No Man’s Sky Revisited — Release vs Today
In my original review of No Man’s Sky back when it was released, I gave it a 6.5/10, which was generous at the time, but only because I could see that the game had potential. Following a steady stream of updates over the last couple of years, we now have No Man’s Sky NEXT — the biggest update so far, and a very important milestone; finally, the game contains everything that was promised by Sean Murray prior to launch.
Yes, just under two years since the game’s release, it has finally become everything Hello Games said it would, and more. Base building, land vehicles, economies, questlines, buried treasure, and cosmic mysteries — No Man’s Sky has finally hit its stride as an epic sci fi adventure. So how was it coming back to the game for the first time since release?
At first, the changes are small, but noticeable. As I spawned on my first planet, I noticed that it had much more of an atmosphere than any planet I’d been to on release. This wintry tundra land was much different than the barren rocky landscapes that I remembered. Between the vegetation and colour palettes, planets seemed to exude a certain mood. As I eventually took off to the stars, my first goal being to find a planet worthy of a permanent settlement, this was reinforced when I found myself on a dark and rocky planet that I could only describe as creepy. After a short and frankly unsettling stint, I decided to blast off in search of somewhere I could call home, or at least somewhere that didn’t feel like the galactic equivalent of a dingy alleyway.
First though, I needed to get together some scratch, a bit of moolah, to fill my coffers. So I did what I had learned to do on release — gather resources. After almost an entire evening of pointing my laser beam at rocks and trees, I realised that I wasn’t having fun. It was a grind, gathering resources, refining them using one of the new machines present in the game, and then schlepping them over to the nearest space station to sell them. It was an easy way to make money, but it was time consuming and tedious, and I felt like I was working a second job instead of being an intergalactic explorer. Sure, there was a main mission thread nagging me to go and build something, but I needed resources if I was ever going to get anywhere.
That’s when I decided to check out something new — buried treasure. Using the scanner, players can find underground caches with blueprints and nanites — a currency used to buy equipment upgrades. While the main purpose was to use blueprints to unlock new building components for bases, I found a better use for them; selling them off for an insane amount of credits at the local space station. Within an hour of this new business venture, I was already a millionaire, and I’d never have to mine again as long as I could just buy any resources that I need. Work smarter, not harder.
It was then that I ran into an almost game breaking bug. You see, one of the first things I bought with my newfound wealth was a better starship, but this was before I had unlocked the hyperdrive tech that would allow me to travel to other star systems. This can cause a glitch with a main questline that means the quest doesn’t register that you’ve fueled your hyperdrive, and traps you in an endless loop where an NPC gives you hyperdrive fuel but the quest never completes. You can’t actually use your hyperdrive until the quest is completed, effectively trapping you in the star system where you started.
Luckily I found a solution on reddit that only involved uninstalling an expensive hyperdrive upgrade that came as part of my new ship, and while I’d rather lose that than an entire save, it was still pretty bullshit that such a critical bug is still present in the latest update.
Digression aside, I made it to a new star system where even more opportunities to make cash arose, the first one being bounty star ships. I spent a brief amount of time hunting space bounties, most of which was me getting readjusted to starship combat. At first, it’s disorienting, but once you get a grasp on it and install a couple more weapons systems in your ship’s arsenal, you’ll feel like Han fucking Solo in no time.
This was when I caught wind of an even easier way to make cash — scanning wildlife. After making it to a certain point in the game which I won’t divulge due to spoilers, I was rewarded with a huge cache of nanite clusters, which again are used for purchasing equipment upgrades. I headed straight to the nearest space station and bought the best scanner upgrade module I could afford. Once I headed planetside again, I scanned my first animal, and realised I would never have to worry about credits again.
You see, when you scan wildlife and plants with the default scanner, you would usually get a couple hundred credits for plants and maybe a couple thousand for animals if you were lucky. With this new module, I was gaining tens of thousands of credits for each plant that I scanned, and sometimes hundreds of thousands for each animal. Within touching down on a new planet, I could make a few hundred thousand credits within the first few minutes, all by literally just staring at things for a couple seconds each. I was now living the high roller life, and not even the sky was the limit.
What can I spend my riches on now? Well, I’ve yet to decide. There’s the obvious — a better ship so I could pursue bigger bounties, better weapons, better mining gear, starship and exosuit upgrades, I could buy the materials to make a bigger and better base, set up autonomous mining and manufacturing operations, or I could buy my very own freighter ship, and take it on expeditions, or just create my own ortibal space station HQ.
My point here is twofold. First, while there is still a bit of a grind involved in the early game, there are now many more viable playstyles that will earn a living and help you achieve your goals in the vast universe without needing to sit there and laser rocks for 20 hours, whatever those goals may be. Sick of mining? Instead earn your keep through exploration, or become a daring space pilot, hunting bounties in the dizzying depths of space.
Second, is how easy it is to inadvertently create your own narrative within the game. Take my experience for example — the story of an entity looking for his new forever home above the stars, a journey that saw me become a miner, a treasure hunter, a bounty hunter, and eventually, a modest scientist cataloging life forms in all corners of the galaxy, with my next adventure and career prospect just a whim away.
This is all complimented by the fact that the game now has a spark of life that seemed to be missing from the release version of the game. On top of the aforementioned improvements to planet atmospheres, NPCs now populate space stations in large numbers, each of them having their own unique interactions with the player. You can recruit NPCs to work at your base, with questlines that they reward the player for completing. Fauna tends to look like the result of evolution within an ecosystem rather than just randomised abominations most of the time.
Multiplayer is now present as promised, although I only had one experience with it, which is that someone ended up in the same star system as me, and proceeded to goose guard the space station I was in so they could try and shoot my ship down when I left. Honestly, I don’t know why I was expecting anything else but for other players to be the biggest assholes in the galaxy.
Not only has No Man’s Sky improved immensely on what was initially released, it is now a universe ripe for exploration, a universe that feels lived in. A place where players can carve out their own story, a new frontier amongst the stars waiting to be discovered, looted, and/or conquered, should you choose to do so. For the first time since the game was released, I feel compelled to play No Man’s Sky again, and see what else the universe has to offer.
Originally published at The Insatiable Gamer.
