Disclaimer: I was very ill for most of this week and am still recovering, that’s why today’s post is a shorter one and not in-line with the results of my recent poll.
In 2014 at age 14, there was nothing cooler to me than space.
On the recommendation of a much respected maths teacher of mine, I had consumed Star Trek: The Original Series and was then beginning to make my way through TNG as well; Elite: Dangerous hadn’t yet come to the Xbox Preview Program (sort of like Early Access for people who were on-board the Titanic) but I would watch videos of it most days in envy, excited for the day when it would be unleashed on console players too. When Elite Dangerous did at last arrive, I became an avid player for the rest of the decade. I had already followed the Mass Effect trilogy to its bitter-sweet end, spending hundreds of hours across the three games and from the age of 11 until this very day on Substack, I have been writing science fiction stories. It is my favourite genre.
Later that year in 2014, I distinctly remember borrowing my mum’s laptop while on a camping holiday and sitting in a stuffy tent to watch E3 2014 (RIP) I like to disconnect from video games while on holiday for the most part so I was tuning in only after hearing rumours of a Crackdown 3 and with a desire to see what was coming next on the -then new- Xbox One… but it was another game on another platform entirely that stole the whole show.
It feels like the gaming internet is almost entirely inhabited by people who were born after the PS4 came out, so there is only one narrative around No Man’s Sky today: a bad game that was made good but if you were there, you’ll remember the feverish hype behind this game and how violently it crashed and burned at launch. No Man’s Sky wasn’t your typical triple-A failure like a buggy Assassin’s Creed or an unoptimised PC port like Arkham Knight, it disappointed an entire generation in 2016 and was one of those gaming events that pulled my continued participation in this hobby into question as I entered early adulthood. I’m not sure another botched launch has made people quite as bitter since, only Cyberpunk 2077.
But I’m not here to talk about all that, the story of No Man’s Sky’s fall and then eventual rise has been told again and again on the internet -and frankly, the game has been good far longer than it was ever bad, which was from about 2016 launch to mid-2019: so only the first 3 years of its 10 year life so far- since then it’s been good and since around 2022? I’d say it surpassed its competitors in the genre and claimed the crown.
I want to pay tribute to No Man’s Sky, on the week of its tenth anniversary, not to dwell on the past.
Now In Technicolour
One of my favourite things about No Man’s Sky is how vividly beautiful the game is.
As a late-teen, before No Man’s Sky was ‘engoodened’ I spent a number of years as an avid Elite Dangerous player once it arrived on consoles: journeying to the centre of the galaxy, engineering up a ship, grinding passenger missions, whatever you can think of in that game I’ve probably done it. I have fond memories of playing Elite with friends but if there’s one thing planets are not in Elite it’s interesting.
Elite Dangerous players, sincerely, if you try No Man’s Sky you’ll probably never go back, what Sean Murray and Hello Games have managed in 10 years compared to what Frontier have done with Elite Dangerous is fucking embarrassing for the latter.
These are just some of my own screenshots I dug up, before this Substack I didn’t make an effort to document what I play, so needless to say, I’ve seen a lot more than these relatively tame examples.
In No Man’s Sky, every single planet in the galaxy can be set foot upon and traversed with no exceptions. Planets come in every shape and size too: you can find oceanic worlds and captain a submarine into the depths, you can find planets of endless rolling wasteland with giant worms that burrow through the Earth and drive between them with all manner of exocraft; you can tame many of the creatures you find to use as mounts thereafter or put them in Pokémon battles aboard the local space station. I don’t know of another video game that uses procedural generation so well and creates such compelling natural landscapes in doing so.
The Universe However You Like
For whatever reason, the other games in this space-sim genre love to make space as boring as possible.
In Elite Dangerous: a game which might as well be a second job if you make the mistake of getting into it, your options are either to grind out combat, where pay is risky, generally not that high unless you’re doing the DLC-locked, on-foot combat zones; grind the exploration path where you fly through space holding down the scanner button and sitting through warp loading screens, perhaps stopping once in a while to drive your moon buggy across yet another brown-grey moon; there is of course the trading route, which relies on real life hours of ferrying passengers about and using third party websites to track where commodities sell well because Frontier can’t be bothered to give you the tools to properly engage with 1/3 of the major playstyles. I’ve played bits of 4X and found it much the same and I’m not willing to put money into the Star Citizen money churner in order to test it out.
No Man’s Sky is actually fun.
No Man’s Sky infamously launched without multiplayer but in recent years, it’s had a Destiny-style hub station added that can be accessed from anywhere in the universe as well as timed events and raids. I haven’t delved into those too much but you can team up with a group of friends in casual exploration and I have great memories of pillaging some of these Derelict Freighters, which are like mini dungeon crawls with enemies, harsh survival conditions and pitch-black darkness.
The ships and weapons in No Man’s Sky are also procedurally generated: a mish-mash of different parts and coloursbased on a few dozen different templates and what I love about this is that even if you and a friend get the same unique ship with the same stats, the chances are they’ll still look completely different or have an entirely different colour scheme; you can even hatch living ships from rare eggs and those look nothing like anything else in the universe.
You can trade commodities if you like but you can also hunt for buried treasure and plunder lost ruins, dig up illicit artefacts and steal ancient bones, you can explore and make insane amounts of money in this game but it means a lot more when you can name everything and even 10 years later, other players will know you discovered a planet when they set foot there; combat is probably No Man’s Sky’s weakest aspect but the weapon variety and the other rewards make that worth it too. Again, this game outclasses the competition on sheer fun-factor, every time.
Charm With Gravitational Pull
Modern space games tend to follow a dull, industrial aesthetic or a kind of NASA-punk, yeah! ‘Murica look, even though they were beaten to the punch on every notable space exploration milestone by the USSR’s own space program. No Man’s Sky on the other hand takes inspiration from the science fiction book covers of the latter half of the 20th century, I personally find this much more appealing and the unique aesthetic not only sets the game apart but captures that all-important sense of discovery and the wonder of an optimistic future that was so important to sci-fi of the era, Start Trek in-particular.
Playing into this too are the 3 species of No Man’s Sky: the Gek, the Korvas and the Vy’keen. While the lore hints at some unpleasant dealings in the past, these 3 species now live in relative harmony with each other and the hustle and bustle of each space station and trade outpost gives civilisation in No Man’s Sky a pleasing, Mos Eisley feel. You can even found your own starport in No Man’s Sky and attract the denizens of the galaxy to settle there with you, again, this is a game with countless ways to play so I tend to spend most of my time aboard freighters rather than setting up bases but I can imagine this being a very rewarding experience on a particularly attractive planet.
I’m someone who has dabbled in a lot of languages and speaks 2 fluently and one up to a conversational level, so the alien language learning aspect in No Man’s Sky was a pull even before I got the game and I have to say, the way it’s implemented feels oddly authentic. The way long blocks of text are slowly filled in by little phrases you recognise before becoming completely intelligible later down the line reminded me of my experience learning Russian.
An Unlikely Success
There is a lot that went into the initial failure of No Man’s Sky: the devastating floods of Britannia herself did massive damage to Hello Games in late-2014, not too long before launch and Sony quickly hung the studio out to dry; Sean Murray was quite visibly unprepared for the level of hype the game generated as well. Despite all that, what could have been an international embarrassment for the British games industry was turned into one of its greatest successes, great enough to end up on my list of the 10 best British video games.
No Man’s Sky isn’t a game for everyone and it’s not something I play all the time but this title is a gift that keeps on giving. Every few months, I hop back on and there is always loads of new stuff to play with or new world types to discover. This is the sort of game I dreamed of playing as an adolescent and I’m glad it all came together for No Man’s Sky in the end. When Elite Dangerous tries to become your second job, Star Citizen is an endless money black hole and EVE has you funding virtual wars with real money, No Man’s Sky keeps the joyful, adventurous soul of science fiction alive.
Here’s to 10 more years of exploring space.
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Haven’t played in a while but I put a decent amount of time into No Man’s Sky with a friend of mine about a year ago—it’s got a lot going for it playing solo, but it’s fucking *awesome* if you’ve got a co-op partner
No Man's Sky is still on my 'games I really ought to get into one day' list. I played it for a little bit but didn't have time to commit to it fully back then. It does have that 'game you could only dream of as a child' sort of vibe to it, which is probably why the initial hype grew outside of the devs' initial capabilities.
There's just something about space exploration that makes the imagination go wild. In addition to the projects you've mentioned, I also remember Spore as one of those games where the mere premise was enough to create an unconquerable mountain of expectations, even though I ended up quite liking that game myself.
Feel better!