The following post is a break from the normal topics that are discussed on this blog. This post is strictly an opinion piece about the newest space exploration video game, by Hello Games, No Man's Sky.
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In 2013 the British video game developing company Hello Games introduced to the gaming community, and the world at large, the space exploration video game, No Man’s Sky (NMS).
NMS is supposed to be so big that you won't be able to complete all of it. It assaults the player with over 18 quintillion planets to explore, a variety of extra terrestrial rocks, flora and fauna to discover and the ability to become either allies or enemies of aliens races. In NMS the player can do business with the alien races, or get into all out dog fights for steeling the cargo from their huge freighters. Having played NMS for many hours, I can confirm this to be the case. However, this is all there is to do; (okay, that and run around each planet you land on getting resources to either sell or beef up your starship and spacesuit - a mandatory aspect of the game if you want to live.) Wait a minute! “That’s all there is to do? Isn’t that enough? What’s the problem here?”
There are some major complaints coming from the gaming community about NMS. One issue arrises from the simple nature of procedural regeneration as a form of video game development. NMS was generated, not through intentional and artistic thought, but through mathematical algorithms. Procedural generation expert Kate Compton states this:
[Your] algorithm may generate 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets. They may each be subtly different, but as they player is exploring them rapidly, will they be perceived as different? I like to call this problem the 10,000 Bowls of Oatmeal problem. I can easily generate 10,000 bowls of plain oatmeal, with each oat being in a different position and different orientation, and mathematically speaking they will all be completely unique. But the user will likely just see a lot of oatmeal.1
Aesthetically speaking every planet seems to be the same. One theme among many planets is a difference in colour scheme and a mountain over here instead of over there, but in the end what we have are just mountainous planets. Other planets are more forestry, but again one planet may be a bright orange, and purple, and pink forest while another is a dark red, blue, and brown forest - different but still nothing but forests; and some planets do have large bodies of water while others are nothing but waterless rocks. In the same way with the exception of small distinguishing features, all the flora and fauna seem to be the same on all planets. In sum it seems that all you need to do is discover let's say 10-20 planets and you’ve functionally (not literally of course) discovered all 18 quintillion planets. Why? They are all virtually the same.
(NOTE: This has been my observation so far, insofar as to how far I traveled into the universe. It is possible that I simply didn’t land on planets yet that are completely unique from what I’ve experienced thus far; and this is something of course that I hope to do as I progress through the game.)
This leads then right into another complaint about NMS. The game play is also very repetitious. One necessary task that all players are commissioned with is to gather resources to stay alive by beefing up their spacesuit which protects the player from a variety of deadly environments that can be found on many planets. As the player traverses through the universe and land on planets they are having to always be on the lookout for resources to keep them alive. This gets boring after a while. In sum the major things to do in NMS is:
- Fly from planet to planet.
- Discover alien flora, fauna and geology.
- Gather resources to stay alive.
- Dog fight with other spaceships for resources to sell to make money to advance your starship; and which will also cause you to grow in allegiance with the alien races that are being attacked by these enemy starships.
- Attack huge star freighters for resources and try to stay alive long enough to get to a space-station so to sell the goods so to make money to advance your starship.
- Do business with aliens races so to advance your starship.
- Repeat steps 1-6.
- Repeat steps 1-6.
- Repeat steps 1-6.
I'm sure you get the drill. Listing these activities like this defiantly gives the impression that there is plenty of stuff to do in NMS. And this would be correct. However why is the player doing all of this? This is the biggest complaint that many people in the gaming community has had about NMS. NMS is not focused on any mission, except to travel to the centre of the universe; but it doesn't tell you why you are to do this. So what is there to encourage you to do it? You decide why you are going to the centre.
This is one feature about NMS that makes it a great game however! Unlike most games where the gamer gets to be brought through a pre-scripted story, such as in Metal Gear Solid 5, NMS forces the player to be the writer of the adventure that they are on. They get to design the backstory of who they are and why they are doing what you are doing - such as discovering all the different species of animals, and planets, and spending half their time collecting zinc, and taring down elements of gold and copper.
Hello Games has done something wonderful for the player even if many people are not aware of it: they’ve given the player the opportunity to use their own imagination. As a NMS player, I am not at the whim of the imagination of the Hello Games team. I am left to make my own NMS experience interesting; and if I cannot do that, then that is strong evidence for how reliant I am on others to tell me a story. Hello Games plopped me into a universe sized sandbox - metaphorically speaking - that has nothing but sand to play with, and with nothing but the barest of essentials to work with, - again metaphorically speaking as I am given starship - and tells me to create my own story.
Hello Games has done something wonderful for the player even if many people are not aware of it: they’ve given the player the opportunity to use their own imagination. As a NMS player, I am not at the whim of the imagination of the Hello Games team. I am left to make my own NMS experience interesting; and if I cannot do that, then that is strong evidence for how reliant I am on others to tell me a story. Hello Games plopped me into a universe sized sandbox - metaphorically speaking - that has nothing but sand to play with, and with nothing but the barest of essentials to work with, - again metaphorically speaking as I am given starship - and tells me to create my own story.
To conclude there are other ways that NMS is a great game, and perhaps I’ll allude to them in the future, but this is one reason why I appreciate Hello Games and the work that they put into developing No Man’s Sky.
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1 - http://galaxykate0.tumblr.com/post/139774965871/so-you-want-to-build-a-generator - Accessed September, 10, 2016
