The procedural space exploration game. 4 years ago, it seemed like we would have a glut of these. From No Man’s Sky to Notch’s n^C squared or whatever it was called to Elite: Dangerous, this looked like a market that was saturated. As a fan of these types of ideas, I was really stoked.
Boy, did we count our chickens there.
Procedural generation makes it possible to create a nearly infinite number of certain kinds of data points. One of the most frequently kind of generated procedural surfaces is basically a geographical map of something.
This technology has existed basically since computers were fast enough to do it, and it would be impossible for me to review the extremely controversial PC/PS4 game No Man’s Sky without mentioning my relationship with another game called Starflight, from 1986.
A good application for procedural generation is obvious: creating limitless planets for a player to explore. Out of this, another obvious game design idea emerges: why not have people explore through this vast amount of computer generated data to find a trail of intentionally-placed clues and artifacts towards some kind of satisfying ending?
Starflight was a difficult game, tough to get off the ground, and tough to keep yourself afloat. Any kind of movement required a very rare and expensive element, so you had to make sure your exploration was profitable to continue. But, the mechanics were identical to NMS: Pilot a ship around to different planets, land on said planets, mine resources, endure storms, earthquakes and hostile life forms, and take it back to a space station to sell it.
I never could beat Starflight, and from what I hear it wasn’t very difficult once you mini/maxed your strategy, but I did rent it on several occasions, which means I really, really was into the idea of exploring through this limitless expanse of planets and stars. The flavor of this concept is right on- it’s something that feels a lot like our favorite space exploration TV shows, movies and novels. But I guess the struggle to make a game about it, that people are satisfied with, goes on, and if NMS is an indicator, it is a task which technology and funding is making more, not less difficult.
There are a few notes NMS gets right. The most impressive thing is that there’s no skyboxes. That planet you see in the sky above- I flew to it, then took the screenshot below, looking back on the planet I had just left. You can also see space stations in orbit above the planets, although not, unfortunately, the fleets of cargo ships you regularly see in space.
Other positive notes is obviously the quality of the procedural generation of planets and ships. Both of these products look excellent in the game, producing stuff that, 40 hours in, still yields unfamiliar results. Planets are made fantastically, with plenty of interesting, different kind of terrain to move about on and in. They are packed with relics, buildings and other articles of civilization, so the game doesn’t have that endless terrain feel that other procedural games do.
The last real positive note is the soundtrack. Slow-building, guitar and synth driven post rock is almost the perfect choice for this lonely, very lazy exploration of these beautiful worlds, with these beautiful, explorable skies.
However, as you are probably aware, No Man’s Sky is controversial because probably most gamers realize that it hasn’t lived up to its expectations. There are plenty of high quality analysis of these expectations and the fact that NMS doesn’t meet up to them, so I’ll leave that to those. Let’s just make the assumption that No Man’s Sky is a product failure at launch.
I don’t write reviews of things I don’t enjoy, so it is a fact that I enjoy playing No Man’s Sky and am still doing so a week in. However, since its such a high profile product failure, I have to address its problems going forward. These problems may be something that can be fixed, but there is literally no reason a single player game should ship in such a poor state.
The first problem is the controls. Movement of the player feels a little clumsy and there is no jump, rather you immediately turn on your jet pack, which doesn’t feel great. Flight controls are extremely auto-piloty, with the player having no fine-tuned control over the ship, and very wonky. Its a challenge, and not in a good way, to land the ship anywhere you really intend to. Sometimes when I launch, physics glitches and I am instantly blasted into deep space. Space stations require you to jump to a higher level to enter the room, and I don’t understand why. A game like this should have exemplary flight and disembarked player movement feel, but its far below average.
The second problem is something I will just refer to as the game design, although that’s kind of a reductive term. The overall concept is that you will level up your ship and your player and your gun while exploring the galaxy and fighting space pirates, hostile creatures, and a mysterious robotic race called the Sentinels as you try to do it.
Ok, that all sounds good so far. But NMS commits a deadly sin in the implementation of almost every one of those points.
Leveling up is committing a deadly sin: Making people give up things they have to level. You can’t get more storage on a ship without getting a new one, and you can’t bring any of the upgrades on the old ship with you on the new one. It’s even hard to salvage the resources on the technologies on your old thing when you get a new thing, because of inventory problems, which I’ll talk about next. This makes levelling your gun or ship a bittersweet, annoying experience, rather than something that brings joy.
The game’s overall levelling mechanic is- customizable storage slots, which you can either use for upgrades OR carrying capacity of resources. Nobody has ever combined upgrade and inventory storage together before, because its a deadly design sin. Storage isn’t fun. Having to drop things because you can’t carry anymore isn’t fun.
You need to sometimes reload things with resources for them to keep working, like deflector shields, environmental protections or weapons. That’s cool. But its not cool to have to go back into your inventory during combat to recharge things. Combat is paused while you do so, which is good, but it’s still not very comfortable and makes combat even clumsier than it already is.
Combat is choppy due to the poor performance of the game, and feels very alpha-level, not very well refined. Most weapons seem to have a ton of auto aim on them, probably because the developers didn’t want to make there be different combat between control pad and PC versions. In any case, it’s good, because the combat and movement of the enemies is so choppy that combat would be incredibly frustrating if it didn’t have it.
But overall, combat doesn’t feel very threatening, beating opponents isn’t very satisfying and it really suffers from a lack of diversity. 40 hours in, and ive only faced 4 kinds of enemies: Hovering sentinels that don’t dodge and just shoot you, walking dog-like sentinels that don’t dodge and just shoot you, pirate space craft that just circle around you, and creatures that move at random and seem to teleport from place to place. Oh also, every enemy auto hits. Don’t even bother dodging because they never miss.
The levelling up system isn’t terrible but like everything in the game, it’s so poorly thought out and really just kind of silly. You need certain resources to craft products, but first you need the blueprints for those products. Blueprints are everywhere, but there are only 4 or 5 tiers of equipment and less than 1% of the way towards the galactic center, I’ve already seen some of the 5th tier. So basically, I always have every blueprint I find. Some encounter types are guaranteed to yield a new blueprint, but these are as rare as finding a disabled ship, which I’ll rant about more later.
Crafting was, I suppose, supposed to be atomic, like in Minecraft, but it is recipie based, and it doesn’t make any sense. There’s supposed to be classes of minerals, like silicates, neutrals, oxides- but it just doesn’t really land, and you end up just feeling like you need random resources to craft things.
The game seems to really want you to just storm through content and keep warping and not backtracking. That’s cool, most people wouldn’t want to backtrack, but there is a very important situation in which you would.
To upgrade a ship, which is probably the most exciting thing flavor wise, if you think about it, you either need to buy it off of an alien at a space station or trading post, or repair one.
Buying them is tough because, there seems to be no tiers of ship sellers. They are running the gamut between being 100,000 unit ships and 16,000,000 unit ships. So its very unlikely early in the game you’ll be able to afford to buy one.
So the alternative is to find a distress signal, then go to a wreck site and rebuild the wreck. This is a fantastic idea, but since you can’t backtrack, if you don’t know what resources to carry around or don’t have the carrying capacity to carry them, this feature is useless. Also, 40 hours in, and i’ve had a grand total of 3 wrecked ship sightings, and none of them but the first were better than my current ship.
So I will stick to my promise of not addressing the “controversy”, and simply focus on what I think about the game. Good points are, beautiful planet generation, and great flavor, of landing on and exploring a limitless scope of planets.
But the game to do, within that exploration? Its ultimately very poorly thought out, obviously not very well tested by people who weren’t stakeholders in the game, and if anybody did, their feedback wasn’t taken seriously.
Game design isn’t fun. It’s not fun to see your very cool ideas get crushed in testing, requiring you to make your brilliant idea much less brilliant, and much more effective for the masses. I feel like a lot of these “rockstar” game developer pet projects, from Daikatana to Black and White to Spore to No Man’s Sky, get into this emperor’s new clothes situation where nobody wants to tell anybody what needs fixing and nobody wants to listen. But you have to do it. The dream moves into reality where rubber hits the road, not in the drivers seat.
