Infinitely Wide, Centimeters Deep - A No Man's Sky Post-Mortem

The sky is bright purple, with green tinges near the horizon; I’ve been walking for an hour now and it’s just now starting to get dark. Rocks crunch under my exosuit’s boots - the same exosuit which is letting off a warning about life support every ten minutes – and as I crest the hill, I spy a huge valley beneath me. Lifeless, rocky with red crystals piercing the ground and immense stone pillars reach for the sky like fingers. An alien creature lets off a whale-like cry in the distance and the wind howls louder, likely meaning a radiation storm is coming in soon. I stop and take it all in. I’m a million light-years from anywhere, possibly the first intelligent life to walk and see this. No one else has seen what I’m seeing, I will be the first and only visitor to this rock.

Except that’s not true, because below in the valley is an alien trading post complete with launch pad that’s midway through docking a trade vessel. In fact on closer inspection, the entire valley is littered with shelters, buildings and as I stare, my suit letting out another goddamn reminder of my life support systems, three alien spaceships fly low in formation, heading towards the horizon in a low burn.

“Undiscovered…sure”

I approach games the way I approach most things in life – hesitantly, with cynicism, or if not cynicism, scepticism, as I’m all for isms. I err on the side of caution for months, the decision to purchase a game is not something I take lightly. It’s about trust. I don’t trust game designers and I don’t know why I don’t trust them. I trust writers, directors, producers, singers, songwriters but when it comes to videogames, a medium I engage in just as much, if not more than any of those, I don’t trust them. It’s something about them that sets me off; they can be the most friendly, down-to-earth guy I know but at heart, on stage and under lights, they are a salesman and the best salesmen don’t even look like they want to sell you anything at all.

So three years ago at the VGX awards, there was little to really get excited save for one small game, the first moment of the show where I leant forward and starting paying attention. As the stream shuddered and buffered, the rich image coming apart at the seams, a developer by the name Sean Murray took the stage, joining a disdainful/grumpy/seething Joel McHale up there with Geoff “Mountain Dew and Doritos Nacho Cheese Mega Pack” Keighley, before sitting down to talk about a game his studio, Hello Games [a British studio of Joe Danger fame], had spent some time working on titled No Man’s Sky.

Something about Sean immediately stood out to me as a human especially when sat next to Keighley and McHale; someone who loved games and nerdy things like his inspirations of Asimov, Clarke, old science fiction films like Silent Running and 2001, someone who was now living the dream of pure creation and was now being able to unveil his work to the world. He spoke with bashfulness, looking down, endearingly awkward and not used to being on stage, and he seemed to exude a sort of human-ness to him; a genuine love of whatever it was he was doing and this is rare among anyone. Then I realised what he was talking about: the biggest game ever made, a galaxy of possibilities to use the hyperbole ridden language of the time.

They rolled a trailer. Procedural generation was brought up. The old video game chestnut of mountains in the distant being actual places you can visit was brought up again and there was, understandably, incredulity at the scope of it all, the size, and then the hype began. I’ll admit, if we’re being honest, that I was impressed but hesitant. I’d been burned on space exploration once [see Spore] and burned on procedural generation once before that too [see Spore again] but No Man’s Sky looked like something that could work – it was early but it looked like it could work. I did have a question that wasn’t answered, and it was one that wouldn’t be answered until months before the games release in 2016: what do you actually do in this? What’s the hook, what’s the loop of action that keeps me here?

As the years rolled on, trailer after trailer, E3 after E3, Conan O’Brian praising, Gametrailers grilling, a deluge of Youtuber reactions, a flooded game studio, multiple delays, backlash and re-hype and re-hype again and a monumental ad campaign by their publisher Sony, No Man’s Sky was finally released. And as the opinions and reviews multiplied like stars, and the tides began to turn, the skies fell dark with the storming reactions.

The reason for all this preamble, picture painting, is that extracting NMS from the hype around it requires surgical precision and my hands are shaky at best – I can’t help but think that some people pinned the rest of their gaming life upon this game, a type of ‘the last game I’ll ever need’ situation. People have projected onto this game for so long that it’s been a discussion of not what the game is, but what people think it is. And when a game studio doesn’t actually get out there, doesn’t sit down and say “This is the game”, as a candid heart-to-heart with the players, the expectations grow, the rumours mount and the community begins to go mad.

We now live in a post-No Man’s Sky world and my point is, with all the preamble and postamble, is that people will always have expectations and I feel that’s what led into a lot of stuff surrounding post-NMS review culture. The gaming public have been told off, scolded, chastised, told to temper their expectations, to keep the cynicism alive, don’t pre-order games, and they are certainly a part of the discussion we’re about to have but the elephant in the room, the one that a lot of reviewers and critics have ignored, is that of Hello Games. A game studio which did not communicate properly, which mislead and dodged and circled around the questions for three long years, that misdelivered on their biggest game ever/the biggest game of this year. A studio that shied away from explanation and discussion and has now lost the people’s trust – it’s not about entitlement, it’s about expectations. It’s about living up to the promises made and standing by your words for better or worse. It may be a shock to people but games do not just appear or get whisked out of the endless void; a game is made by people, designed by people and marketed by people and that which has been released is not what was shown. The promise is not what it was.

No Man’s Sky begins with blinding white light [well, it actually begins with a 2.8gb download through the system of your choice which is frighteningly small for a game purportedly holding within its miniscule allotment of bytes, both giga- and mega-, 18 quintillion planets each the size of our current rock called Earth and this absolutely miniscule download, especially when compared to DOOM which I’d downloaded not a week before, set off my internal alarm like it was the computer from WarGames] and your eyes open on a strange alien planet, with a crashed spaceship and damaged exosuit, smoke pouring from every crack in the damaged craft; these are all constants, you will see this but what differs is where you’ll be. A rocky ice planet, rife with radiation; a boiling hot dead rock, with cool caves; a lush paradise, with tall trees; where I began was a planet with immense flowering palms, a burning hot desert and pillars of gold that cast long shadows in the damaging sun. But of course, where you start is different every time, unique and entirely yours – and how you got here, to this planet, marooned millions of miles from home in space doesn’t matter. You’re here now. Welcome to the party.

During all this, a robotic voice tells you of your current status, of which systems are on- or off-line with the crackly synthetic tones of a disembodied-but-still-malevolent-and-wants-to-kill-all-humans AI from classic Sci-Fi. And as your multi-tool mining laser comes online, and the game hands over control, you’re pretty much able to do whatever you like – as long as what you like is walking, mining and wandering around alien worlds.

The name of the game is survival: you’ve got things ticking down from the get go. Your suit’s life support systems are fueled by Plutonium [marked in capital P and part of the Isotope family which includes minerals Carbon and Thamium9] which can be found in the form of red crystals dotting the landscape. You’ll be collecting crystals to refill your life support systems and keeping some on stock is necessary for longer sojourns from your crashed spaceship. Plutonium and your suit are linked – you need it to keep going, to keep exploring but your exosuit is not the only thing powered by this magical red crystal – your launch thrusters, your mining tool, your bolt-caster attachment and most everything you need to craft require this red crystal. You’d best become familiar with the look of Plutonium because you’ll be seeing a lot of this red shard.

Your exosuit also has shielding, powered by yellow Oxide elements [Iron, Zinc, Titanium – but for some reason only Zinc and Titanium seem to work] which you’ll need to weather your way through any adverse weather conditions. In addition to your own health and safety, you’ll probably want to get your crashed spaceship working at some point, if only to start getting around the planet faster – the game will give you assistance in all this in the form of its “quasi-tutorial”.

In lieu of a traditional “let’s get your bearings” tutorial as is want to do in survival games, you’ve been sort of thrown into the deep end, flung in and NMS is waiting now, sitting back with a drink in hand, to see if you’ll sink or swim. I’d advise following the tutorial messages for the beginning, at least so you know how these systems [if I can even call them that, as you’ll soon find out reader] work. You need to learn how to repair things. You need to learn how to recharge your mining laser and your life support. You need to learn how to fix the ship and you’ll need to learn how to craft things in your inventory and so you’ll set about, for your first hour or more, collecting the materials needed to rebuild your damaged ship. You begin to walk the planet surface in search of materials, like entering an immense supermarket with a shopping list: 25 Plutonium, 100 Iron, 250 Zinc, etc, etc…and you might be thinking “Once I get all this, the game’s really going to kick into high gear” but the unfortunate truth I have for you now, as you scavenge the planet surface of whatever rock you’ve found yourself on is that NMS has two gears: slow, tedious gathering and slightly faster transit – and the transit is usually in service of gathering elements. So don’t rush because otherwise you’re going to see it all too soon.

As you walk, you’ll probably find everything you need in a ten minute radius from your starship. In fact, every planet has the basic components for survival and interplanetary travel, and you won’t be put on some death world from the get-go, but survival can be certainly be hard in the early game. In these early, desperate days, you’ll be fighting the elements, the sentinels – robotic overbearing guardians of the planets, who don’t especially like you strip-mining the planets for survival and will attack if you keep up your Captain Planet-esque villainy – and you’ll be constantly refilling your mining laser and suit systems. The robotic dominatrix that lives in your suit must take an almost sexual pleasure from reminding you of your impending doom. You will quickly tire of, then hate, the robotic voice in your suit and there is no way to turn her off. If you’re anything like me, and I know I am, she will quickly become your disembodied antagonist, joining the pantheon of misanthropic AI’s like SHODAN, GLaDOS and HAL 9000.

Mining is essential, in fact it forms one of the four shakily constructed pillars of NMS [the other three being travelling, inventory management and half-handed diplomacy/trading]. Mining is this: pull out your mining laser, point and shoot. Don’t let it overheat. When it runs out of juice, refuel it with Plutonium. These are your formative moments in the early game, the grind and repetitious nature but you’re working towards something – getting off this rock, moving on, surviving.

Now while No Man’s Sky is trumpeted by the press, the developers and the community as a survival game, it is curiously lacking in actual threats to survive. Plutonium is plentiful and if you didn’t start on a total death world [If you DID start on a death world (I know I did), maybe one with drastic drops in night time temperatures to freezing sub-zero temperatures, or one with crippling radiation emissions and dangerous storms, you’ll be having a much harder time and survival may be a more real, tangible thing] and aren’t you aren’t a total dunce about your resource management, you’ll be doing fine by now at my estimates. You seem like intelligent life to me, reader. But when NMS is compared to games like Minecraft, Day Z, RUST or anyone of the hundred survival games that flooded Steam Greenlight, it doesn’t hold up as a comparison at all because Minecraft, for one, had legitimate threats. At night in Minecraft, as the sun set and your first day came to a close, dark monsters emerged with the express purpose of throwing a spanner in your lifely mechanisms. They wanted you dead and in the pitch black night – or your tiny, lit up cave; you did craft torches right? – you passed your first night with the terrifying new knowledge that you had reason to fear the dark. You had reasons to collect materials, to craft, to survive and you promised yourself you’d never suffer another night like your first. The sentinels in NMS, by comparison, are easily defeated if you’ve got half a brain in your head and if you stay clear of them and play smart, they won’t bother you at all.

In fact, in lieu of antagonistic presences or real threat, you may be wondering what you’re working towards or what’s trying to stop you. Well, you might think your biggest opponent is your own exosuit due to its needing constant refilling, reminding you that your suit power is LOW despite the fact its interpretation of LOW as 75% is odd and annoying. The enemy is you and your backpack, as more often than not you’re fighting your own inventory limits. If you’re a hoarder like me in games, keeping that large medpack or special weapon until you really, really, no really I mean I will use this, need it, then No Man’s Sky is going to be an exceptionally difficult lesson in item management.

It also boggles my mind, to an almost sanatorium level of madness, how poorly the inventory is managed – why can I carry up to 250/500 of an element [500 if you store it within the ship, whereas your exosuit can only manage 250; of course what units this is all measured in, we haven’t a clue] in a single slot but that same slot can only hold a single gem? Why can’t certain items stack in clusters, like Albumen Pearls or Geknik? Why can’t I move suit upgrades to new slots, or rather: why do suit upgrades stay bolted in place and moving them require you disassemble the upgrade and then reconstruct it in a new slot? Why do I have to have a slot free to craft? Why can’t I view all my blueprints and recipes unless I have that slot free? Why do suit upgrades take up part of your backpack, instead of going into their own area or subsection?

This may sound like endless griping, like armchair game design whereby I am ignorant of deliberate decisions made by Hello Games [after all, they could not have looked at the inventory and made the decisions they made lightly…right?] but you must, I beg of you, you must understand where I come from on this: this is a game where over half your time will be spent in the inventory because, as already mentioned, your only opponent is the constant depletion of your suits/ships systems. So to refill anything you must go to it in your inventory/spaceship/multi-tool menu and refill it from there – want to refill your gun’s grenade launcher? Go into the menu, select the component, select refill/charge, then find the item you want to use to refill and done. Now imagine doing that for every single item you have, or better still, imagine trying to do this under pressure as is the case with space combat with space pirates; attempting to refill shields is an exercise in menu diving.

The interface and menus are smooth and colourful, reminiscent of the designs Bungie used for Destiny – lots of clean geometric design, copious use of san serif fonts and minimal in its display of information but unfortunately, that’s often the thing we need more of. We need more information, feedback on our actions – the one time I want some kind of feedback as to my progress, where I am and how much I know. I want some idea what all this is about at some point, some stats, an idea of progression.

So by now, as you repair your ship and begin the process of loading fuel into every available hole in your inventory – life support, shielding, mining laser + optional bolt-caster and grenade attachments, launch thrusters, pulse engine, hyperdrive, starship deflector shields – you’ll be looking towards the skies, into the void, and wondering: what comes now? What comes now is more of the same, but slightly different. There is a lot to see in No Man’s Sky, so much that you’ll never see it all but the reality is that once you’ve seen it once, twice, thrice, you’ll have seen enough to last you a galaxy and then some.

Every planet in No Man’s Sky, as I said before, supposedly has the basic elements needed to support a potential player starting there [despite Zinc being kind of hard to find at times] and every planet has the same basic things but in differing amounts across space. Every planet has the same structures that you’d need to survive, to continue your journey; so are the odds ever really against you? How many planets do we really need to see? And when talking about these planets in NMS, the same figure is brought out to the ring every time, so much so that I imagine this figure to be like a worn out prize fighter and as NMS fought its way through delays and press junkets, this figure, this big number, had to be constantly trotted out to take the hits. Our great figure: 18 QUINTILLION PLANETS.

This figure, with all its resplendent zeroes is almost always in all caps, as though Sean Murray and the games press were screaming from the top of Mt Sinai, clutching the PS4 and PC ports in lieu of tablets and all of us huddled below, gazing up at the light of endless possibility. But the reality, like most things, is less brightly lit and more darkened with the things that actually exist, matter and be counted by a human, not a computer.

The reason for the suspiciously small install of NMS is that you are not actually downloading 18 Quintillion Planets [no computer could do that, obviously] but rather the algorithm that was designed by Hello Games to generate this entire universe. See the algorithm works by generating planets from a pool of assets – ground textures are painted on as they pull from a database. Animals are cobbled together from parts, trees too and eventually you have a whole planet. It’s mixing and matching elements, like pouring all your LEGO blocks into a pile and building something from the smaller pieces. The game also colours everything, shapes the planet in a way that makes some kind of rough sense, adding water, mountains, etc. It sprinkles the planets with objects like monoliths, observation towers, crashed ships and the like. It then does this 18 Quintillion Times until we have an entire galaxy. So yes, there are eighteen quintillion planets but in effect it is eighteen quintillion copies of the same thing – the ultimate exercise in repainting, jumbling, mixing up. It is the video game equivalent of Warhol’s’ Monroe diptych – mass produced, repainted and now you too can have a planet like mine.

My problem with the algorithm, and maybe you’ll have a problem with it too as you continue to land on planets and explore, scavenging the resources and blueprints to build your first hyperdrive Warp Cell, is that while algorithm is capable of generating these immense planets teeming with life [both animal and plant] and substances, there is a underlying feeling of emptiness. And when I mean emptiness, I do not mean in the sense of isolation, desperation or even in a positive sense; I mean it in the sense that these worlds feel devoid of any character, heart, real substance. You’ll have to land on a few of these planets to refill your gauges, to mine, to visit some monoliths and collect blueprints but the only reason to visit is your curiosity and how boundless your curiosity is entirely dependent on your patience with No Man’s Sky. Everything looks different but at the core it is the same thing you’ve seen once before. The first planet you started on is, at its core, no different from any other planet in the galaxy other than colour, shape and mineral deposits.

That is not to say the algorithm is entirely negative. You may discover things on a planet that make you stop and take it all in – floating rock islands, immense lumbering animals, pillars of pure metal, giant cube shaped mountains – and these moments are when NMS is working at its best: a joy of pure discovery, an algorithm working perfectly to generate wonder and infinite feelings of “What else is there to see?”. But these moments are fleeting, temporary, as you’re not working towards a moment: you’re working towards something and our problem is that isn’t enough of these “somethings” in NMS for it to feel worthwhile.

I feel nothing else demonstrates this better than a conversation I had with a friend in the wake of NMS [less than five days after PS4 launch], when I visited his house to watch him play on console while we waited to begin a night of board games. We compared our experiences and as our other friends arrived, sitting cross-legged on the floor in awe of the spectacle on the immense widescreen, we discussed the game and how we were playing it. My friend bristled at the idea that I had spent so long in my first star-system and hadn’t gotten gone exploring.

“See you just gotta keep warping, keep moving. There’s so much to see, you’re still early on in the game” he said.

I shrugged at this “But don’t you want to see it then? That’s why I’ve been mining Gold and Heridium, just want to take it all in, you know?”

My friend then turned to me, from the chair he was slouched in and said “Dude, there’s no reason to mine on just one planet. Like you gotta keep moving, there’s so many planets and you keep moving...there’s no benefit to sitting still, every planet has what you need”

“Then why go anywhere?”

“It looks different”

“Okay, sure” I said, sitting back as he zoomed out the galactic map for everyone watching and the gasps at the size of it all went up. Someone swore with excitement and pins dropped.

One of the driving ideas behind NMS is that everyone is playing within the same galaxy, all at once in an MMO style, [more on this later] and one of the driving motivations behind the exploration is the idea of you being the first to discover a place – for you to claim it by naming it, saying to the world that you were first and everyone, anyone, must know it. You could stumble across a planet discovered by someone else and know that someone else had been here, lived here, maybe even perished here.

But there is also the stickly little fact that you’re not really discovering these planets at all and there is indisputable proof that you are not the first person to ever tread on these hallowed rocks. How can a planet be undiscovered if a Vy’keen merchant is manning a trade-post? How else did this trade-post get built? Not only that but every planet has literally hundreds, if not thousands of radio towers, outposts, shelters, manufacturing facilities, storage holds, trade platforms, drop-pods and more – how could this planet ever claim to be undiscovered when there’s something always a two minute walk from each other? There’s even ancient – ancient – monoliths and structures which means it’s potentially been inhabited twice: once by a race of ancient aliens and currently by newer, more living aliens.

There’s been a long history of people claiming they have discovered things, despite the fact people were already there [see Native Americans, see Indigenous Australians, see most of continental Africa circa “The Rush for Africa” period] and while this is nowhere close to approaching a weird level of quasi-colonialism, [despite the fact Hello Games have talked about adding in the ability to build outposts and fight the natives], it does beg the question of why any sort of discovery is attributable to anyone. The moment for me came where I landed straight onto a trade platform and was staring a Korvax merchant in the face as it brought in the letterboxing to announce I’d discovered this planet. I wonder how the merchant felt as I renamed his home to something violently crude and pertaining to horses and their erectile functions. There’s also the question of if this galaxy is so big it’s unlikely you’d ever run into anyone, in the words of Sean Murray, then what’s the point in laying a claim to something no one will ever see? Is discovery a discovery when you’re the only person who knows it is there?

As you explore your home system, you may be driven by curiosity, by the hope that whatever sits over the horizon is worth the look. And as you journey things will seem different, appear different on the surface, but it’s the same everywhere you go and no amount of your ample curiosity or hope will change that – it will be the same. It will never not be the same.

So where are you now? Entering orbit, fording through the inky blackness, you’ll be starting to come to terms with your starship – a boxy little thing that resembles a futuristic version of what I imagine a Honda Civic to be. It’s slow and pretty awful but you’ll quickly find other ships to salvage and repair up to usable standards. You can repair these crashed ships or even purchase other aliens ships for a usually exorbitant fee – choosing a ship is really up to you, as some people go for aesthetics and some people go for function over form. I chose a ship that looked like it had been stolen from the set of the original Battlestar Galactica.

Speaking of Honda Civics, the ship controls [at least on the PC version, which seems to have been an afterthought due to how poorly it ran during the first week and how poorly it continues to run] much like a beaten up used car; no matter how much you upgrade its engine or thrusters, it just tilts and swerves all over the place, sometimes managing to hover upside down on the side of a mountain. No matter which ship you pick, they’re all like this so it’s not even due to my choice of a Colonial Viper-esque spacecraft. It feels like a gremlin is inside/on the ship with you, ala that one The Twilight Zone episode, twisting the control cables and attempting to fly you into the ground for a fiery death.

Except you won’t be able to fly straight into the ground or into a mountain side in a blaze of glory, nor will you be able to do any spectacular water based landings into an ocean or lake – flying above the surface of a planet, you’ll notice that the game is keeping you a set distance above the ground at all times. Try to get as close as you can and you’ll notice a sort of invisible wall keeping you from the ground; like the planet has a shield up. You can adjust your altitude and angle but at no point will your ship engage in any cool manoeuvres – if you had hopes of flying from space down to the planet, skirting mountains and flying through a rocky canyon Star Wars style, you’ll want to box those hopes up in a box [label the box either ‘NMS DLC?’ or ‘Star Citizen?’].

Look, I understand why the game would do this – this all makes for a relaxed flying experience, with simplified controls and no pressures of things like re-entry or whatever. And constantly crashing into planets would make for aggravating resource collection/repair of your ship but it means that again, another threat is removed from an already threatless game. There’s no skill to flying a ship and to me, and this is a personal opinion now, there’s very little reason to upgrade your ship to make it fly any better. I mean this Colonial Viper rip-off I chose to fix up and take doesn’t even fly any nimbler or faster than some of the ships that look like fridges with scramjets mounted to the sides

While flying in your junker of a starter ship [unless of course you pre-ordered and got an X-Wing like craft] and coming to terms with the flying controls, you’ll realise that you can’t touch the surface unless you go to land. Landing is one of the more frustrating things I’ve had to deal with so I have a personal axe to grind with this one. By all accounts, it should be easy to land: hold down a button to initiate landing and the ship will do the rest but this can sometimes be an exercise in patience and planning.

The game picks a spot to land for you somewhere close to where you initiated the landing button but you have to be sure about what your ship is flying over. It’s hard to gauge a landing as there is no way to look down or around when flying. Sometimes the game will just fail to register your landing request at all. So you loop back around for a second go, taking the reins of the unruly beast that is the flying controls, leaning and spinning and trying to slow down while the ship lurches and rolls like a bull that’s coming off a seven-day-bender and you finally get it to land. You’ll automatically exit the ship when you touch the ground and in one ship I had, it would usually launch me upwards out of the cockpit with such force that I’d take fall damage upon landing.

It’s also annoying to re-attempt a landing as each take-off uses up 25 per cent of your launch thruster fuel, meaning you’ll need to have some of the [by-now] intimately familiar Plutonium to refuel it.

Of course if you land at a trade platform or outpost, you won’t spend any fuel to relaunch but you have to be able to land on the platform in the first place; the amount of times I’ve clicked land while right over the platform, only to have the ship put itself right NEXT to the empty platform is beyond count. It’s often easier to land somewhere else, walk to the outpost and just call your ship by crafting a Bypass Chip – again, you shouldn’t have to do this but it’s just another workaround for a poorly designed mechanic.

I know it might sound a bit pedantic to gripe on about landing but when this is something you’ll be doing constantly, you’d kind of hope it was just a bit tighter. In in a game based around exploration and travel, the travel should ideally be rock solid and fun to do, not this unruly and sloppy. Think about it: if you’re in space or above a planet, you’d want to the travelling to be tight, fun and free and it often feels like everything but that.

Everything about the flying is really quite awful, and space travel is no better as, for the sake of time, you’ll usually just be zipping from one point to the next with your trusty pulse engine – I don’t know of many, if any, people who have actually sat there travelling at regular speed to these planets. The galaxy is wide and boundless but there’s very little to see in space proper, not even comets or space stations or cool nebula [none of the planets have interesting rings or patterns around them either – maybe put this in later?]. But there is a type of auto-piloting whereby you point your ship at an icon/hex shaped beacon and the ship will make an effort to aim you in the right direction but don’t think you could just stand up and leave – the game will attempt to keep you on your feet with the hostile space pirates that infest the games star systems.

My first and only death was to pirates and, to be fair, they have remained the only threat in the game to me thus far; I think twice before jetting into orbit with a full inventory of minerals and a hold full of valuables. They can quickly overpower you if you aren’t careful or fast enough to outrun them – if you have a warp cell, making the jump to another galaxy gives you a way out. They hunt in packs and pull you from a pulse-drive speed into their area – if you’re hoping to extract revenge or perhaps join up as a villain, you’ll be in for another disappointment.

Pirates exist solely to mess with you and the A.I – they do not form some larger part of the world and maybe they didn’t need to but given the lack of stuff happening everywhere, it would have been great if they were a bigger presence in the game. It could have even been expressed through the lore and words of the characters, good in-game story-telling. I even tried to be a space pirate for a while and it didn’t work at all – the game doesn’t give you the same abilities the pirates have, whatever they are, like a tractor beam and the ability to ambush ships. You can’t detect other ships or scan their cargo. It’s hard to find three other aliens to work with and take people’s hard earned minerals. You can play at being an outlaw but you’ll never really be one.

Let’s go planet-side again, and it’s time to talk about some of the other half-formed systems at play within No Man’s Sky. I talked earlier about threats; the Sentinels and the native wildlife form the two aggressive threats on the surface of most planets you find [other than the environment of course] but the fact is that a careful player, one that is either tired of this opposition, tired and just wants to get off this rock or fed up with having to deal with the terrible combat, or one that is actually threatened by such enemies can just avoid these threats all together.

The Sentinels form the GTA-like police presence in the game and usually if you act up – stealing rare things like Vortex Cubes or Albumen pearls, over-mining, breaking into a manufacturing facility – they’ll come after you. They’ll even chase you into space but I have never seen them do that as they give up the chase pretty damn easily; in fact if you just run, you’ll get away from them pretty easily I’ve found. They die quickly and easily and feel as though they were put into the game because someone realised there should be an antagonistic presence so you had something to fight.

Conversely, the animals can be a legitimate threat, especially when they’re bugging out and managing to jump 40 feet in the air to get you despite the enemy being a mushroom with spikes for hair. You can fight back using your bolt-caster attachment for the multi-tool but it starts off pretty under-powered and useless.

But although you start out under-equipped, scavenging supplies and having to refill everything constantly, everything you have on you can be upgraded; your ship, your multi-tool and your exosuit all have ways of becoming less cumbersome and more useful to you. Your inventory can be upgraded at drop-pods and on Space Stations [provided you find an AtlasPass] and this should really be one of your first early game goals given how small the damn thing is. At drop-pods the prices start low, first one free actually and multiply in increments of 10,000. And of course your suit systems can be upgraded through sub-systems, crafted in your inventory and built by finding blueprints in the world. There’s little reason to craft these blueprints and upgrade suit systems as there’s very little threat to be found in the Sentinels or the wildlife. Threats are present in some of the environmental extremes you’ll encounter – extreme cold being a common occurrence for me – but even then you’re able to get by without them easily.

Your multi-tool can be upgraded by finding new multi-tools at either Space Anomalies or at trading posts on the surface on planets – as you find better ones, they’ll have more free slots and come in a better state that your initial peashooter. Having a good multi-tool is critical, as you’ll be mining so much that ideally, making the process go even faster would be useful. Anything to speed up the interminable clicking and holding helps and you can add sorts of attachments to make it exactly the kind of tool you need for the job.

Although upgrading anything requires certain elements that are not as apparent and plentiful as say, Plutonium or Heridium. Things like Silver, Iridium, Copper, the multitudes of rare ores that cannot be harvest; these are the thing you’ll often need and you’ll need to start scouring the galaxy for even one deposit of these coveted minerals. The scarcity of certain elements does become apparent the further you travel [both to and from the galactic centre, at least for me] and if you aren’t properly exploring and scavenging things like Blueprints, formulas and the like, you’ll find yourself searching every planet in a system in hopes of that ONE mineral. For me, it’s Iridium; I’ve searched every planet in this system [and I’ve fully search another eight systems before it – I’ve been to twenty planets and seven moons] and I cannot find any of it, getting to the stage where I’m harassing the local aliens for supplies of the damn thing. It’s literally the one thing stopping me from progression – Iridium means an upgraded hyperdrive, means a new upgrade for my gun, means moving on. I can’t even buy Iridium as no alien seems to want to carry this damn mineral.

This brings me to buying, selling and diplomacy.

In most space games, like ones in the Freelancer or X series, the underlying premise seems to be buy low, sell high [a principle not confined to games, but all of human economy] but in NMS, I cannot grasp what model the economy even works on. I have no concept of what is in demand or oversupply in these systems but I know that each star system values each commodity differently and I think some alien species value different commodities differently too – again, the game gives no feedback on any of this, despite the fact this would be a great time to do so. The game does give you a price indicator, showing that, say, Heridium is selling a +2.9% higher than usual but the reasons as to why are kept from you; don’t look a gift mineral in its structure I suppose. The best deals are indicated, like a school achievement, with a gold star, signalling to you [the player] that this is a very good deal indeed.

There are a number of ways to make money in the game but what disappoints me, a little, is there is no way to read into how the market operates – again, a lack of feedback. What’s driving these prices? Can I drive prices down or up through my actions? I had a moment early in the game where I came across a Titanium facility with large tanks, each holding a lot of them. I destroyed the whole thing, fighting off Sentinels and making off with a load of the precious mineral. I thought this would drive the prices up but when I reached the Space Station, I instead found the prices had actually gone down.

So whatever is affecting supply and demand in the systems is beyond me and my limited human intellect. Each alien you meet also values each commodity differently and carries a different stock so in way it’s an overly simply system but has a lot of confusing, vague busywork surrounding it.

There are three races of aliens you’ll be meeting during your travels across the procedurally generate hell-dimension you’ve found yourself in: the first is the Korvax Convergence, a race of Daft Punk looking machines that seem to have a conscious, possibly ex-flesh, intelligence uploaded into it [during the course of the game, it’s possible to sort of speculate that a convergence between consciousness and computer happened and this race uploaded their beings to a huge server somewhere] and who favour technology, blueprints, intelligent play – if they were given a colour to be coded by, a colour with symbolic meaning attributed to it throughout history, they’d be blue. The second alien race is the Gek, a weird, squat, bird-esque thing, lacking feathers but owning a beak. They seem to be a merchant race and I’d imagine they be green as a colour. Lastly is the Vy’keen, a big brutish warrior race, favouring conflict over diplomacy; colour of red for these large boys.

Now the reason I know more about the Korvax is they are the first race I encountered and early in the game I obsessively visited monoliths with the hope of learning their language – I was sure that learning the words, decoding the language and structure would reveal something to me. Some new backstory, some new opportunity, some great mystery would unfurl itself and stand before me, shiny and new and all mine. But nothing happened. I knew more but knew nothing at the same time. The Korvax continued to only offer me blueprints [and blueprints I already knew as by the time I’d gotten to my third galaxy it seemed that I knew almost every blueprint] and offered me technology that was comparable to mine. I’d spent hours scouring the planets for monoliths, helping the Korvax in many of the random encounters you come across and sure, I’ll admit, learning the language did make some of the encounters less of a guessing game – knowing the word for poison, dangerous, gas and help would help anyone who needed to vent dangerous poison gas – but more often than not there were times when you could just guess what you needed to do through observation as the game tells you in your pseudo-first-person-observation side of the dialogue. And if you failed: so what? There’s a whole planet, a whole galaxy, full of identical opportunities just like this one, remember?

So when the time came for me to start learning millions of Gek words and millions of Vy’keen words, by which I mean those words began to appear more often, I threw in the towel and jumped back into space. Again, why learn this language; to communicate better, sure, but in service of what? What do the aliens have that I cannot get myself? I can find blueprints on the planets for free, I can build anything, do anything – there is nothing they can offer me. They have not offered protection or help, they do not reveal some great secret or shortcut to the centre of the galaxy. They do nothing but waste my resources and waste my time, which is not what the sole other lifeforms should do in this large empty galaxy. The aliens are ciphers, simply giving you rewards for solving problems but never exhibiting any personality. I don’t even know if my colour/culture type of alien assessment before was even correct, I’m just assuming. I know nothing about them except that helping them gives me things which, when you think about it, is an awfully selfish way to think and exist.

There are small encounters, supposedly procedurally generated [this is the word on the digital grapevine but I think people are lying here.], but these feel like someone sat down, created twenty encounter types and called it a day. In two hours of meeting aliens I had seen all the possible encounters there are to see: give 20 of the right mineral, which thing is he pointing at, do I want X, Y or Z? And the location of these encounters never varies; you will always meet the aliens in a facility and they will always be happy to see you. There is no combat, or even movement by the aliens; they are rooted to the ground and will never leave. They exist solely to meet you and when you learn that there is no reason to converse other than to break up your own self-constructed monotony, your own lonely wanderings, then your time frees up even more.

I’ve talked a lot about things wasting your time; I said that you should upgrade your mining laser to save time in your endless bouts of rock harvesting. Upgrading you ship helps with speed and warp cell efficiency so you’ll travel further, faster. You can even upgrade your exosuit like I did with increased jetpack range and further sprinting abilities.

But here’s the kicker now, the thing that made me doubt my entire play-though: what’s the rush? What are we in a hurry for? If we know, two hours in, that everything you’ll see will be the exact same – that literally every possible thing we could see is an altered state of another thing – then why are we trying to rush it?

If this supposedly is the game, this combination of exploration, slow grinding, progression, mining, meeting aliens and seeing the limited sights, then what’s the rush? Is it better to go slow and take your time or is it better to keep moving and waste your time? And if time is money, if we measure a games monetary worth in playtime, then maybe going slow makes sense: we have to drive up the value ourselves so now No Man’s Sky, with all its tedium and busywork, with all its forcing you to hop between planets and scour for minerals, now NMS just might have earned its price of admission.

By now, it’s early morning Saturday, sometime end of August, and as the world settles into post-No Man’s Sky stupor and introspection, and the news stories surrounding the “biggest game ever” begins to lose some of the anvil-esque heat, the gaming web-publications begin to get desperate: what NMS news do we have? You can almost hear an editor yell this, if indeed an editor resides as a video game news publication. And as I sit back, feet on desk and hand on mouse, Kotaku was reporting (reporting in the loosest sense of the word as if telling you a story is reporting, I feel most of us would be quite competent reporters indeed) a story of NMS player who didn’t leave his first planet for a week.

He, this madman iconoclast of a gamer, explored his entire planet and mined and generally didn’t leave at the first opportunity he had. This human headline, this rogue outlaw had played the game differently and this was apparently, probably, worthy of a news story. But journalistic lows aside, it did get me thinking (so in a way it probably won whatever fight this is meant to be) about how NMS was even meant to be played.

I decided to take a leaf from this crazy person’s playbook. I decided to spend a couple of hours on a barren rock of a planet, leaving my ship docked in a trade station’s platform and just went for a walk. I turned off the ambient music – look, I like ambient just as much as the next Valium addict but there’s only so much Brian-Eno-and late-70’s-Tangerine-Dream-esque music I can take – and put on a load of albums I’d been meaning to give a listen to. I got some podcasts I’d wanted to relisten to as well and by the end of an hour or more, I had found ten blueprints, upgraded my exosuit with eight additional slots, discovered the melee-jetpack glitch and mined hundreds of units of Gold, Copper and Heridium but none of it, whatever it was, felt any different from going to any other planet. In fact, while I was doing this, I had an urge to keep moving, to gather enough to escape this rock and move onto a new galaxy and there’s the rub: if I already know that what I see next is the same as everything else, what am I doing here? Why do I keep playing?

The systems aren’t fully formed or deep enough: the crafting is poor and the inventory being a puzzle unto itself doesn’t exactly help with any of this. There is little reason to craft any of the upgrades as you can go anywhere and do anything pretty much from the first second, and there’s little reason to mine anything outside of obtaining units – but you don’t need any units to really survive as everything runs on the ubiquitous Plutonium. You can make money but there is little to spend it on outside of materials and exorbitantly expensive spaceships.

The gameplay loop is so barely there, so underdeveloped, that it makes you wonder what was actually being developed at Hello Games – did no one sit down and figure out how these systems would play off each other and how these systems would exist? It feels like Hello Games bit off more than they could chew. This is not something that is exclusive to a small company [as in ‘well it’s a small company, they have no experience’] as games like Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft and many others in the survival genre have comparatively deep systems and small development teams and while these may not be great comparisons, scale and graphics notwithstanding, the point is that team size has nothing to do with. Game size also has nothing to do with it in this case as we’ve already established that No Man’s Sky certainly has space to spare in the data category, clocking in at a tiny 2.8gb download.

What is this game actually made up of? There is little here in the way of core gameplay and only the promise of The Grind, the incessant, never finishing promise of endless work will keep the dedicated players here. The sky is not the limit in No Man’s Sky; your patience is.

So what will keep you playing, outside grinding for materials and upgrading yourself? The game has two plotlines you can follow from the outset – the path of the Atlas and the path towards the galactic centre.

The Atlas plot-thread might just be one of the least effective uses of in-world storytelling I’ve ever seen – loads of pseudo-philosophical ramblings about infinity and space, like someone combed through Sartre and Descartes, binge watched a bunch of Star Trek and spat out this out. The Atlas plot line is a monumental waste of your time although given the slim pickings for greater goals on offer, maybe you should pursue it; there’s little else to do other than explore. Of course, you could just head towards the centre, joining the apparent rush of prospectors towards this shining, Thomas Aquinas-esque light. What’s there? Who knows and if you do want to know, literally just type it in for yourself and spoil the biggest and only driving motivation for No Man’s Sky. Supposedly something great lies in the middle and exists as something to head for, to give you direction, but I have a speaking suspicion that it is not worth anything. What the centre holds is nothing but a goal.

Reaching the top of a bluff, I gaze down on a crater full of the thick green fog, Turok-esque in colour, which swamps the planet. I wonder, staring out at a crater miles wide, what audience Sean Murray intended for this game. I wonder who or what any of this is meant for, who is meant to enjoy this - and I don’t mean that in a negative sense, or a cynical sense or even a snide, sarcastic sense of the word. I mean I wonder who they wanted to be here, the ideal who that Hello Games imagined when they sat down to create the algorithm that would birth a quintillion planets and then some. I wonder who this is meant for…

Mar-ket-ting. Let it sit in your mouth; marketing is a word I like to roll around in my mouth before I spit. It leaves my mouth in an unpleasant shape when I’m finished saying it, like a weird-quasi-smile, as though the linguists that designed and came-up with the word shaped it to make you happy about something that is, more often than not, antagonistic towards you. Trying saying it, then wipe the look off your face afterwards – feel dirty yet?

Marketing and videogames have never really been as close as they should, never really jelled the way movies, products and other things do. It’s hard to market games at times, a medium of interactivity can be hard to convey in a TV commercial or print ad, especially when a TV ad is all blurry and makes the game look awful and especially when every print ad for fifteen years was nothing but kids saying radical, awful puns and CGI video game women getting their polygonal funbags out – try selling your parents on the maturity angle then. And in all this, grandstanding and overselling have existed since the dawn of video games: Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 is going to be great, Simon’s Quest will be an amazing Castlevania sequel, Madden is going to feature a truck-stick, this game is going to run at 60fps locked, Call of Duty’s got a new paint-job. The oversell and the hype creation: these things are considered commonplace, so intrinsic to the games industry that we can almost see right through it like glass. But companies continue to walk out transparent claims, in every press conference and exclusive first look and we continue to let it exist within in our midst – we don’t call out misleading marketing, bad marketing nearly as much as we should. We’re good at it, we’re certainly good at letting companies know we’re not happy [as anyone who runs a gaming company Twitter can testify to] but I think we’re starting to slow a few steps from the finish line.

Misleading marketing is not granted a free pass under the auspices of “well you can’t trust marketing” [and it’s certainly true enough, you can’t, but still]. In almost every other industry on the planet, misleading marketing lands you with fines, investigations, sometimes jail time or sentencing. And it amazes me, continues to and will most likely always will, that people don’t think a game company would lie to them or if not lie, then misdirect, oversell and generally shill like snake-oil salesmen of old. Some people don’t think, or entertain the possibility, that someone could get up on a stage and not tell the truth because they are associated with videogames. Belief in people is one thing, but naiveté is another and it is one thing more to not develop a strong internal compass to guide one’s self.

What about the whole Might No. 9 debacle, or or Ubisoft and the whole Watch Dogs thing? Or Assassin’s Creed Unity for that matter? Or Bungie with Destiny? Or EA Games with both Spore and Simcity 2013? Or Gearbox with Colonial Marines? Or the whole Killzone 2 trailer thing? Or Warner Bros. with the entire, months-long Arkham Knight on PC debacle? Or Peter Molyneux with Fable? Or Driver 3 back in the day with the whole forum scandals? Or Duke Nukem Forever and its interminably long development schedule for a game that was the equivalent of a grindhouse exploitation film? Or the entire Kane and Lynch paid review sagas? The entirety of the OUYA’s lifespan, the Xbox One DRM saga, the PSN Online Hacking Scandals? Want to go further beyond just products? What about EA Games and their absorption of hundreds of companies only to shutter them and release staff? What about KONAMI and their mistreatment of staff through surveillance, intimidation and corporate culture? What about Rockstar Games and the allegations of awful working conditions? My point is that people are willing, if not able, to leap to the defence of these immense games companies when they have, more often than not, abused customer confidence time and time again among other sins. Why do we defend these companies that don’t need or even value our defences? Why do we leap to volunteer ourselves as soldiers in the war when these companies don’t give a rat’s ass that you're dying in the trenches?

The idea of a console war, fanboys, always strikes me as terribly misguided thinking, delusional at times too – especially when defending a studio, no matter how big or small. Hello Games might be a small studio, and it certainly impresses me that a small studio was able to come up with an algorithm like this, but I’m not at all impressed by the actual game they put out and I won’t forget the circumstances surrounding No Man’s Sky. We in the gaming community have a criminally short memory, most forgive easily and forget quickly, tell ourselves we won’t get fooled again and to most of us, a company is only as good as their last game. But to a few of us, a company is some kind of friend and we’ve attributed personality and feelings to a corporation and it’s become sycophantic and cult-like over time.

And the lines I’ve seen trumpeted is the idea of ‘adjust your expectations’ and ‘accepting reality’, these two lines often wedded together in a hit-piece or opinion bit. But what if the expectations were purposefully set high? What if reality was blurred and indistinct and we had to formulate our own opinions and expectations based on incorrect knowledge? A question remaining is the one about the company and why Sean Murray/Hello Games didn’t communicate about their huge, earth-shattering product better than they did. I can’t imagine being in the position Sean Murray and the Hello Games studio were in; the hopes, the hype, the sheer weight of eighteen quintillion planets bearing down on a small English studio, like Atlas had really underestimated the weight of the world and snapped under the mass of an entire planet’s expectations.

There is a very good reason why videos have surfaced post-launch compiling the contradictory statements and comparing the finished product with promises and pre-launch footage – because what has been given to us is not what it was said to be and while we should judge games on what actually exists [that old drum being brought out and banged upon with a song of ‘judge the game, not the hype’], NMS is suspiciously devoid of at least half of the promised features. PVP was not included at launch, the ‘Dark Souls-like multiplayer” unavailable as was the ability to customise your own suit or character. You cannot see anyone else, nor is there a deep trading mechanic – whatever that was meant to be. There is limited diplomacy, limited trading.

The community have scoured any and all statements Sean Murray has made, with the efficiency of a Secret Police-esque organisation [The fanboy leans over, the light from the desk casting dark shadows across their face “Mr Murray, you claimed that we would we able to land on comets…we have it right here”] and it’s starting to appear that a number of claims about NMS are simply not true at all. If you are mad about this game, you have a right to feel mad. If you are happy with the game you got, you have a right to feel that too.

One day all of this won’t matter anymore. But right now, we need to talk about No Man’s Sky – someone needs to get up and say something.

After the gamut of press junkets and parties, Sean Murray has gone quiet and the opinions of the gaming public swirl and speak like a hurricane of assent/dissent. Shawn on the Gamers With Jobs podcast [no relation to Sean Murray] discussed NMS and the open-world experience and asked “Since when did we care so much what people said? Or trailers?” and everyone had a laugh and continued on. And in all fairness, it’s a good point but the problem is…well the problem is a bit difficult.

If you’re a representative, i.e representing a company like Sean Murray did, a body of people and in a larger sense, an intangible promise of a game, then your words do matter. Your words are gospel, you are now a source of information and people do care what you say. If you hype the game up, the hype goes up. If you play things down, the hype can go down. It also reeks of a weird sort of a indignation – to have been in the press almost constantly saying things, standing on world stages at E3 [they don’t just give you that time up there you know, that gets worked out months in advance], marketing/advertising/hyping your game to every major news outlet on the face on this planet, spreading the word of No Man’s Sky far and wide and now - after appearing on Conan O’Brien, Steven Colbert, and having had pseudo-documentaries filmed about you - now in the face of criticism and complaint, most of them quite well-founded and rational, you ask the question of ‘why did people care about what I said?’. Well, people cared and noticed what you said because you were always up there talking. People cared about the trailers because you put them out there. People took your words to actually mean something not just marketing noise.

Sean Murray’s positivity is not evil, his enthusiasm is not a negative trait to have but his inability to frame the game, to put borders on what is and isn’t a part of the game was pretty awful. He is the sole representative, the person we think of when we think of Hello Games so he’s the person everyone is quick to blame [hell, I think I’ve done it myself somewhere in here]. He didn’t need to be a trained marketer, another guy in a suit on a stage but he did need to open, honest and truthful and it is awful that he will now be forced to deal with the fallout he’s made for himself – he seems, somewhere within him, to be a genuine man who like Peter Molyneux and Todd Howard before, has trouble making promises he can’t keep; filled with childlike excitement and naiveté and real passion for games.

So broken promises, a divided community, a shaky launch, a hollow game, a wobbly PS4 version and a busted-up PC port: how much will this set me back?

Including price in any review or discussion is an odd point to some as although the price might not matter to some, and while there’s certainly an argument to had around the inclusion or factoring of a price in a review [prices drop, discounts happen, prices fluctuate all around the world, currency differences, value that people place on things, income disparity, etc.] I believe the price matters in the discussion around No Man’s Sky. It should be worth pointing out that worldwide, No Man’s Sky is currently valued as a $60 dollar game.

Psychologically, most gamers associate $60 with a Triple A development – with games that have budgets in the millions, with development studios that could fill a stadium with staff members, with immense global marketing, with huge E3 demos and huge press coverage and in many ways No Man’s Sky ticked some of those boxes. It’s certainly blurred the lines between indie development and mainstream, full-price games. Game developers deserve to be paid for their work but aside from impressive technical achievements in an algorithm and lack of load times, I don’t believe No Man’s Sky is worth $60 dollars because I don’t see the actual value; not in story, not in art direction, not in the sound and certainly not in the gameplay. There are not enough assets or art for me to think “Oh, there is where the money went”. This is, in my opinion, a game worth $30 dollars and with the lack of content available at launch, and the supposed incoming changes on the horizon, I’d tell prospective players to wait another six months before delving in.

The game also runs like a fat hog on the PC, despite its small size and meagre system requirements. For the first week, you couldn’t even Alt-Tab out of the game as it would just hard-crash. Intense performance drops, inconsistent frame-rate, slow-down, draw-in, hitching. Some things still cause crashes and I have no idea what causes them; one minute I’m flying and the next I’m literally just staring at my desktop with no stutter or hitching. It’s the quickest, most fluid crash-to-desktop I’ve ever experienced and it’s kind of an achievement. I can’t imagine what this would have played like if they had hit their original intended release date of June and not delayed the release of NMS.

It’s a good game to play while doing something else; while trying not to think about work or a girl you used to like; while listening to music or a podcast; while trying to shut out the world or collect your thoughts for the day; to grind upon and scratch that progression itch. It can be a zen, meditative experience if you think of it as such – you can come to No Man’s Sky with no purpose, and playing it an hour a day helps to lessen the repetition, but eventually, sooner or later, the repetition will get to you. The poorly designed systems will annoy you, the limitations will become apparent and eventually you will want more that will not be there.

To enjoy the game, despite its limitations, is fine. There is a lot to like in No Man’s Sky, certainly much to give it praise for but your own personal enjoyment should not disguise the realities of what it was said to be. It is one thing to judge a game based on what is in it, and only in it, but it is another to deliberately blind yourself to everything surrounding the game – it’s like if you bought a house near a never-ending fire: you could certainly focus on just the house.

You could pretend that the fires don’t exist and convince yourself that they are normal, part of everyday life; deliberately avoiding looking into the flames by refusing to acknowledge or think about them – if you do not see it or think it, then the fires do not exist. You could pretend you don’t hear all the people yelling about the fire, or their screaming about your house but at some point, whether from the smoke or the heat or the guests you bring over asking about the fires they’d heard so much about, one day you will look out at the fires from your window and wonder if the fires are part of something much bigger, less understandable and you might, for once, feel a twinge of doubt.

We should judge games based on what actually exists, what is tangible and real: the finished product is the game, not the marketing and buzz and hype. What is there is there and what is there is lacklustre and thin. But if you want to keep pressing and ask what did I expect? Look, it’s a pointless question really, my expectations are just thoughts of a No Man’s Sky that doesn’t exist, will never exist. It’s fun to speculate I suppose.

I wish that the game were more threatening in way that manifested as a need to survive. I wish that the Space Stations were a better hub of sorts: where I could meet aliens, chat about the goings-on in space, a brief moment of friendliness before delving deep into isolated and uncharted worlds. I wanted there to be less copy-pasting, no structures on planets or if there, make them a couple of standout things. More assets for the algorithm to draw from, more variety. I wanted more aliens to talk of the larger world, to give a little bit of lore and flavour to this empty place, to have a general conversation and make use of the words I’d learnt. The game could have benefitted from procedurally generated missions as well, ala Skyrim’s Dark Brotherhood. Imagine landing on the Space Station for your system and being given some missions - what if you could get a mission to go kill some pirates and return for a reward, like a new Gek word or some units or even a blueprint? What if, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, you could go collect some minerals and bring them back as a fetch quest?

Give me something, anything, to break up the monotony of this sky. I had dreams of being shot down onto a planet surface by pirates, crash landing and having to scavenge supplies to survive. I had ideas of extra-terrestrial survival, living on a hostile star marooned millions of miles from a friendly face, where survival was a day-to-day experience in learning new ways to exist. I had dreams of a universe without an end, whereby every day was a new day, fraught with danger but rife with possibility.

If we had hours or days, we could talk about expectations, dreams and hopes, all we like. I think that we all project onto all things, not just games, and imagine them before we have them, dream of them. We do this from a young age with toys that we want, with places we’d like to visit. We do it now with jobs we want or people we desire to be with. With games we project too, we dream of possibilities. I had dreams about SimCity 2013 and I had dreams about Watch Dogs. Hell, I had dreams of Spore. We project onto games before, during and after release and I still project, despite my cynicism and scepticism. It is human to want and dream and I dream of great games that I can never make and I dream of sequels I’ll never see. I see a No Man’s Sky that could become something great. The dream is not dead yet. No Man’s Sky could certainly shape itself into something more, something stronger and better; like games before it, like Terraria and Minecraft, Starbound and Destiny, Hello Games could build upon the systems in place and make NMS a stronger, more solid game. Content could be added to the game through new updates and patches; the price could be reduced, new encounters and assets possibly added, new aliens, new ships, new, new, new; better, bigger, more infinity than before.

But if the product is what matters, the old idiom of ‘the game is the game’, then what is on offer here, here and now, what they chose to release and sell, is so empty and minimal that it is almost lifeless to explore. Half-constructed systems, an unexciting gameplay loop that is entirely dependent upon exploration of an uninteresting, copy/paste galaxy and a game that does not so much demand your time as waste it.

We talk about depth a lot in games; a deeper experience, deeper engagement, deep systems, immersion even being a word that relates to depth. Some players are concerned with the surface but more are concerned with the depths – what lies beneath, why should I dive in and how deep does it go? There are lots of large games that both have depth and lack it, a variety of video gaming oceans and interactive seas, each with a varying depth and life beneath the surface. But No Man’s Sky is not an ocean. No Man’s Sky is the world’s largest puddle, ocean wide with no horizon but lacking any depth; infinitely wide and centimetres deep. I may not be the first to say this, it’s certainly not original but it’s astute and fitting. Puddles are fun to play with, to splash in, and to dip our feet in but eventually, we want more. No Man’s Sky is not more; it is some but not enough.

And as I stare across an endless, lifeless planet, physically endless but with a horizon that hides nothing but copies upon copies of the places I've already seen, and as my suit warns that the storm is right on top of me, telling me to seek shelter from the fury, I know that although what I am seeing, this wholly unique world, will never be seen by anyone else, I know that while the skies above are full of possibility of difference that there is nothing out there except lifeless space and a useless, empty thought: what if?

- Alex Pennini, 2016.

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