No Man's Sky
Apr. 24th, 2021 03:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrI've been having a lot of fun playing the scifi exploration game No Man's Sky. It's available for Windows and consoles, sorry Mac-only folk. I'm 20+ hours in but playing very inefficiently so am sure there's a lot of the game I haven't seen yet. I spend a lot of time just wandering in a random direction and seeing what cool or useful things I stumble into.
It was famously terrible on first release but I'd heard it had gotten better, and the game it is now is pretty fun if you enjoy wandering around gathering things in space. It is likely BORING AS HELL to anyone who DOESN'T enjoy randomly wandering around gathering things, because you have to do that a lot. There's a thin but mildly interesting scifi plot to pursue: you start the game with no memory of who you are, and slowly piece together the Strange Goings On in the galaxy, which seem to involve Lovecraftian corruption, evil ancient AIs, outsiders with a Special Destiny, etc. But mostly you're finding new procedurally generated planets/outposts/spacestations (complete with procedurally generated alien NPCs) and gathering/crafting/building bases/upgrading your starship etc. It's like a cross between Minecraft and Subnautica with the aesthetic of Mass Effect 1, not quite as good as any of those games but fun if you like this sort of thing.
It's still janky and annoyingly designed in parts, and not as addictively fun or engaging as some similar games. The art is a bit lumpy and the randomly generated landscapes are often kinda fugly, but also sometimes really pretty.
It's mostly pretty gentle, but sometimes when you're in space you get attacked by pirates and those battles are tough. You can also just wait for the chance to escape, and beef up your shields to make this safer. There can also be combat on planets with predators/robot sentries etc, I've avoided it so far but it's just come up in a quest so we'll see how THAT goes. Once again you can save up and spend money on extra fancy shields and weapons to make this stuff easier. I've only died once, right at the start when I hadn't figured out how to recharge my life support, and I believe I dropped some items then teleported back to my last save point. It always starts you out on a planet with dangerous atmosphere so you have to get the hang of the basic mechanics pretty quickly to avoid dying, which is a bit stressful.
There's a lot of options for making your base personalised and cool looking, as well as the option to visit other people and play multiplayer with them. None of which is my jam but it's kinda cool seeing other players around in the multiplayer hub. You can also make alien animals into pets and pat them and do science with their eggs to make prettier babies.
I was delighted to realise that every character uses they/them pronouns, including all the NPCs! The designs look pretty stereotypically masculine, though, afaict the closest to femme is a blocky spacesuit in pink. I have yet to encounter any hint of romance or sex, just some cute background friendships between NPCs.
I started out as a space-suited robot person, which afaict is the default, but later got the chance to make myself a short fat pink and purple lizard with a hat which makes me super happy.
I was less happy when I realised that the lizard species my character resembles (the text still seems to think I'm a robot so maybe it's just my fursona) are...kinda Space Jews, in that really unfortunate stereotype way, a la Ferengi/goblins etc: greedy, amoral, manipulative, small and weak, etc. And also literal lizard people. I googled to see if the plot was going to take this somewhere especially unfortunate and all I could find was this article giving them as an example of the problem in general, so hopefully it's just inadvertently unfortunate riffing on existing tropes and not going to go The Full Anti-Semitism.
Other than that it's very into the whole Breaking Free of Society's Control And Being A Free Spirit thing, which makes sense for an exploration game but has bad associations for me. The colonisation subtext you usually get in these sorts of games isn't so much subverted as just...odd: you go around making bases and claiming land etc, but (a) none of the native life ever seems to be remotely sentient and (b) every one of these planets is already colonised by one of the three main sentient alien societies. I have "claimed land" containing big bustling marketplaces full of aliens with way more money/technology etc than me. Nothing I do seems to affect the existing alien bases, and everyone sees me as just one of many random people wandering around the already populated galaxy. Yet I am credited as "discovering" these planets and their animals etc. Which makes sense from a gameplay perspective, and going around scanning everything is super fun, but it's pretty bizarre in-universe.
Anyway. This is not a game where it pays to think too hard about the plot. There's a few named NPCs with their own unique dialogue and in some cases continuing subplots, and some cute little procedural moments with the other random NPCs, but it's all pretty thin, about on par with Starbound. I mean, my character is so thinly characterised that I can't tell if they're a lizard or a robot pretending to be a lizard.
But definitely look like a little fat purple lizard, so. Who needs characterisation :D
It was famously terrible on first release but I'd heard it had gotten better, and the game it is now is pretty fun if you enjoy wandering around gathering things in space. It is likely BORING AS HELL to anyone who DOESN'T enjoy randomly wandering around gathering things, because you have to do that a lot. There's a thin but mildly interesting scifi plot to pursue: you start the game with no memory of who you are, and slowly piece together the Strange Goings On in the galaxy, which seem to involve Lovecraftian corruption, evil ancient AIs, outsiders with a Special Destiny, etc. But mostly you're finding new procedurally generated planets/outposts/spacestations (complete with procedurally generated alien NPCs) and gathering/crafting/building bases/upgrading your starship etc. It's like a cross between Minecraft and Subnautica with the aesthetic of Mass Effect 1, not quite as good as any of those games but fun if you like this sort of thing.
It's still janky and annoyingly designed in parts, and not as addictively fun or engaging as some similar games. The art is a bit lumpy and the randomly generated landscapes are often kinda fugly, but also sometimes really pretty.
It's mostly pretty gentle, but sometimes when you're in space you get attacked by pirates and those battles are tough. You can also just wait for the chance to escape, and beef up your shields to make this safer. There can also be combat on planets with predators/robot sentries etc, I've avoided it so far but it's just come up in a quest so we'll see how THAT goes. Once again you can save up and spend money on extra fancy shields and weapons to make this stuff easier. I've only died once, right at the start when I hadn't figured out how to recharge my life support, and I believe I dropped some items then teleported back to my last save point. It always starts you out on a planet with dangerous atmosphere so you have to get the hang of the basic mechanics pretty quickly to avoid dying, which is a bit stressful.
There's a lot of options for making your base personalised and cool looking, as well as the option to visit other people and play multiplayer with them. None of which is my jam but it's kinda cool seeing other players around in the multiplayer hub. You can also make alien animals into pets and pat them and do science with their eggs to make prettier babies.
I was delighted to realise that every character uses they/them pronouns, including all the NPCs! The designs look pretty stereotypically masculine, though, afaict the closest to femme is a blocky spacesuit in pink. I have yet to encounter any hint of romance or sex, just some cute background friendships between NPCs.
I started out as a space-suited robot person, which afaict is the default, but later got the chance to make myself a short fat pink and purple lizard with a hat which makes me super happy.
I was less happy when I realised that the lizard species my character resembles (the text still seems to think I'm a robot so maybe it's just my fursona) are...kinda Space Jews, in that really unfortunate stereotype way, a la Ferengi/goblins etc: greedy, amoral, manipulative, small and weak, etc. And also literal lizard people. I googled to see if the plot was going to take this somewhere especially unfortunate and all I could find was this article giving them as an example of the problem in general, so hopefully it's just inadvertently unfortunate riffing on existing tropes and not going to go The Full Anti-Semitism.
Other than that it's very into the whole Breaking Free of Society's Control And Being A Free Spirit thing, which makes sense for an exploration game but has bad associations for me. The colonisation subtext you usually get in these sorts of games isn't so much subverted as just...odd: you go around making bases and claiming land etc, but (a) none of the native life ever seems to be remotely sentient and (b) every one of these planets is already colonised by one of the three main sentient alien societies. I have "claimed land" containing big bustling marketplaces full of aliens with way more money/technology etc than me. Nothing I do seems to affect the existing alien bases, and everyone sees me as just one of many random people wandering around the already populated galaxy. Yet I am credited as "discovering" these planets and their animals etc. Which makes sense from a gameplay perspective, and going around scanning everything is super fun, but it's pretty bizarre in-universe.
Anyway. This is not a game where it pays to think too hard about the plot. There's a few named NPCs with their own unique dialogue and in some cases continuing subplots, and some cute little procedural moments with the other random NPCs, but it's all pretty thin, about on par with Starbound. I mean, my character is so thinly characterised that I can't tell if they're a lizard or a robot pretending to be a lizard.
But definitely look like a little fat purple lizard, so. Who needs characterisation :D
no subject
Date: 2021-04-24 09:55 am (UTC)I remember I first played No Man's Sky, landed on a planet, was still figuring out the controls (I found them so confusing) and an alien ship came by and started shooting me and my small area and then hostile animals came within about 30 seconds and I turned it off after 7 minutes (literally of play time) realising I was going to die.
Apparently most people land on a non-hostile planet the first time they land but I Did Not and idk if they've taken that out, so... I won't play again, but it's a shame because I LOVE wandering around and collecting resources. That's the ideal game. *sighs happily thinking about it.*
But I did not like being shot to death immediately while my dangerous atmosphere tried to kill me and hostile animals tried to kill me lmao. It sounds like you got a nice planet/s to land on!
no subject
Date: 2021-04-24 01:18 pm (UTC)Oh NO that would be very off putting D: My starting planet was radioactive, but nothing tried to kill me other than the air itself.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-24 01:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-24 01:32 pm (UTC)There is a creative mode, but that kind of takes the game out of the game. Forager didn't have enough plot or general progression for me to keep motivated playing but I had fun with it for a little while.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-24 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-26 03:55 am (UTC)Yeah I think it was definitely in part hype backlash, but also the devs really did overstate what features the game would have at launch. My understanding was that it started out really empty, with plot/quests/random items etc so thinly spread that there was really nothing to do but wander around collecting and scanning things for such large sections of the game that people got bored and frustrated. Plus just a lot of bugs.