No Man’s Sky

My first encounter with No Man’s Sky happened when literally everyone I knew with a computer told me they couldn’t wait to play it on the Oculus Rift. I love retro games with simple graphics, for example I’m a huge fan of the original Elite series of games. So I decided to wait and see what would become of No Man’s Sky.

It’s now the eve of the PlayStation 4 launch and I’m excited to see a sandbox exploration game receive this much attention.

My first area of interest is teamwork. Soloing sounds amazing, but space seems lonely. I used to solo Minecraft, and though it was soothing I ultimately found it to be more fun to play with friends. I’m also curious to see how the shared universe experience pans out, particularly with planetary discovery and resources.

Finally, this game was promoted with what I think of as a “magic box” principle. Basically there’s this place to go, the center of the universe or “the box”, and you don’t know what’s in it, but it must be enticing considering all of the work it will take to open it. It reminds me a lot of Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube?, which used a similar principle: get to the center of a cube, and something will happen. When the ending to No Man’s Sky was leaked prior to it’s launch it publicly broke this mechanism. This makes me wonder if the developer will change the ending along with their recent re-generation of the game’s universe.

Unfortunately I won’t be playing this game myself because I’m staying away from video games at the moment. But I’m looking forward to hearing what others think of it.