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.
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
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.
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
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.
The No Man’s Sky BeyondDevelopment 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.
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, 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.
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.
Early in the year I posted A Few Words from a “No Man’s Sky” Time Traveler, detailing my decision to put my 1,600-hour No Man’s Sky journey on hold and jump back-in-time to late 2016 and the Foundation (v1.1) release of the game. (My help page provides assistance to those wanting to do the same.) In that post I explained my motivations for so doing and I won’t restate them here other than to say, in brief, I missed the wilder nature of the early games’ (pre-NEXT) worlds and that greater sense of the unexpected, waiting around every corner. That was over half a year ago and it seems a good time for an update.
As I wrote the aforementioned blog post, I was 25-hours in on a new Normal-mode game started in the Foundation release (version 1.13 specifically), having archived my mainline progress to resume later. I ended up playing in Foundation for 10 straight weeks before archiving that save and going back to the then-current release (Visions v1.77) in order to get back into the active swing of things in preparation for the impending release of No Man’s Sky Beyond.
Beyond promised to bring VR gameplay, far deeper multiplayer, and a large bag of various quality-of-life improvements to enhance the overall experience. Shortly before it was released, I purchased an Oculus Rift S VR setup in order to immerse myself as fully as possible in the game. No Man’s Sky Beyond (v2.0) arrived on August 14 and it did, indeed, deliver on its promises. No Man’s Sky in VR is pretty amazing; I’ve spent hours in the game just slowly wandering about, examining prairie flowers blooming inches from my eyes, marveling at clusters of desert cacti towering above me, and running my fingers through blades of grass carpeting valleys that stretch off into the distance. And, what’s more, I’m liking the deeper online play mechanics introduced through the Nexus in the updated Space Anomaly (a sort of hub where players can easily find each other, explore together, visit each others’ bases). I didn’t expect to find particular fondness with expanded online play, but it feels like a nice addition.
As those who follow me on any of my social feeds are quite aware, I enjoy the game No Man’s Sky. Actually, that’s something of an understatement. I’ve written quite a few words about the degree to which the boundless universe that Hello Games has given us to explore has captivated me in various blog posts over the past two and a half years. In the first of these, written three weeks after the game launched back in August 2016, I explained,
All my life I have dreamed of exactly this in gaming — an interesting, alternate universe, massive in scale, in which I can freely wander and explore at my own pace. That is what No Man’s Sky is to me, and it’s my observation that many others are similarly moved by the game. The fact that the universe is procedurally generated and that even the game’s creators can’t describe everything that’s out there to be encountered ads to the incredible sense of the unexplored, the alien. There is a lovely feeling of solitude to the whole experience of discovering a world, leaving your mark on it, and moving on to the next.
I began playing the game on the PS4 back on its launch day in August 2016. I was so completely drawn into it that just a few weeks later I decided to build a high-end gaming PC — something I hadn’t done in many years — in order to get the best experience possible in the No Man’s Sky universe. The system I built was able to achieve a higher resolution at a higher frametrate than the PS4, as well as allowing mods to be run (which, in the end, I decided to stay away from in the interest of experiencing the gameplay as intended by the developers).
It wasn’t until a week ago, however, that it enabled me not only to travel across the vast and myriad galaxies within the universe at the heart of the game, but to travel back through time within that universe, as well.
Two years ago I downloaded No Man’s Sky on the Playstation 4 and inserted myself into its infinite universe for the very first time. August 9, 2016 was launch day for Hello Games‘ space exploration survival game and the start of my now two-year journey. While I have now spent over 1,200 hours exploring this fascinating alternate reality, on that particular Tuesday two years ago I had no notion of just how deep into No Man’s Sky I would come to find myself.
After falling quickly in love with No Man’s Sky at launch, I began to gear-up in order to immerse myself as fully as I could. After a few weeks I built a gaming PC in order to give the game more powerful hardware to render its worlds. As the months exploring rolled by, the shelves and walls of my home and my office began to tell the tale of my travels. My family was quite aware when an anticipated update was imminent, and they heard, I fear, a bit more than they were hoping to about the ARG associated with some of said updates.
All my life I have dreamed of exactly this in gaming — an interesting, alternate universe, massive in scale, in which I can freely wander and explore at my own pace. That is what No Man’s Sky is to me, and it’s my observation that many others are similarly moved by the game. The fact that the universe is procedurally generated and that even the game’s creators can’t describe everything that’s out there to be encountered adds to the incredible sense of the unexplored, the alien. There is a lovely feeling of solitude to the whole experience of discovering a world, leaving your mark on it, and moving on to the next.
Here, two years later, I feel no differently and have had the pleasure of seeing that dream realized every time I return to this other universe of mine. Two weeks ago, an absolutely massive update arrived — No Man’s Sky NEXT — and everything in the game’s universe has gotten all the more rich, vivid, evocative.
Hello Games has worked tirelessly in support and expansion of No Man’s Sky these two years (and all of this for free to gamers) and for that, I and other explorers I’ve come to know through Discord, Reddit, and other avenues, are grateful.
