No Man’s Sky has had a great month, coincidentally around the launch of the other big space adventure of the day.
No Man’s Sky has been one of the best examples of a video redemption story, and developer Hello Games never stopped expanding the game with new content, and more features. Just recently, the procedural space adventure celebrated its seventh anniversary with the Echoes update, and it doesn’t look like there’s an end in sight to this support.
But do these updates bring back players? The answer is an emphatic yes! Hello Games founder, Sean Murray, recently revealed that No Man’s Sky is having “its biggest month in the last few years.” Interestingly, this is happening across all platforms where No Man’s Sky is available - so PC, consoles, Mac, and even VR.
Most of what I see as ‘issues’ are personal preferences. Stuff like railroaded dialog choices even worse than Fallout 4, or stiff/awkward voice acting, or landing on planets being randomly generated despite claims otherwise. But as for actual issues, two things stood out to me: spaceship flight is very dangerous because bumping into things has a good chance of bugging the physics engine and killing you instantly (but other times, barely even registering damage). And seeing a player get stuck because they got a bounty without even knowing it, and then the bounty was making them shoot-on-sight by guards and them having no clue how to deal with the bounty. I’m sure there’s a perfectly simple way out of the situation, but without any communication to the player, that’s nothing but frustration. Add in broken NPC pathing/animations (people getting stuck inside objects like bar counters), making it all-too-easy to fall down ladder holes in ships, and horrible performance optimization (with Todd Howard being quoted telling people to just buy better computers), and I think it’ll need a bit of polish before really considering giving it a shot.