Reader Submitted: Game Review - No Man's Sky

By Xymbers Slade/Aegis Hyena

It's been a long long time since I've written for the Newser (only reason I don't come back to Second Life is because "Why? I did what I wanted to do there" and I'm out of touch now anyway). I've been wanting to write this one for a long time for Bixyl, so here it is.

No Man's Sky has had its share of ups, downs, and zero-g moves that make the Titanic crashing about in a storm look like a mother rocking her baby to sleep. Pushed out far earlier than it should have, it met with fury from the fans, almost dropping to less than a 18% positive rating on Steam for quite some time. As I understand it, the investors knew it couldn't be done in time, pushed the company, took the money and ran (probably to another planet).

The game was marketed as being all procedural. With over 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets, it marketed as everything being new and original. The problem is, is that it's a computer game. Computer games need assets. As I wrote in a steam review, "There's not enough assets on this planet (heh) to completely make it seem like the universe truly has random plants and animals on every planet."

On top of that (also copied word for word from my review), they took a concept and applied a synonym to it... while you might find an Abandoned Planet somewhere, you'll find the mostly the "same kind" of planet if you find one that is marked Airless, Dead, Desolate, Empty, Forsaken, Life-Incompatible, Lifeless, Low Atmosphere, or Terraforming Catastrophe -- one planet type, many descriptors to simulate depth even though it's the same bloody thing. Come on, devs, you can do better than that. Problem is it requires work time and money which most people don't have.

You start on a hostile world, having to find materials to power your Exosuit (Sodium, to be exact, as well as oxygen, dihydrogen, and carbon). You have a mining laser strapped to one arm, which can be upgraded over time if you find better models. You then proceed to find a crashed spaceship, repair it and take to the stars, exploring planets and warping from place to place, learning to manage inventory (the starter ship has very little room, as does your Exosuit and you need creative managing talents) while you piece together what's going on.

You start alone, and while there is a multiplayer function, I think it's more fun as singleplayer. Sometimes other players CAN warp into your system, and by default voice is activated, so you can communicate with the visitor for trade or PVP or whatever. I've only seen one visitor (because the universe is vast -- it's *that* rare that it happens) in my time playing and might soon jump into multiplayer and trade with whomever I randomly join.

The main storyline is something that revolves around something called Atlas, and the goal of the game seems to be to get to the center of the galaxy where you might be able to warp to a new one. As I selected "free explore" instead of going about on the main paths, I don't know a lot about it and have spent all 130 hours of my current game in my starting system, trading and shooting pirates.

There are three races in the universe: The Korvax (computer hivemind), the Gek (lizard-people) and the Vy'keen (reskinned Klingons). I haven't followed the lore enough to learn more about them.

As with any game of this large a scope, there are an unfortunate amount of bugs. There are more bugs in this game than there are lies coming out of most politicians these days. One bug is a "crate" bug, where you can't remove stuff (I find shutting down the game and coming back 15 minutes later wakes it up). This bug is almost 3 years old, so either the devs won't fix it, can't, or don't know how without breaking the game. Another bug is that locations you loot can only be looted once. If the game later assigns the location as a quest, the terminal is already looted and the quest can't complete. A third bug has quest "return locations" go to empty spots where there is no questgiver present to give the reward, so the quest has to be abandoned.

The opening questlines are very linear. You can't "hire randomly" -- you need to go to specific spots for specific races to join your base, wherever you decide to build it. If the quest requires you to make antimatter, and you find some elsewhere first to use it to warp to another system before you follow the steps / get the recipe for it in order to make it, it'll bug out and possibly lead to problems later.

Finally, and this thing bugs me, is that you can only have nine crates. These crates are twice your size, but only have five slots (a starting exosuit has about 25). If later you get a freighter, the crates you put there mimic the ones you have on the ground, sharing their inventories. What genius was responsible for that idea? This is the 9999th century up in space here. There should be planets that sell warehouse space!

The game is *very* pretty to look at if you're a casual kind of gamer, but like I wrote above, you'll run into repeats (especially locations) very early and very often. The grind especially in the early game will wear you down from a six foot long spear point to six inches of blunt shaft of wood, so be prepared to put in long hours. I like playing hardcore (one life, deleted save if you die) but after a few deaths on this game? Not here. The grind overpowers that of Minecraft's grind for iron and diamonds by a factor of about sixteen.

Overall, the devs got pushed too hard too fast, paid for it, TRIED to rebound (18% positive to 80% positive as of two or so weeks ago, it's back down to about 50% now) and are at least TRYING to come through on their promises. It's still not worth the $60 asking price, so I say get it if it's on sale as an impulse buy. It gets three dragon hoards out of five from me, because at least they're trying and will continue to try.

Aegis

Editor's note: When I wrote about the problems of "No Man's Sky" in Sept 2016, it looked like the game's days were numbered. It seems it's been sticking around due to enough people continuing to buy, the developers determined to redeem themselves, or something of both.

"No Man's Sky" Game Under Investigation By UK For Deceptive Advertising

By Bixyl Shuftan

Hello Games, the people behind "No Man's Sky," is in trouble. Most computer and console owners have been disappointed by games they bought that they feel didn't live up to the anticipation. But in the case of this particular game, so many have expressed disappointment that it's being investigated by an advertising regulation agency.

"No Man's Sky" by Hello Games was one of the most anticipated computer games of the summer, promising an unbelievable huge universe to explore, "epic space battles," challenging planetary survival conditions, and more.

That the game was boasting 18 quintillion planets (that's an "18" with eighteen zeroes after it, compared to a million which has six) did get some wondering if perhaps the makers were exaggerating things a little. But with the hype and videos having wetted the appetites of gamers, when it was finally released, thousands of computer and console owners bought the game. At one point, "Steam" recorded over 200 thousand people playing the game on their PCs at once, and was the top selling Playstation 4 game in August.

To make a long story short, most everyone found the game a disappointment. There were numerous bugs in the initial release, as well as advertised features that simply weren't there, "There are things missing that I didn't even know were missing." One person who did like the game admitted, "It took me about 12 hours to realize that No Man’s Sky is basically an intergalactic mining simulator. ... there isn't much to do ... other than to gaze at the humbling wonders of the universe, and ponder your absolute insignificance in the cosmic scale of things." Even the President of Sony, Shuhei Yoshida, which distributed the game for Playstation, felt Hello Games had promised more than it delivered.

Word got around that the game was underwhelming, and people either demanded and got refunds or simply quit playing. By September 21, Steam was detecting that the number of people playing at once had dropped to under a thousand, less than half a percent of it's peak in just a few weeks.

If bad publicity wasn't enough for Hello Games to worry about, the complaints got the attention of the Advertising Standards Authority in the United Kingdom, an "independent regulator of advertising across all media." While the ASA can't enforce regulations and laws, "it does have the power to have advertisements which breach its code of advertising practice removed," with the threat of sanctions if such ads are not taken down.

For Hello Games however, the damage may already be done. As the maker of such a high profile flop, it may find further games difficult to market. For consumers, it may mean better games in the future as this may serve as a cautionary tale for developers to not make claims that their products can't live up to.

Sources: Wikipedia, Forbes, gamezone.com, Arcade Rage, PC Gamer , 

Bixyl Shuftan