2404: No Man’s Sky and the Case for “Games for Grown-Ups”

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Back in the ’90s, MicroProse, a software company that already produced a number of the most complex computer games on the market thanks to their near-exclusive focus on military simulators, launched a spin-off label called “MicroStyle”. MicroStyle’s “thing” was that they produced “games for adults”. This did not mean “adult” as in “porn”; rather, it meant games about things that — supposedly, anyway — older gamers would be interested in. No cutesy platformers with rainbow colours here; MicroStyle was all about motorbikes, fast cars and, err, Rick Dangerous, the latter of which perhaps erred a little more towards the side of cutesy platformers than its stablemates.

The reason this largely pointless piece of gaming history trivia is at the forefront of my mind right now is due to the recently released No Man’s Sky, and the bafflingly negative reaction it has received from many online commentators. I had been asking myself why there was so very much whining going on about this game, when it occurred to me, partly after a bit of reflection on my own part and partly after a discussion with my friend Chris.

No Man’s Sky is a game for grown-ups. And some people don’t know how to deal with that.

The reason I say this is that there’s a very obvious dichotomy when it comes to this game between those who have sat down and spent time with it — and then, crucially, reflected on the experience — and those who take it at face value, judge it against the frankly unreasonable expectations they set for it in their head and consequently respond rather negatively towards it.

There are two particularly good pieces on the subject of No Man’s Sky that I invite you to read right now before we go any further.

The first, from The Guardian’s Keith Stuart, explores the game from the perspective of someone who grew up playing the original Elite on 8-bit computers. Stuart describes how invested he was in the virtual galaxy that Elite allowed him to explore; how he went so far as to buy a particular joystick to play it with because it looked suitably futuristic, and to make copious notes about profitable trading routes and sectors to avoid. His prose reminded me of my own youth with computer games, when I’d actually go so far as to dress up in a bomber jacket, home-made “oxygen mask” (made from a bit of cardboard and an old vacuum cleaner hose) and balaclava (the closest I could get to an actual crash helmet at the time) when playing games like F-15 Strike Eagle II and F-19 Stealth Fighter on the Atari ST. The use of imagination was key; these games were thrilling not because they presented the most impressive visual spectacles on screen, but because they truly allowed you to become someone else for a short time. The idea that you could sit down in front of your computer monitor and become a space traveller or fighter pilot was intoxicating, and even though at the time I was far too young to really understand those games properly, those experiences still stuck with me.

Stuart describes No Man’s Sky as an Elite for the modern age. He also notes that we already have an Elite for the modern age in the form of Elite: Dangerous, but makes the crucial distinction that Elite: Dangerous has gone heavily down the path of complex simulation, while No Man’s Sky eschews some of the more “unnecessary” aspects of realism in favour of providing an experience that stokes the fires of the imagination.

Stuart’s piece is complemented nicely by this piece in Rolling Stone/Glixel from Star Wars novel author Chuck Wendig. Wendig describes No Man’s Sky as “boring”, but notes that this isn’t actually a bad thing.

“We often play games for the destination,” says Wendig, “but I don’t think that’s why we play No Man’s Sky. We play it for the journey. There is an eerie calm to this game. A utopian serenity. A pleasant, alluring boredom that draws you along the journey – but not too fast. This is sci-fi that doesn’t ask you to kill, kill, kill. It asks you only to wander. To discover. To catalog your findings and sell your wares and move onto the next moon, the next space station, the next world, the next star system. All in pursuit of whatever it is you wish to pursue.”

He’s absolutely right. While there is combat in No Man’s Sky, it’s a rare occurrence — rare enough to make every time you switch your multi-tool from mining laser to boltcaster mode feel significant. The emphasis instead is on exploration, discovery and, above all, imagination. You’re given very little context or explanation for the things you are seeing in No Man’s Sky, and I have a strange feeling that even if you “finish” it by reaching the end of one of the narrative paths and/or the centre of the galaxy, it still won’t answer all the questions you might have.

My friend Chris also describes it as “a game for people who like books: you have to have a bit of imagination, and have your sense of wonder still intact, and understand that there are breeds of sci-fi that aren’t about action.” I can’t help but feel that the fact the whole game looks like an Asimov cover is entirely intentional.

The trouble is that this style of play is the exact opposite of what a lot of younger gamers expect from their games these days. They don’t expect their space sims to be quiet, contemplative, artistic affairs that minimise action in the name of cataloguing flora and fauna on diverse alien worlds. They expect their space sims to be more along the lines of the Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare trailer we saw at E3: all action, all explosions, all bodies floating off into space. And No Man’s Sky isn’t about that.

I can’t help but feel that the loudest complaint of all — the fact that the game isn’t the synchronous massively multiplayer title that a lot of people had come to assume it would be — also ties in with this. Fundamentally, No Man’s Sky is a game about being alone in a vast galaxy, and occasionally coming across traces of evidence that other people have been there before you — whether it’s long-forgotten ruins, from which you can learn snippets of the various alien languages in the game, or star systems, planets and species of flora and fauna named by other players. The fact that you can’t see other players flying around is entirely intentional; the game hasn’t been designed in that way at all, and “true” multiplayer would add absolutely nothing to the experience other than the opportunity to be griefed by players who fancied a career in virtual space piracy.

No Man’s Sky is a game for grown-ups. Specifically, it’s a game for grown-ups who grew up with games in the ’80s and ’90s; it realises the dream of being able to freely fly a spaceship around a vast universe, land on planets and explore them at our leisure; it gives us enough fuel to stoke the fires of our imagination, and withholds enough to allow us to let those flames flare up as much as we want; it’s a game that is the exact opposite of something like Mass Effect’s grand space opera, in which nothing is left to the imagination. (This isn’t to put Mass Effect down, mind you; there’s a place for both the quiet contemplation of No Man’s Sky and the dramatic bombast of Mass Effect in this world.)

Perhaps most tellingly, all the most interesting, thoughtful and sensible commentary on No Man’s Sky has been by people over the age of 30. And the negative comments very much come across as being written by much younger people. (I obviously can’t say for certain how old many of the naysayers are, but their words certainly come across as being less… seasoned, shall we say.)

If all you can do is rant and rave about how Hello Games’ Sean Murray “lied” to you about the game being multiplayer… well, then you’re missing the point. Spectacularly. And you should probably go and play something else. Something with more guns in it.

2399: No Man’s Sky and The Game as a Pure Relaxation Aid

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I’ve been playing a bit more of No Man’s Sky this evening and I still like it a lot. It’s a wonderfully dreamy, ethereal experience to play — helped partly by the wonderful electronic soundtrack that accompanies everything you do — but also because it seems to have been designed to be an experience that is pure relaxation rather than the more typical goal-driven affair that most games tend to be.

There is no goal in No Man’s Sky. Well, all right, there’s one: get to the centre of the galaxy, but that’s so vague as to be almost meaningless, and the important thing about playing No Man’s Sky is not a desperate attempt to achieve that goal as quickly or efficiently as possible, but rather to enjoy the journey exactly as you see fit.

Any other goals in the game are entirely of your own making and will depend entirely on how you like to play. One person’s goal might be to fully scan all the planets in a system to receive the hefty payouts you get for “completing” a planetary analysis. Another’s might be to produce as many warp cells as possible as quickly as possible so they can make a large number of jumps rapidly. Another’s still might be to upgrade their ship, or their suit, or their multitool… it really is up to you what you want to do, and No Man’s Sky offers just enough in the way of structure and mechanics to allow you to make these goals for yourself without it ever feeling like you’re following a linear, prescribed path.

It struck me while I was playing tonight that this is what the game is all about. You don’t play No Man’s Sky if you’re a powergamer, seeking the “best” or “most efficient” way to “clear” something. You play No Man’s Sky during a period of downtime, in which you want to just sit back, relax and take part in something that doesn’t demand anything of you, but which has enough in the way of interactivity and structure to distinguish itself from more passive art forms.

In many ways, it can perhaps be regarded as the natural evolution of the “walking simulator”, the subgenre of first-person adventure games that focus not on puzzle solving or other aspects of “gameplay”, but on storytelling and experiencing a world as if you were there. No Man’s Sky differs in some substantial ways, however, the lack of a linear main narrative being the main one, but the “immersive sim” aspect of the “walking simulator” is present and correct. If you are the sort of person who enjoyed Gone Home not for the ’90s teenage lesbian angst but instead for the interesting experience that was just poking around that little world the developers had created, then you might get something out of No Man’s Sky, because the whole game is poking around worlds of various descriptions.

That lack of concrete story might be an issue for some, admittedly, but for those who still have a working imagination, No Man’s Sky puts it to good use by allowing you to interpret what you’re seeing as you see fit. Is that abandoned outpost that’s full of weird slimy gooey tentacly things a sign that something awful happened there, or is it simply a natural product of the passage of time? Are the Gek a race of entreprenurial merchants, or do they hide a darker secret, hoping to enslave the universe to their bidding? How did that planet get those curiously man-made looking pillars of rock everywhere?

One of the most interesting questions No Man’s Sky asks the player is who are you? You never see yourself in the game, and the fact that the game doesn’t have multiplayer (boy, you wouldn’t believe the whining that’s been going on by people who apparently expected this to be an MMO) means that you don’t see others like you, either. Even if you could see other players, though, there’s no guarantee that they’d be exactly the same as you. Are you human? Are you Gek? Are you a construct of the mysterious Atlas? Are you something else altogether? The game doesn’t answer this — at least, it hasn’t in the 10 hours I’ve spent with it so far — and so leaves this rather important question up to the player’s interpretation.

In other words, No Man’s Sky is what you make of it. If you go in expecting some sort of grand space opera with a clearly constructed story, villains to defeat and great evils to stand against, you may well be disappointed. If, however, you go in expecting a game that allows you to pretend to be a spaceman for a few hours at a time, and can extract a certain degree of joy from that simple experience, then you’ll have a wonderful time.

It’s a game to relax and unwind with, not a game to “git gud” at. And I appreciate it a great deal for that. That doesn’t mean that I want to play it all day every day, but it does mean that I can open it up at any time, fly around and explore a bit, and feel like I’ve had my money’s worth. And with the tantalising possibility of future updates adding more and more interesting mechanics to the game as a whole, I can see it being a game I’ll dip in and out of for a very long time indeed.

2397: No Man’s Sky

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I dutifully downloaded No Man’s Sky at 6pm this evening when it became available on Steam and, aside from a break for dinner, I have been playing it all night.

It’s very good indeed, with a few caveats.

The first is that it is not a game for the impatient. Before you can even get off whatever planet you get dumped on at the beginning, you have to repair a bunch of your ship’s systems, which involves gathering a selection of resources, some of which are harder to find than others. (Pro-tip: zinc can be found in yellowy leafy plants, and heridium can be found in large blue-black rocky monolith-type structures. You’ll thank me for those.) It took me a good half an hour of wandering around (including becoming lost in a rather labyrinthine network of caves that I mistakenly thought might be a shortcut to the heridium deposit my scanner had helpfully found for me 15 minutes’ real-time walk away from the crater my spaceship had deposited itself in) before I assembled everything I needed to get going, but it was absolutely worth it; lifting off for the first time in No Man’s Sky is one of those watershed moments in gaming, like coming out of the sewers for the first time in Oblivion.

The second is that it is not a game for those who like to have their hand held, particularly in the early hours. While the ship-repairing process acts as a tutorial of sorts, the game literally starts with you waking up next to your crashed ship with absolutely no context whatsoever, and from there you have to determine exactly what you’re supposed to do.

There are supposedly three main “routes” through the game, one of which is simply “do your own thing and see what happens”, so wandering around aimlessly trying to scan all the indigenous life on the planet you’ve found yourself on is absolutely an option, but so too is following the trail of breadcrumbs left by the mysterious “Atlas” system, which has distinctly sinister omniscient, omnipotent being undertones (and, appropriately enough, this route was apparently penned by one of the writers of Deus Ex).

It’s a game that encourages experimentation. Arrive in a new system? Scan it and see if anything shows up, then go investigate. Wander around a bit outside to dig up some minerals and perhaps even find a few alien relics that help you learn the words of various languages. Found some weird technology? Disassemble it and incorporate its components into your suit, ship or multi-tool. Found some shiny glowy things? Sell them off for vast profit at your friendly neighbourhood space station. Met a malfunctioning cyborg bartender who wants nothing more than to shake hands with you? Make sure you have more than one health point before doing so, otherwise said bar will find itself adorned with a rather obtrusive tombstone for the rest of time.

There’s a frightening degree of customisation in the game, too, though you have to balance this with your relatively limited inventory space, since upgrades for your various pieces of tech occupy valuable inventory slots or cargo space in your ship. Upgrading your multi-tool is probably the most interesting so far, because by doing this what starts as a simple short-range mining laser can become a machine gun, a plasma launcher, a grenade launcher, a shotgun, a long-range scanner, a lifeform analyser and all manner of other things besides. You even have to consider the layout of the components in your tool, because upgrades and modifications unsurprisingly work better if placed adjacent to the parts they are tweaking.

The thing that’s struck me so far is how incredibly absorbing it is. The whole game has the look of Tim White’s cover art for Isaac Asimov novels, with a touch of Roger Dean here and there. The worlds you’ll visit are varied and interesting, despite their randomly generated nature; there are hills, valleys, caves, seas, deserts, mountains, canyons and all manner of other landscapes to explore, and, assuming you don’t piss off the local Sentinels or the indigenous life, exploring it is an enormously relaxing pleasure. Indeed, at one point this evening as I stepped out of my ship onto a tiny island, then dove beneath the ocean waves to see what lay beneath, the Zen-like atmosphere of it all made me feel more at peace than I think anything else I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing in recent memory. Then I started to drown, so I had to cut my underwater exploits short, but for a short period it was bliss.

Thus far, No Man’s Sky looks set to be a really interesting take on sci-fi that is a far cry from the usual “space military”-centric angle we tend to get in video games. Its dreamy, mysterious narration (all in text, no voiceovers) is written with a similar tone to Asimov novels and lends a suitable air of, appropriately enough, otherworldliness to the whole affair. I’m not sure if I’ve locked myself into one of the three “paths” as yet, or if that continues to be a series of choices you make as you progress through the game, but so far everything I’ve encountered with relation to the lore is fascinating and intriguing, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes. Well, I know that — the centre of the universe — but why? What happens there? Who are you, the player? Why is it so important you follow this path that has seemingly been set out for you?

I can’t answer any of those questions yet, but I’m looking forward to seeking some answers. It’s early days yet, but so far this feels like the space game I always wanted to play. Fly a cool ship, land on planets, wander around, shoot stuff like a badass, become embroiled in metaphysical crazytimes, possibly find out that you/your ship/the weird thing on the cover is God or something.

2395: Adventures in Space

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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.