OOps sorry @SaraStarwind I should have said my experience is with PC online connecting. I don’t seem to be having network connection problems (as yet!). I didn’t realise you were talking about your experience of PS4. I understand and sympathise with you entirely. The switch off connecting to the network should work exactly for the reasons you suggest. I’m sure HG will fix it soon. I hope so!
As for the Irony, I have absolutely loved the game and its atmosphere of escapism from the first day I doenloaded it too. The irony reflects those who complained and wrote horrible things day after day after day and still do to the present day which aren’t constructive in anyway. Now some of those die-hard HG bashers are now realising that actually the initial developer’s vision in the first iteration was actually not a reflection of an uncaring game developer. Something we ‘fans’ with patience and insight new all along.
I ha d to wait until September 2016 my father’s birthday before I actually played the game. It was a frustrating few weeks reading everything that was going on in the media. (I’m not ignoring there were flaws on release) To me it looked amazing. And it was. And still is. When I did get the game I kept thinking 'people ’ aren’t taking time to discover the art and deisgn and experiencing something very different in that genre of gaming.
I felt compelled at the time to write a review late 2016 of those eary impressions (when I tore myself away from playing the game lol). All I kept reading was ugly press.
Summary
No Man’s Sky puts the Fun into Space
Shortly after release:
It is a beautiful game. A wonderful combination of mathematics, art and coding. A game changer, challenging how we might approach and play games of the future. And that’s clever. Very clever. It puts Hello Games and Sony in a unique position for its future success.To be able to leave the surface of a full size living planet and in ‘real time’ fly seamlessly to any moon or planet in the sky, indeed across the universe, is an extraordinary achievement. On the new world, visit new landscapes and life there, then choose any other star in the galaxy and fly back and forth discovering things no one else has. Follow space ships into battle in grand fantastic ‘art painted’ science fiction encounters on a massive scale, with superb sound design and detail. With 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets to discover there is an impossible lifetime of adventures.
Accompanying the game is an astonishing sound and musical soundtrack by the award winning band 65 Days of Static, quite out of this world and full of empathy for the design. Comparable to a mash up of artists like The Orb, Radiohead, Chemical Brothers, Orbital and Air, the band has lovingly created its own defining genre of haunting atmospheric music that mingles in the halcyon days of 90s techno and dance, one of the best of any modern video game. Arguably worth the price tag of the game alone.
No Man’s Sky despite much discussed promises (and every modern game has flaws), is way ahead of cumbersome games like Elite and Star Citizen which suck all the fun and imagination out of childhood ‘B-movie Adventures in Space’ leaving just a complicated, text plagued, violent, orange and grey shooters set in a shiny dull tin-can void of padded cupboards and joyless music and design. Science Fiction remember is fiction otherwise we may just as well crowd fund a space tractor simulation in zero gravity for hard core gamers to drool over. (Yes, tractor simulations do exist).
NMS pioneering design quirks perhaps leave it suffering from letting us roam in an infinite universe where there really are no rules, asking us to question how we play games as real virtual explorers. Many things could be refined and developed and they will be. The platform seems ideal for VR development and future improvements to real-time environmental effects would add to the already remarkable experience of setting foot onto an alien surface. Gravity can be a little silly at times but it can be amusing landing on a tree or destroying objects and realise your starship remains stuck up in the air. But then you realise you have a jet pack or can blast tunnels through mountains to reach your ship.
Updates have improved user controls and added an enjoyable well thought out base building and satisfying animated farming experience, without interrupting the flow of the game. Massive freighters, silent behemoths of the skies, now dwarf planets and moons, giving the player opportunities to win control of and defend your very own Star Wars like the star destroyer, that wowed cinema goers seeing for the first time the opening scenes of A New Hope in 1977. It’s easy to be awed by the game’s extraordinary work of art on show and forget that the No Man’s Sky universe is at its core procedurally generated by extraordinary mathematics.
The procedural challenge Hello Games are developing allows you to create your own science fiction adventure without a pre-determined choice of routes. This is not to say goals are to be ignored in games. That’s the point of a game to take part and reach a satisfying end. NMS has to decide if there is one goal or infinite goals that can be affected procedurally. Imagine landing on a planet and being caught up in a war. Flying to another and having to do search and rescue. Crash landing and escaping from an alien virus or having to pilot a giant freighter with other players across challenging space and horizons.
The core procedural planet concept has been realised. Now procedural evolution of storytelling needs refining. It’s an enormous undertaking for such a small studio. Procedural animation and emotion might be improved. Sound too, though excellent, might be developed procedurally to define a wider range of birdsong and alien life to captivate the voyager discovering a new horizon. Animated cinematics revealing story choices might compliment the well written, if slightly obscure, text based story links. Perhaps the game needs some protagonists players call on for help? It would be fun to leave loot or clues or put out distress calls for other players. Maybe even transport alien life from one planet to the other. The possibilities are infinite.
The first person approach borrows visual cues for its unique stylised look and procedural concept from all sorts of loved science fiction landmarks like Tron, Forbidden Planet, Hitch Hikers Galaxy, Star Trek, Time Bandits, Star Wars, Alien, Myst, Dr. Who, H.G.Wells, Isaac Asimov, Dune, Star Man, Star Gate, 2001, Moonraker, Natural History documentaries and many, many more. NMS is all the things you want science fiction to be.
The game is colourful artistic space at last, on a grand, vast scale. Who knows what has yet to be discovered finding that last rewarding creature on a planet? Space is finally fabulous to look at, like all the paperback science fiction covers enticing us to read them. It’s fun and serious, it’s what YOU want it to be. With an impossible number of life sized planets to fly to and discover it could be anything you imagine and that is perhaps what challenges us as players to give up an arguably tired, traditional way of playing games that essentially follow a pegged out story mode or ‘latest map release’ that has become more and more violent.
Hello Games seems to have angered hard core fans for turning their perceptions of gaming upside down. The goal is discovery and serendipitous adventure. Forget the boring bits of space landing, animated starship steps, over designed sliding doors and fussy spaceships, climbing in and getting out, shopping trolley music and marvelling at what latest fashion to wear in rival space simulators. Let’s go where No Man has gone before… No Man’s Sky puts the fun into space.
Small developers and artists have a passion for their games. They wouldn’t continue to create otherwise. Hello Games has vision, talent and clearly demonstrated a love and enthusiasm for their science fiction and their artful game. Something public relations would be wise to handle with care and not stifle. Despite the bungled early release of the game No Man’s Sky sets a benchmark to be a science fiction dream that appeals to all generations. Sony will be proud of it. If not they should be. It’s a great game, flawed perhaps only by its ambition, but a beautiful game none the less set in an astonishing magnificent universe, on an impossible scale, full of ideas that continues to surprise with each update.
Look back only a few years and compare Tomb Raider for PS1 to today’s PS4 franchise. Look at defining landmark games such as ICO, the early Medal of Honour series and Medal of Honour Frontline animations, theatre, music and sound, Grand Theft Auto, Deux X and realise how they all changed computer gaming. There are plenty of classic games which have now become massive franchises but are they as good as when they were creative blocky digital pioneering 3d? Not really, but great ideas will endure and change.
Here’s a sample of pics from my first eight weeks from the very first game. Enjoy! Bear in mind, during that period I hadn’t travelled far, and the images were grabbed mostly wandering aimlessly, on the fringes of a tiny part of the Euclid Galaxy. I had yet to move to a more colourful palette closer to the center of the galaxay.
I think the game has improved in many ways for the better, not just technically but visually too, but looking back there are still some jaw dropping fun memories of quiet solo discovery challenging even today’s game. These up to Christmas 2016 roughly. I have left many, many out.
