No man's sky gambling addiction. No Man's Sky Next changed everything. From the disappointment of the year to the best representatives of the genre. What's above is not what's below

In two years, visionary developers turned a tech demo into a full-fledged game, and we are glad that they did not give up

Gambling addiction https://www.site/ https://www.site/

Call me a zealous nonconformist, but I've always liked No Man's Sky. Yes, as a game the project was far from perfect - in fact, I myself once wrote in a preview I don't understand how to play this game. But as a cultural phenomenon...

Just think about it!

A whole world that is stored on ordinary hard drives. On the other side of the screen is a real galaxy with 18.6 quintillion stars. All that remains is to launch artificial intelligence with self-learning there. So the birth of virtual life is not far away!

What if we ourselves live in such a world, procedurally generated on the computers of other creatures for whom we are virtual creatures? This theological conspiracy theory will be cooler than any pasta monsters!

In short, I have always perceived No Man’s Sky not so much as a game, but as a milestone in the development of technology. Well, yes, the first damn thing is lumpy, it’s an everyday matter. But, for example, the idea of ​​a procedurally generated galaxy was already adopted in the second Beyond Good and Evil, so the project left its mark on game development. And, most likely, it will come back to haunt you more than once in the future, so whether it is playable or not is not so important.

But the developers thought differently. Two years after the release, scandals and friendly spitting on the entire Internet, they rolled out version 1.5 (or simply Next), in which they greatly changed the game balance and still turned No Man’s Sky into an exciting “survival game”. And if you did not return the money to Steam after the purchase, you can simply assume that until that moment the game was in a very crude early access, and now it has finally been released.

I see a purpose, but I do not see obstacles

The main thing that has changed is that actions become more meaningful. Previously, we were simply thrown into virtual space, and to the question “what to do?” They answered “whatever you want!” And it seems like the right principle. Don't we always demand freedom from games and swear when we are led by the hand? Well, it turns out that without this is also bad, especially in our high-speed era, when not everyone can afford to thoroughly understand unfamiliar rules.

No Man's Sky now constantly challenges the player. It all starts with the basics: we find ourselves on an alien planet with virtually nothing, we only know how to run, jump and get resources. The game tells you that first you need to fix the scanner, and now we can already see that there is something useful in a small radius. Then we have a visor that gives detailed information about every object we encounter and allows us to look into the distance.

Then we are smoothly brought to the spaceship and allowed to fly. Then build a base. And after that - jump to a space station and do trade, fly to a neighboring planet and build a base there, assemble a warp engine and move to another star. And there will be space battles, and management of the merchant fleet, and quests and orders from intelligent life forms, and much more.

Commanding frigates is a very successful “game within a game”, similar to expeditions from Warlords of Draenor. We select a target, equip the ships and wait for several hours in the hope that they will return with loot.

The entry curve into No Man's Sky has now been carefully calibrated. You won’t get confused anymore, unless you pick up too many side quests and don’t know which one to take on first. If you follow the plot, there are almost no lags in the gameplay: you are always learning something new and improving the old. The gameplay changes and is expanded, you feel progress - and this is extremely important for games in general.

If you want to live, know how to provide for yourself

At the same time, the game follows rules typical for the survival genre. In the wild, the character is constantly in danger. If the planet is hot, you need to regularly add resources to the cooling system; if it’s cold, then to the heating system. All active actions consume “life support”, which here replaces hunger and thirst, and its restoration also requires resources. Sometimes disasters such as firestorms or acid rain occur - it makes sense to wait them out indoors, otherwise the indicators will decrease too quickly.

Shelter can be found, dug, and built. This sky is not so “no man’s”: on each planet there are both inhabited and abandoned buildings, discarded containers of humanitarian aid, fragments of equipment, ancient artifacts, capsules with technologies and much more that is clearly of artificial origin.

All this is adjacent to dense thickets, flocks of animals, and fossil deposits. Using existing tools, they can be processed into resources (many here will remember the last Prey) through a special distillation apparatus - convert some chemical compounds into others, and then from all this create what you need: spare parts, upgrades, building materials. And the terramorphing device allows you to dig caves or, conversely, build up soil, giving the planets a look to your liking. Then we will be able to build a house and furnish it with furniture and useful units - complete freedom of expression.

No Man’s Sky Next also features full-fledged multiplayer, so you can explore worlds with a group and bring guests to the hacienda to show off! A third-person view has been added and the ability to customize the hero’s appearance—you can even turn him into a representative of a different race. Although it is not a fact that he is a person, everyone calls him “Anomaly” and constantly encourages him to find out who he is and what is happening around him. And collecting information about the world and the player’s role in it is now much more exciting - unless, of course, you managed to spoil everything for yourself.

Imperfect space

At the same time, No Man’s Sky is still far from ideal. The same survival mechanics require constant grinding of resources: to run around the planets you need protection and life support, to fly on a ship - fuel, for a mining laser - charges. You'll spend a lot of time just digging and processing minerals. For this reason, by the way, I would not recommend high difficulty levels: they doom you to additional constant grinding. However, if you like difficulties...

All sorts of little things like limited sprint and constant overheating of the “miner” are also annoying. Well, in fact, you have to dig and run all the time, why put an artificial framework on it? The procedure for calculating planets also leaves an imprint: if you fly over the surface on a ship, the objects below you do not always have time to be drawn, and you will not be able to see everything. If you don't want to miss anything, walk or ride moon rovers (though it's slow). Or land, look around through the visor, place a marker, climb back and fly where you need to - just keep in mind that the marker may suddenly disappear. Either a bug or a feature that encourages you to remember landscape landmarks.

Things are also bad with attempts to ignore plot markers and do something of their own. Yes, you can do that. Get on a ship and fly anywhere and do whatever you want there. At least by upgrading a spacesuit or, say, saving money for a ship of a higher class. But it will be monotonous work to extract a large amount of resources, grind, elevated to the absolute level (yes, approximately like in the 2016 version). It is much easier to achieve the same thing by simply moving along tasks - so at least the activities will be varied.

In 2016, it shook the gaming industry. But not the endless universe with billions of planets, but the resounding failure of the Hello Games studio. This is due to many things: the publisher’s loud advertising campaign, the overly talkative studio head Sean Murray, trailers with content that did not make it into the final release, as well as the wild imagination of the players who imagined No Man’s Sky as an ideal space simulator. For two years, the indie project was a symbol of unfulfilled hopes and disappointed expectations. However, just recently the NEXT update was released - a free improvement to No Man's Sky, which added the promised multiplayer and new content. But does this make the game better?

At first glance, definitely yes. A clear and quite tangible progression has appeared in the game. From now on, the main goal is not reaching the center of the Universe and not the Atlas quest chain. No Man's Sky has added an expanded storyline and many third-party activities for the emerging galactic factions. Various merchants and researchers give the player tasks, for which they are rewarded with special currency. For it you can buy equipment blueprints and various improvements that will make the gaming experience easier. By the way, special currency can also be obtained for discovering new objects and entering them into the general encyclopedia.

All restrictions on the construction of bases have been removed - now you can have an infinite number of stations in various parts of the Universe. In addition, we expanded the functionality of construction and crafting, thanks to which now in No Man’s Sky you can not only observe, but also fully create.

Improved generation system. The planets have become more diverse and interesting to study: giant oceans, forests, scorched wastelands, lifeless moons. We are still far from completely different worlds, but compared to the release, the progress is noticeable. This can also be said about the animal world: now animals are much less likely to resemble those made of laughter for the sake of mutants from Spore.

Among other things, Hello Games did a good job of working out the underwater depths.

The start of the game has been reworked. Now all the player’s initial steps (repairing the ship, obtaining the first resources, the first flight) are determined by the plot, which is conveyed through messages on terminals and messages left behind.

All these innovations mitigate many of the problems of No Man's Sky, but do not cure them. The most important problems remained untouched. The Hello Games project is still quite crude, boring and extremely unpleasant in terms of gameplay.

The game has a convenient and flexible photo mode with which you can create real magic.
For example, you can change one landscape to another only through the settings.

The spaceship is poorly controlled: the clumsy teapot is reluctant to obey commands and does not allow it to land accurately at the desired point on the planet. But if you can still minimally move around the Universe on the keyboard, then on the gamepad the vehicle is simply uncontrollable.

Any player action is slowed down by stupid, unnecessary work. For example, you need to fly from the starting planet on a starship. What needs to be done for this?

First, fix the ship. Repairing and charging engines requires resources. To get them, you need to use a laser, which also needs to be charged with other resources.

Secondly, it may happen that the necessary substances will have to be extracted in difficult conditions: there may be acid rain, fire storms and other disturbances on the planet. In order not to die, you will have to charge the suit and life support systems. And charging requires resources.

Thirdly, often the necessary chemical elements may be hidden in special rocks or not found at all. Then you will have to collect simpler reagents in huge quantities in order to create the necessary materials through routine crafting and processing that the player is not yet able to obtain or cannot obtain at all.

Spaceports have become large and densely populated, but the local contingent looks more like mannequins than living beings.

And so with every step in the game, regardless of the goal. Actions and interesting activities lasting a couple of minutes are stretched out for hours due to the intermediate work of charging countless batteries. In this way, the developers wanted to introduce elements of survival and add realism and atmosphere to the exploration of the universe: it would be foolish to think that exploring space is an easy and inexpensive activity. However, in this regard they greatly overdid it. The constant need to collect consumables, resources and fuel does not add either hardcore or atmosphere. This is just a primitive, vulgar grind that even MMO games don’t allow themselves these days.

The initial quest line does not perform its function as it should. For example, the guide tells the player that he needs to build a special device for the next action. However, the training is in no hurry to clearly say exactly how to build it - the necessary button to open the inventory and other information can only be found in a separate text submenu. The developers considered it unnecessary to simply display a hint on the screen. That is, tasks, instead of clearly teaching and explaining the first steps, prefer to hide the necessary knowledge and confuse the player. In addition, the quality of the assignments leaves much to be desired. When, in the middle of the plot to find information about yourself, the player has to pause for the obligatory construction of a wooden hut, you just want to throw up your hands.

The menus and interactions in the game are made very clumsily. The simplest actions, such as turning on a flashlight, require going through two or three submenus. Even multiplayer emotes like greetings or gestures require the player to navigate to separate interface windows instead of a convenient wheel attached to one specific key. Game menus, crafting tabs, even the simplest settings - all of this suffers from inept design, forcing the user to perform unnecessary actions and waste their time. This problem in No Man's Sky has remained since release, and with the advent of new features it has only gotten worse.

The menu below is responsible for all crafting windows, appearance settings and emotions.

But one of the main problems is multiplayer. No, his very appearance is a very big step for No Man’s Sky. Its absence in the release version was the main reason for the public's hatred of the game. But the problem is that it was made for show. The presence of a friend as a full-fledged, living astronaut is the only thing the co-op can offer.

If you don’t really like to bother with crafting, then No Man’s Sky will seem like hell to you.

Even the simplest research with a friend is quite problematic. While exploring the area, running in different directions is not difficult. And what’s the point of two players going into a cave where one player can easily explore and collect supplies? It will be more useful to scatter in different directions in order to collect more resources, which can be exchanged if necessary. Only in the end the user plays alone: ​​the only difference is that now somewhere over the hill there is guaranteed to be a friend with whom you can exchange loot. And this is the only thing that co-op brings useful to the game.

- not really a game. This is the dream of a ten-year-old boy who was pumped up with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running, the covers of sci-fi paperback novels and the romance of science fiction writer Carl Sagan. Then the boy was given a team, a budget and the right to do whatever he wanted. The dream came to life.

No Man's Sky is ruled by naivety. No matter how bombastic the marketing campaign was, I have no doubt that when Sean Murray, one of the founders of Hello Games, said that he was making an infinite universe, it was not a advertising ploy, there was not an ounce of malice in his words. Just a dream. Big, sincere and perhaps unrealistic.

In the end, everything crashed into an evil reality, where just a beautiful dream is never enough.

The game is like a universe

In No Man's Sky you explore space. Admire the stars. You can land on any planet and explore it far and wide. Then - in the very distant future - you will reach the center of the universe. Or you won't get there.

The pursuit of scale has reached its climax here, which is rather good. Eighteen quintillion algorithm-generated planets are here because they are needed. Not so that you visit them all, on the contrary: so that you realize that you will never see everything, so that you stop trying to keep up with every blip on the radar. Here you want to walk, you want to look around and be a pioneer. Just for the sake of the process itself.

The creature generator very rarely produces someone cute (there are only dickosaurs, seven-assed monkeys and Cronenbergs around - the developers asked themselves when they gave players the right to name animals), and there are a limited number of types of planets and parts that make up animals, vegetation and ships. There will be enough land everywhere to land a ship (that is, no gas giants or oceanic planets), and sooner or later you will think that those crabs or floating kites have already been seen somewhere.

But in practice, the parameters that the generator operates on are enough to paint with broad strokes the image of some special place, the like of which you will never find. Almost every planet has at least something memorable.

You can do piracy in space - but don't expect it to backfire on you in a big way.

No Man's Sky is a great contemplative game. There are truly magical moments in it: for example, when the planets in the sky align in a particularly beautiful way, or when you first see someone’s ship landing over the horizon, and you think - is this player alive or not? He may not be alive, and Murray’s long-standing stories that you can meet another player here may turn out to be fiction... but the illusion has already taken shape. Whether it’s true or not, why do we need to know?

The last one is worth hanging on to. Contrary to its sci-fi premise, No Man's Sky is a religion game. There is a lot to be taken on faith. She throws up hypotheses, and they are physically difficult to verify. After all, is it really possible to get to the center of the universe? We had already reached the center of the galaxy, and saw... something there. Is it worth continuing? This question is answered simply: what if there really is something more there?

Robot guards look after the planets. Almost like GTA cops, they level up if you interfere with the planet's nature in front of them. But in reality they don't interfere very much.

Game as a game

In those moments when No Man's Sky doesn't excite the imagination, it tries to pretend to be a normal game - or rather, a completely ordinary survival simulator. You have life support systems, engines, guns - many different things that require recharging with different types of fuel. Fuel needs to be extracted. Resources for the necessary upgrades too. And the pursuit of all this one day begins to drown everything good and eternal within itself. Romance is replaced by angry pragmatism, expressed in numbers. Counters, sliders, free cells, occupied cells. Money. Upgrades. Real life begins to seep into fantasy.

Everything about resource management and survival in No Man’s Sky seems to have been completely transferred from the game about a lone astronaut, right down to the interface. But there, crafting, optimizing inventory junk, and maintaining normal vital signs worked better, since the game itself was entirely about them. There, the developers managed to balance everything so that the game systems themselves built the narrative, made you nervous and go out of your way to survive.

In No Man's Sky, all this is just a distraction. Yes, at first, resource scarcity can create emotionally powerful emergencies: your life support system runs out of fuel, you frantically search for something to refuel it with, and at the last moment you find a tree full of carbon. But once you get used to it a little, understand what is where, and unravel the principles of building local worlds, the extraction of resources for self-sufficiency will become a simple formality, which will soon develop into a tedious obligation.

You may or may not meet such handsome men. The enjoyment of the game greatly depends on how lucky you are to stumble upon a cool planet.

And in everything that doesn't involve numbers, No Man's Sky space is a no-brainer space. Here you don’t have to learn to fly: to arrive somewhere, you just need to aim at the target and hold down two buttons. Rare battles on the ground can only be slightly annoying; shootouts in space stop fraying your nerves as soon as you attach a homing laser to the ship.

And despite the freedom, space in No Man's Sky is a controlled space. You can go anywhere, but sooner or later you will still, as if by chance, stumble upon a quest bunker, some important anomaly for history, or space raiders. I never felt that I had found something because I was specifically looking for it - more often than not, it was like an interesting thing was slipped under my nose, marked with an icon. Eventually? I'm not a space explorer, but an amusement park visitor.

These guys (like everyone else) don’t ask unnecessary questions like “Why were we born?” and just walk through the fields like fools.

Everything would be great if No Man's Sky could create stories from gameplay situations. But this is not and not even . The algorithms here create stunningly beautiful galaxies with stunningly beautiful planets, where stunningly beautiful (if you don’t get too close) nature blooms - but there is no life in all of this.

Ships, like almost everything in the game, are created by an algorithm from many modules.

No Man's Sky, despite its name, is full of people. You don't feel truly lost, because almost everywhere you are greeted by intelligent races, flocks of ships, robot guards, space stations and other traces of those who came here before you. You are constantly being led somewhere. They are constantly showing something.

But then you enter the space station, and there is a lone alien standing there... And that’s it. The landing bay constantly receives new ships, and you can even talk to their pilots - but only to trade and exchange ships. The planetary fauna, no matter how wild it may seem, either rushes at you or runs circles around you. You can feed the dinosaur, and it will spoil resources. That's what emergence is all about.

Game like an aquarium

Because of its purely “game” moments, No Man’s Sky resembles an old domestic one. You complete one identical mission after another, walk along the typical corridors of planetary stations and along the way you think that the game could be something disproportionately greater. Only here it is even more upsetting. Even after all the accusations of monotony, after all the attempts to rationalize and explain what is happening in No Man’s Sky, you continue to feel something mystical. Some well-hidden truth that you want to get to the bottom of.

Sometimes you see something you haven’t seen before, and such discoveries, even very small ones, make you move on.

I’m sure that No Man’s Sky will continue to be solved - as it was solved, for example. Only in this case is between us and the answer to the question “is it possible to reach the center of the universe?” It’s not the search that lies, but tens of hours of routine work. Roughly speaking, the answer will be known (or not) by the one who first accumulates enough fuel. It's so primitive. Perhaps somewhere there will be something that you will have to puzzle over. But how long will it be until then?

* * *

No Man’s Sky tries to portray itself as an ordinary, familiar and understandable game about numbers and progression... despite the fact that its best moments are those when you, not understanding anything, bewitched, go to the horizon to find out what is there. Not the kind where you're frantically mining plutonium to fuel your engine because you want to get out of here as quickly as possible. These points are perhaps necessary to underscore all the others. But here they do not emphasize, but draw all attention to themselves.

This is one of the most significant events of this year. The game from indie studio Hello Games may well immortalize itself in the game design textbook as the biggest game created as of August 2016. But this textbook should be called something like this: “How not to make video games.”

Hello Games has taken the rest of us one step further towards procedurally generated video games, as their creation takes up less than 4 gigabytes. Who knew that the result would be so bad? There is no smell of revolution here, because the game turned out to be simply boring for most gamers.

Indeed, despite its apparent atypicality, No Man's Sky is a rather boring game, and to understand this, you don't need to visit all 18 quintillion planets that the developers are so proud of. Almost everything in it can be seen in just a few minutes funny few hours.

Starting the game and generating planets

No Man's Sky begins very cheerfully and perfectly sets you in the right mood. There are endless expanses of an unknown planet around, there is nothing useful in the backpack, all the equipment has become unusable after the ship crashed. This world will become a sandbox for the player until he understands , how to collect basic resources and create useful items from them.

During the passage of this preparatory stage, the game is naturally amazing: here everything is truly created randomly, without any logic familiar to us, earthlings. No one knows where a new player will end up in No Man's Sky - on a lifeless radioactive cobblestone, on a blooming and fragrant paradise, or somewhere else. The first two hours are real magic.

Each new item that the player repairs during training gives him new abilities. For example, a scanner allows you to inspect the area for resources and interesting places, and with the help of a jump pack you can go around uneven terrain. At these moments, you want to forget about everything and just run forward towards adventure.

There are a lot of things on the planets: vegetation, rocks, caves, optionally animals and plants. There are also objects of artificial origin: abandoned settlements, crash sites, factories controlled by aliens and robots, mysterious obelisks storing the knowledge of alien races, trading posts and much more.

What is especially surprising is how cleverly the developers arranged the interaction with intelligent aliens and their electronic terminals. All messages are presented in an unknown language, which at first cannot be translated.

You have to choose options at random. However, as you study the special stones of knowledge that are found everywhere on the planets, you can add new words to the dictionary, and then the speech of the next talking turtle gradually acquires meaning.

However, due to the poor localization, this element of the game evokes mixed emotions, because the translated words in the messages do not agree with each other. Instead of “hello, friend,” you have to read something like “greetings friend” with a sour expression.

Gameplay of No Man's Sky

No matter how cool the first planet is, you still have to leave it in order to move forward. The first takeoff is very promising: a real fire of enthusiasm burns in the chest of the newly minted researcher.

However, he is not guaranteed a way out, because outside the planet the player is waiting for a rather empty system, in which there is nothing but a star, other planets, many drifting asteroids and a space station.

After visiting the latter and talking with a single alien caretaker, the player receives a hyper-drive diagram. It can be used to move from one system to another.

The game has no goal as such, although after the first hyper-jump there is a meeting with a certain entity that calls itself Atlas. This mysterious introduction takes place only to instruct the player to fly to the center of the galaxy. What is there is the main intrigue of the game, which, by and large, has no impact on the gameplay. It is possible that the developers will simply make fun of the player in the style of Adams.

- Forty two! - Lunkkuool squealed. - And that’s all you can say after seven and a half million years of work?

“I checked everything very carefully,” said the computer, “and I declare with all certainty that this is the answer.” It seems to me, if I’m being completely honest with you, the whole point is that you yourself didn’t know what the question was.

— The answer to the main question of life, the universe and everything in Douglas Adams' book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Regardless of the goal, the gameplay will include the same set of actions: landing on a planet, collecting resources, searching for buildings with completing monosyllabic quests with three answer options, selling everything unnecessary at the station, creating improvements and flying to another system.

At the moment of awareness of this constantly repeating algorithm, all magic dissolves. It doesn’t matter what planet you land on, everything happens the same way: collecting resources for the next upgrade of equipment, weapons or ship, searching for special places with valuable technologies and artifacts for sale, and, ultimately, taking off and then jumping somewhere else. And so on ad infinitum!

Yes, of course, there are some differences, and sometimes they even affect the gameplay. For example, the planet may have aggressive fauna or even acid rain. In space, sometimes you meet space pirates, and then you dive into an absolutely single-celled “shoot-up” without any variability. All this does not affect the gameplay, it only stretches it out a little, forcing the player to be distracted from the endless “farming”.

Collect resources to upgrade equipment, which will allow you to collect resources faster! Upgrade your weapons to quickly deal with the robots that guard resources in order to collect them! What a revolution!

Illusion game, screen game

It is the monotony that completely kills the desire to explore, turning the gameplay into a meaningless routine. In this, No Man's Sky has gone even further than t, because Mojang's game at least gives you the opportunity to create something, come up with entertainment for yourself, while Hello Games does not provide any alternatives.

Even trading stations and posts on planets are just an illusion. Merchants do not trade with each other, and the stations themselves receive their goods literally out of thin air. Therefore, there is simply no meaningful trade in this game and there cannot be, because the goods are not interconnected by production chains. Of course, no one expected Hello Games to create a realistic economy, like, for example, . But this “illusory nature” of what is happening extends to almost everything that is in this game.

Multiplayer could have saved the situation, and then traveling together with voice communication could significantly prolong the enjoyment of the game. Alas, the developers abandoned the idea of ​​​​a cooperative game, and they did it at the very last moment, because after the release in Europe, boxes with the game were discovered, on which the icon with the network component was bashfully taped over. It is quite possible that many bugs at the start of sales are associated precisely with alterations at a late stage of development.

The game, which, according to the promises of the developers, was supposed to surprise the player constantly, stops doing this after just a few hours. Dialogues with aliens are repeated, the buildings on the planets are the same over and over again, and interest in exploring the planets completely disappears, because you have to do the same thing on them.

Comparing with other “sandboxes”, one can come to the horror conclusion that the “revolutionary” No Man's Sky does not provide anything at all except the monotonous exploration of planets and collection of resources. This is absolute emptiness and a complete lack of variability for the sake of maximum repetition.

Graphics and technical execution

If the game definitely didn’t work in terms of gameplay, then with graphics everything is a little more complicated. On the one hand, Hello Games was able to bring early concepts to life and created a very nice visual style. Often on planets there are very beautiful views that you just want to capture and show to someone.

On the other hand, the drawing distance in the PlayStation 4 version is simply nonsense - objects appear at a distance of 15-20 meters, and everything that is further turns into a mess of acidic colors.

At the same time, the developers were never able to implement 60 frames per second, although they repeatedly mentioned their intention to do so. It’s very disappointing to see this on a platform that has , which, by the way, also runs at 30 fps and often demonstrates very vast spaces.

In addition to weak graphics, the release version of No Man's Sky boasted an abundance of bugs. The developers have already released three patches that fixed the most annoying crashes and glitches, but they did not solve all the problems.

Crashes on PS4 have been recorded several times, which is very rare. How it happened that Sony allowed such a crude product to appear in its store is absolutely incomprehensible.

The game's release on PC was little better due to terrible optimization. Indeed, 30 fps on PS4 is a fairy tale compared to what PC owners experienced. Do not believe the system requirements, which include Intel Core i3 and Nvidia GTX, because the game runs disgustingly even on an i7 in conjunction with a GTX 970. It is simply impossible to call it anything other than counterfeit.

Controls and sound

Perhaps these are the only entities against which it is difficult to make serious claims. First of all, I would like to thank the 65daysofstatic team for their decent work on the soundtrack, which gives the game a good atmosphere. The rest of the sounds that can be heard on planets and in space are perceived neutrally, be it the rustle of acid rain or the cry of some strange creature.

With the controls, everything is also quite acceptable: playing on a gamepad is quite comfortable, but this is mostly due to the fact that the game does not require anything at all except navigation and pressing a couple of buttons. Continuing to talk about controls, one cannot help but note the fact that the developers were clearly inspired when creating the interface of their game. It's not just similar, it's almost identical, which raises some questions.

Stop it, I'll get off!

Hello Games deliberately deceived players by talking about things that were not actually in the game.

For example, lead developer Sean Murray deliberately misinformed the gaming community by repeatedly confirming the presence of multiplayer. However, just before the release, something went wrong, and as a result there is not even a co-op for two.

No Man's Sky is the biggest disappointment of recent years. After all these interviews with the developers, after all the enticing videos, we received a techno-demo with minimal functionality, which is definitely not worth the 4000 that they ask for on the PlayStation 4, nor the 2000 , which the game costs on Steam.

It's worth buying only if you're not afraid of the prospect of dying of boredom. But it’s better to visit some more vibrant galaxy.

The ship flies at several speeds. A conventional engine does not provide you with very fast movement over the surface of the planet. You can turn on the accelerator by pressing the corresponding key on the gamepad. At the same time, do not forget that a running engine consumes fuel, which tends to run out at the most inopportune moment. Therefore, it is advisable to have a supply of elements like Plutonium or Tamiya-9 with you. Once in orbit, you gain access to the pulse engine. With its help, you can quickly move between planets within the current solar system. But if you want to leave this very solar system, here you will have to build a hyperdrive and refuel it with warp cells, or use the help of black holes, which play the role of teleporters in No Man’s Sky. In this case, you can navigate using a three-dimensional map of the universe, on which the galaxies where you can go are marked.

The main character's space suit, called the Exosuit in the game, is also very important. It is also equipped with slots for storing resources and technologies. If all slots are full, you can send some of the collected resources to the cargo hold of your ship using material teleportation technology. Each additional technology that improves your suit takes up a separate slot. The suit, like the engine of your spacecraft, consumes energy. With its help, it protects you from the harmful effects of certain planets, such as acid rain, radiation, cold or heat. Do not forget to check the charge level of the life support system from time to time, otherwise at the most inopportune moment you will find yourself far from the ship without the necessary resources to recharge it. It’s good that at least the jetpack built into the suit does not require fuel and recharges automatically.

Your best friend in this game is the Multi-Tool tool, which I already mentioned above. It combines the properties of a pickaxe, a shovel, and even a weapon for self-defense. You can also improve it by discovering new technologies during your travels. When extracting resources on the planets you discover, do not forget that greed is punishable. For example, if you decide to clean out some local cave from Plutonium deposits, the so-called “Guardians” may react to this - robots of unknown origin who protect the fragile ecosystem of each planet and try to punish especially zealous hunters for valuable resources. You can shoot the guards using the blaster built into your Multitool, or you can simply escape from them. If luck did not smile on you and you still died, get ready for the fact that you will have to find the place of your death, because all the resources you collected will remain there. If you manage to die before you can get your property back, it will be lost to you forever.

Space battles are implemented rather strangely and extremely inconveniently. Once the space pirates attack you, it turns out that your pulse and hyperdrives refuse to work until the battle is over. And hitting the enemy with ship cannons is something out of the realm of science fiction. Aiming is incredibly difficult, and navigating in three-dimensional space when fire is coming at you from five directions is even more difficult. Of course, I'm not a big expert in space simulators, however, something tells me that this is not the strongest part of No Man's Sky. So it turns out that in such skirmishes the easiest way is to die and be resurrected at the nearest space station, instead of frantically aiming at the tiny pirate ships flying around you at enormous speeds. Fortunately, the game is automatically saved with enviable consistency.

As you explore planets, you may come across several types of objects that are of particular interest to you. First of all, these are planetary stations. Here you can find new technologies, communicate with aliens, and also activate a device that marks other “points of interest” located on this planet on your scanner. It will be important for you to visit alien obelisks. Around them you can find stones, with the help of which the main character will gradually learn the languages ​​of the three main alien races. So, word by word, you will learn to understand the space wanderers you meet. Obelisks also contain a kind of test, when the player is asked to make an important choice, as a result of which the obelisk can either reward or punish him. Depending on your actions, the reputation of the main character in the eyes of all three alien races will constantly change. And this, in turn, will affect your relationships, including in terms of trade.

The crafting process in the game is done quite traditionally for this kind of sandbox. Hover your cursor over an empty slot in your inventory, turn on the crafting menu and select the object you want to create. If you have all the resources necessary for this, the object appears in the slot. Crafting is the second most important activity in the game No Man's Sky, so it is recommended to master it first. It is especially useful to always have materials with you that are used as fuel for your ship and energy for your spacesuit. Without this, there is a high risk of dying in the unfavorable conditions of an alien planet. Before you can create anything, you must first obtain a blueprint (recipe, description - whatever you want to call it) of this object or technology. You will receive drawings while exploring planets, as well as when communicating with aliens you meet.

Visually the game looks pretty good. Despite the fact that most planets are more or less similar to each other, sometimes you will encounter truly colorful worlds. Of course, the landscape, flora and fauna are generated procedurally from elements pre-drawn by Hello Games studio artists and within specified parameters. So it’s unlikely that the game will be able to create something completely unique. Something that was not originally intended by its creators. However, during your travels you will see many amazing creatures and unusual plants, admire alien sunsets, fluorescent caves, underwater life, acid rain and icy blizzards. In this regard, the game really perfectly conveys the atmosphere of science fiction books about travel to other planets. Another undoubted advantage of No Man’s Sky is the post-rock soundtrack. It was recorded by the British band 65daysofstatic. Additional procedurally generated background music for the game was programmed by composer Paul Weir.

But the weak point of the game is the variety of gameplay. Or rather, in the absence of this very diversity. After literally a few hours of playing, you realize that you have already tried literally everything in No Man’s Sky, and new planets and space travel no longer give you the same excitement. The game turns into a tedious simulator of a space miner mining for resources so he can go to a new galaxy where he will have to mine resources again. And so on almost ad infinitum. The plot in the game is limited to small text inserts and communication with the spherical creature Atlas, which gradually leads you to the logical conclusion of the story. But the endings of the game (and I found only two of them) are so ambiguous that they can disappoint even the most unassuming players. It’s no joke, play No Man’s Sky for about 40 hours, and at the end you get something completely incomprehensible as a reward.

Procedural generation of worlds is, of course, good. Similar ideas have been nurtured by programmers for a very long time and were even implemented to one degree or another in games like Elite. Generating a universe is only half the battle. But filling it with activities that are truly exciting for players, interesting quests, and even populating it with intelligent life - the problem, as we see, is still very relevant to this day. While playing No Man’s Sky, for some reason I immediately remembered the mobile toy Out There from the mi-clos studio, released in 2014. There, a lone astronaut tried to return to Earth, finding himself in an unknown corner of the universe. He also had to repair his ship, collect resources, learn alien languages ​​and communicate with aliens as he moved from one planet to another. But even this tiny mobile game had much more varied gameplay, which once again proves that the essence of a good game is not the number of planets available to you, but the quality of the gameplay.

Pros:

• A procedurally generated universe with 18 quintillion unique planets.
• You can discover truly beautiful planets. Or you may not open it.
• It’s quite interesting to learn the languages ​​of alien races and complete obelisk tasks.
• Magnificent music perfectly brightens up cosmic loneliness.
• The crafting system in the game is implemented quite successfully.

Minuses:

• At the last moment, the multiplayer component was cut from the game.
• The incredible monotony and monotony of the gameplay negates all the advantages.
• Space battles from which it is almost impossible to emerge victorious.
• There is always not enough space in your inventory, which quickly becomes annoying.
• The endings of the game will disappoint even those who did not expect anything from it at all.
• The game No Man's Sky could not bear the weight of expectations placed on it.

I wouldn’t dare call the game No Man’s Sky bad. The developers at Hello Games have done a truly excellent job of creating a huge world full of solar systems, planets, nebulae, asteroids and black holes. Despite this, No Man's Sky at this point feels more like a technical demonstration of what procedural generation can achieve, rather than a fun game that you'll want to spend a week or two playing. Even the most avid fans of science fiction will get bored with the game very quickly because there is simply nothing to entertain yourself with, and the ending is not worth the effort put into achieving it. The picture is somewhat brightened up by glimpses of the plot, communication with aliens and obelisks, as well as a pleasant soundtrack, but on the scale of No Man’s Sky this is just a drop in the ocean of endless flights from planet to planet and monotonous resource extraction. I bet the game 6 points out of 10 and I really hope that the developers will be able to diversify their project by releasing patches and additions in the future.