Release Date: 09/08/2016
Played On: Win
Available On: PS4 / Win / XBO
Time Played: 113h
Progress: Built a base / did loads of quests
Developer: Hello Games
Publisher: Hello Games
I normally wouldn't bother writing another post about a game that I've already written about, but No Man's Sky continue to be an anomaly. The free update labelled "NEXT" has changed the game in many significant ways that will change the landscape forever. Although, it's not as simple as just adding more stuff if you want to keep players happy.
The original release of No Man's Sky was relatively anaemic compared to the promised features and systems that blew everyone's minds. There's no need to re-hash the debacle that was the game's original release, but it's important to remember how this all started. After all, considering how volatile the game's infancy was, the team at Hello Games have managed to redeem themselves (to an extent) in the time between release and the NEXT update.
The developers actions have shown that they are actually human beings who simply made a lot of mistakes along the way. I'm not excusing the lies and broken promises that hoodwinked many consumers into spending their money on a product that failed to deliver. There's no doubt that they messed up big and these developers have a huge mountain of goodwill to recover. Thankfully though, the NEXT update is a good way to start the journey.
There are many features added to this version of No Man's Sky, so I'm not going to mention a lot of small bug fixes and random improvements. I wasn't all that keen on getting back into the game after retiring it when I did, but the following will hopefully illustrate why I managed to spend another forty or so hours roaming the procedural universe.
No Man's Sky: NEXT feels like an expansion pack, but it contains all the things that should have been in the game when it launched. One of the biggest features I explored is base building, and bases in general.
This was brought in during an earlier update, but it seemed to only be fleshed out properly with NEXT. I'm not one hundred percent sure because I didn't play the game regularly, but as a returning player, bases are one of the largest changes to grasp.
Bases come in the form of structures you build on planets, or huge capital ships that you acquire much in the same way as regular ships. As I was taking my first looks at the update, I encountered a capital ship being attacked by small fighters. After engaging and destroying the enemy fighters, the capital ship hailed me and asked me to head to their bridge. Upon doing so, the captain offered me the ship for free, and I was suddenly the owner of my very own space station.
I say space station, as these huge ships offer many different services that would otherwise be limited to stations and alien structures in the world. There's a hanger where multiple ships can be stored, you can hire a crew (which we'll talk about later), and eventually you can build a fleet of medium sized ships to send on missions for resources and credits. The capital ships can't be flown around a system in the same way as a regular ship, but you do have the option to call it to any location and have it warp there immediately. Alternatively, you can pilot the huge craft and warp to other systems, along with any ships that may be in the hanger.
It all seemed pretty great at first, because I was still trying to learn all the ins and outs of the game's systems. However, what initially seemed to be a world of possibility soon turned into a limited offering of undercooked features.
For instance, one of the exciting features about owning your own gigantic capital ship, is the possibility of all the crap you can store on board. No Man's Sky already had issues with inventory management and capacity, so I almost jumped for joy when I learned that I could create and install a seemingly unlimited amount of storage containers onboard.
Sadly though, attempting to build a storage container on the ship only removed exterior walls and floors, exposing the interior to the vacuum of space. It turns out that the ship is made up of an invisible grid, with each cell of the grid acting as a location for putting items or rooms. When you place a room-sized object within a cell, it removed whatever was taking up that space previously. Unfortunately for storage containers, they are room-sized, but not as big as an entire room. So when a cell is emptied to place the storage container, the spatial difference is left blank and empty.
Thus, I found myself continuing to be limited to the frustrating inventory of the ship itself and others I already had, like the suit's backpack. When I eventually built a base on the grounds of a planet, I figured it was my chance to create an endless storage unit to keep all my crap in. The boxes fit together nicely and snapped in place with my base's rooms, but again I found myself limited.
Everything you build in the game is based on blueprints that you acquire through quests and discovery. The storage container has about nine different versions of the same blueprint, numbered from 1 through to 9. When you build container 1, you can no longer use the number 1 blueprint, as it already exists in the world. So by the time you've used all nine, you're out of luck and there's no more storage for you.
To make matters worse, each storage container only has four slots available. Each slot will hold a large number of materials, but there are still only four slots. Even my trusty backpack had thirty regular slots, and six high capacity slots. Couple all of this with the fact that I often found myself with many different materials, instead of huge numbers of a single material, so four slots per storage container felt extremely limited.
It might sound like I'm being too picky by talking about storage container implementation instead of all the other things included in the NEXT update. However, this is just one example that can be applied to just about everything I encountered along the way.
Another interesting addition is the ability to hire a crew of scientists, engineers, and warriors to help you expand and improve your technological capabilities. There are a number of workstations that can be built in a base or on a capital ship, then manned by aliens you meet on space stations. Each one essentially becomes a quest giver, with the rewards being new blueprints and better technologies. It's actually not a bad way to introduce more things for players to do, but like the storage containers, there are serious limitations.
I found that my crew routinely bugged out in the middle of a quest, which left me either wasting time, or wasting resources. Apparently the game can't handle it when you have more than one workstation built in multiple bases, as you can only hire one alien to do the job. After I'd built a base on a planet, I ended up with workstations on my capital ship, as well as on the ground in my new base.
Although, the game gets confused, as the capital ship can move from system to system, so the workstations located on board were rarely in the same place for long. There can only be one crew per workstation type at any single moment, so when you move from one base to another, they are teleported from their previous post to the new one. The reason this is bad with a moving capital ship, is that quests would often get stuck at the crew's previous location, which is nothing but empty space.
Most quests follow the same format of: pick up quest from crew member, go do the quest (usually gathering resources or attacking a location), then return to crew member to hand it in. Pretty soon I had a couple of quests that were waiting to be handed in, but the location I needed to visit was no longer where the crew member was located. For whatever reason, the quest marker was tied to the location in space, rather than the quest giver themselves.
I could go on with more detailed examples, but I think you get the picture. Despite all of the additions that were made in the NEXT update, No Man's Sky continues to be a shallow pond of potential, with very little pay off.
However, I did enjoy the new land vehicles you can build, and there are some great quality of life changes. Having separate inventories for materials and technologies on just about everything is a fantastic way to make it all easier to manage. Space stations have more interesting quest givers and a larger variety of NPCs to interact and trade with. The universe does feel a lot more alive than it previously did, which is an accomplishment in its own right.
Speaking of which, the NEXT update also brings multiplayer to the game, which is something that was promised in the original version of the game. Although, I didn't have a lot of opportunity to see what the multiplayer was like, as I don't know anyone who plays No Man's Sky, but I did bump into a couple of strangers. Unfortunately these brief encounters were nothing more than a notification saying that someone had entered the system I was in, then another saying they had left. It didn't seem all that interesting at the time, but I was probably figuring out the logistics of storage container construction instead.
The thread that ties everything together in the NEXT update is the concept of there being many additions, with little quality control. Another quick example is that you have to build terminal to place in order to claim an area to build a base on. This terminal rewards you with blueprints over time, but mine bugged out and only ever gave me a single blueprint. I wouldn't have minded so much, except there are quests that require certain blueprints, which only come from the base terminal.
This is how everything feels in No Man's Sky: NEXT, as there are so many bits and pieces to wrap your head around and learn. However, by the time you have it figured out, whatever it is has probably broken in some way thanks to bugs and soft-locks on progression.
Although, perhaps the other major flaw introduced to the game is the concept of base building in the first place. When I first played No Man's Sky, I really enjoyed the exploration aspect. I had a lot of fun travelling from one strange world to another and seeing how the landscape would change between worlds. I enjoyed it for the science fiction opera of discovery that I was controlling, which had a continual flow of exploration.
Now with bases and capital ships, it feels like there's an anchor holding you back from what the game wants you to do. It's like there's an enticing universe to get lost in, but you have to go back to your crappy base and talk with your crew (if they aren't stuck somewhere else in space).
These disparate styles of playing the game do little to complement each other. In fact, they feel completely at odds with each other, as to focus on one side of the coin is to completely ignore anything else. As a result the game now feels split and spread thin.
I guess that's really the take-away from the NEXT update, as it brings so many new features and opportunities, that it feels incredibly shallow. Even the parts that made the original game interesting have been diluted and nullified.
I've only managed to touch on a few of the many additions that have come with the NEXT update, but there are so many that I'm not about to list them all. Suffice to say that there's enough in NEXT to entice existing players back in for a few hours to see what all the fuss is about.
These kind of changes and expansions are a good way for Hello Games to continue earning back all that lost goodwill, but I hope they focus on quality instead of quantity in the future. After all, any iteration of No Man's Sky could be summed up as quantity over quality, so I hope the pendulum will one day shift.
I'd still like to play a completed and polished version of this game, but I don't think that will ever be possible. Putting the limitations of procedural generation aside, there just isn't enough depth to any of the systems in No Man's Sky to warrant any hype.
My own forty hours post-update was mostly spent figuring out how things work. I much preferred the earlier experience of just getting in a ship and exploring the universe. We can only hope that Hello Games fix all the bugs and then figure out they need to keep things simple. At the very least, they need to keep things working.