No Man’s Sky
You are a Traveller in a universe that stretches beyond your imagination. There are hundreds of planets to explore, minerals to collect, plants and animals to discover. In the game No Man’s Sky you will be set into an open-world adventure where you can easily get lost. You will have the ability to meet strange aliens from different races. You will have the ability to create your very own base on numerous planets you discover, but be warned not all the residents of the planets will be happy about you simply being on their planet. You will get to pilot a spaceship, upgrade it, trade it in, and even gain a fleet of ships to send on missions.
I’ve put in over 80 hours into this game, or I guess at this point I should say experience and I can honestly say that this game encompasses so much that it makes my head hurt. The unfortunate thing is that some of the brain pain is caused by quirks in the game itself. After investing so much time into this I have to say that I’ve just learned to make those quirks as painless as I can, and sometimes it works and other times its a complete failure.
So now that I have your attention lets put a spotlight on those issues/quirks. Let’s start off with the fact that many of the quests, which have turn-ins that are not on a space station, HAVE to be the active quest in order for you to be able to turn them in. There’s also the issue of those same quests not advancing if they are not the active quest. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to be one a collection quest, but NONE of your progress is actually getting credited because it’s not the active quest.
Here’s another quirk/issue that many games have problems grappling with, inventory management. As you can imagine you are going to be accruing tons of items, materials, parts, etc. The obvious dilemma is that you are very tight on space when it comes to what you can personally hold and what your ship can hold. So you’re going to want to have storage containers at your base. Each container you can build in your base will hold up to 20 items. Now have no fear there will be item stacking, however the max number of items will be a mystery until you see a second stack appear. Here’s the thing, those 20 spots, they are going to fill up super quick, so you’ll want to build more. If you’re going to build more, at least when it comes to me, I’m going to want to organize my stuff so that all items that have something in common, say metals, are all in one spot. So you go off adventuring once again and upon your return you utilize the quick transfer option and select storage. You would think that the game would just add to the pre-existing stacks, but it doesn’t the game will just find the first empty slot in the first storage container it can find. You can pray that the first choice will end up being the correct storage container, but 99% of the time that won’t be the case. So you’ll have to end up manually moving things around from time to time. Speaking of moving things around, when you want to add something to storage you have to make sure it’s in your PERSONAL general storage. If it is on your ship, you can’t store it. If you have it under your PERSONAL cargo tab, you won’t be able to store it.
At this point you have to be asking yourself, why the hell have you put so much time into this game, and to be honest why are you still playing this? The answer is I really don’t know. There is something about the ability to quickly jump in and out of the game. You can take on a couple of quests, explore a new world, upgrade your ship/equipment, and advance the very strange story. This is something that when you don’t have the ability to focus 100% of your attention on, you can still get things done. While I’m writing this up I’m still playing. Even as I’m sitting here I know that there’s probably more that I find annoying, and yet here I am STILL playing. There’s just such complexity and layers in this game that even though there is a VERY VERY long list of issues, I’m going to keep playing.
