If someone promised you a game with an endless amount of things to do, a good storyline, and a huge open world to explore, you’d be pretty excited, right? Well, how about if all of those things except for the last thing were true? Would you be pissed? Because you should be. If this rings any bells, you might have heard about the gaming travesty that is “No Man’s Sky,” the supposed groundbreaking game that lets players travel through space with the goal of finding the nicest planet to live on whilst obtaining supplies to keep themselves alive.
This is a game that has been hyped up until the day of release. All potential players, myself included, were eager to see how expansive the universe that “No Man’s Sky” had in store for us. Little did we players know... That’s about all it had.
If you go on any video on YouTube about this game right now, you’ll see floods of comments about how bad this game is and how mad people are that they spent their money on it. There’s a plethora of reasons why people are mad about it, and the biggest reason is that the creator of the game, Sean Murray, lied about some of the features that were “going to be in the game.”
In several interviews, he was asked about encountering other players via playing in a multiplayer setting. While he said that it was very unlikely given the size of the game, he always made it sound as if it were possible. Yeah, that was a lie. There’s no finding other players. Any person that you see in this game will be a procedurally generated AI whose function is to either sell you supplies or give you blueprints for equipment to make.
This isn’t the only reason why “No Man’s Sky” tanked so hard. I, for one, think it plummeted in ratings so hard because there’s really not a lot to do. You go from planet to planet trying to survive while collecting supplies to better your ship and gun, encounter alien lifeforms, take pictures of animals, and get slowed down by an intense lag time because the game needs five thousand updates to run at an acceptable speed.
With the exception of that last part, this is what I expected out of the game. These are the features that trailers for “No Man’s Sky” promised, and they delivered on that promise. Now, was it worth my $50? I can’t really say for sure. Because I got exactly what I expected, I can’t complain to heavily about it. The only thing I’m mad about is the ending, which -- SPOILER ALERT -- brings you back to the beginning of the game, everything that you got in the game being transported with you. Yeah, traveling to the center of the galaxy…That’s not a thing you can do in the game either.
One other thing that I do want to note about this game is that there might be free DLC that is made for the game to make it less suckish, but who knows if that’s true either.
So what do you think? Is “No Man’s Sky” a piece of garbage that you want to stomp on and throw to the curb? Or are you just alright with it? I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
