No Man's Sky Initial Thoughts

Welcome to LittleWatt Gameplay. Quite possibly the biggest game for PlayStation 4 for 2016 has been released and I'll share my initial thoughts about No Man’s Sky.

No Man’s Sky is a space exploration and discovery game developed by Hello Games. It's a procedurally generated game, which means something that I'm not sure I fully understand. Here's a link to help explain it.

I'm not going to get into graphics and gameplay and all that jazz with this initial thoughts post. But I can say the game runs smooth and the images can be fascinating.

I open the game as a crash-landed space explorer to my best guess. There isn't any story so far so I'm only able to piece together what I've experienced. My first job is to repair my busted ship—which for me is a similar looking machine to the X-wing fighter. I have to search the area to find repair items. The items aren't hard to find (once I got the handle on it) but they're vast distances away from the crash site. I'm armed with a multi-tool, which looks a lot like a toy blaster I had as a kid. The kind you pulled the trigger on and sparks shot out the top or sides. And I'm inside a protective suit that needs various repairs during my sojourn for organic materials and various items from the periodic table.

My character is all alone aside from the plants and various creatures on the planet. (There is an element of creepiness during the exploration because anything can appear at any time). And these drones that are sometimes friendly and sometimes not, which may have to do with me destroying a couple.

The game is open world to the extreme, which for all intents and purposes, is all new for me. I'm not convinced I'll enjoy the game yet. Perhaps when I finally get off my initial planet and into space it'll improve. And there will certainly be more aspects to No Man’s Sky once I get further into the game, but my big concern will be my attention span for the game as it unfolds rather slowly for me.

And although this game may eventually be one I could easily place on a shelf and forget about, I do believe it'll be a big success for Hello Games, PlayStation, and gamers all over the world. And perhaps beyond.

Up and Coming: No Man's Sky

Welcome back to LittleWatt Gameplay. This blog is dedicated to gaming topics I'm interested in as well as game reviews and Let's Play video content. 

I'm going to start a series of blogs about upcoming games that I'm interested in and will likely be playing in the future. And for the first post I'm going to tackle No Man’s Sky. 

The most interesting part about my curiosity for No Man's Sky is I'm not the kind of person who would ever consider space travel. I mean it's great and fascinating to learn and to see. But as for actual space travel...That's for someone else. You won't be finding me on Mars planting potatoes or on the Moon doing whatever they might do there. So the question becomes why, Glen, are you intrigued by this game? 

I'm not sure I can even answer that coherently but I'll share a few thoughts anyway. But first a bit about No Man’s Sky. 

No Man’s Sky is developed and produced by a small indie studio in the UK—Hello Games. Now they've developed and produced other games but I've not played any of them. The game is an exploration, survival, first-person game with 18 quintillion, ten to the eighteenth power, or 18 with with 18 zeros, planets. A staggering number. So basically you could play the game your entire life and never run into another player even though other players are there and may only be in the next star system. And in each one of these planets there is an ecosystem—if you don't know what an ecosystem is, well I can't help you—specific to that planet. Or the shorter version is infinite possibilities. 

The scope of this game is staggering. Consider all the information people know about our own real life universe, which is around 4%, and now think about a completely unknown universe created in No Man’s Sky. 

You can close your mouth now. 

So yeah I'm ready to explore. 

There's another facet to this game that will be relatively new to me as well. The open-world aspect. Nearly all of my gaming has been a linear style. Get your objective and accomplish said objective. Move onto another objective and finish that one. You get the picture. 

So going from mostly structured objectives to you pick your path sorta thing will be quite different. And this is one reason I recently acquired Fallout 4, another open world game. But that's for another post. 

Now on to the nerdy, real-life science part of why the game is so profoundly intriguing. 

Space travel and humans in space. Space to humans is exceedingly dangerous. This is a major reason humans aren't on Mars currently. There's no guarantee they would survive the trip if it went perfectly. Solar radiation and cosmic radiation would surely kill them during the five month trip. And that doesn't take into account the trip back. 

For life, Earth is a safe place, but Earth will apparently not appear in the game. But with 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets available an earth-like or nearly exact replica of earth is entirely possible. And let's face it, the game is based off earth-related physics and chemistry and knowledge, although the developers have added other elements, which could throw a monkey in the wrench. 

But in No Man’s Sky we get to explore space safely from our homes. And that is the essence of video games. Although games aren't on the level of books, we do get to be someone else in another place or time or universe. 

No Man's Sky 

Potatoes on Mars

Space travel