It’s been a while since I’ve played No Man’s Sky and, to be fair, I thought I had completely written this game off entirely. When it first released in August of 2016, I fell deep into the hype trap, even shelling out the full $60 tag, something I am usually loath to do, and was subsequently burned. Once bitten, twice shy. After some more recent hype revolving around No Man’s Sky, though, this time with a $0 price tag since I’ve already bought into it, I decided to hop back in and check out what has really changed since launch. Find out what the ‘Next’ really means of the now titled ‘No Man’s Sky Next‘. Turns out, quite a bit has changed.
First of all, I find it weird that I’m using terminology and treating this game like it’s some sort of MMO, which now that there is some sort of real multiplayer going on I guess it is much closer to that. For all intents and purposes, though, No Man’s Sky Next still feels mostly single player. Which is fine by me. Usually, as a solo player, encountering other players in MMOs turns adversarial. We’re either fighting over the same drops, the same mobs, or fighting each other. That, as players, we’ve grown to consider this infighting ‘good, normal’ and ‘the way it should be’ is… odd. But I digress.
I delve back into No Man’s Sky Next after not touching it since release to see what has changed and if it’s worth playing again.
I remember when No Man’s Sky launched it felt like a wide ocean of content that was only a puddle deep. Everything was large and grand, but nothing felt important. There was no weight. Upgrades were acquired almost by accident and the primary focus was exploration… of similar, not-that-exciting locations. You could complete 99% of the game by just staying on the same planet you started on.
Now? Well, I’m not *entirely sold that No Man’s Sky Next is monumentally different, but it does feel a lot better. The focus has absolutely changed. Now, the focus is about building up your properties, your freighter fleet and your base, and completing the story missions. Your time spent on planets is transitory, hitting up only the points of interest you need to, and moving on. Which is good, because the less you see and pay attention to the procedural generation, the better. There was just not enough difference in the generation before. Now, it just feels… better. Planets feel more varied and look more populated. There’s more variety. I mean, there could always be even more variety in a game like this, but you don’t see the man-behind-the-curtain as much as you did two years ago.
What were the devs smoking when they made *this* a possibility?
Upgrades, too, seem to be made more from progress than from randomness, which is a much better feeling than just stumbling across the best weapon/ships in the game. That random big find is still included, too, though, but now instead of finding a big new ship, you now find a big *broken* ship that you need to spend a good chunk of time and resources fixing.
Again, it feels productive, not accidental. This is good.
Ah yes, the big red ball… things.
Also, we need to talk about the screenshot capabilities. They are, hands down, the best screenshot options I have ever seen in any game. Period. And I consider myself a screenshot aficionado, so I don’t say this lightly.
At any time you can pause the game to take a screenshot. When you do, you can move the camera to any position around your character to take it, within a large distance. On top of that, if the lighting isn’t right, you can change the time of day and the position of the sun. You can add/remove clouds, change the depth of field, and even add an Instagram-like filter on top of all that. For real, all other games need to take a page from No Man’s Sky’s screenshot book. Screenshots are your players methods of advertising your game for you, and having a system like this only helps you.
The Rings at Night! Glow Big and Bright! *clap clap clap clap* Deep In the Heart of… of… wherever this is.
So will I keep it up? No, of course not. I’m a rambling gamer and will pass quickly from game to game as my whim takes me. However, with No Man’s Sky Next focus having changed to one that feels purposeful instead of accidental, I’m a lot more apt to keep it going. Plus, the entire game fits into only a 10 GB footprint, which is efficient and impressive as anything.
It currently is still sitting at $60, though, which I wouldn’t say feels entirely worth it, but if it falls back down to $30, or even $40, I wouldn’t hesitate to suggest snapping it up. Have you hopped back into No Man’s Sky Next as well? Let us know on Twitter @SubCutured!
P.S. – If you’re looking for a good planet to settle down on, I highly suggest planet Ocho II in the Mucalls system. Red grass, bright sun, abundant resources, and a pleasant temperature all year long. Nice place to vacation. Just don’t murder me, okay?
REVIEW | Salt and Sanctuary
PAX South 2019: Splitgate Arena Warfare, World of Horror, JackQuest, and Disjunction
PAX South 2019: Jump Force, Skellboy, A Fold Apart
REVIEW | Spider-Man PS4
REVIEW | Downward Spiral: Horus Station
REVIEW | Smoke and Sacrifice
There are two types of hype. The more commonly known hype is the extravagant or intensive publicity or promotion when used in marketing terms. For me, hype is that billowing of excitement that comes deep from within. It is the fuel that guides me and all of us towards a purchase in this medium. Hype is that faith you put into a product you have never touched yet find yourself defending it blindly. The idea and feeling of hype is a good thing, but if you allow it to run wild and choose to bring your hype levels to immeasurable heights you need to ask yourself, “Was it the marketing, or was it me?”
I am a firm believer in giving into the hype. I am not saying to lose your sense of logic and let your expectations run amok. More so I mean to just allow yourself to be excited about the things that speak to you. Being skeptical and negative all the time is physically draining. I know it is because I used to be that person. When you just pick apart marketing, assume the worst, and build up negative views, you are setting yourself up for a cycle of hate that will bleed well over into the game’s launch. You are giving into skepticism not to hype. Now no matter what the score is or buzz is, you’ve already made up your mind to hate the game.
On the flip side, if you just give into the excitement, you experience a very positive marketing cycle that will build a confident expectations all the way up to launch. That excitement is important. The buzz you spread by talking about your enthusiastic views to friends and others online builds a community of hype. This is a positive thing when dozens if not hundreds of people in your online circle are expressing their enjoyment for a game to come. Trust me when I say that people feel better when they are excited, not skeptical.
By no means am I saying that over-hyping things are okay. You have to practice a bit of restraint as well as remain logical about what exactly it is you’re excited for. By assuming something will be the greatest game of all time, you are setting yourself up for failure. Just reword your internal feelings and expectations to fit more along the lines of, “I cannot wait to experience this game for myself.” These are just suggestions; I have no dominion over how you express yourself. However, these tips may just put you in the correct mind space to have your expectations met.
There are so many examples I can give either personally or just from the industry itself. Being a student of the gaming industry for over 25 years now, I have seen many games rise and fall thanks to customer hype levels. Success is made or broken depending on the market the developers and production companies, but also on how the customers are responding to their product. One thing to always keep in mind is that marketing is created to trick you, to lie to you. The idea of marketing is to convince the consumer that they need this product even if deep down the product isn’t really for them. This does not exist in a vacuum, this is how marketing works across all products and mediums.
As a consumer you must speak the language of marketing so you don’t get fooled into buying something that ultimately just does not resonate with you. Nobody but you knows what you like. To fall victim to marketing speak that oversells an item is on the consumer, not the developer. Sure they should not weave lies and manipulate their product to seem like something else, but it is also on you to inform yourself.
There are plenty of games journalist, reviewers, videos, and ways to get the information you need to build a case for your excitement. Plenty of people have gotten their hands on this product that isn’t trying to sell it. Align yourself with somebody in the industry who previews games and trust that they are telling the truth by reviewing their body of work. Always make sure the blame is pointed towards the right party. If you are the “best game of all time,” guy then you have foregone your ability to put the blame on the developer. You said it was going to be the best, not them.
Recently I suffered from overhype. The Metal Gear Solid series has always been my favorite thing to exist in the history of ever. So of course when The Phantom Pain was announced, I was over the moon. We were slowly dip fed information for over 3 years as each trailer push me more and more towards immeasurable levels of hype. When the game came out, and the Kojima/Konami controversy happened, I was still blinded by my own excitement. I never thought in a million years that the game would not deliver for me on a personal level. While the gameplay was the best the series ever had, the game was far from a Metal Gear experience in terms of narrative and characters. The story was hollow, and for the most part not even present. It still ended up being my game of the year because I was objectively able to see that there was a great playing game within the coding of this mess of a story, but the way I hyped this game up for myself will haunt me. Would I have loved this game if I had just ignored the marketing and my pure love for the series? Sure the game was cut short in development, and pieces of it were obviously missing, but if I had not had the expectations I set for myself, would I have just enjoyed the game for what it was? This is how hype can turn on you.
Allow me to give a different example though; one that is more on the macro instead of my personal micro. Almost a month ago a little game called No Man’s Sky was launched. Now, I followed this marketing very closely over the last 2 or 3 years. A lot of things were said by creator Sean Murray, but at no point do I ever feel that he outright lied about the project. When talking about a game made by a small team that was announced years before it actually launched, you have to take things said early on in development with a grain of salt. Not every idea makes it into every game. Look at every Fable game for an example of that. Does that excuse the developer? No of course not; they should be as truthful as possible about their product but again remember, marketing is meant to trick you into purchasing a thing you didn’t even know you wanted. The whole world lost their minds when No Man’s Sky came out and it wasn’t the Second Life in space that everybody assumed it would be.
As somebody who did follow the marketing, and who was extraordinarily hyped for this game, I ended up getting the game I wanted and thought it would be. My question is how did so many other people assume that it was something else? It is simple…it’s the hype machine taking control. This is the self-manufactured excitement that you yourself allowed to achieve. In this case I think there was a mixture of poor communication from the developers as well as people allowing their expectations to run rampant. I still play and enjoy this game to this day and am getting everything I ever wanted out of it even with my extreme levels of excitement that I allowed myself to get to. Deep down I knew this was more of an indie project, created by a small team, with randomly generated properties that would make the experience different from person to person. I managed my hype, followed the marketing, and kept a healthy level of skepticism. It paid off with immense enjoyment of the game which many cannot claim.
You are the controller of your own hype, so when things don’t meet your expectations try looking internally instead of lashing out at the developers or taking it personally. These are video games people, they are a great hobby and great escapism but never warrant outrage that turns into death threats to developers. I seriously suggest seeking help if you are the type that jumps to death threats every time something does not meet your expectations. I don’t care if the threat is hyperbolic or not. Gamers get a bad rap for being overly opinionated, self-entitled, and generally just rude to one another; especially with the anonymity of the internet.
Be the example by just owning up to yourself when you have overhyped a game, but at the same time don’t fear to give in to your own excitement. It takes much more energy to be skeptical about something than it does to be hopeful about something. Plus it is just generally better to seek out that positivity rather than dwell in the negativity. You just have to ensure that you are self-managing the hype machine and not allowing it to take over your ability to remain grounded and logical about the incoming product. Mastery over hype ensures for a healthier and more gratifying gaming experience. There is an art to marketing and the road to a game’s launch, and I implore you all to be mindful about the information that is out there while all at the same time, surrendering to the hype.
REVIEW | Salt and Sanctuary
PAX South 2019: Splitgate Arena Warfare, World of Horror, JackQuest, and Disjunction
PAX South 2019: Jump Force, Skellboy, A Fold Apart
REVIEW | Spider-Man PS4
Review | Re-Exploring No Man’s Sky Next
REVIEW | Downward Spiral: Horus Station
Having had technology and the acquisition of technology be one of my foremost hobbies over the past decade or so, I’ve come to a very distinct realization: Technology, at its core, is just a tool. Seems simple, right? A tool is just an implement used to carry out a particular function. Like a hammer is just a tool. In game development, designers use multiple tools in their creative works, one popular tool of late is Procedural Generation.
Procedural Generation, at its heart, is the process of programming an application to design the content of a game using and working within a specified set of parameters. The use of procedural generation in video games goes hand-in-hand with the genre itself. Games like Rogue (1980), of which the term Roguelike is derived, was nothing but procedurally generated dungeons, one after another, that the player was meant to explore. This gave the game a never-ending appeal, where a little bit of code gave you a game that was always different than the last. Procedural generation has been used to do everything in gaming from creating environments, to dungeons, to loot lists, to sprawling towns and populations. In the end, though, it’s just a tool.
I finally found a creature larger than a horse and different enough to share.
Everybody’s Sky
Kyle, one of the writers here at Sub-Cultured, has been enamored with No Man’s Sky. For good reason, too. No Man’s Sky, first off, is gorgeous. The art styles, the visuals, and the chance of seeing things nobody else is seeing are some of the game’s big positives. I also picked up the game within its first week of release and had some fun exploring the few worlds that I found, but in the end I found myself quickly losing interest. Yes, the worlds themselves could, at times, be very pretty, but I had a hard time feeling that anything I was accomplishing was meaningful or significant.
I was exploring all of these places that had already been explored before, I was re-naming animals and plants that were located around small settlements and surrounded by floating machines, constantly scanning them, and I was learning languages that, even after learning a metric ton of words, I still couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. Nothing I was doing felt like it had any impact on anything, or at worst felt like I was just already going where everyone had already gone before.
Overall, I blame the procedural generation and how heavily they used it. It is the hallmark of the game, how what you were seeing was never seen by any other player and it was special to you. Except that it had been seen before. When I came across my 50th giant tooth shaped plant (and was naming it ‘Yet Another Giant Tooth’), or my 30th wolf-looking creature with fungal spores all over it (‘Yet Another Diseased Wolf’), I had reached my limit.
No Man’s Sky‘s use of procedural generation, their hammer, felt like the only tool they were really using seriously, and when it duplicated assets, it was glaring. Any “story” was coming at what felt like a snail’s pace, and progression was also a slow process. This means that the way the developers wanted you to play involved just hitting one procedurally generated planet after another. Which means also seeing the same formations over and over in maybe varying colors or sizes. I’m not sure which writing outlet first used the phrase “18 Quintillion Bowls of Oatmeal“, but it certainly feels apt.
Daggerfall, one of the first 3D attempts at mapping seen in a video game. Not a great attempt, though.
ProGen Behaving Badly
Let’s be real, though, No Man’s Sky isn’t the first to overuse procedural generation. One of the biggest games of all time, literally, is one that used procedural generation to launch a franchise: The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall. Coming off of the successful Arena, Bethesda wanted to make a game that truly felt like a world. Some sites posit that the full landmass of Daggerfall reaches a staggering 62,394 square miles! I started playing it not long ago and it isn’t kidding around. If you were to walk from one town to another, even if those towns were right next to each other, it would take you HOURS to do so. With 15,000 towns, cities, and villages to explore, the game wasn’t messing around. The first thing you bought was a horse and a wagon, because without them you were hosed.
The landmass of Daggerfall wasn’t even the worst of the procedural generation, though, it was the dungeons. Daggerfall‘s dungeons took multiple dungeon “sets” and patterns and hooked them together to form an overall dungeon. Combined with an uber-confusing three dimensional mapping system, Daggerfall would turn a simple low-level dungeon into an hours long slog through random-mob infested hallways, where sometimes monsters well above your level would lie in wait to wreck you. To put it lightly, Daggerfall‘s use of procedural generation was simultaneously complete overkill, frustrating, and completely unforgiving.
Yes, I play American Truck Simulator. My truck is awesome, don’t judge me.
Randomness Isn’t Really Exploring
One of my favorite things to do in games, though, is exploration. I will look behind every nook and cranny, every little path, every little tiny area, and in most games that exploration is nicely rewarded with either a nice sight, some extra loot, or some easter egg. They are specifically placed on the game map by the developers, though. When you start making everything through procedural generation, you lose those little rewards. Everything you could possibly encounter by checking every nook and cranny is just as available as any other point. The entire gaming world gains a homogeneity that stops rewarding exploration simply by its very nature.
There was a poll given by the developers of Star Trek Online on their forums once that once asked the players “What do you really want to see in Star Trek Online?” The biggest response back was simply “Exploration”. Since the tagline of Star Trek is “To boldly go where no one has gone before”, though, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The problem was that the game already had an “exploration” system. They combined random scenarios, randomized enemies, randomized aliens, and placed them on some randomized maps. To the majority of players, although what you were seeing was fresh, it didn’t “feel” like exploring.
I don’t blame the players, though, it truly *didn’t* feel like exploration. To hit this home, the game that I play that hits that exploration button the best is American Truck Simulator. Sure, ATS uses some procedural generation to save time on creating the environments, but it’s seeing all the specific locations and special places that makes the exploration worthwhile. It isn’t what is random that taps that exploration feeling, it’s what is purposefully placed that you’re seeing for the first time.
A BLANK?! Why, thank you! I’ve always wanted a BLANK!
ProGen Is A Good Tool, But Shouldn’t Be The Only Tool
If you take a look at some of the best games of our day, though, like Diablo, you’ll see that they all use procedural generation. However, their use becomes reserved to creating large, similar themed environments without sacrificing development resources and isn’t a crutch. Procedural Generation isn’t going to go away anytime soon, and it really shouldn’t because it’s such a useful tool.
What makes a great game, though, is using many different tools in its construction. Use some ProGen, some story, some good mechanics, decent audio, music, setting, etc. and put all together you have a great game. Relying on any one tool will make that tool stand out and show its flaws.
No Man’s Sky I feel was relying just too heavy on the procedural generation, and it was their downfall. Even compared to a game like Elite: Dangerous that also relies on space exploration and a ginormous universe, Elite feels more fleshed out and your actions feel like they have more weight.
I hope that we haven’t heard the end of No Man’s Sky, though. It has so much potential and can be so much more than it is. It’s at a good starting point and can only go up, but it will definitely need something more than just procedural generation to get players back.
REVIEW | Salt and Sanctuary
PAX South 2019: Splitgate Arena Warfare, World of Horror, JackQuest, and Disjunction
PAX South 2019: Jump Force, Skellboy, A Fold Apart
REVIEW | Spider-Man PS4
Review | Re-Exploring No Man’s Sky Next
REVIEW | Downward Spiral: Horus Station
Ah gaming. It’s one of the rare pleasures of life. Video games are an addiction, an obsession, a forgotten remembrance for those of us who are forced to adult. In honor of Gaming Month on Sub-Cultured, I have written a short lament for all the gamers like myself who are missing out on all the latest and greatest happenings this Fall. I present to you, an ode:
“For those too busy to play
who are caught in their jobs and their pay
time with the family, exercise, keeping sanity
the Xbox sits idle all day
We long for that place
flying through time and space
where the land is acclaimed No Man’s Sky
Sounds of Doom filled the room
as we blasted and leveled
Running through ancient dungeons and tombs all disheveled
Nothing could stop us with Legions and boss hunts
instances we transitioned and lead inquisitions
while our armies protected our grunts.
We try to recapture our fun and our laughter
but we keep on displaying low prioritizes for playing
Time we can’t seem to catch, pokeballs we dispatch
and still always end up with disaster”
REVIEW | Salt and Sanctuary
PAX South 2019: Splitgate Arena Warfare, World of Horror, JackQuest, and Disjunction
PAX South 2019: Jump Force, Skellboy, A Fold Apart
REVIEW | Spider-Man PS4
Review | Re-Exploring No Man’s Sky Next
