Hey, I’m Hamish, and this is Writing on Games.
As a critic, trying to attribute authorial intent is a dangerous road to go down.
It’s something I’ve certainly fallen foul of in the past.
You have no idea what went into the creation of a piece of media, so to assert yourself
like you do is disingenuous at best.
That said, there’s no game where I’ve desperately wanted there to be some grand
purpose to it all quite like No Man’s Sky.
It’s maybe the main dilemma I’ve had with the game since it released two years ago:
figuring out whether its confused design, lack of quality of life features, endless
performance issues, its relentless grind towards the nothing at the centre of the galaxy was
some interrogation into the nature of existence or whether No Man’s Sky was merely failing
to turn its massive universe into some kind of structured game.
For example, it seems safe to say at this stage that what was once seen as a glitch
in your ability to sidestep your mining beam’s heat gauge by momentarily letting off as it
reached maximum, is almost certainly intentional at this stage; a kind of active reload mechanic.
It was something I didn’t notice until Joseph Anderson pointed it out in his video at launch,
rightly baffled at this apparent oversight.
But it’s all I do when mining now.
I look at the heat gauge, releasing just as the bar fills up to see my gun magically cool
itself off instantly.
It has to be intentional.
It just has to be.
I mean, it’s been two years.
It’s borderline unconscionable to think that this aspect of mining for resources is
something the team could have missed.
And yet, it’s not presented as such.
There’s no visual alert to tell you that by employing a skill, you’ve made this process
slightly more efficient.
There’s nothing explaining the apparent mechanism cooling your gun when it’s supposedly
incredibly hot.
It still looks and feels like a glitch.
It’s not part of the fiction.
Or… is it?
Perhaps one of the most intriguing elements added to the game since my last video is the
narrative path of Atlas Rises—a more guided route through No Man’s Sky’s quote-unquote
“journey to the centre,” with full-blown missions and set-pieces.
Spoiler alert: the game now makes it clear fairly early on that everything around you
is mere simulation.
You are engaging with a piece of software that itself is the result of a rogue AI and,
moreover, it’s an imperfect simulation; one that cracks and crumbles before your very
eyes.
It turns a universe full of possibility and wonder into a broken existential nightmare.
It’s a surprisingly meta and often interesting examination of solitude and loneliness; of
feeling completely distant from the many alien creatures around you, with the few whose language
you can understand talking in gibberish; those you form even a hint of a connection with
turning out to be false before the entire universe is destroyed, rendering it all meaningless.
The thirty-or-so hours you’ll spend collecting resources in service of moving this plot forward,
piles on top of collection of more resources.
You’ll arbitrarily mine asteroids for fuel before going down to a planet and arbitrarily
killing an arbitrary number of arbitrary creatures or collect some arbitrary resource before
realising you need to create a different kind of fuel to take off so you collect two more
resources but you also need to be close to your ship to refuel so if you wander off to
collect things you’ll need to wander back, so you collect oxygen to power your life support
systems and maybe craft some ammo for your boltcaster if you get attacked by sentinels.
All for the purpose of arbitrarily increasing your standing with a particular race because
an objective marker told you to.
It might not be the most invigorating set of events, but on some level it’s embracing
a core tenet of good sci-fi; it frames the universe as bigger than your understanding
of it—its vastness as exciting as it is paralysing.
But it’s also hard not to read this whole endeavour, coming two years after a rocky
launch and considering where the game currently stands, as an excuse of sorts; a deeply self-flagellatory
acceptance that No Man’s Sky is now the game it was always meant to be… and that
might not be what you want it to be.
Because perfect No Man’s Sky is not; on my journey questlines would often break, the
framerate would tank to unbearable levels for some reason and unusual glitches would
often occur, among other technical issues.
These issues would, ironically, completely remove me from and kill the momentum of the
game’s story of existing in an imperfect simulation.
But you see the problem here—maybe that’s just it.
The game is telling me that my idea of the universe is falling apart.
Nothing is real, so is the mining laser just a glitch in the system, or… just a glitch?
When I get caught by sentinels as I’m somewhere in the void between planets, unable to hyperdrive
away until they’re eliminated but also trapped in a constant cycle of reinforcements, leaving
me to either spend the upwards of half an hour flying manually towards the nearest space
station, continually fighting off increasing waves of enemies with the game’s less-than-optimal
combat controls, or just laying down and accepting death… is that conveying some message about
the futility of conflict, or is the lack of any efficient escape route an oversight?
When I spend the time mining the overly-intense amount of resources needed to build the bases
the game tells me to, go through all the trouble of flying to space to get a specialist, then
flying back and forth to do their quests to progress the story, only to come back and
find them and my terminals gone, my base reduced to a couple of empty rooms that I’ll likely
never come back to, is that supposed to happen?
Is my base meant to mean nothing?
Or did something break?
When the final quest of the game causes the anomaly to present the same goodbye message
every time I warp, momentarily glitching the Atlas interface out of existence and forcing
me to contemplate manually travelling to the galactic core, is this a result of Atlas only
having 16 minutes of existence left like I was told?
Or is it just that I hadn’t selected the experimental beta patch that fixed the quest
that had broken for multiple users?
Was that part of it?
Is the game being that meta that you have to interact with the software such a granular
level?
That you have to almost literally fix this all yourself?
You see the issue with reading into intent too much.
At what stage do we ask… is this just kinda rough?
On top of all this, if the game’s goal is to place the player in a state of endless
existential terror, it’s hard to feel like No Man’s Sky fully commits to this vision,
seeming to run at cross purposes with the game’s other new updates designed to streamline
the experience and make it more player friendly; more like the game everyone said they wanted
at launch.
Multiplayer has gone from being non-existent, to being represented by dots that you can’t
interact with to a full drop-in/drop-out system where joining your friend is as easy as clicking
on their name.
The sweet spot was in the middle, with those orbs you couldn’t interact with; you were
unlikely to come across them because the universe is so large, their place in your world similar
to the characters you encounter in the story—seemingly so close, yet unfathomably far.
And to experience this crushingly lonely meta-narrative with your pals—that when you’re not mindlessly
shooting each other or trying to break the game, you’re waiting for them to separately
access the holo-terminal because you already did it, you already got that bit of story—is
to rob some of the weight from that story.
What’s more though, the game’s focus on its more guided mission structure necessitates
a recalibration of resource requirements.
Most notably you now require a means by which to easily travel between systems, meaning
that warp cells—once one of the game’s more difficult-to-obtain resources—is now
incredibly easy to construct, relegated to the same level as the many other resources
you mindlessly collect on your travels.
Why waste the time you would normally spend crafting a warp cell when you could just zip
between previously discovered systems for free at space stations?
As a result, the focus isn’t on exploring these planets or this universe anymore, at least in the main narrative.
My journey felt smaller and more constrained than it ever did in previous versions, taking
place for the most part in the same small cluster of systems before the final quest
necessitated a little more forward movement.
My concern before was that navigation was so effortless, exploration so repetitive that
you might as well be selecting planets off of a menu.
Now, you’re literally selecting planets, friends, quests, everything from a list.
Indeed, as opposed to No Man’s Sky being this now fully-defined experience, “the
game it was always meant to be,” its purpose feels more disparate than ever.
The image of No Man’s Sky as this egalitarian sandbox for you and your friends to goof around
in and leave your mark on seems entirely at odds with No Man’s Sky: the terrifyingly
indifferent void, feeding off your torturous slog for something as menial as data input.
As time went on, though, I guess I came to view Atlas Rises as a thirty hour tutorial
for whatever the hell No Man’s Sky actually is; giving me a brief glance at the surprisingly
vast array of systems you come across and how they might interact with one another;
but most importantly hammering home how much of a tedious process it all actually is, before
tearing it all down and throwing you back into another random point in another random
galaxy to start your real game in earnest, with all the knowledge and lore you picked
up the first time through.
But when looked at in those terms, on the one hand I have a less-than-satisfactory game
experience, where I’m bombarded with nakedly technical, sometimes flat-out unenjoyable
systems, and even that’s when they decide to behave themselves and work properly.
On the other hand I have that experience contextualised by an occasionally neat metanarrative, but
one that is so oppressive in the existential dread it forced me to confront that I have
no wish to put myself through it again.
It tries to cater to everyone, and in reality, seems destined to cater, perhaps very intensely,
to a fraction of those people.
Let me put it this way: as my flatmate saw me place my head in my hands as I got caught
by another inescapable space battle, and heard me audibly groan as the story’s momentum
was killed by some overly-vague objective or an outright broken questline, he asked
me “are you actually enjoying yourself?”
I told him “it’s compelling,” which was true; for a time, I couldn’t stop thinking
about this game upon picking it up again.
I played constantly; I needed to know how this was all going to play out, I was compelled
to find out if there was some greater purpose to my arduous journey.
To this he responded, “tonguing a mouth ulcer is compelling, but that doesn’t make
it fun.”
No Man’s Sky, if not the game it was always meant to be, is the game it’s likely always
going to be from here on out—it’s hard to see where they go from here that isn’t
just doubling down on this identity crisis as I see it—and while there may be some
merit to the grind that remains at its core and the questions it legitimately made me
ask, while I’m incredibly happy these devs get to continue to work on something they’re
obviously immensely passionate about and people now seem to… mildly enjoy, it’s not a
simulation I feel like I ever want to return to.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on No Man’s Sky.
As always this show is made possible by your generous support over on Patreon, which I’ll
be updating very soon with all new rewards and goals including exclusive written content.
If you feel like you can, maybe check it out.
Special thanks go to Mark B. Writing, Nico Bleackley, Rob, Michael Wolf, Artjom Vitsjuk,
Cole Mendell, Spike Jones, TheNamelessGuy, Chris Wright, Dr. Motorcycle, Ham Migas, Travis
Bennett, Zach Casserly, Samuel Pickens, Tom Nash, Shardfire, Filip Lange, Ana Pimentel,
Jessie Rine, Brandon Robinson, Justins Holderness, Christian Konemann, Cameltraffic, Mathieu
Nachury, Nicolas Ross and Charlie Yang.
And with that, I’m Hamish and this has been Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.