, but it is so easy to find the resources needed to keep your health bar at maximum, this game cannot seriously be considered a survival game. You cannot build shelters (though Hello Games promise this in a future update) and there really is no need to, because you can so easily maintain your health from available materials you can find without much effort.
The one exception to this rule, for me, is cave exploration. I am always mindful to keep track of the path I am taking as I explore what can be pretty extensive networks of underground passages. This is because I know that I am almost certainly the first and only person ever to enter this particular cavern, and so there are no guides on the Internet to help me find my way out if I get lost. So when I am exploring caves I take care to make a mental map of what route I took, and pick out features which will help me find the way out again.
IS THIS EVEN A GAME?
Some critics are complaining that No Man’s Sky hardly qualifies as a game at all, more of a tech demo. Having played it for a good few hours and come to realise that it's gameplay aspects are very simple, and not at all varied, I can sympathise with that point of view. I would not be at all surprised if it were the case that Hello Games’s development time was devoted almost entirely to getting their procedural generation to work, and they then just dropped in some aspects of what just about passes as ‘gameplay’ in at the last moments, as an afterthought.
It seems to me that No Man’s Sky was released too early, and this supposition has little to do with the crash bugs that have earned this game the unenviable title of ‘worst game since Arkham Knight’. I say this game was released too early because I can imagine it being much more capable as a VR experience rather than a videogame. As a videogame, its mechanics are too repetitive and simplistic to recommend it to most players. But I can well imagine a lot of people using No Man’s Sky to showcase their brand new PlayStation VR headgear. Even on a TV screen, No Man’s Sky occasionally delivers real spectacle, and I can only imagine this is even more the case as, headgear strapped on, you stand on the summit of a hill, looking out across an alien landscape of fantastic floating islands, a flock of dinosaur-like flying animals causing you to track their journey as they pass overhead, silhouetted by a vast planet hanging majestically in the purple skies above….
IN NO MAN’S SKY, NOBODY CAN SEE YOU…..AT ALL.
As for multiplayer, well, Hello Games is at pains to stress that this is not meant to be a multiplayer game. It is a shared universe, yes, but the gameplay is just not designed around traditional ‘capture the flag’, and other familiar features of online coop/competitive gameplay. Thing is, though, Sean Murray had assured players that while encounters with other players were extremely unlikely, given the sheer size of the universe, it was possible for players to bump into one another. Incredibly, even though you would think the odds of such an encounter were like the odds of throwing a hundred dice in the air and them all landing snake-eyes, within two days two players did manage to reach the same star system, the same planet, the same room...only to find they could not see one another at all. They tried several times, figuring the fail was down to them being on different servers and several other possible explanations, but they never succeeded in being able to see each other.
I can only conclude that Sean Murray lied. There is not even the remotest possibility of player encounters in this game.
YOU WOULD PROBABLY THINK THIS GAME IS CRAP BUT I LIKE IT.
If you come to this game expecting anything like a traditional videogaming challenge, NMS will very much disappoint. But I did not buy this game under such pretences. I bought it because it sounded to me like a game where, at long last, I would be left alone to just explore, go where I feel like, and see sights that sometimes make me go ‘oooo would you look at that’. The minimal nature of the gameplay itself leaves plenty of space for my imagination to work. I enjoy encountering new species, and making up ‘scientific explanations’ as to why they evolved to look that way (yeah, I know they are all just variations of designs put together by Hello Games, but this is pretend!) I have not once felt that frustration of a spike in difficulty level where you are having to repeatedly try and fail at the same damn challenge multiple times.
Whether the opportunity to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and boldly go where no one has gone before will continue to entertain me in the weeks and months ahead will remain to be seen. I have heard that players quite quickly learn that the creatures in this game are all variations on a theme and that a feeling of ‘seen one seen them all’ sets in if you play through NMS for any length of time. But for now I am enjoying this chilled-out game that dares not to constantly challenge me with tests of my ability or fill in quiet moments with yet another cinematic cut-scene. But I cannot deny that the game is not without its faults, and that those faults are probably enough to turn most other players off of No Man’s Sky.
IF YOU LIKE WHAT YOU SEE, BUY
My advice for those thinking about buying it would be to watch some Let’s Play footage of the game and to ask themselves if the wonder of what might be over the next hill, or what the next planet will look like, is enough to keep them doing the kind of activities typical of five minutes’ play long enough to justify the asking price of the game. Because believe you me, what you see people doing in Let’s play videos is all you will be doing. Shoot red rock, repeat. Pick up health bar-increasing energy from yellow plant repeat. Learn Korvak word from handy stone pillar or monument, repeat. Combine that with some bland, cumbersome inventory management, and endless flying or walking across procedurally-generated space and landscapes which sometimes offer up sights that are arresting, and you have No Man’s Sky. If that sounds appealing, you will like this game just as I do. But I suspect most people won’t like NMS much at all.