When You Wish Upon a Star
by Aaron ‘A-Dub’ Reed
The road to No Man’s Sky has been a long, winding trail with only one major pothole that is long behind us. Not too long after the game’s debut to the world at the 2013 VGAs, Hello Games ran into some cloudy weather after basking in the much deserved sunlight of the warm industry reception. Their offices in Guildford, UK were flooded as the sweet lord pressed “Reset” on their game development process. The team hadn’t lost everything, but they were definitely set back a ways. Fast forward a bit and the game was reintroduced at E3 2014 like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
But this is all part of the unfolding Cinderella story we’ve become overly familiar with as this game has slowly inched toward completion. By slowly, I mean:
-2014 Playstation Experience demo and A Night Under No Man’s Sky
-2015 appearance on the Late Show with Colbert, 10/2/15
-2015 Playstation Experience presentation
And here we are with a laundry list of interviews, IGN First coverage, videos galore, and speculation oozing from every orifice as 2016 has finally come into the forefront. Over the course of preening every bit of text that has been published and scanning every video frame by frame, we here at Control Issues have become a little fatigued.
This guy gets it.
From a gamer’s standpoint, it’s fair to say that NMS may have missed the window where it could have made the biggest impact. According to Yves Guillemot of Ubisoft, the best time to introduce new IPs is during the first year or so after the launch of new hardware. With us only a stone’s throw beyond the 2 year mark, we have been enjoying a steady release of quality titles. Last year alone, we’ve gotten Bloodborne, The Witcher 3, Batman: Arkham Knight, Metal Gear Sold V: The Phantom Pain, Mad Max, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, Star Wars: Battlefront II, Just Cause 3 as well as the highly anticipated Fallout 4. Each new announcement and release bolsters our backlogs while consuming our disposable income, but the most damaging effect the passage of time is having on No Man’s Sky is quite possibly decreasing interest.
Personally, this lasted a few months for me, but my hype is being slowly restored in No Man’s Sky with the help of a couple titles that have some rather strong similarities to what Hello Games intends to bring us. One of those games is Out There.
Like waaay out there.
Out There is a mobile title where the basic premise is that you are flung to an unknown region of space. From there, you must make your way back to your home planet (Sound somewhat familiar yet?). As you hop from star to star, you have the freedom to orbit and land on planets in order to mine them for resources, encounter intelligent alien life, discover forgotten alien technology you can use to upgrade your ship (There are a few of them that you can take command of if you find them out in the cosmos). You have limited cargo space to manage your much needed fuel (H & He) to continue traveling, iron (Fe) for repairs as well as crafting, oxygen (O) in order to continue breathing, and other elements instrumental in obtaining ship add-ons that boost your range as well as your efficiency when traversing the stars.
The action is all text based decision making while the remainder of gameplay is built around using your fingertips to carry out the more intensive stuff aboard your vessel such as splitting resources and mining stars. Exploring an abandoned space station could result in returning empty handed at the expense of oxygen, navigating asteroids could cause severe hull damage, and so on. As you progress, the game becomes an escalating balancing act of risk vs. reward where the risk continues to increase as the rewards become more scarce although more significant if you can manage just one more jump. The game has also received a significant upgrade through its Omega Edition that yields an incredibly enhanced visual flare among other improvements to an already solid space exploration experience.
No Man's Sky has a striking resemblance to this small title and yet it promises so much more. We begin at the edge of the galaxy jumping from star to star on our quest to reach the center. Along the way, we discover new stars in uncharted regions of space, upgrade our ship as well as our suit and multitool, collect resources to use or sell on top of physically navigating the countless planets (Well, we know exactly how many, but it’s a heck of a lot). Things go a bit further with the prospect of bounty hunting, exploring crashed ships, traveling through star gates to more unknown destinations on foot, making allies or enemies among the other intelligent lives, docking aboard space stations for commerce, and the main draw of planting your flag on everything you will no doubt be the first to discover along your way. Watching videos (Too many times to count) demonstrates how NMS also embodies some key elements of one of my favorite games of all time, FTL.
If you only knew what it takes to reach this point.
The idea that you can become a wanted person and spend your travels evading captors as you draw closer to the center of the galaxy is right up there with evading the Rebel fleet to make it across the galaxy in order to deliver valuable information. FTL is described as a rogue-like-like (That’s right) which doesn’t spare your feelings as it throws progressively more daunting circumstances into your path to victory. Distant, ephemeral victory earned on the back of fiery ship to ship combat. As you race from one end of a sector to the next one jump at a time, you encounter random text based scenarios with multiple choices that result in multiple outcomes ranging from saving space station survivors in the grip of giant spiders to taking part in seemingly harmless alien experiments and everywhere in between. In the 144 attempts it took me to finally complete a single run through the game, my crew has been burned alive, beaten to death, suffocated in airless rooms, killed by giant spiders, blown up, you get the idea.
Decisions, decisions.
You can never be certain of what will happen on your next jump. Will you find a free weapon floating in space? Maybe you’ll get hailed by travelers in need of fuel or a lift across the sector. Sometimes you jump to find nothing at all. You collect scrap to buy things and fix your ship while making sure you have enough fuel to stay out of the clutches of the Rebel fleet. The rebels are an ever present threat that sweeps across the map guaranteeing a tough Rebel encounter with minimal reward if you fall within their search area. The Alpha Edition update added new content including additional weapons, a new race, new ships, and quests written by the great one, Chris Avellone.
Where FTL has your lone crew racing across its various sectors to reach the Federation, No Man’s Sky sets everyone who plays it within the same super massive environment racing toward the center for reasons only Sean Murray and his team know for certain. The big thing with No Man's Sky is going to be not only the lone discovery of large parts of space by everyone who opts to play, but also what that will mean in the long-term as we check up on the discoveries of others. Sure, it will be cool to see things people have discovered in the Atlas (The game’s central databank), but the best sense of discovery may come from finding things others have already discovered in the wild. Don't get me wrong. Discovering brand new things is probably the highest sense of discovery, but with a game like this where we will be largely alone for a majority of the experience, finding something seen by someone else affirms that you aren't alone and that if you can follow the right stars, you may find that person as well. At the very least, you can follow their path and piece together their adventures from the lingering aftermath of their choices as if another gamer could stumble upon the conquered sectors of my FTL runs.
Make a left at the red giant and go straight for 7 light years.
Maybe that person has left behind a sort of road map to finding certain resources and making new alloys. Or maybe that person has malevolent intentions that you are compelled to bring to an abrupt end. The more I read and see of No Man's Sky, the more I'm beginning to see how open it is to whatever experience may be the most gripping to each individual. The foundation being laid down by Hello Games will allow us to make the game into almost whatever we want provided we come in with genuine curiosity and a strong imagination. Where FTL and Out There rely on text to convey their more powerful moments, No Man’s Sky will deliver those experiences visually. While I don’t expect to save anyone from a space station or pull a crystallized stasis pod from a ship’s remains, NMS has already shown me that the awe and wonder of being present on alien environments with random life forms prancing about in the downpour of extraterrestrial rain can be more powerful than a block of text articulate (What can I say? I’m a visual person).
I could go on about the possibilities as the gaming community has for over two years now, but with a June 2016 release window, we won’t have to for much longer. It’s also worth mentioning that these are just two games that preserve my personal hype for NMS. A couple other noteworthy titles that can be heard among the gaming community’s whispers are Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen, the latter having just gone into alpha 2.0. So if you haven’t already, check those out as well to get your sci-fi fix for these next few months.
Until then, see you space cowboys.