10:34:00 AM
“No Man's Sky” is a single player
exploration game set in space. It's been touted as having 18
quintillion planets that can all be named by the players and a
variety of minerals, plants and animals to discover.
It's been receiving hype for almost 2
years and now that's it's released on PS4 it's hard to find a
Youtuber or Twitch streamer who isn't playing “No Man's Sky” at
least a little bit (or being begged to play it).
Short answer, in my opinion, yes.
Longer answer: The scenery is quite
lovely. For the first hour. And then you collect enough resources to
get off the first planet and visit another one and you realize it
looks eerily similar. And then you repeat. If you're lucky you might
hit a planet that has some water which has some new pretty scenery.
But then you leave that planet too and head to another planet. And
you've suddenly seen it all.
Not only did I experience this while
playing the game, but I watched it in countless Youtube videos and
Twitch streams because I thought maybe, maybe it was just because I
was going to planets near one another and they had the same weather
and plant types. But it seems to just be everywhere. There are a
handful of variations and then they're reused over and over and over.
Or I've just gotten really oddly
unlucky in what I've experienced and seen on streams.
The thrill of running into something
named by another person wears very thin when you run across a
legless, long-bodied, hopping creature named 'dildusaurus'
(dildosaurus isn't allowed, but that's not a deterrent) or what will
doubtless become countless planets named after fecal matter. It's an
interesting idea in concept, but then you put it into the hands of
actual people and realize people are just dicks.
And that miniscule chance we were told
there would be to see another player? A couple of players got a chance on the first day. That improbable but
not impossible chance is apparently more improbable than we thought
due to technical reasons or due to lack of being implemented. We
won't know about that for sure until we get developer commentary, but
for now, it's disappointing and I feel bad for the two people who hit
the jackpot and didn't get to actually see each other as had been
previously stated.
If seeing other players was never going
to be a possibility, developers should have come out and stated it
right upfront. To be clear, this is not looking for a multiplayer
experience. Even when saying it's not a multiplayer game, Sean Murray
repeatedly stated users would be able to see one another. The
statement he made a few times, “The chances of two players ever
crossing paths in a universe this large is pretty much zero" is
not the same as 'there is no chance of players seeing each other
because that's not a feature, but there's plenty of other stuff to do
and you'll have fun'. It seems Murray was confusing enough, or
playing coy on purpose, to confuse a lot of people if that's what he
was actually trying to say when he said people would see the
character model of other players or ships going by, but have no
nameplate or other item to make it stand out as a PC.
In the end, “No Man's Sky” is a
single-player game with no real drive to achieve a goal, no story and
absolutely nothing to do except look at stuff and mine stuff. Stuff
you don't even need to mine after you get your ship running. The
pretty wears off quickly, the names other people have chosen for
things can be vulgar and if you go offline to avoid that then there's
even less to do. The game's an overpriced walking while looking at
stuff simulator.
The hypetrain left the station with
this game and it shouldn't have. “No Man's Sky” maybe could have
handled a hypewalk. For those that like aimless walking simulators
with some pretty scenery they can discover things in, this will be
golden, but that's not likely to be the majority of gamers. The hype
made it seem bigger and more impressive than it really is, and more
appealing to a wider range of gamers than it will likely appeal to in
reality.
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