No Man’s Sky …unless? (27 Dec 2023)

i chose to build a hazard control room instead of a tavern in my settlement; my citizens aren’t very happy, but my colony was in debt. i don’t speak the language very well, though, so when i talk to the citizens i don’t know what they’re saying. and it’s not particularly my colony, so much as i saved them from Sentinels one time and was immediately elected mayor. the second decision i had to make as overseer of the colony was between the same pair of buildings again.

i sent my freighter on a mission doing satan knows what. it said it’d take an hour and a half real time, so they’re probably back now. and it's not like i built or scavenged the ship; i saved the existing crew from pirates one time and the admiral was like “hello would you like to command my ship”. the last time this happened, i said to just pay me instead, because i could not fathom why anyone would turn over command of their ship to a random stranger whose sole qualifications are saving them from pirates one time, and i suspected the ship command mechanics would be thematically inconsistent and somewhat janky; it turns out you can command an entire fleet of freighters and a squadron of smaller ships.

i’ve said before that half of Dragon Age: Inquisition would be the best video game of all time. i don’t know if i’d go that far at this point, but it’s certainly got a lot of good parts and a lot of extra cruft that distracts from those good parts. and when i think about Dan Olson’s Alone in Public (and, as i’ve just also discovered, Hbomb’s THE NO MAN’S SKY RANT) and i compare it to the experience i’m having seven years later, i think of cruft, and systems that add Content™ but don’t add anything meaningful, and potential wasted not by underdelivering but by adding filler to something good, and Dragon Age: Inquisition.

i also think of George Lucas. because the game that Dan and Hbomb played doesn’t exist anymore. the settlement system was added in Update 3.6, FRONTIERS, in September 2021. the Anomaly, a teleporting space station that acts as a hub for some of the overarching story and mechanical progression, has a dozen or so other players running around in it at any given time, sending the framerate and the themes equally to hell; i’m not quite sure how it worked at launch, but the player limit was raised to 16 in Update 2.0, BEYOND, in August 2019. the freighter fleet mechanics, including the real-time missions, were added in Update 1.5, NEXT, in July 2018. a lot of the bad filler has been added over time. not every patch has been a change for the worse, and i’m sure you could make a case that on balance the game as it stands now is better than it was at launch, but something has certainly been lost, and not merely lost, but erased after release by an author not content to stay dead. and that erasure began in Update 1.1, FOUNDATION, in November 2016, with base building.

my home base employs four total NPCs. the most confusing was the first hire, the overseer; surely it would make more sense for an NPC to oversee the settlement full of NPCs and me to oversee my own base, rather than me overseeing a settlement full of NPCs whose language i do not speak but having to hire an NPC to oversee the base i am building my damn self. my science, weapons, and farming experts are all fairly reasonable by comparison, although they all always have quests for me to do and the rewards are frequently blueprints i already unlocked by other means. one of the first things the game suggested i build at my home base was a teleporter, which renders distance itself meaningless after the first journey to a new solar system. i’ve built several other bases consisting exclusively of teleporters, because the convenience of fast travel is too hard to ignore even in a game that so many people have loved for the slow pace of travel. i don’t think all of these systems were added in FOUNDATION, but the first step into base building was a step towards this.

my weapons expert, when giving me some quest or other, said i had to fight the Sentinels so it’d be “no man’s sky but ours”. and yeah, having a home base in the first place, carving out a piece of the world in which i specifically belong, undermines not just the themes that people connected with in the game as it released but the very goddamn title of the video game. what Dan and Hbomb played and loved was a game that’s about an adventure that can never pause, always moving to the next place but not belonging there either, some planets more hostile but no planets really comfortable, permanently inbetween. a lonely liminality, if you will.

what i’m playing is a game that used to be about all that. and it’s fine.