January 2020 - NMSspot

Photo of a craggy elevation on a golden lush world from No Man's Sky version 1.1

Exploring a Golden, Lush World from Times Past

01/31/2020 blakespot Comments 3 comments

As mentioned in earlier posts, I am presently exploring the historical universe of No Man’s Sky Foundation (v1.1, circa 2016) alongside the current universe of No Man’s Sky Beyond. In so doing, I regularly encounter a great many striking worlds — bizarre and spectacular, both — in my travels. I have shared a number of these in earlier posts and in my Back to Foundations photo gallery.

Recently, while exploring the Foundations universe, I set down upon a lush, golden planet that was truly breathtaking. A planet part ocean, the land is covered in vibrant grasses and trees and rises in places to great, craggy heights. I was so struck by the beauty of the world that I wanted to share it with readers, and have captured a bit of footage while just wandering the hillsides. I hope you enjoy.

Community Event #13: The Culling of the Fish

01/29/2020 blakespot Comments 3 comments

This past weekend’s No Man’s Sky Community Event #13 took us under the sea to a distress beacon and a voice that ominously spoke of a wound in reality requiring a sacrifice. The voice conveyed that it must consume material from the planet to quell the disturbance, and that meant culling indigenous aquatic creatures for their meat, in the form of the consumable Salty Fingers.

I joined the event (on PC) mid-day on Sunday and found the sea strewn about with carcasses and those creatures yet living, very much on the run. The host planet was violent with storms and the land covered in gargantuan flora. As could be expected, quite a few player bases were constructed within the system, some of which I visit in the video, below.

The sea — it foamed red that day, traveller.

“No Man’s Sky” Wins Excellence in VR Adaptation Design Award for 2019

01/28/2020 blakespot Comments 0 Comment

No Man’s Sky has won Road To VR‘s Excellence in VR Adaptation Design Award for 2019 in the publication’s third annual Game of the Year Awards.

Road To VR indicates that games ported to VR often come out wanting, due to aging game engines or a lack of commitment to fully realize the VR experience. They salute Hello Games’ work in delivering the full experience to VR with all the bells and whistles intact.

… Here, No Many’s Sky bucks the trend by presenting a fun and fully-playable VR mode, which thankfully came to all users this summer for free as a part of the base game on PC or PlayStation 4. The VR mode is basically exactly what you’d imagine from No Man’s Sky in VR; blasting off into space is magical, exploring planets is awe inspiring, riding around in exovehicles is really awesome. It also looks great too, as the rich and vibrant universe demands even more inspection from the immersive viewpoint of a VR headset. …

No Man’s Sky chief Sean Murray recently acknowledged the win in a retweet of the award results.

Other kudos that Hello Games’ work on No Man’s Sky has garnered over the past year include winning the Game of the Year 2019—Best Ongoing Game award and the Game of the Year 2019: Best VR Experience award.

A Glimpse of the Action at Community Event #11

01/15/2020 blakespot Comments 0 Comment

This past weekend was community event week #11 in the No Man’s Sky universe and, as you might expect, I portalled in and took part. I enjoy the sort of mayhem that these weekend events bring, and was worried that the action I’ve been seeing during my typical, late-Sunday arrivals (as the event timer is nearly spent) would be absent during this earlier, mid-day Saturday partaking. Happily that wasn’t the case.

Stepping out of the portal and hopping over to the event site, I saw players chasing players, sentinels chasing players, walkers melting players, and raging, horned lizard-beasts that seemed pissed off at the whole affair. And, of course, player bases peppered the planet. I captured a little bit of the action while I was there.

See you out there next weekend, travelers.

A Walk Through the “No Man’s Sky” Redemption Story

01/09/2020 blakespot Comments 2 comments

A wonderful video has just been posted by Internet Historian that I very much wanted to share with readers. Entitled The Engoodening of No Man’s Sky, and at nearly an hour in length, the piece is Internet Historian’s take on what he calls the “No Man’s Sky redemption story.”

I have repeatedly shared my strong opinion that No Man’s Sky had little room for “engoodening” just as it was at launch, which was, indeed, a minority — but not solitary — opinion. That being the case, there is much that I love about this video and the embattled journey that it details.

The narrator underscores the fact that the approach Hello Games has taken over the years since the game’s launch, in working their way up to the game’s current Steam rating of “Very Positive,” its winning the Game of the Year 2019—Best Ongoing Game award as well as Game of the Year 2019: Best VR Experience award, stands in rather stark contrast to those sadly taken by many other contemporary titles.

“…they never added pay-to-win, they never added microtransasctions or paid DLC, they never made VR as a second game. They didn’t give up on the game or scale their resources back to do it. They didn’t come out and call gamers entitled, they didn’t have loot boxes, they didn’t start work on the next big project or sequel. They didn’t do much of anything except get back to work.”

Looking back over the three and a half years since the game launched, it seems clear that the saga of No Man’s Sky is one of — if not the — most dramatic comeback stories in the history of videogames.

A Look at the Wild Antics of Community Event #6

01/07/2020 blakespot Comments 0 Comment

The No Man’s Sky Beyond Development Update 3 (Patch 2.15) brought back the community events that we first saw for a period following 2018’s release of No Man’s Sky NEXT. I have participated in most of the events and have enjoyed them all, more for seeing other players on-site — the shenanigans going on — as well as the player-built bases that can always be found here and there in the vicinity of the mission target.

"Hot Air Balloons" above a river in a No Man's Sky screenshot

One of the busiest (even downright chaotic) events I’ve observed was community event #6 on the weekend of December 7th. I started the mission at the Nexus on Sunday, in the late afternoon / early evening when there were only a few hours left before the clock ran out.

I arrived to find five or six ships landed near the access portal, with many more zipping about at the mission target, a monolith by a lake, over which were flying two impressive “hot air balloons” (cleverly constructed bases). Players were everywhere — on foot, in starships, in ground vehicles. I came to find, later, that I caught footage of the Galactic Hub Defense Force (in their distinctive all-white, large fighters) engaging a number of “griefers” who were trying to obstruct the mission target with terrain. (Shortly thereafter, Hello Games released a patch including a bullet-item addressing this: “The ability to edit terrain in a multiplayer game is now its own permission setting, alongside the permission to edit a base.”)

It was quite a scene to behold.

I captured several minutes of video of the mayhem as I carried out the mission (on PC), which can be seen.

Welcome to NMSspot!

01/06/2020 blakespot Comments 0 Comment

Welcome to NMSspot, my new place on the web to detail my No Man’s Sky adventures.

I began playing No Man’s Sky on launch day (on PS4) and after 2,050 hours in-game, I’m still at it (now on PC). I’ve written a number of pieces about the game over the past three and a half years, posting them to my vintage computing blog in a not-so-on-topic fashion, for lack of a better place to publish (though one went out through Polygon). After so long in the game, I figured it was about time I setup a blog dedicated to this deep and abiding interesting mine, so here we are.

screenshot of a section of the ByteCellar blog showing an older No Man's Sky post on the page

I have migrated the relevant posts I have written up to this point from the other blog to this one, preserving their publication date (if not the existing comments). With a dedicated blog, I expect to write rather more frequently about the game than I have been in the past. I hope you enjoy the site.

Hit me up on twitter ( @blakespot ), on Steam or in-game ( blakespot ), or on the NMS Discord server ( blakespot#0050 ).

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Month: January 2020