Its pretty clear that No Man's Sky might be the most divisive game to have been released in quite some time. While it would have been easy to talk about what I personally don't like about the game and its questionable marketing, it's more interesting to chat with a few editors and get multiple perspectives on their experience with No Man's Sky for this video.
No Mans Sky starts off on a pretty interesting note. Your ship is crashed and you're stranded on your first planet. No cutscenes explaining why, no tutorial or side character giving you directions, nothing. It's just you, your gun, the emptiness of space, and the most confusing placement of the sprint button on an FPS since the PSP was a thing. Eventually after being murdered by crabs and triumphantly blasting off Pizzapotamus, I ran into my biggest issue with No Man's Sky.
Why I was doing this? Now before you brigade me in the comment section let me be clear: I don't mean this in some lame pseudo intellectual "why am I playing Rock Band" sort of way. Within the first hour of the game there just isn't any context to why I had to fly to empty planets to collect rocks and punch the occasional bear to death. The lack of story and direction in this game is definitely one of its biggest flaws. Without any kind of motivation or world building the game feels lifeless and empty. There are no cities to explore, audio logs to listen to, or even other crashed pilots to pillage. The vastness and loneliness of space is apparent here, and while that's really interesting at first, it gets boring after a few hours.
In the video below Chris, Robert, and Andrew make some interesting points about the game's narrative that I hadn't considered until then. So after recording the video I sat down and dedicated a few hours to the game and found myself enjoying it. No Man's Sky is by no means the best game to have come out this year, and it's still plagued with problems and terrible marketing, but under all of that there's still something interesting to be discovered.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfpkRutpuTc]
No Man's Sky is currently available on the PS4 and PC platforms.
When im not playing games Im working on TV shows as a colorist. You can find me on twitter posting pictures of my rabbit and other useless junk.
