No Man’s Sky is Hello Games’ magnum opus, an open-world space exploration game where you are placed in the shoes of a spaceship pilot that goes around exploring procedurally-generated worlds in an unnamed galaxy. According to the developers, the game is built around five foundational pillars that make the game what it is.
- Exploration: Flying around the worlds scattered around the galaxy to find a suitable place to land and build up is the game’s core mechanic. A lot of these worlds hold secrets that are a blast to discover.
- Survival: Once you do find a suitable location to land on, the next thing of importance is thriving in that environment. Not all worlds are forgiving, with extreme climates and hostile alien creatures to worry about.
- Combat: When you find hostile aliens, you must defend yourself. The game’s combat system is pretty simplistic, with various upgradeable weapons to choose from. Different enemies go down faster to different weapon types.
- Base building: Once you make sure all the immediate dangers of the planet are taken care of, it’s time to make camp. Setting up your base was a feature introduced in a later expansion and it was a very welcome one. You can craft your base out of materials you gather on these planets.
- Trading: After you set up your base, it’s time to start generating some resources. You can do that by trading the excess you gather with others that require it more, thus generating some good overall net profit.
Once you ingrain these concepts after a few hours of playing, the rest of the game gets progressively easier. It has somewhat of a steep learning curve at the beginning, but getting over that hump does give you a triumphant sense of accomplishment. As fun as the game is in its current state, that was not always the case for No Man’s Sky.
Problems at launch
The turmoil that Hello Games went through during the lead-up to the launch of No Man’s Sky was unparalleled at the time. It started with an intellectual property issue over the word “Sky” with Microsoft back in 2016. That issue was settled without much hassle, but it seems like it was only the beginning of the misfortunes to come.
Two weeks before the official launch of the game, a Reddit user acquired a copy of the game from eBay. This led to a lot of leaks just before the launch, with the user submitting several screenshots and gameplay videos before the game even launched. This situation somehow got worse as more people got their hands on several copies of the game soon after and screenshots of the game flooded social media platforms.
If this wasn’t bad enough for Hello Games, fans who played the game before launch experienced a slew of bugs and unfinished features, with some claiming the game was unplayable in that state. This was further corroborated by other fans and even players that purchased the game after launch. The frequent crashes and glitches were causing players a lot of frustration.
When the game finally released on Aug. 9, 2016, Hello Games reset the game servers so that everyone would have a clean start. The devs also released a day-one patch that claimed to fix all the problems that were leaked before launch. This patch fixed a major exploit that players were using to finish the game early but also did little to fix most of the bugs players were experiencing.
Apart from these issues, players kept reporting more issues over time including resource duplication exploits, poor graphics rendering, low framerates, and even inability to start the game entirely. Things were looking very bleak for Hello Games at this time.
Positive changes
After the disastrous launch, things started to take a positive turn as the bugs were patched out and exploits were fixed. Much of the rendering and graphical issues were down to errors in code which were quickly patched out as well. After the first few months since launch, things were finally looking up for Hello Games and it seemed like its bad start was behind it.
This turn of fortune was then exacerbated by the addition of free DLC that Hello Games launched as a thank-you to players who purchased its game and stuck with it through its darkest days. The first major DLC called the “Foundation Update” was released at the tail end of 2016 and it added a few new features to the game.
The biggest change was the addition of home bases that players were allowed to build on the planet of their choosing. This was then followed up by interstellar freighter purchases and an addition of an open creative mode for players to tinker with. Every feature added to the game in the Foundation Update was fully customizable as per the players’ tastes.
Capping off the update was the addition of a Survival mode. This special mode allowed players to play the game in a much harsher and more dangerous environment with reduced resources to use at the beginning. The hostile aliens you encounter are also significantly stronger than they are in the base game, making this mode a perfect fit for players that enjoy a challenge.
The final update that took the game to new heights was the addition of a VR mode. In the Beyond update in 2019, the game added virtual reality functionality, allowing players to be fully immersed in the game as if they were on the planets themselves. Following the success of their VR mode, Hello Games plans to remaster the game with modern graphical capabilities in the near future.
Final verdict: Is No Man’s Sky worth it now?
Now that six years have passed since its launch, the question has to be asked: Is No Man’s Sky worth it in 2022? The answer to that question can vary depending on what your priorities are. If you are looking for a massive open-world game with new surprises arising every time you boot up the game, you will love the game in its current state. If you prefer a more static gameplay experience and want to have a more casual, relaxing experience, maybe this title isn’t the one you’re looking for.
For returning players that have not played the game since its launch and want to give it a second chance, there is no better time than now. The massive amount of content updates released since 2016 with new elements added to their procedurally generated worlds makes it a unique experience even among several similar titles today. The caveat here is that Hello Games has added all of the new content for free, so you don’t have to spend additional money on expensive DLC.
With an impending Nintendo Switch release on the horizon, No Man’s Sky offers players a variety of ways to play this game. The game has no baseline requirement to meet or objectives to complete. As a player, it is entirely up to you to choose how your journey will play out. Will you thrive in these dangerous worlds or will you crash and burn? Only time will tell. But the journey to get there definitely makes for one hell of a ride.
