"It's time for A's GAMING moments!"
One of the most ambitious games ever made has to be "No Man's Sky".
It was huge on a legendary scale, with apparently over 18 quintillion different planets to see,
which, to put that in perspective, if you spent one second on each of these different
planets, and removed all the in between travelling time, it would still take you a
whopping 585 billion years to visit them all.
And to think, that all this came from a developer whose previous game... was "Joe Danger".
Now that's quite a step up!
The game was seen parading around the E3 stage for years, but the question that everyone
kept asking was this- what do you actually do in "No Man's Sky".
Well, hopefully today I'll clear that up.
So the game was split into two parts; the flying sections... and the on foot sections.
Now the flying sections put you in your little spaceship, and were basically your main means
of getting around.
The overarching aim of the game was to reach the centre of the universe, but for this,
you needed to gather the resources needed to warp drive.
And as well as warp drive, your ship also had three other different speeds, one for
getting between planets, one for speeding through the skies, and one slower speed for
when your getting ready to land.
So, already you can tell that this game was ginormous.
Each of these little dots was a fully explorable solar system, filled with planets and moons,
with each of these large enough to literally take hours to walk across.
In fact it's worth pointing out now, that every single player plays "No Man's Sky" in
this exact same universe, but the chances are that you will never see another soul.
In fact, your best chance of having contact with another player, was simply by seeing
their name as the original discoverer of an object or place, along with the time and date
that they found it.
It's funny to think that in, say, five years time when you land on something that was first
discovered in 2016, the chances are that nobody else set foot on that planet in all that time.
So, anyway, onto what you do outside of your ship . Now really, this was where the main
bulk of the exploration and resource gathering was done.
You were armed with a mining gun, which you could use to chip away at resources with,
from aluminium, to carbon, to plutonium.
These materials were then collected to then be used to either craft something, repair
something or to be stored away to later be sold on the galactic market.
To help you track down a particular resource that you wanted, you also had a scanner, which
popped up which resources were where, as well as an analyser, which you could use to identify
new creatures and plants with.
There was a surprising amount detail and variety to each of these planets, considering how
many of them there were, and no two that I ever came across were exactly the same.
The animals were all a kind of mad Frankenstein experiment, with various body parts being
cobbled together to form something new and, even after dozens of hours of playing, the
wildlife still managed to throw up some surprising creatures.
And as for the planets themselves, they weren't just a copy and paste job with the odd palette
change, no, each planet did feel unique and surprisingly well crafted, with lakes and
caves and the even odd abandoned building to explore.
There were different atmospheres and weathers to worry about, with everything from acid
rain to incoming storms.
There was definitely a survival element to the game, because you had a life support system
and a hazmat suit that would slowly deteriorate in bad conditions, so it had to be repaired.
Thankfully, the materials that you needed to do the repairs were all common, and your
suit didn't degrade that fast, so it wasn't a constant pain in the ass.
I think that the main hook of the game though, was the fact that there was always something
to upgrade, whether it was your ship's boosters, your mining gun's cool down rate, your sprint
speed- you were always only a few materials away from that next enhancement
"No Man's Sky" did have a few different elements of combat about it, but don't make the mistake
of thinking that this was an FPS.
The only real thing that needed shooting where these sentinel robots, that would vary in
aggression depending upon the planet that you were on.
And the space dog fights were fun, but nothing too complex.
It wasn't about completing missions, or even about achieveing an ultimate goal.
It was about the journey, rather than the destination- hence why it popped up big "Journey
Milestone Accomplished", when you had done something a certain number of times.
During the opening sort of tutorial, you were led to a bunch unique types of land marks
that you could come across in the game, like alien monoliths, or abandoned distress beacons.
Unfortunately these sound a lot more interesting than they actually were.
Usually they just provided access to another upgrade, which there were already a tonne of.
These upgrades were usually only rewarded though if you answered correctly to some form
of alien test.
It was like an old choose your own adventure book and even had the odd math question to answer.
Only problem was, often you didn't speak the alien's language, so you had no idea what
was being asked of you.
However this lead to what I thought was one of the coolest mechanics of the game, where,
as you explored, you would slowly learn new alien words, so as you got more fluent, you
would have a better chance of answering the questions right.
So in a nutshell, that is "No Man's Sky".
It was all about dangling carrots in front of player's noses, constantly giving them
slight upgrades to work towards.
Soon you would find your own technique for best achieving these.
For example, soon I stopped looking for the materials that I needed and instead went out
to mine whatever was in high demand, to then sell at a good price and then just buy whatever
I wanted with the profits.
Or, as another option, you could always have spent your time finding all of the different
animals on any given planet, to then receive a large boost in funds.
So, in a way, it even kind of had a Pokemon element to it!
Inventory space was always tight, so ideally you wanted to buy a space ship with a large
amount of cargo space.
But rather than dish out the hundred's of thousands of units needed to buy a new one,
you could always search the land for a crashed one, repair it up to good nick, and you were off!
It was the type of game that was relaxing, the kind that was perfect to play while listening
to music or a podcast.
"Beyond!"
When I wasn't playing it, I was thinking about it- which can only be a good thing.
And there was even a certain strange feeling knowing that you were the first, and probably
the only person to ever visit some of these planets.
And as an old maths student, I would love to know the formulas of how a game could ever
be made this big.
And by the way, if you did like "No Man's Sky", then I've got to give a quick shout
out to the game "A.D.I.O.S", which was basically a 2D, physics based "No Man's Sky" but also
with a bunch of different hats...
Check it out.
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always, thanks for watching.
I'll see you next week.