2395: Adventures in Space

After feeling somewhat lukewarm to the idea of it for a while — the relentless hype train hasn’t helped — I’ve come around to the idea of No Man’s Sky, so much so that I’m now actually looking forward to it releasing on PC on Friday so I can get started on some grand space adventures.

I’m very interested to see how it’s turned out, though I am tempering my expectations accordingly as well as intending on paying attention to the evolution of the game over its lifespan; this is a game that, several months down the line, may be very different to what it is on launch day, and that prospect is both exciting and a bit of a reflection on the modern games biz.

The reason why I’m interested to see how No Man’s Sky ends up is that the concept reminds me of some of my favourite underrated games of yesteryear, and a genre which we don’t really “do” any more, and that is the Star Trek-style space sim. Star Wars-style (i.e. combat-heavy) space sims have been enjoying a bit of a resurgence in the indie space in recent years, but the more sedate pace of Star Trek-style (i.e. exploration-heavy) sims is something still largely consigned to the past, with the exception of a few 2D affairs like Starbound and Interstellaria, neither of which, I feel, particularly capture the real feeling of space travel and exploration.

The specific games I’m thinking of when I ponder Star Trek-style space sims are the two Starflight games by Electronic Arts back in the 16-bit era. These were games where you were given a starship and pretty much told to just get on with it at the outset; there was an overarching plot to follow, but the main attraction of Starflight was the ability to just pootle around known (and unknown) space exploring solar systems and planets, then bringing goodies of various types back to home base for analysis and filthy lucre.

No Man’s Sky isn’t quite the same thing as Starflight in that you appear to be piloting a single-seater ship rather than a big-ass starship, but the philosophy behind the game seems to be similar in that the emphasis is on discovery, and the main means through which you profit, progress and flourish is through exploring and finding exciting things rather than blasting anything that dares to pass through your crosshairs into a smooth pâté.

To continue the comparison, both Starflight and No Man’s Sky had/have significant planetside components in which you explore, find useful things and perhaps uncover a few mysteries along the way. I can’t speak for No Man’s Sky yet, but I have some fond memories of landing on planets in Starflight, then sending my all-terrain vehicle out into the wasteland to track down valuable minerals, artifacts and, if I was lucky, some specimens of life, too. Starflight’s primitive graphics were enriched by some enjoyable descriptive text whenever your ground crew ran into trouble, and naturally it would be up to the crewmember you’d assigned as your medical officer to patch people up when they got back onto your ship.

Starflight was interesting, exciting and compelling even when you weren’t in mortal peril, though, and indeed a lot of the time you weren’t. There was a simple joy in entering a new system for the first time only to discover that it had an abundance of planets and moons, each of which could be landed on, explored and stripped of as many valuable minerals as you could fit in your ship’s cargo holds. It sounds as if this is the sort of experience No Man’s Sky offers, too, and if that’s the case then I’m pretty excited for it.

Like Starflight, No Man’s Sky appears to have an overarching narrative pushing you towards a “conclusion” of some sort at the centre of the galaxy, but also like its distant predecessor, you’re free to just do your own thing as you see fit for the most part.

I’ll be particularly interested to see how things like encounters with alien NPCs and suchlike go in No Man’s Sky, as some of these interactions were a real highlight of Starflight. Judging by this screenshot, though, it looks like I don’t have much to worry about.

Anyway. Just a couple of days to go until I can find out for sure whether No Man’s Sky is actually the space sim I’ve been wanting to play since I didn’t have a spare floppy disk to hand to save my game in Starflight on the Atari ST, so had to start again each and every time I played. No such woes await with No Man’s Sky — hopefully, anyway, though doubtless day-one server issues will be A Thing — and so I’m looking forward to jumping into my Roger Dean/Asimov-inspired space odyssey and, frankly, seeing if Hello Games have managed to make an interesting game out of 18 quintillion planets or however many are supposed to be in the damn thing.