You Can't Take the Sky From Me...
Note: Originally I was going to be talking about NieR : Automata this week but due to me playing WAY to much Zelda : Breath of the Wild I did not get as far I felt I should in order to formulate proper thoughts on it. So that will be coming but maybe not for a couple weeks.
A little less than a year ago a small company released a game with very big expectations - No Man's Sky (NMS). The hype meter was off the charts along with unrealistic expectations. Now I get excited about new games that look fun but I've been at this long enough that my cynicism keeps me in check. Regardless I liked what I saw from Hello Games that I pre-ordered NMS...something I very very rarely do. I think I was excited that pre-ordering came with a cool different starting ship (so much for not falling for the hype).
Launch day came and the game was unplayable. Literally the game would not launch on my computer - it tried but after the loading screen sequence it would just crash. Launch day blues. I was bummed but after spending half a day trying to get it going I just accepted that sometimes this happens and wait for a patch. And a couple of days later all was good, the game launched and away I went. In that few days the public option of those able to run the game came out and boy oh boy was it rough. It seems NMS was not the game that was advertised and pitchforks were out for Hello Games. Again I've been down this road before with games and figured I would wait for form my own opinion rather than jumping to conclusions based on the unrealistic expectations of others.
I happen to have the weekend off work the first real days I was able to play NMS. I bounded into the crazy colored worlds, bizarre flora and weird (sometimes comically so) fauna. I explored the world I started on. I repaired my spaceship and jumped off to new worlds. Planet exploration, warp jumping, space stations, crafting and more passed through the game into me. Some 2 weeks and over 30 hours later I had long forgotten all what had been unachievably (not a real word) promised by the ad campaign and really enjoyed what I had been playing.
Wasn't I supposed to hate this game (and the developers)? Or at the very least be massively disappointed? Sure it wasn't 100% what was promised but I realized I didn't care. The game was fun. The systems of the game integrated well with each other. The resource gather/crafting cycle (while sometimes long winded) worked for me. Flying the space ship felt good. And I really liked the visual aesthetic NMS has, from the ships to the planets, things looked both cool and often weirdly alien in a way I didn't expect.
Over the rest of the month I put in another 20 hours of play, messing about with some of the mods that people had made for the game and just seeing all the game had to offer. At this point I was slowing down in how much I was playing and other games from my library were calling to me so i decided to give NMS a rest until later. After a number of quiet months Hello Games released a huge content patch adding base building, more variety in resource/crafting and even a limited quest system as well as many tweaks to the core game to just generally improve it. POW! I played another 20 hours. So much had changed, the game almost felt like a 1.5 version of itself, so many relationships between game elements were altered to make NMS a smoother and more interesting experience I was eager to explore them all.
Recently a second big release added vehicles and more base elements to the game. I have only poked at so far it but realize there is another pile of hours for me to burn there. I did build a jumping space buggy and drive it into an ocean though. That was fun.
So is NMS (and Hello Games) the anti-christ? Of course not. Does it deserve its "mostly negative" score on Steam? Not at all. Could that game have been better at launch? Yes with out a doubt. Should the ad campaign been more honest? Hell yes. Do I regret buying (nay even pre-ordering) NSM? Nope. Not one bit. I have almost 80 hour in the game and as long as they keep releasing content that will keep going up. At it's core No Man's Sky is a good game that I have really enjoyed.
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