I haven’t played No Man’s Sky since launch. What’s it like going back?

I’m one of the few people who actually rather liked Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky on its original launch. While it was clear that the game had been hyped up considerably more than it was able to deliver, I really enjoyed the freeform, exploratory gameplay and the feeling that one was stepping inside a Roger Dean painting and wandering around.

I haven’t touched the game since it enjoyed any of its major updates over the course of the last six years, so with the game’s sixth anniversary bringing with it a revamped ability to own, design and generally fiddle around with capital ships — something which I didn’t know the game offered, but which is rather appealing to me — I decided to boot it up, start a new game and see exactly how the experience differed from when I played it on day one.

I have mixed feelings about games that get constant updates, but they’re a reality of the modern gaming space — so in situations like this it’s worth revisiting titles like No Man’s Sky.

No Man's Sky

Of course, I had realistic expectations in place — I didn’t expect the new capital ship update would immediately be relevant to a new player, for example — but I was curious to see exactly what it was like to jump back in to the game as someone who hasn’t played it for a long time, effectively getting the full “new player experience”.

What I was expecting was a feeling somewhat akin to jumping into a non-Final Fantasy XIV MMO for the first time after it’s already had several expansion packs: constantly running into things that weren’t relevant to you yet, but which offered no explanation as to when they would become relevant; a continual sense of overall “inferiority” in the overall game world; and generally a feeling that if you weren’t there from day one, you might as well not bother.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen, because the introductory missions for No Man’s Sky provide a decent interactive tutorial as well as providing a sense of narrative context for your adventure. In some respects, this part of the game hasn’t changed hugely since its original release, but there are a few noteworthy additions that make it clear No Man’s Sky in 2022 is very different to No Man’s Sky in 2016.

No Man's Sky

For the unfamiliar, No Man’s Sky opens with you waking up in an environmental suit on a random planet somewhere in the game’s massive universe. As the cliché goes, you have no idea how you got there, why you’re there or what you’re supposed to be doing, but the computerised systems in your suit seem to have some good suggestions as to how you might be able to survive.

Over the course of a few hours of gameplay, you’ll gather materials to repair the damaged systems in your suit and multi-tool, add some new features to it, locate a downed spaceship whose owner is nowhere to be seen, repair it, fly it, land it again, start building a base and, along the way, be teased with an intriguing mystery that you can optionally follow over the course of the game as a whole.

Most of that is as I remember it, with the exception of the base building. This was actually added to the game relatively early on, with the “Foundation” update of November 2016, but it was new to me. It allows you to make use of resources you’ve mined, refined and otherwise acquired to construct buildings and facilities which can subsequently be used for various purposes. There’s even a research tree, for those who like that sort of thing.

No Man's Sky

Over time, you can populate your base with non-player characters to staff various terminals and provide you with missions that, in turn, will enable you to expand your base further. The NPCs will also automate certain processes and unlock new gameplay options, meaning you can be more and more efficient at doing what you do, and no longer need to solely rely on your own patience for shooting at plants and rocks to acquire resources.

For me, the core appeal of No Man’s Sky was that it always felt like it was supposed to be a spiritual successor to classic exploratory space sims from the relatively early days of computing — games like EA’s Starflight and Toys for Bob’s Star Control II. There was definitely a hint of that in the early days back when I first played it, but with the addition of everything that has been put into the game over the course of the six years since launch, it really does feel like it’s reached its potential to be a truly modern take on those classics.

I was concerned that the massive number of updates the game has received since 2016 might make it feel completely overwhelming and directionless, bombarding the player with possibilities and making it impossible to focus on what you wanted to do. But my experiences with returning to the game and starting afresh have reassured me somewhat; while there are indeed a lot more possibilities for what you might want to do in the game in the long term now, you certainly don’t get them all thrown at you at once.

No Man's Sky

In fact, if anything, the game has a much more “game-like” feel now, with a clear structure and sense of progression. In some respects, I feel like that’s a bit of a shame, as I really liked the sort of “interactive art installation” feeling that the game’s original day-one release had to it. But ultimately, Hello Games have a vision as to what they want to deliver with No Man’s Sky, and that initial release didn’t really represent it.

One thing I will say is that although there’s now a much stronger emphasis on completing missions in order to progress and unlock things, there’s a constant sense that at any time, assuming you have the appropriate resources and technology, you could simply bugger off to another star system and just see what’s going on over there, or simply pursue your own self-set goals. And that’s a real sort of “best of both worlds” situation; for those who enjoy completing objectives, you can do that; for those who simply enjoy exploring, you can do that too.

My interest in No Man’s Sky is certainly revitalised after just a few hours of play on a fresh save file. So if it’s been a while since you took to the stars — perhaps because the game wasn’t quite what you hoped when you first played it — then I’d encourage you to give it another look. While it might not feel like things have changed radically in your first few hours of play, over time it’ll become clear that this is a considerably more ambitious, impressive game than pretty much anything else out there right now.

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Pete Davison
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