They just keep bringing me back, don’t they?

If you haven’t heard the news, No Man’s Sky (NMS) recently released yet another massive free update to the game. This time around, you can build a corvette-class ship that will allow you to… get up and walk around in your ship. That might not sound like much, but it is actually kind of rare even in space games, especially considering you do so with no loading screens. In any case, I decided I need to give things another go after 5 (five!) years.

What I encountered was still one of the worst opening sequences for almost any game.

I apparently have never commented on it before, but NMS starts with you awakening on an alien planet, your suit powering up, and then a number of warnings about your environmental protection waning. Conceptually, this is fine; other survival games start you out in imminent danger too. For example, ARK has you awakening on a beach and sometimes being eaten by a raptor right away. In NMS’s case though, it just feels… bad. Your visor scanner doesn’t work, sometimes you don’t spawn near required resources to refill your environmental protection, and you don’t have the terrain modification gun yet which otherwise trivializes most hostile weather (e.g. dig a tunnel and get underground).

Worse, I actually tried starting things back up by immediately choosing an Expedition. Big mistake. Expeditions were added to the game several patches ago, and they are basically more focused experiences where you start out on predefined planets and need to accomplish specific goals. The problem is that these are absolutely tuned more for advanced players with a good grasp of the underlying mechanics. Well, and the other problem is that everyone is thrown into the same subsets of planets, so you might spawn in an area where everyone has mined most of the nearby ore. More annoyingly to me though, is that when you are looking around for resources, you’re bombarded with dozens of (useless) player base icons, making finding things difficult.

So, yeah, don’t do what I did. Instead, get a foothold in the game and then go into an Expedition – including bringing some good loot in with you! – via a vendor you unlock a few hours in the game.

In any case, since I hate myself, I chose to start a brand new save on Survival difficulty. C’mon, I had 130+ hours logged already, right? Beginning is brutal, as mentioned, and you have to contend with some extra nonsense like smaller stack sizes for material, etc. Within about 15 hours though, I’m back to having 22 million units, 6000 nanites, and unlocking all 10 freighter storage racks.

No Man’s Sky has indeed improved tremendously over the years, but fundamentally it does still have a problem with “but… why?” It’s the same place I landed on five years ago, and unfortunately it does not appear much has changed. Well, OK, there have been a lot of changes. Expeditions, there are now Dissonant planets with corrupted Sentinels, there is a Settlement system, Pirate Dreadnaughts to fight/own, the new bespoke Corvette-class ship building system, and so on.

Fundamentally, though? When you’re on foot, none of the randomly-generated creatures matter; only Sentinels pose any threat whatsoever, and there are only like a half-dozen types. Why even have so many different kinds of weapons for your multi-tool if only one is needed to take down every enemy? Meanwhile, if you spend more than 30 seconds in space, you’re likely to be accosted by fleets of hostile pirates that will absolutely murder you if given half a chance. The space gameplay “loop” is not particularly deep, but nevertheless feels miles more complete than what you are doing in the other 80% of the game, e.g. walking on planets.

Having said all that… yeah, 130+ hours plus however many I muster this time around. I’m harsh on the game because I’m mad. Hello Games have added so much and just inexplicably left such a gaping hole in the center and I don’t understand why. Maybe having Gek pirates running around on foot blasting you would feel too weird or whatever, but apparently it’s fine when they’re faceless ships? OK, just use some of the six trillion randomized alien creatures and make some of them require that fancy mech to fight! Or lean more into those bug aliens that are apparently as ubiquitous as the Sentinels for (presumably) some kind of lore reason.

Or, I guess, ignore all that and hurry up and give me Light No Fire.