No Man's Sky

I've played the video game this post is titled after for a very long time - since about 2018. I remember paying the full $60 price for it, which was quite expensive for young me. Looking back now, it was very much worth it. Steam reports that I have spent nearly 900 hours playing No Man's Sky. This game has faced so much controversy and discussion about its game play that I have at times questioned why I like it so much. Despite that, it is a game that I value immensely.

I remember that when I watched the Star Wars movies for the first time, I told myself that I just wanted a video game where I could explore the planets. All I wanted to do was see all of the different kinds of alien planets that no one had ever seen before. That fantasy of having a vast galaxy of new places to see is what I really wanted out of a video game. Everything else, combat, NPCs, trading, multiplayer, etc. was all just extra. At its core, No Man's Sky is exactly that. When I first saw the announcement trailers for it, I knew that this game was made for me. Those trailers turned out to be fake afterwards, but regardless, the spirit of the game resonated with me. It still does today.

I've always just liked exploring in No Man's Sky. I don't really build bases or call any one place my home. In truth, I am a nomad, roaming the stars, making my home in whatever star ship I choose to pilot. I collect resources as I go, some times making outposts to return to for something specific. That has been the game play loop for me since I first started playing. None of the updates have really changed that - they've just added in new things that make that experience more interesting.

All of the updates Hello Games have done to No Man's Sky are wonderful. They've really only improved the game. None of the updates are particularly terrible, some just have less interesting things than others. That core idea, though, of being a wanderer in a lonely universe still exists to me. There's a lot more options to play with other people now, which is good since that helps build community. The main game play, however, is still a solitary experience. No Man's Sky was never meant to be experienced with other people. Those features that allow multiplayer interaction are all meant to be transient. No matter what, the game always returns you to a single player state.

I value this hybrid single-multi player experience. It enables people to collaborate outside of the game by sharing coordinates to places they've left behind, for example. I most recently experienced this by visiting people's runaway mold farms, which is a resource that can be refined into one of the game's currencies, nanite clusters. I didn't actually see anyone in the game, but I found coordinates online to one of these farms and was able to visit it and benefit from it. It has that magical feeling that I think some people might attribute to MMO's. It doesn't feel like something that only exists within the game. The game is discovering places and leaving something for other people to find.

I think what I'm trying to say is that No Man's Sky is like a legacy board game. You play the game, make progress, and put it away. The next group of people that open that game later and play it will have benefited from the progress made by that previous group. No Man's Sky is the same way - it's a universe that you access from your computing device with all of the discoveries made by those who have already played it. You can choose to benefit from those discoveries, or you can choose to strike out on your own. Really, that's true for any game, I think. There's guides for everything nowadays. So much so that games don't ship with their own guides any more.

Still, I think No Man's Sky has the power to grow with time. I recently visited a planet that I discovered 7 years ago. It's like seeing a message sent by a friend ages ago that you forgot about. It's a game that has had such a lasting impact on my life. It has been present for so long that I don't think I will ever stop playing it. I always come back to it, no matter what other games I am engaged in. There will be a day that it loses multiplayer support, and that's okay. One day Hello Games will stop supporting it. That day will be sad, but it will be necessary. But it won't be the end of No Man's Sky for me. I will still be there, exploring the stars on my own, until my body can no longer support me.