Five Years Later

Ok, so hear me out, first off. I’m not really the best when it comes to writing reviews and what not. But that’s not really what this is about. It’s not even a review. This post is more or less somewhat of a personal journey. But it wasn’t also a journey for myself alone. This whole game was a journey.

This game, the struggles that the team behind it faced, and everything that rose out of the ashes of a once doomed game was an entire, freaking, journey. From its controversial and disastrous launch to what many people call the one of the games with the greatest redemption arcs in perhaps the history of gaming itself, I played the ever loving crap out of this game because it had done something that no other game had done before. But now that I think about, you might not know exactly what it did that was supposed to make it so revolutionary. Well, imagine…

The year is 2016. You’re just relaxing inside your house, escaping the heat of July. You’re scrolling through your phone or maybe just watching the news, maybe even watching some videos on YouTube, I don’t know. And then you come across this brand new game.

No Man’s Sky.

You find out that it’s a game about space, so you know that it’s already gonna be cool, right? But as you dig a little deeper to find out more about this game, you might have found or heard about an interview with one of the game’s creators himself, Sean Murray. And how the game that he and his team made would take

585 billion years to fully explore.

That’s literally 130 times longer than our own planet has been around, and 45 times more than the universe itself has existed! But how could this be? Maybe there was a typo, perhaps an exaggeration, or maybe just a straight up lie, a fib meant to get people’s hopes up. But from what Sean himself had told his interviewers, it was rather quite simple. Instead of his team going by hand to construct more than 18.4 quintillion planets (or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets if you want the exact number), an algorithm was used to generate these worlds instead, using a process known as “procedural generation”. Sure, some games had used this before. But never on a literally universal scale.

And not only did this process save time, but it also saved space on your hard drive as well. Take for example, Fallout 4. Released about a year earlier, you had to have at least 30 gigabytes of space when it released on, well, whatever you play video games. And it takes at least a day and some more hours to beat that game, right? But No Man’s Sky? A game that’ll take over half a trillion years to beat?

10 gigabytes on release. That’s it.

So, if this game was supposed to change the gaming industry back then…

What happened?

“The internet is really good at knowing when somebody has made a mistake. It’s not necessarily the best at determining the most appropriate response, but it’s really good at knowing when somebody has messed something up. We definitely messed up a whole bunch of communication. I’ve never liked talking to the press. I didn’t enjoy it when I had to do it, and when I did it, I was naive and overly excited about my game. There are a lot of things around launch that I regret, or that I would do differently.”

-Sean Murray, 2018

To start things off, the development process for No Man’s Sky began in 2013, and over the course of those three years its development was seen as an ambitious project for a small team by the gaming media in general. Along with this, the hype for this game was steadily, or perhaps more accurately and the somewhat opposite, rapidly growing. And with trailers like these two, it is perhaps easy to see why back then.

So as the days, months, and years went by, the hype for a game in which you could explore an entire universe grew more and more, like an birthday with a delicious cake with every kind of flavor that you could ever want packed into it and cooked to perfection. And when the launch day arrived, people rushed blindly forwards, getting their hands on a copy of No Man’s Sky for their PC and/or PS4. And so eager to begin playing, they did not hesitate to forcefully remove what other game might have been in their lives and began to embark on their journey across their own endless universe. But soon…it began clear. This game that was supposed to be full of life, full of color, full of adventure and excitement was-

Empty.

A dull, almost lifeless universe. While there were the creatures that walked the lands, flew in the skies, and swam in the oceans of many of this countless worlds, they seemed to come few and few. The same could be said for the freighters and other spaceships that were supposed to trek across the galaxies. And that wasn’t even mentioning bugs and graphics issues in the game itself. So when Hello Games itself was asked by numerous people as to what was going on-

Complete silence. As if the company itself had gone dark.

And that same hype for the game quickly turned into an almost hive mind rage, with people demanding their refunds or, for worse matters, taking things to the extremes.

“We didn’t talk about it, but it was as bad as things can get, basically. There’s a smorgasbord of things that the angry mob can do. It is a crowdsourced thing of how bad you can make someone’s life. I getting a death threat about the fact that there were butterflies in our original trailer, and you could see them as you walked past them, but there weren’t any butterflies in the launch game. I thinking to myself: ‘Maybe when you’re sending a death threat about butterflies in a game, you might be the bad guy.’”

-Sean Murray

It was only after months of death threats, mediocre reviews, and an absolute blaster fire of other internet harassment that Sean Murray himself spoke out. He stated that the community itself had asked him to speak up about the silence of Hello Games, and he went on to confess that his game, his team’s ambitious project, was largely unfinished upon released. He went on to state that this was not only somewhat due to harassment from of the community making it hard for his team to fulfill their artistic vision, but also pressure from Sony itself, as the company wanting the game released as soon as possible forced the team to cut many key features of the game itself.

Sean went on, apologizing to the community for what they had been denied before asking them to be more understanding of his team’s current situation, as at the time they were a small studio with a limited budget. He stated that he and his team had tried their best to put all of their time and effort into their game, their vision, and that the complete lack of respect for all the effort he and his team put into their project greatly saddened themselves. Finally, he told the community that his team wanted to improve their project, wishing for it to become what many of the gaming community had hoped for.

And so, after the initial hype for No Man’s Sky had disappeared, and the dust from the backlash had settled down, Sean and his team set out to do just that.

Yeah, exploring space, sailing across the stars, and finding alien life is fun and all.

But what if you could build your own base on your favorite planet?

Well, that’s exactly what this update did! It offered players the chance to settle down on their favorite alien world and relax in a base that was built from scratch. While it might have not really been what some players who had stuck around with the game, it was perhaps a step in the right direction. A glimmer of hope, showing that it’s developers were still as ambitious as before. But it wasn’t until the next update that No Man’s Sky rose from the ashes of a catastrophic launch. And with it began to road to redemption for a once doomed game.

At the time of this update, one year had ed since the launch of No Man’s Sky. It was with this update that the project that Sean and his team at Hello Games set out to bring to the gaming world began to make its comeback. A brand new and revised storyline, which added a layer of mystery as to how you came to be in this universe to begin with. Star systems now had wealth, economy and conflict levels, all with seemed to vary throughout. Portals which could take you from one side of space to the other. New planets, new ships, new…faces? This update brought so much to the table, and the community that once shunned the game and it’s developers began to slowly gravitate back to it. And things only got better from there.

With this update, it was finally possible to play with other people! Not only that, but you were finally to customize your own appearance! You wanna be a red astronaut? You could change the color of your outfit! You want to play as a different species? You could do that too! You could even go on missions with your friends across the star systems if you wanted to. But still…it was lacking something. Or perhaps somethings. Sure it was nice to be able to go on adventures with your friends, but what about being able to meet new people through the game itself? Being able to meet people, perhaps from the other side of the world? Going on missions with random strangers and forming friendships with the ones that stuck around with you?

Or perhaps you want to experience No Man’s Sky in Virtual Reality?

To see the scale of your character compared to your spaceship. To feel like you’re actually on that planet, gathering resources, building your base, making friends with the local wildlife. Or running away from the aggressive ones. Well my friends, Sean and his team went above and ‘Beyond’.

OKAY!

You get the idea now, right? That despite what the team at Hello Games had been through, they didn’t quit? That a game that was once seen as perhaps a dumpster fire has blossomed into a beautiful and dazzling flower? Since Beyond, the game’s 2.0 release, there have been 9 more updates, all with in the last two years! The people at Hello Games are really giving it their all, aren’t they? By the time I even post this they might have released a Five Year Anniversary Update. Or at the least have an event for it.

But now, I assume that we come down to a single question, perhaps the most important question about all of this. About this rollercoaster of a journey, as well as my time from playing this game and traveling across countless star systems.

“Should I play No Man’s Sky?”

And I answer your question with ones of my own.

Do you like outer space and the mysteries that it hides?

If so, then yes.

Do you like exploration in games, and sometimes getting lost in the process?

If so, then yes again.

Do you like an open world experience, with the freedom to go wherever you want to go?

If so, THEN YES!

So yeah, that’s about it. Didn’t really think of a nice way to end this other than to tell you how awesome I think this game is, so thanks for taking the time to read this. Peace out!

Edit:

Sure enough, they did end up doing a little something for their Five Year Anniversary.