To be honest, I never thought I’d get into No Man’s Sky. In fact, my latest attempt isn’t the first time I’ve tried. On two previous occasions, I’ve jumped into my red exosuit and donned my trusty multitool, only to fade away after a few days.
But this time, something finally clicked, and it clicked hard.
I think the problem I’ve had in my previous attempts at the game was the same thing that irritates me about all survival games in the early stages: the tedium of the survival aspect. These games teach you to make a tool, but the tool wears down. They teach you that you need to chop wood, but the wood burns up and needs to be replaced. Each new aspect of surviving requires constant re-visitation that distracts from your progress, and the more they stack up, the more your overall progress slows. NMS is no different, requiring constant gathering of (admittedly abundant) resources, recharging of life support systems and mining lasers, and crafting of minor components and fuel.
Thankfully, once you’re able to push through that initial wall of tedium, either by upgrading equipment or by tuning difficulty levels to reduce resource consumption, the game really takes off – literally. Once I was able to freely travel between planets and establish small bases with travel portals, much of the minutia seemed to melt away in favor of true exploration and a feeling that I was now in the “real game.”
My first goal was to get into a different ship. Hello Games makes it fairly easy to upgrade from the starter ship into something a little bigger and more aesthetic. All it takes is a little asteroid mineral farming and a quick visit to a space station, where every NPC visitor is happy to part with a ship for the right amount of units. Something that I appreciate about the design of NMS is that once you break through the aforementioned tedium, low-level ship progression does not feel insurmountable.
Little did I know that mere hours after upgrading my starter ship to an inexpensive C-class shuttle, my exploration would be rewarded with coordinates to a crashed, and absolutely free, B-class explorer ship! All it would cost me was a little additional resource gathering to repair damaged components. Until this moment I was not aware that it was possible to find a downed ship and claim it. That’s a pretty cool feature that might keep me out there exploring for a long time.
Most veteran NMS players are probably well aware of everything mentioned above. After all, the game came out in 2016, and most folks aren’t as slow to get into games as I am. As happy as I was to slowly make my way though old systems, I am especially excited that the most recent update, Voyagers, has introduced a lot of pretty cool stuff for those of us who enjoy the spaceship aspect of the game. For one, it’s added the ability to build modular, customizable corvette-class starships. For the first time, players can walk around the interiors of their largest ships, share the space with friends, and even open up the hatch and take a space walk.
While I was more than happy to gradually work my way towards the new features, a friend reminded me that the newly activated community expedition, which happens to be corvette-related, is active for only a brief window of time. Since the rewards include corvette modules and some other things that would be very helpful to a new player, I decided to jump head-first into my first expedition.
For a first-timer, expeditions are a little confusing. Visiting a specific NPC will initiate a conversation that attempts to walk you through the basics: You can take some stuff with you, the expedition is treated like a new game, and you are able to switch back-and-forth if you wish. Sounds reasonable enough. However, after depositing my items into the expedition cache and pressing the “start expedition” button, my character awoke on an unfamiliar planet with nothing. After a bit of pinging around the community, I learned that this was to be expected, and I wouldn’t get my items until a little further into the story. So off I went, ready to work towards building a corvette!
Expeditions are basically a list of achievements (called milestones) that need not be accomplished in any particular order. That is to say, there is a loose chronology to how the expedition guides you from one point to another, but it’s sometimes easy to accidentally finish a milestone without even being aware that it exists. For example, thanks to a glitch in how players corvettes can share the same landing pad in a space station, I accidentally finished the “hitch a ride on someone else’s corvette” milestone when the player sharing my pad took off and dragged me along!
As another example: To my surprise there is a milestone for taking a screenshot of your corvette, which I did as soon as I had mine assembled because that’s just what you do, right? So far my favorite milestone was to spacewalk for 60 seconds. Sounds easy, right? Well, it is, unless you’re like me and you forget to stop your ship first. It’s a bad feeling to step off the ramp and watch your new corvette zip away into space. Luckily, the devs built in a summon ship feature just for people like me.
Overall, I’ve been very impressed most aspects of NMS. I’ve barely scratched the surface of many of the systems and I feel like there are still many yet to discover and explore. For example, I haven’t even glanced at a freighter yet. I have no idea what they’re used for, but I’m vaguely aware that they exist. I have not set up any industrial outposts yet, which is one of my goals to reduce the amount of resource farming I’ve got to do. I’d also like to learn all of the words to at least one of the alien languages. In all, I’m so glad that I finally pushed through the wall of micro-management to discover all of the fun and interesting things available in this space sandbox!
It’s a big wide universe out there, and the MMO industry is busy filling up the space between the stars – with sci-fi MMORPGs! Join the MOP team here in Stick and Rudder for intermittent voyages into all the big space-trucking, dog-fighting, star-flighting MMOs of the moment.
