If there’s one thing the No Man’s Sky team at Hello Games wanted to hammer home, it was the wonder of space exploration. “Exploring a universe of pretty procedurally generated worlds, with beautiful creatures” is top on director Sean Murray’s list of things No Man’s Sky is actually about.
Let’s set all the controversy about cut features and lies aside. Let’s talk instead about the potential that made No Man’s Sky the subject of such hype in the first place, the spirit that animated the entire project. How did that play out?
I would argue that No Man’s Sky is awesome in the biblical sense: a game that inspires both horror and wonder, and a game of tremendous scale.
There is nothing safe and comfortable about the void of outer space. When I warp into a new system and see four planets and a moon, I must maneuver around one planet and through an asteroid field to get to the next one. What if I boost too far in the wrong direction? Get lost in the void, frantically spinning to get an angle on a planet, only to see nothing but the cold beauty of star-spangled nothingness? That’s scary.
I could warp to the next system if my hyperdrive is juiced up, but then I won’t have fully explored my galaxy. No Man’s Sky is about exploring - if the planets are impossible to fully traverse, at least hitting up those four planets and that moon doesn’t seem so impossible. So I scrabble through space, my resources draining as I struggle to find a planet to point my ship towards, stuck between two planets I’ve already visited. If I manage to boost around one planet I’m suddenly in that uncharted territory, floating in the vast dark, spinning to get my bearings on that new hunk of rock that was supposed to be there, somewhere....
I find space in No Man’s Sky so unnerving that I don’t even like exiting the atmosphere to pulse-jump to that crashed ship marker three hours away.
The horror isn’t relegated to space alone. Have you been to a world with oceans? On Earth alone, the deep ocean is a horror show: dark and heavily pressurized, with strange, huge monsters and eldritch beauty floating sinisterly through endless square miles of water. What kind of awful things float through alien seas? Hunting ocean fauna in No Man’s Sky gives me Emerald Weapon flashbacks. I don’t want to sink into the deep black sea only to find a pair of glowing eyes staring back at me. I’ll pass on the 100% completion .
Still, alongside the anxiety, there’s wonder. Wonder in No Man’s Sky might fade given sufficient hours of rushed gameplay , or if you’re just not the type who likes looking up at the sky and being moved by what you see there. The goofy, procedurally-generated animals can fail to impress, but I’ve yet to see a screenshot of an alien sky that didn’t induce a faint touch of awe. Whether the planet is lush and teeming with life, or a forlorn rock where lonely outposts perch on distant crags, there is something gratifying when disparate elements join together in brief aesthetic perfection.
A pink horizon on a toxic planet filled with Tim Burton-esque spiraling plants, the system’s three other planets hanging in the sky like jewels. The emptiness stretching for miles when you exit that drop pod. The glowing caverns, radiant by night. “This new thing, I saw it, I was here, I witnessed it, I was first.” That sense of wonder is missing from a lot of sci-fi games whose exploration phases feel so promising, but which ultimately fall victim to the fact that the game is really about something else. In No Man’s Sky , seeking that wonder is the game .
Finally, there’s scale. We’ve heard enough about No Man’s Sky ’s 18 quintillion planets to last us 18 quintillion years, but it’s still a figure worth mentioning. Those beautiful points of light as No Man’s Sky loads are all galaxies burgeoning with the promise of the frontier: glory, beauty and money at your fingertips. The Biblical “awesomeness” includes scale, a sheer sense of bigness , and if you’ve ever tried to hit up every green question mark on a planet or activated 25 waypoints in a frenzy of ill-considered exploration, that daunting enormity can’t help but touch you.
For all of No Man’s Sky’ s failings when it comes to features that should have been present and gameplay mechanics so clumsy it’s baffling, its strength lies in the concept at its heart: the horror, wonder and enormity of space. The elements to No Man’s Sky that so many people are upset about would do so much to build on this theme. When No Man’s Sky ’s clumsier gameplay elements rear their awkward and badly executed heads, they detract from that theme, making those failings harder to forgive.
I still like No Man’s Sky because I believe in its concept. A sci-fi exploration/survival game is all I’ve ever wanted. But the failure to fill the universe with things that matter , not just things , means that No Man’s Sky becomes more about what I bring to it than what it brings to me.
So I like No Man’s Sky in spite of its terrible combat (in and out of space), the cluttered and unintuitive GUI (thanks for the trillion waypoints clogging up that planet in the sky and leading me to the same ruins over and over), the broken promise of its procedural diversity (yellow flower blue flower, three alien cultures with identical architecture). I’m still drawn to its horror, its wonder and its scale.
Can Hello Games match the gameplay to the grandeur of its theme? Will its community even give them a chance to do so? That concept is worth the chance. We’ll see.
