Posted July 18, 2021
No Man's Sky
So, after finishing Subnautica, I asked the good people here suggestions for the next game I should play, with a somewhat similar thematic, albeit not identical. From all suggestions, I chose No Man's Sky.
It's a great game, but it has a lot of limitations and an enormous amount of padding. In fact, over time, it made me appreciate Subnautica's tight design even more.
There's a lot of places to go, after all, procedural generation is the base of the game. You can always hop into your starship and head to somewhere random and find new interesting views to see. The thing is, everything starts repeating way too soon, even though it keeps feeding you slightly new stuff over time. Every few planets you'll see a repeating plant, creature, or wacky mineral formation. In fact, if you land on two different planets of the same type, chances are, the flora will be practically the same, with very few notable changes. Still, dozens of hours in, and, blam! You accidentally find a new planet with entirely different stuff that you had never seen before.
On the other hand, the same can't be said about the structures. Every planet has a huge amount of the very same structures randomly placed everywhere, and even the insides of these places have a tendency of being exactly the same. Sometimes, the overall theme of the constructions will change due to belonging to a different race, but the insides will be the same.
Yet, there's an huge amount of stuff to do. I'm 160+ hours in and there are systems and mission types I have barely engaged with. In this regards, it reminds me a lot of Daggerfall, and I'm pretty sure a modern Elder Scrolls game crafted following the philosophies of Daggerfall would feel very similar to NMS in various aspects.
The main story is somewhat simple and even tries to help you learn a lot of the games systems along. It does try to appear more complex and profound than it actually is, though.
It's an incredibly easy game to get lost into, and see hours pass without really noticing, even with all the repetition.
What I didn't like is the grinding, because it often feels like it's there just to pad the game and keep you around for longer. Your character can build stuff instantly, but "transforming" and "processing" resources takes minutes (though you can do other stuff, even pause the game and ALT+TAB away from it meanwhile).
You have a huge inventory available, but you start with less than half of it usable. You have to grind inventory spaces one at a time, either finding upgrades in the wild, or buying them (ever more expensive) in every new Space station you enter (and you can never buy more than one space from each vendor). It's even worse because the game has this great focus in doing stuff inside your various inventories (personal, ship, exocraft, freighter, base storage) and constantly carrying resources with you, yet, adding inventory spaces to your ships and freighters is even more difficult and complicated (because it's either expensive as fuck, or you got to find extremely rare items that allow you to add inventory space to them), not to mention that damage to your ship and multi tool is often represented by broken inventory spaces, or broken technology that is installed in these spaces (you install tools and upgrades in your inventory spaces, you even have dedicated tech tabs in it) and you have to find the necessary resources to fix them.
There are three currencies in the game, units, nanites and quicksilver. Units are somewhat easy to grind once you're far enough into the game, but nanites are always an absolute chore to grind. Quicksilver even more so, since you can only get so much per day you play the game, but it's worth noticing that Quicksilver is only used for cosmetic items, being a reward for certain multiplayer missions (that, thankfully, you can do solo). The thing with nanites, is that you need upwards of 50k of them for certain necessary upgrades, but they come in few hundreds every now and then. It's infuriating.
Finally, there are the exploits. Which I'm not sure are still in the game intentionally or not. For example, you can find abandoned broken ships you can claim for your self, and you can fix and keep them, or scrap them for items, both useful and sellable. You build a base next to one, or put a save beacon there and everyday it respawns, the same ship, the same loot once you scrap it (so, if you find one that happens to give you a storage augmentation for ships, you can get an extra one per day). I've also somehow, cut a 24 hour timer on a mission short once, by entering the Anomaly (which is a multiplayer hub you can summon and enter anywhere in space). There's also a weird bug that's very easy to trigger that allows you to essentially bypass all the nanite grind as much as you want. I ended up using it, but I kept that feeling of "Why not have the goddamned nanite economy better balanced instead of this bullshit?"
Lastly, as I said above, it's an incredibly easy game to get lost into, and see hours pass without really noticing, even with all the repetition. And for that I recommend it.
So, after finishing Subnautica, I asked the good people here suggestions for the next game I should play, with a somewhat similar thematic, albeit not identical. From all suggestions, I chose No Man's Sky.
It's a great game, but it has a lot of limitations and an enormous amount of padding. In fact, over time, it made me appreciate Subnautica's tight design even more.
There's a lot of places to go, after all, procedural generation is the base of the game. You can always hop into your starship and head to somewhere random and find new interesting views to see. The thing is, everything starts repeating way too soon, even though it keeps feeding you slightly new stuff over time. Every few planets you'll see a repeating plant, creature, or wacky mineral formation. In fact, if you land on two different planets of the same type, chances are, the flora will be practically the same, with very few notable changes. Still, dozens of hours in, and, blam! You accidentally find a new planet with entirely different stuff that you had never seen before.
On the other hand, the same can't be said about the structures. Every planet has a huge amount of the very same structures randomly placed everywhere, and even the insides of these places have a tendency of being exactly the same. Sometimes, the overall theme of the constructions will change due to belonging to a different race, but the insides will be the same.
Yet, there's an huge amount of stuff to do. I'm 160+ hours in and there are systems and mission types I have barely engaged with. In this regards, it reminds me a lot of Daggerfall, and I'm pretty sure a modern Elder Scrolls game crafted following the philosophies of Daggerfall would feel very similar to NMS in various aspects.
The main story is somewhat simple and even tries to help you learn a lot of the games systems along. It does try to appear more complex and profound than it actually is, though.
It's an incredibly easy game to get lost into, and see hours pass without really noticing, even with all the repetition.
What I didn't like is the grinding, because it often feels like it's there just to pad the game and keep you around for longer. Your character can build stuff instantly, but "transforming" and "processing" resources takes minutes (though you can do other stuff, even pause the game and ALT+TAB away from it meanwhile).
You have a huge inventory available, but you start with less than half of it usable. You have to grind inventory spaces one at a time, either finding upgrades in the wild, or buying them (ever more expensive) in every new Space station you enter (and you can never buy more than one space from each vendor). It's even worse because the game has this great focus in doing stuff inside your various inventories (personal, ship, exocraft, freighter, base storage) and constantly carrying resources with you, yet, adding inventory spaces to your ships and freighters is even more difficult and complicated (because it's either expensive as fuck, or you got to find extremely rare items that allow you to add inventory space to them), not to mention that damage to your ship and multi tool is often represented by broken inventory spaces, or broken technology that is installed in these spaces (you install tools and upgrades in your inventory spaces, you even have dedicated tech tabs in it) and you have to find the necessary resources to fix them.
There are three currencies in the game, units, nanites and quicksilver. Units are somewhat easy to grind once you're far enough into the game, but nanites are always an absolute chore to grind. Quicksilver even more so, since you can only get so much per day you play the game, but it's worth noticing that Quicksilver is only used for cosmetic items, being a reward for certain multiplayer missions (that, thankfully, you can do solo). The thing with nanites, is that you need upwards of 50k of them for certain necessary upgrades, but they come in few hundreds every now and then. It's infuriating.
Finally, there are the exploits. Which I'm not sure are still in the game intentionally or not. For example, you can find abandoned broken ships you can claim for your self, and you can fix and keep them, or scrap them for items, both useful and sellable. You build a base next to one, or put a save beacon there and everyday it respawns, the same ship, the same loot once you scrap it (so, if you find one that happens to give you a storage augmentation for ships, you can get an extra one per day). I've also somehow, cut a 24 hour timer on a mission short once, by entering the Anomaly (which is a multiplayer hub you can summon and enter anywhere in space). There's also a weird bug that's very easy to trigger that allows you to essentially bypass all the nanite grind as much as you want. I ended up using it, but I kept that feeling of "Why not have the goddamned nanite economy better balanced instead of this bullshit?"
Lastly, as I said above, it's an incredibly easy game to get lost into, and see hours pass without really noticing, even with all the repetition. And for that I recommend it.
