No Man’s Sky: A Gallery Of Gorgeous Space Vistas
Hello! I've just updated this gallery of screenshots with my latest travels in No Man’s Sky [official site]. Mostly I'm just documenting lovely, peaceful moments and lovely colour palettes. Humour seems to lend itself better to video than screenshots, as with these animals.
To navigate the gallery just use the arrow buttons near the images or the left and right arrow keys on the keyboard!
My ongoing explorations of No Man's Sky have led to a gradual shift in my feelings towards the game. At first I was finding the interface clunky and frustrating, and a lot of the basic methods the game has for imparting information woeful. Then I settled into a rhythm where I was just exploring, wanting to find the creatures on each planet and seeing what came up along the way. Now I've teetered over into a kind of grab-bag experience. I go down to a planet's surface to see what the procedural generation has spat out this time around and if I like it I'll explore a bit but otherwise it's a case of going on to the next pretty quickly.
I'm not particularly interested in following quests and things because so much of this game for me is about how it looks or how the environments it generates make me feel, so this gradual loosening of its grip on my will to keep exploring and being entranced by each new thing is going to play a big part in whether I keep playing or not. I'm also having that experience where I'm recognising a lot of the jigsaw pieces that the procedural generation uses in creating creatures so the moments of excitement with those are becoming less frequent. I'm not sure if that's to do with how the game generates things - i.e. if planets in nearby clusters will use similar assets - or whether the set of go-to pieces is a lot smaller than I'd thought. I think the fact that they tend to have similar movement patterns is part of why the animals seem less and less like individual species. I've seen the wild aimless scampering and the ear scratching and the fear responses a lot by this point and it's starting to really highlight that these aren't creatures who seem to be reacting to the world around them. I don't think I've seen any of them interact with one another in any particularly interesting ways, either.
I'm not sure how to position that as a criticism because I have honestly got no idea what an undertaking it would be to even approximate what I'm critiquing. So what I hope this update does is just lay out the changes in my feelings towards the game as I play more of it, and where I'm starting to become aware of the limitations.
Check out our No Man's Sky guide if you're more into maximising efficiency than pretty pictures.
Original article
I've spent a significant chunk of the last few days having an explore in No Man’s Sky [official site]. I still have my reservations and there's so much clunkiness and frustration that needs dealing with AND the tutorial/new player onboarding is dismal - in fact, my thoughts are pretty much in line with John's review of the game - BUT I've also had moments of joy, and I do feel compelled to keep exploring. My screenshot count is just shy of 400 right now so I've put together a kind of travellogue to illustrate my journey so far via my favourite images. You can click on any of them for a larger version and you can navigate the gallery using the arrow buttons just next to the images.
Disclaimers:
The gallery is not exhaustive because a lot of my early screenshots had me forgetting to remove the HUD so I've culled those from the collection! It's also on temporary hiatus while I indulge in a lot of creative swearing. The swearing is because the auto-lander that takes care of parking your ship has landed me in such a way that I'm trapped on the terrain which cannot be destroyed and every time I try to take off the engines and launch thrusters explode. I'm steeling myself to go back in and see whether I have any previous saves to revert to or whether hopping in and out of the ship to try and fix the problems has left me with a choice of identically screwed files to choose from.
If it's the latter I have a long trudge across a hostile landscape trying to find a point at which to try and summon the damn thing. No idea if that's even possible if the engines are borked.
But yes. Let's focus on the pretty moments here and not, e.g. the thing that caused me to say the C-word so loudly a bird flew away outside.
OH. Also Alec wrote some stuff for the game. No idea what but if I find any aliens who seem to be keen to explain their Transformers fanfiction I figure I'll have narrowed it down significantly.
