My Ten Years in No Man's Sky | Hacker News Reader

My Ten Years in No Man's Sky

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79 pointsblakespot88 comments

Such a frustrating game. Feels so big but it’s so insanely shallow. Mechanics abound, but they just don’t interact.

Exactly. Every few years I return to the game (which I bought day one on PS4 and again later on PC when it was released there), each time hoping that the fundamental play experience has been enhanced after all these updates, but it hasn't. The best part about the game is still experiencing the “seamless” planet-to-space-to-planet transition for the first time.

Possible this isn't ten years of loving No Man's Sky so much as a self imposed bet to only play it until GTA 6 ships. Rockstar really is out here ruining lives on a delay.

It's sick what Rockstar makes us do!

The scary thing about this article is how quickly ten years can pass—especially if you are in a video game world for many of those ten years.

The days are long, the decades are fast. (Something like that)

I know, right? I got the same feeling for WoW’s 20th anniversary.

Here's a "fun" one. The XBox 360 release is closer to the US release of the NES, than it is to today. I read this one before and had to double check it, because that stings lol. But yeah, it's true. If you're planning to have kids, don't wait til a good time, because wow do the decades fly by - and "good times" like you might envision never come. There's always something that could be better, and with the world going through so many inflection points - predicting the future now is less possible than ever before.

I would've said, if you plan to have your wisdom teeth removed, to be more inclusive. Actually, I think it is far easier to predict the future than ever before, but only because we are heading down some pretty distressing pathways where predicting and creating are more intertwined than ever before.

ps: no thanks to trading names :)

Kids are a real issue, because age just sneaks up on you. By the time a woman starts hitting her mid to late 30s, it starts getting very hard to have children. And you are in a constant race against menopause, made even more stressful if you want to have multiple children.

My wife and I got very lucky on this front, but nobody in their right mind should ever plan to start anywhere near this age. And the worst part is that we both turned out to love having children which is kind of ironic because neither of us are especially fond of kids, at least other peoples' kids I guess. We'd probably have 5+ if we'd started earlier, but the chance of that happening now are near zero. I regret almost nothing in my life, except for not having children earlier, and the only reason that didn't happen is because I wasn't really aware that sometime in your mid 20s we all apparently just step into a time machine.

Good god. The 360 and the NES are perfectly chosen to sting me personally (and I'm sure many others of my generation).

A story I've told too many times at work: I was born in 1991. The first game console I owned was an NES which we got one year, for Christmas, new in box.[0]

I can't imagine I was any younger than 5 or 6, first off because I remember the Christmas and second off because I don't think my parents would have bought a game console for me as a toddler. So that means they'd have bought it in 96 or 97.

But the N64 released in '96! So we were two console generations ahead of the NES by that year. So when I tell this story to co-workers, I always end: "where did they find it??

Anyway, the 360 was also a sort of signpost in my gaming career. I don't think it was the first console I self-purchased, but it was kinda the first "grown up" console, I guess. Many happy evenings spent during high school with friends on XBL.

tl;dr - thanks, I hate your fun fact

[0]: From some quick research it appears to have been the "NES Challenge Set," and I saw reports of people buying them as late as 1997, so maybe I'm not as unique as I thought.

My parents bought the original NES when it still came with the R.O.B. robot.

I actually really enjoyed the game on day 1!

Unfortunately, even with all the updates - they never fixed my main gripe - each planet is just lifeless, and it's basically the same few square kilometres copy and pasted over the whole planet (I'm about 120h played).

I wished they somehow made it more exciting to explore.

Have you played somewhat recently? They've had a few expeditions that addressed variety in planets.

I think that's the limit of procedural generation. What you're asking for probably requires gen-AI or similar.

When I was younger I was really excited about procedural generation, because it seemed like a way to give games replayability. And it does do that for certain types of strategy and builder games, e.g. MOO2 or Factorio.

But, so far at least, it really doesn't work for first person games. You end up with a universe that's seemingly, but also endlessly boring.

I used to quite enjoy exploring in Minecraft though.

You can do really complex and interesting stuff with procedural generation, even at-scale. You need a large breadth of well-designed rules, and then you need temporal simulation over that breadth. That simulated history is just as important as having a lot of high quality rules when you want to create a living, breathing world. Ultima Ratio Regum is an example of how important this time aspect really is, that a place needs to have a history.

The real limitation is that virtual worlds get boring. It really doesn't matter how sophisticated they are. Generative AI can't help with that. It's not a problem of the structure, or needing some additional variety, or more sophisticated set of constraints. It's the simple fact that while you can day dream about endlessly flying around a galaxy, landing on planets, eventually it just becomes rote. It's a normal biological process of adaptation and normalization. Like how when you first move somewhere, everything is fresh and full of potential, and then 3 years on everything that was novel and cool has become just background noise.

> You can do really complex and interesting stuff with procedural generation, even at-scale. You need a large breadth of well-designed rules, and then you need temporal simulation over that breadth. That simulated history is just as important as having a lot of high quality rules when you want to create a living, breathing world. Ultima Ratio Regum is an example of how important this time aspect really is, that a place needs to have a history.

Dwarf Fortress also does an excellent job of this

The problem isn't the quality of proc-gen. The problem is that every gameplay loop roughly consists of 'scan for a thing in a proc-gen world, then click on it.'

Improving the quality of the proc-gen won't fix that.

This is a high-tech sci-fi setting! This gameplay space should have been the dev's oyster! Have resources which can be pinpointed with the scanner! Have ones that you have to triangulate the location of! Have clouds that you'd be collecting via ramscoop! Have drones following your ship! Set up a mining station! Mini-games for dealing with alien tech. More ruins and salvage opportunities than just that one species of aliens! Capture animals for questgivers! Have the actual experience of flying not be an on-rails theme park ride that's fun about twice.

I could go on and on.

This obviously costs money and time. But without it, you get a 'game' that's as wide as an ocean, and shallower than a puddle.

"Every quest is a fetch quest"

There's no such thing as a limit of "procedural generation". It's a limit of the choices they made.

Look at something like DF or Rimworld - they generate pretty dense worlds with plenty of lore and things to see. Whereas Minecraft and No Man's Sky just go for physical dimensions with little content.

Same. Played thru the original version. The overall vibe of the game was great and incredibly polished for a game half done, but yeah it was stretched very thin and started to lose feeling after a while.

That said,idk if I would like the fame at all now. Base building seems antithetical to the original nomad-like setting. And there's only loss to have adding identity to the protagonist after having played it as "yourself"

And apparently this is one of the main criticisms of Starfield. The Bethesda designers either never played No Mans Sky to understand the problem, or they simply believed a large enough budget could mask these problems.

Starfield is also just such a freaking grind compared to their other games

I'm also a day one NMS enthusiast. I thought I was the only one. I can definitely agree with your critique, and I think the difference was in how I played it. On release day it was basically a really pretty tech demo. You couldn't really die/fail in any meaningful way unless you tried to. But wandering the universe in a goals-agnostic sort of way, looking for different types of exocritters, learning the different alien words and doing some resource gathering/trading was satisfying enough as a second screen experience. Much like when I play American Truck Simulator, or when I focus on cargo hauling in elite dangerous, it's just kinda something to keep my hands busy while I listen to a podcast or documentary or just sit and bullshit with my wife.

Does anyone know what the roughly square-aspect monitor in the middle of his 3-monitor setup is? Looks interesting but I can't zoom in far enough to see a logo, and the Upgrading the Gaming PC[0] post. Thanks

[0] <https://nmsspot.com/2023/01/20/upgrading-the-gaming-pc/>

Im having trouble zooming on the image but I'm pretty sure benq has the only 3:2 desktop display on the market that isn't a graphics tablet.

You should also look at the LG Dualup if this kinda thing interests you.

https://www.benq.com/en-us/monitor/programming/rd280u.html

https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq780-b-dualup-monitor

Thanks for the reply. The Benq definitely interests me. Maybe one day companies will be more incentivized to make "strange" aspect ratios like this.

It's an LG Dual Up (you can find the info in some earlier posts)

Technically it's 8:9 so not a perfect square, 2560 x 2880

https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq780-b-dualup-monitor

discontinued and going for almost double the msrp on ebay, alas

And as I see there is no modern high resolution 1:1, 5:4, or 8:9 monitor on the market

Indeed not, sadly.

Indeed, it is a DualUp -- the best display I have ever owned. I love it so very much, I planned to get a spare for when it dies, before they EOL'ed it. (I assumed it would not last long, as there can't be widespread appeal for such a display.) I missed that chance - but after months of setting eBay alerts, I found a local teacher that had a used one with just 400 hours on it (I have 17,000 hours on mine), and I bought it ($50 above retail price) and have it cleaned and waiting in a cloth sleeve for its time to shine, one day.

I talk about it and using it on a Mac with HiDPI display modes in this blog post from several years back:

https://bytecellar.com/2022/11/08/4k-scaling-is-not-a-proble...

More photos of the DualUp can be seen in my Mac Studio photo gallery, over on Flickr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/albums/7217772030208...

I was so pissed off by the lies around the launch of this game and subsequently being refused a refund that I never went back to it.

They really turned it around. You should check it out.

But yeah, super crappy launch.

this is an understatement (on both fronts) in my opinion.

the launch was beyond super crappy, and "turned it around" is underselling it.

"the engoodening of no mans sky" was a youtube video that came out ~5 years ago and covers the story of the launch up until the point the video was made. since then they've had several more really amazing (and compeltely free) updates.

> and "turned it around" is underselling it.

This. I really feel that the good will they burned up with the launch - and I'm not denying it was very poorly handled - they've made up for 10x over since then. Every expedition is like a whole new DLC, but they've released every single one of them for free.

"Sean we forgive you" became a meme for a reason. The fact that to this day they keep working on the game is truly noteworthy; they could have called it quits at any point in time, especially after NMS got good enough.

Obviously it's not purely ego driven (if at all), so I wonder how the financial aspect plays into that narrative.

I suppose the fact that it sold so much throughout the years gave them enough runway to actually work on it with no worries? And I suppose that people would be skeptical of a new game launch by this studio, thus dooming them to work on NMS for eternity... we'll see how Light No Fire's launch will do.

That and I'm pretty sure they are using NMS as a backport target to test systems for Light No Fire (which is an instant buy for me, Hello Games have completely redeemed themselves in my eyes).

at this point, i think they continue because of the goodwill it builds. as the other comment says, light no fire will be an instant buy for me because of the support they've given no mans sky over the last decade

> so I wonder how the financial aspect plays into that narrative.

I've been wondering about this for a few years now. Do they really sell enough new copies of the game to fund development of several new expeditions a year? I suppose they must, but it's still surprising - more so as the years went on.

Honestly though, at a certain point, they could've started charging for the expeditions as DLC and I wouldn't have even complained.

I wonder if the ports play a role in getting additional updates over the years. Every year or so, NMS gets a port to a different platform, with a sales bump, and maybe part of that process includes adding just a little bit more to the base game.

> the launch was beyond super crappy, and "turned it around" is underselling it.

Everyone says this and I really disagree. It's been a year or so since I last play but I have been playing off and on about every year.

Whenever I start a new game, it feels basically the same. Once I get into the universe, there are way more things to do but nome of them feel like they matter.

The game is a classic example of a mile wide and an inch deep. Every update just seems to bring a new system that feels, in itself, feels about as satisfying as the game did on launch.

Despite the valiant and admirable effort to continue updating the game (and for free), I still don't think it's come close to the game that was promised. It's still the launch game in my eyes; nothing seems to matter. I can just also build a base (or any of the other new features) that doesn't matter too.

It's a fun game for maybe 30 hours a year (300 hours!) and that's an accomplishment but I don't think it's come close to fulfilling it's original promise.

This is totally valid and many people feel similarly. I wouldn't entirely agree that it's only an inch deep (this isn't Elite Dangerous for goodness sake) - but it's certainly sometimes harder than it should be to find the deeper parts of the game.

The Expeditions can really help with this, as they provide a more traditional linear, quest-driven way of going through the game.

> there are way more things to do but nome of them feel like they matter.

In a lot of ways its Space Minecraft, so you have to make your own fun, your own stakes. If you don't like it, then you don't like it.

I can't articulate why, and I'm not even a big fan of Minecraft, but it honestly feels way deeper than NMS.

I think it's the fact that NMS has a lot of systems, but they are just separate, and they have a lot of limitations. Ships are separate from bases which are separate from freighters. They sometimes interact if it's explicitly coded, but nothing is allowed to be emergent.

In Minecraft I can put 100 nether portals in my basement if I feel like it, and I can set up a sheep farm in hell. I can pour water into my base and have a mini pool with fish. I can make copper golems that move items, and that opens a whole can of worms.

In NMS, it feels like I have no freedom to experiment at all. For that reason, it's been pretty hard to get into. Everything feels so baked in place. The only thing that really scratched that itch of mine was making big farming factories. But I was not interested after that.

I'm interested to hear what aspects of the original promise you believe remain unfulfilled.

I'm interested to hear what aspects of the original promise you'd say remain unfulfilled.

From the engoodening video:

“…they never added pay-to-win, they never added microtransasctions or paid DLC, they never made VR as a second game. They didn’t give up on the game or scale their resources back to do it. They didn’t come out and call gamers entitled, they didn’t have loot boxes, they didn’t start work on the next big project or sequel. They didn’t do much of anything except get back to work.”

https://nmsspot.com/2020/01/09/a-walk-through-the-no-mans-sk...

Just a side note if someone decides to watch that The Engoodening "docu-meme": the channel author reads a very "rich" fanfic involving Sean at the end of the video - you've been warned lol

As for NMS itself, it all comes if you dig survival and building type of games, and you'd to step into Star Trek-style away missions.

I think it's fair to say they started off bad, but redeemed themselves.

In contrast Star Citizen is far more ambitious but shows 0 sign of ever actually landing.

NMS is still a great fun space game to play, the lore / back story of each faction is quite bleak though and the lack of good individual characters does leave it feeling more like exploration sandbox than a really compelling world you care about.

I'm curious who refused you the refund? I seem to recall it being refunded pretty steadily by everyone who sold it digitally. Maybe I am misremembering.

Still entirely fair to have been turned off by the experience. Plenty of developers or publishers I don't purchase from anymore due to similar shenanigans.

I don't always seem to be able to stick to my values, but this time it was easy to just write them off and never look back.

I think maybe because there's just so many games being released every single day that this is a sufficiently competitive market. It's not like I'm deciding to never take the city bus again.

At least it didn't drive you to smoke crack like it did to of my friends. Though ironically he still plays to this day though a lot less than he used to.

i used to know someone who used to play this game; he eventually killed himself. i am sure most people that play this game won't experience it that way.

My friend does have some mental issues. Some of these tedious games really suck them in and it becomes personal when things go wrong and it can trigger an episode. For my friend he almost smashed his PC but instead left the house, went to a bar where he got drunk then met a dude who had some rock and made poor choices. Edit: I should add he looks back at that moment humorously but yeah, NMS drove him to smoke crack.

Everyone is well aware of how crappy the launch was.

From the article: "Speaking of No Man’s Sky’s updates, there have been 286 of them since launch. Hello Games has released 54 major updates as well as 232 smaller patch/updates across these ten years. That is a total of 286 updates—and every one has been free. Hello Games has never introduced paid DLC, microtransactions, loot boxes, or any such thing. Over the life of the game, they have been updating it at basically a fever pitch—and always for free, and free, the updates shall remain. This is pretty unheard of in the game industry."

These guys have done everything humanly possible to make things right. I think they had things pretty much fixed up within a couple years or so. They are doing a better job than virtually everyone in the gaming industry and have been doing it for most of their existence at this point. Maybe you could stop holding a grudge 10 years later.

Slashdotted: https://archive.ph/RnExB

One of the most interesting talks on the math behind procedural generation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9RyEiEzMiU

That presentation was foundational for me personally wrt quite a few things.

The issue with procedural generation isn’t how to do it, the issue is how to keep it from being boring.

It's the Bowls of Oatmeal problem:

https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-ge...

Yeah the scope and detail of the universe is great, but it still feels like a well polished demo to me. The interactions with intelligent beings are very repetitive and boring. I can wander around and build things, but I never really feel strongly engaged like I do in a game like Valheim or GTA.

If you add civilizations and intelligence to procedural generation- you get really fast into foundation prime radiant territory- where you generalize from huts to radioactive ruins or substrate (matrices) - the rise and fall of civilization from first principles. To put that into deterministic math- is fascinating - but then to add the players input and have the fate diverge..

As in deterministic circumstances + a historic noise + a formula for civilizational fungi.

Basically a recursive scenario-tree- with branches for capabilities- and regressions as loops to previous iterrations. The noise function is the index and the dice - and the tree modifies its branches depending on the iterration. You gain a panopticon- your chance of accidental nuclear war wither- the loop back to savagery reduces in likelihood. And so on and so forth.

I can't believe how little this article says about the game itself. It's basically the author taking a victory lap for being the game's #1 fan since launch. If I didn't already know what the game looked like, I would leave still not knowing.

The OP is also the author, and writing on 'NMS Spot .com".

This is an article for fans, with an audience of fans. Explaining the basics would be unnecessary for the vast majority of readers.

Now, maybe posting to HN requires you address your new audience as well, but I'm just pointing out the above.

I am the author. I've been running the blog these 10 years.

I sat down to write about the game, summarizing it and how it has grown over the years at this huge milestone. And then, as I started writing, it occurred to me that ... I -- a person who has been playing this game daily for ten long years -- am probably more of a story that some may find notable than anything I could write on my "just for fun" NMS blog as a general recap of the game's history, with so many mainstream gaming sites surely doing the same in articles and YT videos.

So, instead, I just told about my time playing it. Obviously a lot of people couldn't care less about what I've been up to all this time (that's not lost on me!), but I'm still happy with how I decided to mark the occasion and what I decided to write about.

"The Galactic Hub" is the best. Very active community, ongoing ambitious projects (many completed), it's really so much fun. It's also easy to get in to it. They have a "taxi service" on discord where a user gets on the mic and coordinates with you to bring you to the hub worlds so you don't have to do it manually.

If you're remotely considering it, join up. I hop on every month or two and it's a treat.

10 years later I can say they spent a lot of time putting lipstick on that pig, maybe even a dress and a tiara. Probably one of the nicest pigs out there, but it's still a pig and always will be.

Never played, but it seems to me that this shares the same problem with Holodecks, from Star Trek, which is why would anyone ever want to leave?

Anyone else went along and reached the center of the universe on permadeath?

https://archive.ph/RnExB

Hug of death already I think

Biggest gaming disappointment in my life. Could have been so much...

10 years. I still have the game in my Steam library, waiting for me to try it.

I guess I will never try it, once you hit your 40s, games lose their appeal anyway.

No Man's Sky is great, but it does feel a bit too relaxed for the kind of experience I'm typically looking for in a game these days.

What kind of games did you play before and how do you enjoy spending your time now?

>I guess I will never try it, once you hit your 40s, games lose their appeal anyway.

you say this as if it is a law of nature, but into my 60s, i still quite enjoy relaxing with a good game. no mans sky is one of them!

I think it's a free time by age thing?

Would be interesting in your observations on the other side of this, but to me it seems related to those studies showing the trough of happiness is on average the mid-30s to mid-50s.

Most studies ascribe this to being the overlap of peak career hustle, childrearing, taking care of aging parents, and personal health scares all hitting at once.

Putting aside the obvious emotional toll, to me it looks/feels like a dearth of free time. Personally I find it hard to find blocks of time to do anything "for myself" that are more than 30-60 minutes. Video games now, compared to my youth, seem to be much deeper and entail much longer time commitments.

i certainly played less in my 40s/early-50s than i do now, mostly due to lack of free time and other commitments, so i totally understand what you and the parent are saying.

but i never stopped playing entirely. in those 30-60 minutes where my wife would watch her weekly show, i would pick up where i left off in a game. i find most games today are pretty well-designed around being able to play in spurts, even if the game is long + deep.

for longer story games, though, i usually keep a notebook beside me to jot down some context to help me pick it back up if i know it will be a while (mainly because my memory isn't what it used to be).

Agreed. Except for Cracktorio, I mean Factorio

Not true. I just bought No Man's Sky on a Steam sale a few months ago and have been having a blast with it - only very occasionally neglecting my adult duties because of it.

Consider that it has a "Very Positive" review rating in Steam now.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/

Its last major new content was released on May 27th of this year.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/275850/view/69538767...

A video from a gaming news channel on it... No Man's Sky Treated Players Right, Now It's Unstoppable https://youtu.be/jxxRXe1hRjQ

And the steam stats for it - https://steamdb.info/app/275850/charts/#6m

As I write this, there are 10,467 people playing it now. (The stats from 2017 where in the 1000 - 2000 players playing it).

Comparing it to Factorio (which is a great game) it has 19,103 players playing it now.

As a person on the far side of my 40s, No Man's Sky occasionally gets dusted off for some play.

That is a lot more Star Citizen players than I expected.

Also that Factorio chart is weird: https://steamdb.info/app/427520/charts/#max . I don't think I even saw another game with such steady player count. It is horizontal line after 1.0 to DLC release, and after DLC to present.

It's probably more personal circumstances than age, and your priorities definitely shift as you get older. I'm not in my 40s yet (mid-30s) and my decisions around games I want to play has changed.

I get to play games maybe a few hours per week (mostly in the weekend), so the idea of starting a new Assassin's Creed and spending 80 hours (many months) on a singleplayer game is pretty unappealing. (TBH, I was never super into SP games, but the appeal now dropped to 0).

At the same time, I've been having a blast with "The Finals" since launch and it's pretty much the only game I play. Easy to pick up and play 1-2 rounds :)

The real killer is the inability to commit the time needed to actually get into something. Games that I used to bang through in 2-3 days now take 2-3 months, if I finish at all. It's all just a bunch of random pockets of 1-2 hours here and there, and you can't even really get into it because as soon as you do, it's time to stop and might be days before you come back.

+1, that's why I don't do Single Player (story-driven) games anymore. But a MP game (currently "The Finals") for me, works much better. It's easier to pick up for a few hours and then drop again for a long time. Sure, you might not be hyper competitive but that's fine.

Also works pretty well for racing games (like Forza MotorSport / Horizon) imo.

I started playing NMS at age 44. I'm 54 now.

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